Content d'être un gars
Glad to be a guy

 Dimanche, le 30 octobre 2005
Sunday,October 30 2005

Le site Masters of photography répertorie plusieurs centaines des oeuvres qui ont marqué l'histoire de la photographie. Content d'être un gars diffuse ces photographies; nous estimons que les valeurs que défend Content d'être un gars et celles qui ont marqué l'histoire de la photographie sont proches les unes des autres.

Les féministes ont-elles de l'humour?

Oui, mais seulement quand il s'agit de dénigrer la moitié masculine de la population

If your dog is barking at the back door and your wife is yelling at the front door, who do you let in first?

The dog, of course. He'll shut up once you let him in.

Jugement à la suite d'accusations basées sur de fausses allégations

Mauvais temps pour les grandes gueules

Canadian Government Caught Funding Anti-Christian Bigotry - Minister Won't Apologize

OTTAWA, October 27, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Conservative MP has discovered through documents obtained under Access to Information that Status of Women Canada has been funding anti-Christian bigotry and
pro-abortion activism.  However, in a startling exchange of correspondence,
the Minister responsible for the funding neither offered to pull the funding
nor to apologize to Christian Canadians for funding groups which defame
them.

Writing to Minister of Canadian Heritage and Minister responsible for Status
of Women Liza Frulla last month, Conservative MP Maurice Vellacott pointed
out that the documents obtained through access to information requests revealed the government granted $27,400 last year to the BC Pro-Choice Action network (pro-CAN). In his letter to the Minister, MP Vellacott notes:

Pro-CAN spokesperson Joyce Arthur uses derogatory labels to describe individuals who are pro-life, saying their opposition to abortion, "comes primarily from religious justifications for oppressing women" and a need to "maximize (the Catholic Church's) membership levels to maintain their worldly influence and wealth."  Pro-CAN accuses pro-life Christians of being "religious fanatics" who do "little or nothing for children once they are born."  She says pro-life Christians are "anti-woman and anti-child," have views which are "uninformed, sexist, cruel," and lack the ability to empathize which "breeds intolerance, hate crimes, and war."  Ms. Arthur says that the pro-lifer's attitude towards women is like "the slaveholder's attitude to blacks, and the Nazi's attitude to Jews."

Vellacott suggested that the Minister withdraw funding from the group and apologize to Christian Canadians for funding such bigotry.  "The government should be taking no part in spreading this sort of bigotry.  Please ensure that any current funding to Pro-CAN ceases immediately and that no future taxpayer money be given to this group.  And please have your department issue a public apology to all Christians and pro-life Canadians because of your department's financial support of this hate mongering organization," said Vellacott.

In a curt reply dated October 18, Minister Frulla says, "I appreciate being made aware of your concerns."  The Minister acknowledges that pro-CAN and the other pro-abortion activist groups mentioned in the letter by Vellacott, "did indeed receive funding under the women's Program of Status of Women Canada."

Frulla suggested she was well aware of the activities of pro-CAN, but found no objection to funding the anti-Christian group with public monies.  "Each application is assessed according to a stringent set of objectives and criteria . . . Please be assured that the initiatives cited in your letter, which did indeed receive funding, met all of the above-mentioned objectives and eligibility criteria."

Frulla concluded her response, "Please accept my best wishes for the challenges ahead."

Express your concerns to the Prime Minister:
pm@pm.gc.ca
or write or fax the Prime Minister's office at:
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa
K1A 0A2
Fax: 613-941-6900
To Liza Frulla
House of Commons
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
(613) 995-6403
Frulla.L@parl.gc.ca

See page 1 of Vellacott letter to Minister Frulla
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005_docs/Vellacott_le...
See page 2 of Vellacott letter
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005_docs/Vellacott_le...
See letter to Vellacott from Frulla
http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2005_docs/Frulla_lette...
jhw

http://www.sceptiques.qc.ca/SM/smmain.html

http://www.injusticequebec.ca/

Vies brisées : Les erreurs judiciaires
Par Michel Dumont
 

« Victime d’une erreur judiciaire, je viens partager mon expérience tumultueuse dans les dédales de la justice criminelle canadienne. Accusé de viol en 1990 à la suite d’une plainte fondée sur le témoignage de la victime, je fus convoqué en procès en 1991.

« Malgré six témoins solides (tous prêts à m’appuyer) et armé d’un alibi en béton, je fus quand même reconnu coupable. Suite à mon incarcération, j’ai décidé d’aller en appel. En 1992, la victime reconnaît le véritable agresseur dans un club vidéo de Boisbriand. Réalisant l’erreur judiciaire, elle en avise les policiers et le procureur de la couronne. Ceux-ci ignorent toutes ses demandes. Ce n’est qu’en 1994 que l’on entend mon appel et la couronne omet délibérément d’informer la justice, ainsi que mon avocat, des faits additionnels à mon endroit. L’appel fut rejeté.

« Ce n’est qu’en 1997, lors de ma sortie de prison, que la victime m’informe de ceux-ci. Elle le fit même devant les caméras de l’émission Enjeux en 2001. Entre-temps, mon innocence a été prononcée, cependant, le gouvernement ne veut toujours pas reconnaître son erreur à mon endroit. C’est pour cette raison que j’ai décidé de fonder Injustice Québec afin d’exiger du gouvernement Charest et du Ministre de la Justice, Yvon Marcoux, une action rapide pour toutes les victimes d’erreurs judiciaires au Québec. Dans un pays aussi progressiste que le Canada, nous avons tous les moyens nécessaires pour implanter un tel programme et nous devrions même nous en faire un devoir.

« Notre système de justice est-il infaillible? Loin de là! Est-ce que son système de preuves et témoignages est-il efficace pour savoir toute la vérité, rien que la vérité? Chose certaine, j’ai été victime d’une flagrante erreur judiciaire et nous devons intervenir afin que de telles tragédies cessent. »

Michel Dumont a été emprisonné pendant 3 ans et 2 mois pour un crime qu’il n’a jamais commis. La couronne a même omis délibérément la divulgation de preuves qui auraient pu prouver son innocence. Il est maintenant le porte-parole d’Injustice-Québec, un groupe militant pour un meilleur soutien aux victimes d’erreurs judiciaires.
 

Jean-Pierre Gagnon,

pédagogue, responsable de la recherche pour l'organisme L'APRÈS-RUPTURE (Liens pères-enfants)   

Monday 10th October 2005

Three teenage girls have been sent to prison after using an imitation gun in a robbery.

Croydon Crown Court heard how Billie Jane Leslie, 17, Simone Minott, 17, and Kerri Leyanne Storer, 18, who were living at the Lansdowne Road YMCA at the time of their arrest, robbed three girls in George Street as they made their way home from a night out at the Cartoon.

Judge Simon Pratt lifted reporting restrictions preventing the 17-year-olds from being named as he sentenced Leslie to five years, and Storer and Minott to a four-year jail term last Friday.

Leslie had pleaded guilty to robbery and possessing an imitation firearm, but Minott and Storer were found guilty on September 2 following a five-day trial.

Detective Sergeant Bob Gould, from South Norwood robbery squad, said: "This was an excellent result. The sentencing reflects the crimes committed. "

October 25, 2005

Kelsey Bennett had her first drink when she was 13. She doesn't think she was pressured by her peers. She doesn't think she was swayed by advertising. She just had a few friends over one night and opened some bottles in her parents' liquor cabinet.

"The older kids are drinking and having a good time, so why not, you know?" says Kelsey, now a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "When you start drinking, it's kind of this mystery, something you can't do."

It's something that young people have long been forbidden to do, and done anyway. But the reality has been changing, with evidence that it is now girls such as Kelsey, not boys, who constitute the majority of youths using alcohol.

The gradual shift, which has only emerged over the past few years and has not been widely reported, raises questions about whether society understands enough about the different forces motivating boys and girls as they move from grade school to college.

Some factors affecting both sexes are obvious: Start with alcohol's huge presence in American culture, add more absent parents and rising rates of stress and depression among youths, and you have a cocktail of reasons explaining underage alcohol use.

Beyond that, many girls "want to be one of the boys," says Joseph Califano, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York. Also, in the center's studies of 12- to 17-year-olds, girls report far higher stress levels than do boys. That, along with more spending money, correlates with a greater propensity to drink.

Moreover, alcohol's disinhibiting effects can be alluring as a shortcut to girls who "feel enormous pressure to have sex." The push to be sexy often goes hand in hand with the pressure to drink. Experts say that's a factor that advertisers exploit, often to the detriment of girls more than boys. "Bad girls make good company," reads one ad for Cuervo rum. In a Martell Cognac ad, a sultry woman is on display with a plea to "Be at least capable of bad."

To be sexy, goes the logic, is to drink, says Jean Kilbourne, a visiting research scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women. And more subtly, alcohol goes beyond being a tool of seduction, promising empowerment, liberation.

The role that ads may play is highlighted in a study released this week by the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Georgetown University in Washington. The group looked at the advertising content and readership ages of popular magazines such as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, and Sport Illustrated. The study found that underage youths saw more alcohol advertising than did adults in 2002 — and that teen girls were far more likely to be exposed to that advertising than teen boys.

For example, while underage boys saw 29 percent more beer advertising in 2002 than legal-age men, underage girls saw 68 percent more such advertising than legal women. The disparity is just as striking in the "malternative" market (malt-based drinks), where boys saw 37 percent more such ads than legal-age men, while girls saw 95 percent more advertising than legal-age women.

Ashleigh, a teenager who recently graduated from a New Jersey boarding school, says marketing definitely plays a role in her friends' decisions to drink. "I don't think it's considered unladylike to drink a lot," she says. "Look at college girls. They are always depicted in the media as getting trashed and they look cool."

The numbers don't surprise Susan Foster of Columbia's center on addiction. "Targeting women is nothing new," she says. "The alcohol industry, just like the tobacco industry, knows that if you want a lifetime heavy drinker, the best way is to start them early."

Watchdog groups have long criticized the industry's marketing tactics, which are self-regulated. Georgetown issued a report less than a year ago finding that up to 60 percent of visitors to alcohol company websites were minors, citing games and music on the sites that may be most alluring to an audience younger than 21.

Jim O'Hara, executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, says his study measured ad practices that precede the industry's promise to market to an audience of 30 percent minors or less — a big step from the 50 percent limit imposed prior to 2003.

Estimates of alcohol use among teenagers have ebbed and flowed over the years. The number of high school seniors who said they had taken five or more drinks in a row during the past two weeks, for example, fell from about 37 percent in 1975 to 28 percent in 1993, but edged back up to 29 percent in 2002, according to Monitoring the Future at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

In a shift since 2002, girls now outnumber boys in using alcohol. The group Leadership to Keep Children Alcohol Free, for example, cites 2002 research showing that 38.5 percent of ninth-grade girls reported drinking in the past month, versus 34 percent of boys. Some 21 percent of girls and 19 percent of boys reported binge drinking. Until that year, girls had reported consuming alcohol at rates less than or nearly equal to boys.

The factors influencing young people go far beyond advertising. For teenagers in particular, alcohol can be inextricable from the transformed climate of sexual experience, including an emphasis on "hooking up" for casual encounters. "One reason girls are drinking so much is that it's pretty hard to have these kinds of relationships sober," says Ms. Kilbourne. "It's easier to have meaningless sex when you're drunk."

With many teenage girls already losing confidence — studies show that girls' self-esteem plummets in adolescence — Kilbourne and others point to alcohol as a means of short-lived escape. "Most teenage girls have been led to feel terrible about themselves, and alcohol can make you feel beautiful, witty, all kinds of things — or at least make you not care."

There is strong evidence, too, that alcohol abuse is far more common among those with eating disorders, the Columbia center announced in December — and most such disorders develop among teen girls. Also, peer pressure to drink appears to sway teen girls more than it does boys, according to a study released the following month by the National Institutes of Health in Washington.

The impacts can be far-reaching. Youths who start drinking in their mid-teens are more likely to become alcoholics, and alcohol is a factor in leading causes of teen deaths: accidents, murder, and suicide.

Particularly among girls, heavy drinking can launch a perilous cycle. One drink for a teenage girl has roughly the same impact as two drinks for a teenage boy, due to lower body weights and different metabolisms, says Mr. Califano.

Adult women still drink less than men do, and are less likely to drink heavily, but that gap is closing among young girls, Dr. Foster says.

One answer, some argue, involves holding parents more accountable. "Advertising is one thing, but just the prevalence [of alcohol] itself is normalizing," says Bruce Simons-Morton, who led the NIH study on peer pressure last year. "So those parents who continue to be highly involved with their kids, to monitor their behavior — their kids are less likely to" drink.

Meredith Maran, author of "Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic" and a mother of two, is concerned but also seeks to avoid alarmism. "How many decades are we going to study drug use instead of looking at what causes kids to do drugs?"

October 24, 2005

WASHINGTON -- Women made up 7 percent of all inmates in state and federal prisons last year, the government reported Sunday.

A co-author of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Paige Harrison, linked an upswing in the rate of arrest for women to their increased participation in drug crimes, violent crimes and fraud.

The number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons in 2004 was up 4 percent compared to 2003, roughly double the 1.8 percent increase among men, the study said. In 1995, women made up 6.1 percent of all inmates in those facilities.

''The number of incarcerated women has been growing at a rate nearly double that of men, due in large part to sentencing policies in the war on drugs,'' the Sentencing Project, a group promoting alternatives to prison, said.

The group said the number of drug offenders in prisons and jails has risen from 40,000 in 1980 to more than 450,000 today. According to FBI figures, law officers in 2004 made more arrests for drug violations than for any other offense.

The total number of people incarcerated -- including people awaiting trial -- grew 1.9 percent in 2004 to 2,267,787 people.

October 20, 2005
The 14-year old girl who claimed she was raped in June near the Porterville Road Bridge in the Town of Marilla has admitted that she fabricated the story, Erie County Sheriff's deputies said last week.

The teenager will be charged with filing a false report. She will appear in Family Court to answer the charge.

"Area residents who have been understandably concerned can rest assured that this incident never took place," said Erie County Sheriff Timothy B. Howard.

Senior Detective James Hatch, who has been working on the case, re-interviewed the teenager Tues. Oct. 11, and following the interview the girl disclosed to her mother that she and a friend concocted the whole story for personal reasons.

Sheriff's deputies in early September released an artist's rendering and description of a man the girl described. The girl told deputies that while she was walking her dog in June the man asked her for help fixing his car at the side of the road.

"The Erie County Sheriff's Office took this report very seriously and spent countless hours tracking down any and all leads," Howard said. "This should serve as a warning to anyone considering filing a false report. If a report is proven false, whoever filed it will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. This is a very serious matter. We have numerous other cases to invest our time in and when something like this occurs and turns out to be false, it drains our limited resources in helping fight and solve real crime."

READING goalkeeper Graham Stack woke up one morning last week and started piecing his life back together.

The previous 12 months had been a living nightmare for Stack after he was falsely accused of raping and sexually assaulting a young woman.

Croydon Crown Court ruled Stack was the innocent victim. The jury found him not guilty and his friend Alan Smillie was also cleared on two counts of sexual assault.

The harrowing ordeal was finally over and Stack could get on with his life and a promising career with Reading.

Of course, we can never know for sure how deeply the emotional scars run and how long it will take Stack and his friend to fully recover, that is if they ever will.

Meanwhile, the alleged victim sloped off into the darkness and probably won't be seen or heard of again. All we know is that she was a 22-year-old law student from north London.

Stack, on the other hand, had his name, address and intimate details of his sex life plastered all over the media.

Justice eventually prevailed but the association of being involved in a rape trial could take longer to shake off. Mud sticks, as they say.

What this does is highlight a growing problem with the process of investigating claims of rape and sexual assault.

Why should Stack be identified in a case which found him innocent when his accuser benefits from her right to anonymity?

As far as I can see, it was the alleged victim who was the sinister party in all this.

It was she who concocted a story that Stack and Smillie attacked her in Stack's bed while his fiancee was in the room next door.

Stack maintained she had consented to sex with him.

The court later heard she had had too much to drink and threw herself at the two men who were "pawns" in a game she "invented to justify to herself what she did that night".

Her punishment? Nothing.

Stack, though, is not alone. Only last week two women walked into a London police station claiming a Premiership player and his friend took turns to rape them at a hotel.

An investigation using valuable police time and public money is now ongoing to establish whether or not there are grounds for prosecution.

It is a delicate subject and a tough one to balance. The last thing anyone wants is a rapist walking free, but there must be better ways to sift out the false accusations from the real crimes while protecting everyone's identity.

The trouble is that it is often one person's word against another, which makes it too easy for the likes of Stack's accuser to walk into the local nick making all sorts of wild claims. With tabloid newspapers also offering large sums for kiss-and-tell stories, these women often have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Last year three Leicester City players Paul Dickov, Keith Gillespie and Frank Sinclair spent six nights in a Spanish prison following allegations of sexual assault on three women before all charges were dropped.

Ex-Chelsea midfielder Jody Morris suffered a similar ordeal after being falsely accused of raping a woman in Leeds, and Dutch police are currently investigating Arsenal's Robin van Persie over a rape claim.

It is almost as though a trend has been set and professional footballers can expect to suffer more of the same treatment unless a change is made to the law.

Unfortunately, that will come too late to protect the identity of innocent victims like Stack and to expose his false accuser - whoever she was.

Puisque vous partez en voyage

Crouche

Foufoune power

Ce moment de thérapie visuelle permet d'insensibiliser les mâles aux appâts qui pourraient servir à les piéger.

Ensemble nous sommes innombrables