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So much for all those liberal laws changing the way a society works . . .

  [h3]Camp shut down because he is gay, Loney charges[/h3]Former Iraq hostage James Loney charged Tuesday that his homosexuality was behind the decision of a Catholic men's organization to shut down a youth leadership camp where he once worked.[/p] Loney held a press conference in Toronto on Tuesday during which he accused the Knights of Columbus of discrimination targeting gays and lesbians.[/p] "I feel very sad that this act of discrimination against me as a gay person is really impacting the whole Catholic community of Ontario," Loney said.[/p] Loney said he and his supporters agonized over whether or not to go public with his allegations. [/p] "It was a decision we made after a great deal of thought and prayer, and some agony,'' he said.[/p] "We are doing this because we care about the church, we care about young people and we care about the kind of church they are coming into.'' [/p] Loney, who spent four months in captivity in Iraq, kept his sexual orientation secret from his captors for fear it would further imperil his life.[/p] Upon his return, Loney appeared on national television with his partner Dan Hunt.[/p] Days later, the chairman of the Knights of Columbus Ontario State Council -- which funds the camp -- expressed concerns to the camp's director that the event was promoting a homosexual lifestyle, Loney told The Canadian Press. [/p] The Ontario Catholic Youth Leadership Camp, near Orillia Ont., was to operate this year between Aug. 21 and Aug. 26. [/p] Loney said he had been a staff member at the camp for a number of years before coming out to the public.[/p] A spokesman for the Knights of Columbus Ontario State Council told the Toronto Star the camp's closure had nothing to do with Loney's homosexuality.[/p] "That statement is totally out of left field," said state deputy John Clancey. "We closed down that leadership camp because we needed to review the way we were going and the curriculum that we were teaching." [/p] The website for the Knights of Columbus says the decision to close the camp was made in April "as part of its routine policy review."[/p] The Catholic men's organization has made headlines in the past with their position against same-sex marriage.[/p] In British Columbia, a chapter of the organization decided to cancel a wedding reception in its hall after discovering a lesbian couple had rented out the hall for their 2003 nuptials.[/p] The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal last year awarded damages to the couple, saying in its judgment that the Knights cancelled the booking in a way that affronted the same-sex couple's dignity, feelings and self-respect and should pay them $1,000 each, as well as reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses to compensate for their injuries.[/p] The organization has said it wants Ottawa to re-introduce legislation to "recognize, protect and re-affirm the definition of marriage as a voluntary union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others." [/p] Loney will hold his news conference on the same day he and his partner are to be honoured in Toronto for their perseverance through the hostage ordeal.[/p] The couple are to receive the "Fearless'' award at a fundraising gala and awards dinner Tuesday night as part of the festivities for Toronto's Pride Week 2006.[/p] In 2001, Amnesty International reported that Iraq's constitution was amended to make homosexuality a crime punishable by death.[/p] Although the constitution reverted back to the original 1969 document when Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in 2003, the status of gay and lesbian rights remains murky in the Middle Eastern country.[/p]

[Mexico Worries About Its Own Southern Border]

Mexico Worries About Its Own Southern Border
Ginger Thompson
NY Times[span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;"][/span]  June 18, 2006

TAPACHULA, Mexico, June 11 — Quiet as it is kept in political circles, Mexico, so much the focus of the United States' immigration debate, has its own set of immigration problems. And as elected officials from President Vicente Fox on down denounce Washington's plans to deploy troops and build more walls along the United States border, Mexico has begun a re-examination of its own policies and prejudices.

Here at Mexico's own southern edge, Guatemalans cross legally and illegally to do jobs that Mexicans departing for the north no longer want. And hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from nearly two dozen other countries, including China, Ecuador, Cuba and Somalia, pass through on their way to the United States.

Dense jungle makes establishing an effective law enforcement presence along the line impossible. Crossing the border is often as easy as hopping a fence or rafting for 10 minutes. But, under pressure from the United States, Mexico has steadily increased checkpoints along highways at the border including several posts with military forces.

 The Mexican authorities report that detentions and deportations have risen in the past four years by an estimated 74 percent, to 240,000, nearly half along the southern border. But they acknowledged there had also been a boom in immigrant smuggling and increased incidents of abuses and attacks by corrupt law enforcement officials, vigilantes and bandits. Meanwhile, the waves of migrants continue to grow.

Few politicians have made public speeches about such matters. But Deputy Foreign Minister Gerónimo Gutiérrez recently acknowledged that Mexico's immigration laws were "tougher than those being contemplated by the United States," where the authorities caught 1.5 million people illegally crossing the Mexican border last year. He spoke before a congressional panel to discuss "Mexico in the Face of the Migratory Phenomenon."

In an interview, Mr. Gutiérrez said Mexico needed to "review its laws in order to have more legitimacy when we present our points of view to the United States."

Another high-level official in the Foreign Ministry was more blunt, but spoke only on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be seen as undermining Mexico in its dealings with the United States.

"Are we where we should be in the treatment of migrants?" the official said. "No we are not. But is the Mexican government aware of that? Yes, and it is something we are trying to correct."

Unlike the immigration debate in the United States, where immigration opponents and proponents bandy about estimated costs and benefits for everything from the agriculture industry to suburban horticulture, hard numbers on the effects of illegal migration on Mexico are rare. A trip to Chiapas raises questions about whether Mexico practices at home what it preaches abroad.

 If the major characters in the migration drama unfolding in Chiapas could be captured in a collage, it would include a burly, white-haired farmer named Eusebio Ortega Contreras, who did not hide that most of the workers who picked mangos in his fields for $6 a day were underage, undocumented Guatemalans. Indians from Chiapas used to do these jobs, Mr. Ortega said. But in the past five years, they have been migrating to the United States. And lately, he said, he has begun to worry that he is going to lose the Guatemalans, too.

"We know that the conditions we provide our workers are not adequate," said Mr. Ortega, president of the local fruit growers' association, who showed a reporter the meager shelter he can offer: an awning off a hay shed for a roof and lined-up milk crates for beds. "But costs are going up. Production is going down. We barely earn enough money to maintain our orchards, much less improve conditions for the workers."

Joaquín Aguilar Vásquez, a 22-year-old father of two, would be standing with his knapsack in front of a passenger bus for the northern border, because jobs here at home barely kept his family fed. He said he started migrating two years ago to work in an electronics factory in Tijuana, where he earned $12 a day and saved enough to build a house. When he reaches Tijuana this time, he said, he will hire a smuggler to sneak him to a construction job in New Orleans.

There would be a skinny unidentified Chinese citizen, chain-smoking in the new migration detention center after being caught with more than 50 of his countrymen stowed away among banana crates in the back of a tractor-trailer. Next to him would be a group of Cuban rafters who floated to Mexico because of the increased United States Coast Guard presence around Florida. And there would be a flock of Central Americans, so scruffy and tough they seemed right out of "Oliver Twist," hopping a freight train north.

In the collage, Edwin Godoy, a 21-year-old Honduran who said he was deported last year from Miami and separated from his wife and two children, would be posing in front.

"They call this train the beast," Mr. Godoy shouted in English to get attention. "Do you want to know why? Because it can either take you where you want to go, or it can kill you. Some of us won't make it out of here alive."

At the start of his presidency nearly six years ago, Mr. Fox pledged that, as part of negotiations with the United States for legal status for illegal Mexican immigrants, this country would crack down on the flow of illegal immigrants crossing from Guatemala. He talked of a so-called Southern Plan that was to be an "unprecedented effort," and the United States offered an estimated $2 million a year to help Mexico deport illegal Central American immigrants.

George Grayson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William and Mary who has made several research trips to Mexico's southern border, said little had come of those efforts. He described this border as an "open sesame for illegal migrants, drug traffickers, exotic animals and Mayan artifacts."

And Mr. Grayson said the United States ended its support for deportation after the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, which instead provides some technical aid and training to increase security at Mexico's southern border checkpoints.

Mexican migration officials acknowledged that they had fewer than 450 agents patrolling the five states along this frontier, which has some 200 official and unofficial crossing points.

The rains came recently and flooded most rivers, making parts of this border as treacherous as the Sonora Desert, the deadly Arizona gateway where more than 460 migrants died of exposure and dehydration last year. But human rights advocates and government migration officials say nature does not do as much harm here as crime and corruption.

The Rev. Ademar Barilli, a human rights advocate who, with the support of the Roman Catholic Church, runs a shelter for migrants in Tecún Umán, a Guatemalan border city, said that unlike crossing patterns at the northern border, migrants here did not typically go far into remote areas, hoping to avoid the authorities. Instead, he said, the migrants try to bribe their way through.

"A migrant with money can make it across Mexico with no problems," Father Barilli said. "A migrant with no money gets nowhere."

Mexican law authorizes only federal migration agents and federal preventive police officers to inspect cars for illegal migrants and to demand proof of legal status. But Mexican authorities acknowledge that migrants face run-ins with every level of law enforcement.

Migrants are also routinely detained by machete-wielding farmers, who extort their money by threatening to turn them over to the police. So many female migrants have been raped or coerced into sex, the authorities said, that some begin taking birth control pills a few months before embarking on the journey north.

Few are punished for such crimes, the authorities added, because the migrants rarely report them.

"This society does not see migrants as human beings, it sees them as criminals," said Lucía del Carmen Bermúdez, coordinator for a government migration agency called Grupo Beta. "The majority of the attacks against migrants are not committed by authorities, although there is still a big problem with corruption in Mexico. Most violence against migrants comes from civilians."

Grupo Beta is a uniquely Mexican creation; established 16 years ago in Tijuana to protect migrants. It was a time, said Pedro Espíndola, the director of Grupo Beta, when Mexican migration to the United States began to soar, and smuggling groups evolved from small-time, community-based operations into transnational criminal cartels.

Grupo Beta was expanded to the southern border in 1996, Mr. Espíndola said, when throngs of Central American migrants, aiming for the United States, began hopping freight trains in Tapachula. Train stations became easy staging areas for gangs to ambush migrants. Hospitals became overwhelmed with men and women who had fallen beneath moving locomotives, often losing limbs to their wheels.

Last year, Grupo Beta reported, 72 migrants died crossing the southern border, mostly in accidents on trains or highways. Human rights groups say the real figure is more than twice as high. And in the 16 years since one woman, Olga Sánchez Martínez, began selling bread and embroidery to operate a shelter and then a clinic for migrants, she said, she has treated more than 2,500 migrants with machete and gunshot wounds or severed limbs.

Last year's rains did so much damage to the bridges and roads around Tapachula that the train does not stop here anymore. But that has not stopped the migrants.

Some detour north of here, the authorities said, to train stations that run through the state of Tabasco. But migrants like Mr. Godoy, the Honduran, have so far refused to abandon this route. He walked eight days along the tracks that run from here to the station in Arriaga, about 120 miles away. Then he, along with at least 300 others, hopped a freight train that leaves there almost nightly, in plain view of evening traffic, the local police and the train's engineer.

It was Mr. Godoy's third attempt in three months. He said he had been caught by United States Border Patrol officers in Laredo, Tex., on each of his previous trips.

"I am not going to give up," he said. "I had a good life in Miami. I got no criminal record. I never hurt nobody. I'm just trying to be with my kids, you know? That's all I need."

 

[Walt Disney Stalks Your Child]

 I've got to admit that I've got an attachment to this guy's columns.  When he gets it, he gets it.

My feelings about this?  The only trouble I got into as an unmonitored kid was getting the crap beaten out of me by neighbourhood thugs who would ambush me in the woods.  Once some creepy guy tried to get my gawky 9-year-old self to accept a ride only three blocks from my house.  Call me naive, but it wasn't until I was in college that I figured that one out.  Meanwhile, I had friends from extremely strict households who were getting knocked up or caught driving drunk (or killed in drunken accidents, in a few cases) in high school because they would sneak out and not know how to put the brakes on their rebellious behaviour . . .



Walt Disney Stalks Your Child
Now even kids have GPS cell phones. So much for running away from home  
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, June 16, 2006

It was time to do something drastic.

It was summer. It was a weekend. It was a mild suburban Spokane middle-class upbringing and I was perfectly fed up with it all, but especially with always being told what to do: Clean your room, eat your asparagus, sweep the driveway, unbury the dog, quit touching yourself there, stop dealing heroin and Pop Rocks in the school yard and mowing lawns in the shape of a skull and crossbones. You know, typical.

I was about 8. Maybe 9. Our painfully idyllic young lifestyles bearing heavily upon us, my friend Paul and I decided to make a run for it. To split that crazy nightmare suburbia scene and get the hell out, once and for all. Enough of the endless chaos of raking leaves and the anxiety around the eating of peas. Enough, you know, working for the Man. Let's do it. Let's run away from home.

We had our bikes. We had our backpacks. We had some extra socks and underwear and about $4 between us and it was an aforementioned warm summer's day as we snuck away without anyone noticing, and we rode and rode for what seemed forever, on and on and on, until we ended up at this fabulously cool construction site radiating all manner of scrap wood and unfinished buildings and lots of glorious nooks and crannies for us to build our ideal hideaway fort.

It was perfect. We were, I believe, less than one mile from home. But it might as well have been the moon because no one knew where we were. The devil had yet to invent cell phones or GPS or implantable RFID chips and hence it was still possible to get away and, for all intents and purposes, vanish from the face of the Earth. Ah, the glory of it.

We leaned some planks up against a tree. We found a beat-up tarp for a doorway. We collected nails and hunks of scrap wood (for ammo) and dug in. There was a small market right nearby (excellent strategic planning on our part -- access to cheap candy was, like, right there) and we stocked up on supplies: one box of Honeycomb, four generic grape sodas, a large bag of potato chips. We had 75 cents left over for, you know, emergencies.

I have no idea how we thought we were going to survive. I have no idea how long we thought we would last. I remember that scarythilling rush of newfound independence, like I was leaving home forever and I was finally free of all rules and boundaries. I remember the taste of dry Honeycomb and the smell of the sawdust and imagining everyone's horrified, distraught expressions when they found I was gone forever. Let this be a lesson to them all! We laughed and strategized and got nicely sugared up and felt all rebellious and disobedient.

Until it started to get cold. And we started to get hungry again. And our flashlight didn't work. And the construction site quickly turned from friendly welcoming wonderland into dusky creepy shadowland. And so we did what every normal preteen runaway does in this situation: We quickly rode home. In time for dinner.

I now guesstimate that our radical rebellion lasted roughly six hours. During this time, I do believe my parents had no idea where I was. Not only that, but when I returned, they didn't even realize I had gone. I remember this being rather humiliating, because if there's one thing worse than failing in your defiance of authority, it's having authority smile warmly when you walk back in the door and offer you a bowl of hot macaroni and cheese with little bits of cut-up hot dogs in it. Bastards!

Alas, it is but a faint memory. And it's also a scenario that might well be disappearing from the face of the culture. No more tiny but fiercely independent romps into the unknown for modern postmillennial kids. No more untethered visits to where the wild things are.

And why? Because technology has stomped on in and has taken childhood by the throat and is right now handing a cell phone to every child over 5 years old, telling them it's absolutely mandatory that they be able to call Mom or Dad or the police at a moment's notice because, oh my God, have you seen the news? Child molesters are everywhere. Sexual predators are lurking behind every MySpace page. Leave the neighborhood without telling anyone? Ride your bike to mysterious parts unknown? What are you, insane?

Indeed, there's a whole slew of new phones and services aimed at the under-10 set (see the LG Migo, the Firefly, etc.), cute little bug-like things designed with a handful of preset buttons that instantly dial Mom/Dad or the police or the fire department or perhaps (if you live in Colorado Springs) a disapproving and suspicious God.

But this isn't the sad part. It's this: The big telecoms are now offering a new service to parents wherein, for an extra monthly fee, you can log in to your PC and actually track your child's movements based on the location of his/her kiddie phone. True. And one of the biggest new providers of such happy creepy family surveillance? Disney. Shudder.

But it doesn't stop there. Not only can you check your kids' whereabouts, but for an extra fee, you can have the system alert you whenever your kid goes beyond preset boundaries. That's right, you can be sitting there innocently surfing hard-core German fetish porn when -- beep-beep-beep -- an alarm goes off letting you know little Dakota has crossed the half-mile radius of the house and might be ... I don't know what. Smoking. Playing with matches. Joining the Taliban.

Oh, I know. It's a perfectly reasonable concept. It's every mildly paranoid parent's wet dream. Hell, kids today are crazy, right? They could just as easily wander over to the wrong side of the tracks as buy a plane ticket to Vegas to meet some guy they met on MySpace. Hence, such phones are admittedly a bit useful.

But it still must be said: Much of the cosmic point of getting lost in the mall or riding your Schwinn too far into another mysterious neighborhood is not being able to call your mom at the slightest whiff of the perilous unknown. This is, after all, how you begin to learn to figure the world out for yourself. This is how you make the soul snap to attention. Fear awakens the mind. The survival instinct learns to French-kiss the Mystery.

Of course, you might argue that it's still possible for even halfway intelligent, rebellious kids to disobey, to break the rules and split their horrible cushy suburban Ritalin lives and explore the construction sites of their own independent souls. And I'm sure many of them are already catching on.

You want to run away from home? You want to really feel the world, kiddo, even if it's just a few blocks away? You want to experience true danger and mutiny and independence, a feeling that even adults can no longer handle without freaking out and looking terrified? That's easy. Just leave the damn phone at home, silly.

   

I went to a show at Jazz Alley the last time I was down there.  They've just sent me an email with some 1/2-price admissions and free appetizers.  These are only good until the end of August, and I'm not going to be in Seattle any time between now and then.  So, is anyone interested in them?  

Let me know and I'll forward the email to you.
 

[Drugs firm blocks cheap blindness cure]

Drugs firm blocks cheap blindness cure
Company will only seek licence for medicine that costs 100 times more
Saturday June 17, 2006
Guardian

A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.

Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called Avastin into the eyes of patients with wet macular degeneration, a common condition of older age that can lead to severely impaired eyesight and blindness. They report remarkable success at very low cost because one phial can be split and used for dozens of patients.

But Genentech, the company that invented Avastin, does not want it used in this way. Instead it is applying to license a fragment of Avastin, called Lucentis, which is packaged in the tiny quantities suitable for eyes at a higher cost. Speculation in the US suggests it could cost £1,000 per dose instead of less than £10. The company says Lucentis is specifically designed for eyes, with modifications over Avastin, and has been through 10 years of testing to prove it is safe.

Unless Avastin is approved in the UK by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) it will not be universally available within the NHS. But because Genentech declines to apply for a licence for this use of Avastin, Nice cannot consider it. In spite of the growing drugs bill of the NHS, it will appraise, and probably approve, Lucentis next year.

Although Nice's role is to look at cost-effectiveness, it says it cannot appraise a drug and pass it for use in the NHS unless the drug is referred to it by the Department of Health. The department says its hands are tied.

"The drug company hasn't applied for it to be licensed for this use. It wouldn't be referred to Nice until they have made the first move," said a Department of Health spokeswoman. "They need to step up and get a licence. If they are not getting it licensed, why aren't they?"

New drugs for the condition are badly needed: those we have now only slow the progression to blindness. With Avastin, many patients get their sight back with just one or two injections.

Avastin was first used on human eyes by Philip Rosenfeld, an ophthalmologist in the US, who was aware of animal studies carried out by Genentech that showed potential in eye conditions. This unlicensed use of Avastin has spread across continents entirely by word of mouth from one doctor to another. It has now been injected into 7,000 eyes, with considerable success.

Professor Rosenfeld has published his results and a website has been launched in the US to collate the experiences of doctors from around the world. But although the evidence is good, regulators require randomised controlled trials before they grant licences, which generally only the drug companies can afford to carry out.

Prof Rosenfeld said the real issue was drug company profits. "This truly is a wonder drug," he said. "This shows both how good they [the drug companies] are and on the flip side, how greedy they are." He would like to see governments fund clinical trials of drugs such as Avastin in the public interest.

Rising drug bills are a big problem on both sides of the Atlantic. In the UK, said David Wong, chairman of the scientific committee of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, doctors are fighting battles to persuade primary care trusts to pay for drugs to stop their patients going blind while they wait for Nice to decide on Lucentis and another expensive drug called Macugen. That decision is not expected before the end of next year.

About 20,000 people are diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration in the UK each year. "From the patient's point of view, if they have an eye condition that deteriorates very quickly, there is no question of waiting," said Professor Wong. "We're talking about days and weeks, rather than months. The question is should we do nothing and say there is no randomised controlled trial to prove Avastin is of value?" He called for primary care trusts to agree to pay for the planned phasing-in of new drugs for the condition.

Last night Genentech said its main concern over the use of Avastin to treat eye conditions was patient safety. "While there are some small, single-centre, uncontrolled studies of Avastin being performed, safety data on patients who are treated with Avastin off-label is not being collected in a standard or organised fashion," said a spokeswoman for the company.

Pharmaceutical firms say they need to launch drugs at high prices because of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on developing them. Critics point out that the company's calculations also include the marketing budget.

 

[Barman killer had been released early]

Just found this one in the Guardian.  I hear so much homophobia coming from people in their 20s these days that it saddens me to think that something like this can still happen.   My professional life has led me to have a lot of gay friends, and it worries me that society seems to be moving backwards on this issue--or it may be that homophobia is less frowned upon here in Canada, I'm not in a position to tell.


Barman killer had been released early
Friday June 16, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

One of two men jailed for life for the murder of a barman in an attack motivated by "homophobic thuggery" had been released from prison early, police said today.

Scott Walker and Thomas Pickford punched, kicked and stamped on Jody Dobrowski "as if trying to kill an animal" while walking back to a hostel for released offenders.

Unemployed Pickford, 25, and 33-year-old decorator Walker, both of no fixed address, were told by an Old Bailey judge they would serve a minimum of 28 years after admitting to killing Mr Dobrowski on Clapham Common, in south London, last October.

It is understood to be the first time that a judge has been able to use an anti-gay motive as an aggravating feature to help decide the sentence.

The court heard that, in January last year, Walker had been jailed for 15 months for assaulting his mother, making threats to kill and criminal damage. Scotland Yard confirmed Walker had been released early from prison last June, and had been on licence until the day before he killed Mr Dobrowski.

Mr Dobrowski, 24, from Stroud, Gloucestershire, suffered dozens of wounds when he was attacked as he crossed a gay cruising area on the common.

The Common Serjeant of London, Judge Brian Barker, said it was likely that Walker and Pickford would serve longer than the 28 years he had fixed as a minimum before they could be considered for parole.

He said the pair had only one intention when they went to the wooded area on Clapham Common on October 14 last year - "homophobic thuggery".

"It was Jody's tragic misfortune to cross your path," he said. "You subjected him to mindless abuse and showed him no mercy. In those few seconds, you took from him the most precious possessions - his life and future."

Walker and Pickford had been returning to a charity-run hostel for released offenders after a night of drinking in Lavender Hill and decided to cross the common.

The pair encountered Mr Dobrowski and, following a brief exchange of words, Pickford threw punches at him. Walker joined in the assault, and Mr Dobrowski's head, neck and body were punched, kicked and stamped on.

Witnesses saw and heard the sustained assault, and one who tried to intervene was warned off by Walker and Pickford.

One of the attackers said: "We don't like poofters here, and that's why we can kill him if we want." The witness, who was threatened with similar treatment, called the police.

Officers arrived in the area and were guided to the scene. They described Mr Dobrowski's face as "a bloody, swollen pulp".

Nicholas Hilliard, prosecuting, said the "gentle, loveable and well-liked" barman's family had only one question of the two men - why did they take his life? "The answer is because he was gay," he said.

Both Walker and Pickford had been involved in an assault on another man in the area two weeks earlier.

Mr Dobrowski, an assistant bar manager at Bar Risa Jongleurs, in Camden, north London, was alive when police discovered him. He died in hospital from severe head, neck and facial injuries.

In court today, the judge told the attackers: "I am quite satisfied that aggression was uppermost in your minds.

"It was a premeditated attack on a gay man. As it continued and increased in ferocity, there was an intention to kill. He suffered considerably before his death." The killers had damaged the lives of those who loved Mr Dobrowski, said the judge.

Outside the court, the victim's mother, Sheri, described his death as "an outrage".

"It was a political act. It was an act of terrorism," she said. "Jody was not the first man to be killed, or terrorised, or beaten or humiliated for being homosexual, or for being perceived to be homosexual.

"Tragically, he will not be the last man to suffer the consequences of homophobia which is endemic in this society. This is unacceptable. We cannot accept this. No intelligent, healthy or reasonable society could.

"We would like to pay tribute to Jody Dobrowski for his strength in the face of cowardice. For struggling to become who he was - an intelligent, funny, hardworking and beautiful man, whose life was brutally and mercilessly punched and kicked from him."

Jaswant Narwal, the district crown prosecutor at the Old Bailey trials unit, said afterwards: "We believe this is the first instance where the judge has been able to use motivation based on sexual orientation as an aggravating feature when sentencing for murder."

Stonewall, the gay equality organisation, welcomed the sentence.

"These sentences properly reflect that this was an appalling crime," said its chief executive, Ben Summerskill. "It's absolutely right that murder motivated by hatred of minority communities should be treated with this sort of severity."

Mr Dobrowski was beaten so badly that a pathologist was unable to say how many times he had been hit. The pathologist identified 33 areas of injury to his head, face, ears and neck.

He suffered a swollen brain, a broken nose and extensive bruising to his neck, spine and groin.

The pathologist concluded that Mr Dobrowski's death was a result of the combination of the brain injury, extensive bleeding, the inhalation of blood and a severe crushing injury to the larynx.

His family could not identify his body because of the severity of his injuries, and identification was made through fingerprint comparison.

After the attack, the killers returned to their hostel where Pickford, who punched his victim so hard that he cracked bones in his hands, told fellow resident Kevin Hanlon: "I've just kicked the crap out of someone. I feel great."

After the attack, Walker was seen to be constantly checking Teletext for news of the murder. A week later, hostel staff contacted police, and he was arrested.

Pickford, who had been asked to leave the hostel a few days earlier after admitting taking heroin, was arrested in Croydon.

In a police interview, he admitted starting the assault on Mr Dobrowski, claiming he did so to impress Walker. He claimed he was too frightened of Walker to stop him continuing the attack. "I just wanted to look like a hard man," he told officers.

Walker refused to comment during interview.

Detective Chief Inspector Nick Scola, who led the investigation into the murder, said: "Jody Dobrowski was beaten to death for no reason other than he was gay.

"I hope today's sentences will send out a strong message that crimes such as these will be dealt with robustly by the courts and will always be vigorously investigated by police.

"We can be grateful that neither Pickford nor Walker will be able to pose a threat to anybody else for a long time."

In January 2005, Walker was jailed for 15 months after he pushed his mother against a door, punched her and bit her on the nose three months earlier. He kicked her while she was on the ground and then put his hands around her neck on a sofa.

Pickford has previous convictions for burglary in the late 1990s.


 

[Don't Blame Me, Blame My IED]

Don't Blame Me, Blame My IED
Are you a ragin' jerk, or do you simply have "intermittent explosive disorder"? Ah, choices
by Mark Morford

Everyone you know is deeply messed up. Everyone you know has some sort of disturbing issue, some sort of simmering psychological demongurgle that spins them off the norm and makes them more than a little peculiar and maybe just a little dangerous and that includes when they act totally blissed-out happy and generous all the time, an intensely bizarre temperament which, as we all know, is just terrifically unsettling and should be properly medicated ASAP.

This seems to be the common wisdom, our unstated religion: We are all latent psychotherapy patients. We are all crazy bubbling lasagnas of potential psychotrembling meltdown.

It is very likely, for example, that you or someone you know suffers from "intermittent explosive disorder." Can you feel it in you? Did you already know? No, it is not another term for arbitrary ejaculation during viewings of "CSI: Miami." It is not what happens when you step on an odd-shaped lump while walking through downtown Baghdad. Nor is it what happens to your intestines following the consumption of the entire Taco Bell Big Bell Value Menu. At least, not officially.

No, IED is when you have sudden outbursts of violent anger when you're normally calm and placid and just a little boring. It is screaming road rage, it is suddenly hurling the dog across the room during a relatively mild argument, it is angrily breaking lamps and screaming at the sky and cracking a few ribs in a seething rage as you pay your taxes and then sighing and apologizing for the blood on the carpet and taking a nap.

Sound familiar? You bet it does. Hell, in Bush's America, not to suffer from wicked outbursts of savage karmic pain and mysterious rashes on your brain resulting in the mad desire to shred the drapes with your teeth would be unusual. This much we know.

But that aside, for the past couple of decades, doctors thought IED was relatively scattered. They didn't even really have a clear name for it, until a big new study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health where they asked a large pile of people what happens when they watch too much Bill O'Reilly and eat too much Burger King and listen to the president molest the English language (I'm just guessing) and their brains become mushy and small and stained like a chain-smoker in a New Jersey Denny's.

Sure enough, under such everyday karmic attack, lots of people now report violent outbursts they can't seem to control, outbursts that are entirely out of scale with what sparked the anger in the first place. Isn't that interesting? Isn't that obvious, in a painful, there-they-go-again sort of way?

Voilà, a new disorder is born. IED is now ready to become a bona fide affliction, suffered not by a miserable few but by upward of an estimated 16 million Americans. Which may or may not mean that raging jerks and violence-prone morons can now point to this study and say, Gosh, sorry about that knife wound, baby, it was my IED talking. It may or may not mean we are deepening into a cultural phase where every behavior and every aberrant thought can be classified as a nicely narcotizable syndrome.

After all, IED, they figure, is merely a result of poor serotonin receptor functioning. It's just wacky wiring, which just so happens to be affecting more and more of the global population. And what do you do with such an affliction? Why, you take Prozac, silly. For, quite possibly, the rest of your life.

But you do not have to believe me. You merely need to glance at the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known to devotees as DSM-IV), the deeply creepy bible of the psychiatric profession, which is roughly a thousand pages long and which lists more sad 'n' disagreeable disorders and conditions and painful permutations of Self than the "Joy of Cooking" lists recipes involving heat.

The DSM, it is like a tumor. It is like a Christian megachurch. It is like a ... a ... something large and invasive and numbing to the soul, and while it has been, I'm sure, hugely helpful and necessary to many, it is churning and growing and seething all the time, swallowing all of humanity in its vortex of new and vaguely quantifiable suffering. To read any part of it is to come away convinced you suffer from at least a dozen happy disorders, most requiring medication or partial lobotomy. It's that kind of joy.

Which is just another way of saying we are aswim in a bizarre and surreal system, one in which shiny good-hearted doctors conduct well-funded studies and then write the descriptions of the resultant disorder they invariably find (and they always, always find something), and then turn around and make a nice payment on their sweet new Mercedes SL with the money they made from the pharmaceutical company that paid them to identify the new disorder for which the pharmco can now invent fun toxic new behavior-modifying drugs to treat. See? Everybody's happy.

I am now enjoying this trend. I mean, what the hell. I am now wondering what sort of conditions and what sort of syndromes can be identified just as easily. Surely, the next major update of the DSM, which hits the country like a hammer in 2011, will include all manner of new conditions, including IED. But perhaps it can also include other common afflictions of the modern world. With open-ended criteria like this, why not?

Let us now suggest: Rumsfeld Hope/Joy Dysplasia, or Oozing Coulter Panic Arrhythmia, or Spasmodic Ben Stiller Recoil. Let us offer up, say, Sudden Leather-Whiffing Swoon Syndrome, or Fingerling Potato Polycystic Neuroplasmia, or Diastrophic Cervical Frat Boy Rejection Clampdown. Then there's always Hyperkinetic Eyeball Flutter Related to Excessive Images of Dead Innocent Iraqis (HEFREIDII).

iPod Erection Syndrome. Sudden Thong Glimpse Moan Disorder. GOP Colon Self-Knotting Disease. Jingoism Synapse Slaughter. Jesus Did Not Say That Repetitive Exclamation Fatigue. Vatican-Induced Blood-Boiling Soul Trauma. Lynne Cheney.

Wow. This is so easy. No wonder the DSM-IV is so damn long. Why not define some of your own? Submit them to the DSM-V, laugh a wide-angled, open-thighed, sighing laugh and watch your own tendency toward IED drop dramatically. Hell, who needs Prozac?

 

[with a borrowed car.]

    OK guys.  I don't like to post rants.  And I don't like to post something that can be construed as racist.

But I'm really steamed now.

So . . .

Thursday it rained.  There were two accidents outside my place in E Van, so I knew things would be crazy--especially in my part of town.  I was on my way to a computer place in Kits, and got little more than a kilometre from my place when some dope slams on his brakes in front of me.  Being a veteran of East Van driving styles, and knowing the pavement was slippery, I had given him plenty of room (growing up in the NW,  plus living for two years in a place with a lot of snow--I'm not stupid).  Wouldn't you know, just about 6' from the guy's bumper, nearing the end of my stop, I hit a patch of oil on the road and slide right into him.

I wish I didn't have to relate what came next, but it's true.  This older Asian male jumps out of his car (the guy in front of him still has his backup lights on, wanting to get into a parking space, but since this guy stopped on his ass he can't move), and starts berating this white chick who ran right into his brand-new car.  We had to wipe the dirt off of his brand-new bumper to find three 1/2" scratches in his paint.  I gave him info, and was so freaked out I went straight home.

I rang him that evening.  A female voice speaking perfect, unaccented English is on his machine, so I leave a msg, asking him to ring me back.  I've already spoken to a guy in a body shop, who gives me a decent estimate to sand and repaint the guy's entire bumper.

Remember, I may have lived here for four years, but I've never dealt with ICBC before.  I'm used to American insurance companies with deductibles and huge rate increases if you make a claim.  I figure if I offer to repaint the guy's bumper (and for all I know the scratches were already there--but I'm not going to argue) I'll save myself a lot of money and hassle.  I've got a lot on my plate right now, and I just wanted to deal with this quickly and effectively.

The guy rings me up the next morning at frickin 6AM!  I work late, and wasn't in the mood to talk with him, so I set up a meeting later that day.  When we met I gave him the card of the guy at the body shop and took a picture of his car.  He wanted to look at mine, for some reason, even though I told him it was all right.  He asked me about every single bloody scratch on a six-year-old car that has seen many "anonymous" parking lot dings in its life (you know, the kind you come out and find--with no note on the windshield) and its 80,000 miles (that's includes five coast to coast trips, btw).  I told him that I didn't have a husband or family to look after me--that maybe my car and house weren't super glamorous, but they were both paid for and I was just managing to support myself.  I wanted to sort this business out with him as quickly and efficiently as possible.  I told him the place I got the estimate from was where ICBC would probably send him, but they were giving me a break because they wouldn't have to deal with paperwork or delays and would get cash from me right away.

This guy was old enough to be my father and acted very condescending towards me.  I did my best to be polite to him, but I wasn't going to let him walk all over me.  He wanted to take his car to the dealership since it was new, but I asked him to ring my guy first (I gave him the number) before he got an estimate from the dealer.  He also managed to worm out of me that I was from the States (for some reason he thought I was from Eastern Europe?!?).  I think that is what is responsible for what happened next.

He rang me this morning and wanted to meet with me and give me the dealer's estimate:  more than TWICE what my guy quoted--and said that it might be more if there was any "hidden damage" (yeah, like if he took a tire iron to it before he dropped it off to them).  He had not rung up my guy, I said that I would only look at his estimate if he rang my guy first.  Suddenly, after four perfectly cogent conversations, he "couldn't understand" what I was saying.  I tried three more times to explain it to him in the simplest English I could.  He started giving me this "I get to choose where to go, and you pay" business.  I asked him to bring someone with him to our meeting the next day who could explain what I was saying to him.  He said he knew no one like that.  I asked him who the woman with perfect English on his answering machine was, couldn't she come?  When he said that he knew no one who could translate I said I didn't believe him.

He then told me that he would ring ICBC.  I warned him that ICBC would probably send him to the same guy I recommended but that it would take 3-4 weeks, and wouldn't he rather just deal with it now?  Oh, no.  He was going to ring ICBC and he hung up.

Five minutes later, I was talking to an ICBC adjuster.  What is the first thing I found out?  IT WASN'T EVEN HIS CAR!  Someone else with the same last name owned it, but he wasn't the owner.  So who was it?  The woman on his machine?  His daughter, perhaps?

He was playing the big man with the fancy new car (not even a medium-priced one, but "brand new") and acting patronising towards me while trying to hose a lot of money from someone who has no other support system who was going further than necessary to accommodate him, and he didn't even own the damn car!  What do you want to bet the actual owner speaks perfect English, too?

I just really have a problem with this kind of behaviour.  I'm trying to keep myself together here, and trying to do what's right even though this guy's actions contributed (albeit in a small way) to what happened--I mean, it was mostly just bad luck on my part, but I still admit that the fault has to rest primarily with me.  So I'm trying to be a nice person, and I'm trying to appeal to his sense of humanity--and he's trying to extort all this money from me, playing Mr Big Shot and putting me down in the process, with a borrowed car.

Arrrgh.  I don't imagine any of you would want to read through this long rant of mine, but if you happen to have done so, thanks.  I just needed to get it off my chest.

I'm just getting so tired of people trying to take advantage of me.   Just because I'm white and well-educated doesn't mean that I have money to burn.
     

[BASE jumper died on 4th leap of day]

. . . beats a slow death from cancer or heart disease, or deterioration by inches in old age.


BASE jumper died on 4th leap of day
Fiance, friends say she loved skydiving, was 'really happy'  
Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Shannon Dean of San Mateo spent her workdays in the picturesque Sausalito office of a wine importer. On weekends and at night, her view was even more spectacular as a fearless skydiver who also jumped off bridges.

The veteran free-faller died Monday after her parachute failed to open on her fourth jump that day, her fiance said, from a world-renowned bridge-jumping site in Twin Falls, Idaho.

She was on a special birthday trip arranged by her fiance of nine months, Bob Ash, 42, of San Mateo, just eight days before she was to have turned 35.

"She loved to live life to its fullest. She was never content with the status quo," said Ash, who met Dean three years ago while skydiving in Byron.

Many skydivers become BASE jumpers as well. Twin Falls is one of the most popular spots in the world for practitioners of BASE jumping, which stands for the buildings, antennae, spans and earth from which they leap.

"She loved the freedom she experienced through skydiving and BASE jumping and, I think more than anything, she loved the communal aspect to skydiving and all the friends and people she met along the way," Ash said Tuesday. "She's a very loving person, and she'll be missed."

Dean jumped from the Perrine Bridge on Highway 93 over the Snake River three times Saturday without any problems, Ash said. The couple were to leave Idaho on Memorial Day, but first Dean wanted to take one last jump from the bridge.

After leaping from a structure, BASE jumpers throw out a pilot chute into the air. The chute catches the wind and is supposed to activate the parachute.

But when Dean pulled her pilot chute, it got caught in an air-pocket behind her back, Ash said. Usually, skydivers can turn their bodies if the pilot chute gets stuck. Dean ran out of time, Ash said.

Dean fell 486 feet into the Snake River at 12:10 p.m. Monday, moments after Ash kissed her at the top of the bridge and told her he loved her.

The tragedy was caught on video cameras by other BASE jumpers, said Nancy Howell, spokeswoman for the Twin Falls Sheriff's Department.

On her MySpace.com page, Dean described how she had been out of commission for several months because of back surgery. "I'm finally back in the air now," she wrote. She described her fiance as "this amazing guy."

Dean's death has cast a pall on Northern California's skydivers and BASE jumpers. On a forum at www.dropzone.com, one mourner wrote, "Enjoy that eternal freefall Shannon." Many others wrote, "Blue skies" or simply, "Blues."

"I'm really sad, because she was a really good friend," skydiver Krista Lim, 22, of San Francisco, said of her former roommate. "She was doing what she loved, and she was really happy. It was a beautiful day for her to be doing what she loved."

Dean grew up in Costa Mesa (Orange County), where she attended Orange Coast College. A wine connoisseur, she worked at Vine Connections in Sausalito, an importer of wines and sake. Several years ago, she worked for a Sacramento-area company making rigs for BASE jumping.

She had recently moved to Ash's San Mateo home after living with Lim and her husband, Thom van Os, in San Francisco. "She was just a wonderful person, loved by all," van Os said.

Dean would sometimes go BASE jumping at night, said Lim, who declined to specify locations because such thrill seekers thrive on secrecy. She had gone on about 500 sky-dives, Lim said.

"She's a beautiful person," Lim said. "Her life meant so much to so many people. Sometimes you meet people and you feel awkward, but sometime you meet people and it just clicks." That was Dean, she said.

Dean's death came at a particularly perilous day at Twin Falls. Two other jumpers were injured within an hour of her fatal plunge. Paramedics were still at the site of one of the accidents when Dean fell, Howell said.

Two other people have died from jumps off the bridge, in June 2002 and October 2003, authorities said.

There have been about 100 BASE jumping deaths worldwide since 1981. Since 2004, about 140 skydivers have died around the world, according to unofficial statistics maintained by enthusiasts.
 

[If it's about steroids, be prepared for lots of asterisks]

My apologies to those rare few who still look in on DV.  This was my farewell post there, and I thought that it might have a little more resonance on "our" side of the 49.


[font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 127);" size="4"]If it's about steroids, be prepared for lots of asterisks[/font]
From McGwire on down.  Like it or not, steroids have been part of the sport (on both sides of the plate) for the past 20 years.  Just because androstenedione was not a banned substance, anyone who has spent time around a person on andro knows that it is as potent a performance enhancer as it is a mood disruptor.

[font style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 127);" size="4"]What about "greenies"?[/font]
People say that steroids may let you pitch or hit the ball harder, but that they don't help you actually hit the ball in the first place.  However, amphetamines are medically proven to not only increase alertness, but to sharpen a player's perception of moving objects and quicken reaction times.  "Greenies" have been a staple of baseball clubhouses since the 50s.   Major League Baseball instituted an amphetamine testing policy only this year.  Are we going to go back and ask the likes of Hank Aaron, Pete Rose and Carl Yastrzemski whether any of their record-setting hits occurred while under the influence of amphetamines?

[font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 127);" size="4"]What "level playing field"?[/font]
The most famous "asterisk" in baseball statistics was placed next to Roger Maris' single-season HR record because major league baseball seasons were longer than in Babe Ruth's day.  The removal of the asterisk was an acknowledgement of the fact that records will never be based on a "level playing field".

Since the institution of the Designated Hitter in 1973, accomplished hitters have been able to extend their careers beyond what they would have been had they been required to punish their bodies playing defence, allowing them more career ABs than players from a previous era.

There was the "dead ball era", the "juiced ball era", smaller leagues with less travel, less sophisticated medical techniques that made for more career-ending injuries.

Outstripping all these examples of "tilting" the "field", of course, was segregation.  Some of the greatest players the game has seen were never allowed into the major leagues because of their race.  Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth never faced Satchel Paige or Slim Gibson.  Josh Gibson is estimated to have hit over 900 home runs, though statistics from the Negro Leagues are incomplete.  "I played with Willie Mays and against Hank Aaron," Hall of Famer Monte Irvin once said. "They were tremendous players, but they were no Josh Gibson."

[font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 127); font-weight: bold;" size="4"]Just how clean are other major sports?[/font]
Oakland Raiders linebacker Bill Romanowski, who last year in a civil suit was ordered to pay US$415,000 to his teammate Marcus Williams after a brutal attack during a team practice, is implicated in the same investigation of BALCO, the Bay Area lab alleged to have supplied Bonds with "designer steroids".

Have performance-enhancing substances been behind other incidents in professional sports?  In 2002 a professional trainer in Vancouver remarked to me that the "clusters" of what he called "boneheaded penalties" that Todd Bertuzzi was subject to committing bore an interesting resemblance to the on/off cycling of steroid use.  Donald Brashear's violent off-ice tangles made the news after getting whacked by Marty McSorley in February 2000.  Link Gaetz achieved a Lyle Alzedo-like reputation for his on- and off-ice misadventures.  Increased size and strength are only one benefit of steroid use.  Decreased recovery time is an advantage that can be especially valuable during the grueling NHL schedule, especially with current trends toward a faster game.  The NHL only started testing for steroids during the 2005-06 season.

Ephedrine-type stimulants are not covered by the NHL's testing policy.  It always cracks me up to see post-game interviews in training rooms full of third- and fourth-liners "de-spinning" themselves on rows of stationary bikes.

[font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 127); font-weight: bold;" size="4"]Is it because Bonds "looks like" Satan?[/font]
It doesn't help that Barry Bonds is, by media accounts, a thoroughly disagreeable personality.  Not incidentally, his late father, Bobby Bonds, was not reputed to be particularly pleasant to the media during his career in baseball.  But I find it striking that Bonds, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa are taking so much heat for "cheating", while admitted steroid users Mark McGwire (also not a particularly "touchy-feely" guy), Jason Giambi and the late Ken Caminiti are largely overlooked.

Could it be for the same reason that Darryl Strawberry's drug problems won more attention than those of Caminiti and Steve Howe?  Or the reason that Grant Fuhr was pilloried for using cocaine at the same time that rampant drug use by his teammates was reported in the mainstream press?  Or that it took a phenomenal performance in the 1971 World Series and his subsequent tragic death in a plane crash for Roberto Clemente's achievements to be recognised outside of Pittsburgh?

[font style="color: rgb(0, 0, 127); font-weight: bold;" size="4"]The real context[/font]
While everyone yammers on about the purity of "sports", when it comes to high-level professional sports leagues economic reality dictates that the commodity being presented to the general public is not sport, but ENTERTAINMENT.  Whatever is going to sell tickets and bring revenues to the teams, broadcast and print media, and the advertising circus surrounding the teams and individual athletes is paramount.

In which case, how do performance-enhancing drugs differ from those used by entertainers?  Plastic surgery, pain-killers, stimulants and diet drugs are in widespread use by actors, musicians, models, and all other manner of entertainment (and broadcast journalism!) professionals--but these are all accepted as "part of the business".

For every parent who says, "My son is an athlete, and I don't want him to be enticed into using steroids by Barry Bonds", how many say, "My daughter is studying acting, and I don't want her to become anorexic like Mary-Kate Olsen"?


Instead of singling out Bonds, perhaps one ought to consider the bigger picture.
 

   RIP, you ROCK GOD!