Green Beings

Animal Rights in Amsterdam

Bill on Humane Slaughter Yields New Front for Muslim Tensions NYTimes

Muslim and Jewish butchers, like at the Marcus kosher shop in Amsterdam, will have to import meat if a pending bill is passed.Herman Wouters for The New York Times The Dutch Parliament will vote Tuesday on a bill that will require all butchers of every religion to stun animals mechanically, electrically or with gas before they are slaughtered. The change eliminates an exception in the current law.

Because there are 1.2 million Muslims in the Netherlands and only 50,000 Jews, the change is seen as another attack on Islam. 60 percent of Dutch people support the bill, introduced by two animal rights activists, and the vote is expected to win. Only Christian Democratic parties are against the bill, on religious grounds.

The head of the animal rights party, Marianne Thieme, 49, a lawyer and vegetarian, denies animosity toward religious groups. The law is necessary, she said in written answers to questions, because the general regulations on slaughter, including stunning the animals before killing, “are set aside when it comes to ritual slaughter.”

She said there was a “worldwide consensus among scientists that animals suffer terrible if they are not first stunned before slaughter.”

More liberal Jewish rabbis support the proposed law, saying that some Jewish communities already practice stunning before shechita, as Jewish slaughter is known. Some European countries, such as Sweden, require all animals to be stunned before slaughter with no exception for religions.

New Research Argues That Non-Stunned Animals Do Feel Pain at Slaughter AOC Green Beings

Dr Craig Johnson, who led the study at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, demonstrated that the pain originates from cutting throat nerves, not from the loss of blood, suggesting the severed nerves send pain signals until the time of death.

In animals stunned animals 5 seconds after incision and showed that this makes the pain signal disappear instantly.

“It wasn’t a surprise to me, but in terms of the religious community, they are adamant animals don’t experience any pain, so the results might be a surprise to them,” says Johnson.

Johnson thinks the way forward is best exemplified by Muslims in New Zealand, who use a reversible form of electrical stunning that animals can recover from if they are not immediately slaughtered. This proves the animal is alive when killed and is therefore halal.

Boys Club

Women With Guns

Libya Unveils Its Latest Weapon Against Nato: Women At Arms Guardian UK

500 women and girls chanted their willingness to die for Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli yesterday, celebrating their graduation from a class in weapons training.

“Kill all the people in Libya first, then come for Muammar Gaddafi,” said 14-year-old Fatima Hassan. “I will kill myself if Muammar Gaddafi is killed. I know our people will kill themselves if he dies.”

Camera Trackers Document DSK Behavior

Strauss-Kahn’s Demeanor at Lunch May PLay Key Role in His Trial NYTimes

RedTracker

Michelle for President?

First Lady: Mandela meeting ‘surreal’ Politico

First Lady MIchelle Obama with Nelson Mandela in South Africa last week. Hours before landing back on American soil last evening, First Lady Michelle Obama told ABC’s ‘This Week’ Sunday talk show about the ‘surreal’ nature of her meeting last week with Nelson Mandela.

Asked by ABC’s David Muir what she said to Mandela, who led South Africa from the yoke of racial apartheid to become its first black president, the first lady said: “I told him you cannot imagine how important your legacy is to who I am, to who my husband is, I just said thank you, thank you, thank you.”

First Lady Michelle Obama poses for a photo with Peace Corp Volunteers in Botswana after a meet and greet session with U.S Mission employees in Botswana.

Barack Obama or Michelle Obama Could Run for President in 2016, and Beyond The Daily Beast

Is this just pie in the sky thinking or a real possibility?

According to these admittedly speculative scenarios, Barack would appoint Michelle to some highly visible but non-controversial public position (U.N. ambassador comes easily to mind) in the middle of his second term and would work behind the scenes to line up support for her ambitions. In a sense, this strategy would help him avoid the “lame duck” curse that regularly afflicts even the most successful presidents in their second terms; Washington’s power players couldn’t afford to disregard Barack Obama for a moment if his wife stood a real chance of succeeding him in the White House.

America’s Mistress of Tough Love

Bachmann boasts of having a ‘titanium spine’ CNN

“I have a titanium spine for doing what we need to do” to get the country turned around, Bachmann told Fox, later challenging a question about whether past misstatements showed she was “flaky” by saying: “I think that was insulting to say something like that, because I’m a serious person.”

Michele Bachmann will announce her GOP candidacy for president in Iowa today.

Anne of Carversville Fundraising Campaign

In a moment that was pure serendipity, Anne made the donation yesterday that put Max Dashu’s IndieGoGo project over its goal.

With no advance planning, Anne’s donation was preceded at IndieGoGo by one from AOC writer Lisa Catherine Brown.

That’s darn cosmic! We urge our readers to support Max Dashu’s ‘Woman Shaman | The Ancients’ project with additional funds which will be used to tag all the articles and images at the Suppressed Histories Archives.

Anne will launch shortly AOC’s first IndieGoGo fundraiser in support of AnneofCarversville.com and the upcoming Marie Curie Festival in London, September 2011.

We are encouraged by the possibility that AnneofCarversville.com can leverage our current base of 250,000 unique readers who love us — and the power of their digital friends — generating a revenue flow to hire writers and Internet support for AOC, with 50% of the money raised against the goal — less fees & taxes — to our partner project. If we exceed our fundraising goal, an additional 20% of all contributions will support the original project to twice the goal, with any remainder going to a worthy project that advances women worldwide.

Our first AOC Marie Curie Festival fundraising project at IndyGoGo will celebrate the wonderful factoid that because the two-time Noble Prize winner who discovered radium and polonium refused to patent and commercialize her scientific discovery of the radium-isolation process, she found herself unable to afford to buy the radium she needed to continue her experiments.

The notoriously private Marie Curie gave an interview in Paris to an American woman, journalist Missy Meloney, who launched a campaign to have the women of America contribute $100,000 to buy a gram of radium for presentation to Marie Curie for her use at the Institute of Radium in Paris.

Maloney, who was the editor of the national women’s magazine The Delineator, exceeded her goal by raising $156,413 in 1920.

Our support of the Marie Curie Festival will give AOC a new avenue to become activists in advancing the international history of women working together and supporting each other. Read more details about the Marie Curie Festival 2011 in a press release from Anne’s friend Magdalena Rutkowska, an organiser of the September 2011 event.

Marie Curie Festival | University of London | September 2011 AOC Sexual Politics