Batch of Good Readin’

1. Denver voters OK marijuana possession
2. ‘Technical virginity’ becomes part of teens’ equation
3. No Propaganda: Some Real Soldiers’ Stories
4. Pharmaceutical Association Pays Novelist To Write Horror Story About Importing Drugs From Canada…
5. U.S. Quietly Issues Estimate of Iraqi Civilian Casualties

1. Denver voters OK marijuana possession
By Jon Sarche, Associated Press Writer | November 2, 2005

DENVER –Residents of the Mile High City have voted to legalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana for adults. Authorities, though, said state possession laws will be applied instead.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday, 54 percent, or 56,001 voters, cast ballots for the ordinance, while 46 percent, or 48,632 voters, voted against it.

Under the measure, residents over 21 years old could possess up to an ounce of marijuana.

“We educated voters about the facts that marijuana is less harmful to the user and society than alcohol,” said Mason Tvert, campaign organizer for SAFER, or Safer Alternatives For Enjoyable Recreation. “To prohibit adults from making the rational, safer choice to use marijuana is bad public policy.”

Bruce Mirken of the Washington, D.C.-based Marijuana Policy Project said he hoped the approval will launch a national trend toward legalizing a drug whose enforcement he said causes more problems than it cures.

Seattle, Oakland, Calif., and a few college towns already have laws making possession the lowest law enforcement priority.

The Denver proposal seemed to draw at least as much attention for supporters’ campaign tactics as it did for the question of legalizing the drug.

Tvert argued that legalizing marijuana would reduce consumption of alcohol, which he said leads to higher rates of car accidents, domestic and street violence and crime.

The group criticized Mayor John Hickenlooper for opposing the proposal, noting his ownership of a popular brewpub. It also said recent violent crimes — including the shootings of four people last weekend — as a reason to legalize marijuana to steer people away from alcohol use.

Those tactics angered local officials and some voters. Opponents also said it made no sense to prevent prosecution by Denver authorities while marijuana charges are most often filed under state and federal law.

The measure would not affect the medical marijuana law voters approved in 2000. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana laws in Colorado and nine other states would not protect licensed users from federal prosecution.

Also Tuesday, voters in the ski resort town of Telluride rejected a proposal to make possession of an ounce or less of marijuana by people 18 or older the town’s lowest law enforcement priority. The measure was rejected on a vote of 308-332.

2. ‘Technical virginity’ becomes part of teens’ equation
By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
Ten years after Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s relationship made oral sex a mainstream topic, there’s still plenty of debate over whether oral sex is really sex.
“There’s not only confusion; there’s fighting over it,” says J. Dennis Fortenberry, a physician who specializes in adolescent medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. “People disagree fairly vehemently.”

The latest fuss is spurred by new federal data that found that more than half of 15- to 19-year-olds have received or given oral sex. Although the study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not ask the particulars of these encounters, research conducted in pre-Clinton times, along with more recent studies, suggests that teens largely fall on the “it’s not sex” side. (Related story: Teens define sex in new ways)

“Some adults say it is a form of sex, but kids don’t really see it that way,” says Natalie Fuller, 19, a sophomore at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“For most teens, the only form of sex is penetration, and anything else doesn’t count. You can have oral sex and be a virgin.”

Fuller was 16 when she, her brother and her mother co-wrote the book Promise You Won’t Freak Out, which includes discussion of teen oral sex.

The report released last month by the CDC shows that one-quarter of teens who have not had intercourse have had oral sex. The survey questions, administered via headphones and computer for maximum anonymity, clearly defined the actions to eliminate any ambiguity about the meaning of the term “oral sex.”

“The implications are that teens who define themselves as abstinent may be engaging in oral sex,” says Jennifer Manlove, a senior research associate with the non-profit group Child Trends, which analyzed the federal data.

Kyle Tarver, 17, a high school senior from Pikesville, Md., who was among an informal USA TODAY focus group of Maryland teenagers, says most teens who have had oral sex think of themselves as virgins.

“If you were to ask someone if they were a virgin, they wouldn’t include that they had given or gotten oral sex,” he says.

A study published in 1999 in the Journal of the American Medical Association examines the definition of sex based on a 1991 random sample of 599 college students from 29 states. Sixty percent said oral-genital contact did not constitute having sex. “That’s the ‘technical virginity’ thing that’s going on,” says Stephanie Sanders, associate director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University and co-author of the study, which the researchers titled “Would You Say You ‘Had Sex’ If …?”

“There is not nearly as much conversation between two people and as much thought put into engaging in oral sex. That, in my mind, makes it a lot different,” says Michael Levy, 17, a senior from Owings Mills, Md.

What constitutes sex tends to be defined in a culture and varies with the times, Fortenberry says.

“In certain times in the history of the world, certain kinds of kissing would be considered sex,” he says. “Not too many years ago, a woman would have been considered a ‘loose woman’ if she kissed a person before marriage.”

But a new book from the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, an Austin-based non-profit that has worked for abstinence education with the Bush administration, doesn’t waffle. In Questions Kids Ask About Sex, oral sex is clearly sex.

“Sex occurs when one person touches another person’s genitals and causes that person to get sexually excited,” the book states. “A girl or boy who’s had oral sex doesn’t feel or think like a virgin anymore, because he or she has had a form of sex.”

Melissa Cox, who edited and contributed to the book, is a Denver-based medical writer who also edited a publication for Focus on the Family, an organization devoted to Christian family values.

She says a medical panel for the institute determined that oral sex is sex because it places young people at risk for sexually transmitted diseases and infections, puts them at risk for long-term emotional harm and opens the door for other sexual activity.

Not everyone agrees.

“If you look at the information that they have, you might find it difficult to cite a basis for that, other than someone’s opinion,” says adolescent-medicine specialist Fortenberry.

Teenagers say messages from the media make them feel that casual oral sex is normal and suggest that all teens are preoccupied with sex.

“I feel like I see more commercials about casual sex than I do about how important it is to have a family and how important it is to be in a marriage instead of having sex with people from a bar,” says Shanae Sheppard, a 17-year-old senior from Owings Mills, Md.

Last week, the federal government announced $37 million in awards to 63 programs across the country aimed at encouraging young people to abstain from intercourse until marriage.

But abstinence-only education may inadvertently reinforce the belief that oral sex isn’t real sex, says John DeLamater, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin and editor of the Journal of Sex Research, a scholarly journal published by the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.

“We should be sending a message that sexual activity is much broader,” he says.

Because teens are focused on that narrow definition of sexual intercourse and the message is to postpone it until they are older, they tend to equate intercourse with adulthood, Tarver says.

“Oral sex is not on a pedestal the way that regular sexual intercourse is,” he says.

3. No Propaganda: Some Real Soldiers’ Stories
George W. Bush’s disgraceful exploitation of military men and women for the administration’s propaganda purposes is now a matter of public record. We now know that last week’s “informal conversation” between the president and a group of U.S. troops in Iraq was more scripted than a network-television sitcom.

In addition to being choreographed and fully rehearsed before the president even appeared, it was later discovered that one of the group, Master Sgt. Corine Lombardo, is actually a reporter and public relations flack with the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division Public Affairs department. In other words, her job is to put a positive spin on all aspects of the Iraq war.

Disgusting stuff to be sure, but not entirely surprising coming from this White House.

So, in the absence of my government giving me real dialog from actual “boots on the ground,” I thought I would find it myself.

Let’s start with Zachary Scott-Singley, a Sergeant with the 3rd Infantry Division, who writes the blog A Soldier’s Thoughts, from Iraq. Scott-Singley, who is a 24-year-old husband and father of two young children, writes movingly of the conflict he feels in being a father so far from his children, in a post called Ghost of a Father.

“I get so scared sometimes that my kids will think I have left them. That maybe their daddy doesn’t care about them or that they will forget me. I know you will tell me that these are hollow fears but to me they aren’t. To me they are as real as the fears of heights or flying are to others. It isn’t hollow for me, but instead I am filled with self doubt and sadness.

“Over the phone I always talk to them and tell them how much I love them, but of course it isn’t the same as playing with them and giving them hugs or holding them after they have been hurt. Those things are real to a child.”

Keep Reading

4. Business, like politics, sometimes makes strange bedfellows. But more often than not, the couples it brings together are perfectly matched.

That seemed to be the case when the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, hooked up with Michael Viner.

…According to the proposal, PhRMA would pay Phoenix a six-figure sum for the marketing and production of a written-to-order fictional thriller. The plotline was what Hollywood would term high-concept — a group of shadowy terrorists conspires to murder thousands of Americans by poisoning the medicine they’re importing from Canada to beat U.S. drug prices. (Think “True Lies” meets the Physicians Desk Reference.)

Read Full Article – Pay Site

5. U.S. Quietly Issues Estimate of Iraqi Civilian Casualties

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: October 30, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 29 – In the first public disclosure that the United States military is tracking some of the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the military has released rough figures for Iraqis who have been killed or wounded by insurgents since Jan. 1 last year.

The estimate of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians and security forces was provided by the Pentagon in a report to Congress this month.

It appeared without fanfare in a single bar graph on Page 23 of the document. But it was significant because the military had previously avoided virtually all public discussion of the issue.

The count is incomplete – it provides daily partial averages of deaths and injuries of Iraqis at the hands of insurgents, in attacks like bombings and suicide strikes. Still, it shows that the military appears to have a far more accurate picture of the toll of the war than it has been willing to acknowledge.

“They have begun to realize that when you focus only on the U.S. it gives the impression that the U.S. doesn’t care about Iraqis,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research group in Washington. “In these kinds of political battles you need to count your allies, not just yourself.”

According to the graph, Iraqi civilians and security forces were killed and wounded by insurgents at a rate of about 26 a day early in 2004, and at a rate of about 40 a day later that year. The rate increased in 2005 to about 51 a day, and by the end of August had jumped to about 63 a day. No figures were provided for the number of Iraqis killed by American-led forces.

Extrapolating the daily averages over the months from Jan. 1, 2004, to Sept. 16 this year results in a total of 25,902 Iraqi civilians and security forces killed and wounded by insurgents.

According to an analysis by Hamit Dardagan, who compiles statistics for Iraq Body Count, a group that tracks civilian deaths, about three Iraqis are wounded in the war for each one who dies. Given that ratio, the total Iraqi death toll from insurgent violence would be about 6,475, based on extrapolations of the military’s figures.

“It strikes me as low,” said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch in New York. More Iraqis are dying now in insurgent attacks than at American checkpoints or in American military operations, he said, but the numbers of Iraqis killed by Americans would still add to the overall total.

Indeed, the tally is lower than the 11,163 deaths of Iraqi civilians in the war during the same period counted by Mr. Dardagan’s group, which draws its data from reports of deaths and injuries by news services, newspapers and other news outlets.

It is also lower than figures released by Iraq’s Interior Ministry showing that 8,175 Iraqi civilians and police officers had been killed by insurgents from August 2004 through May 2005. Even so, the tallies show that the military has been recording Iraqi deaths by insurgents with some regularity since the first months after the invasion.

The casualties were compiled from reports filed by coalition military units after they responded to attacks, said Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman, in answers to questions from The New York Times sent by e-mail.

The numbers are spotty, he said, because forces do not respond to every attack, and initial on-site counts are often incomplete. The count did not separate the dead from the wounded, nor did it differentiate between civilians and police officers or soldiers.

“These incident reports are not intended to provide – and do not provide – a comprehensive account of Iraqi casualties,” Colonel Venable said in his e-mail message. The information in the reports shows “trends in casualties resulting from insurgent attacks.”

The report, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” was the second of the quarterly accountings mandated by Congress this year in connection with an emergency spending bill. The first, issued in July, was criticized by some members of Congress for providing too few details about the effort in Iraq.

The second report, which included the Iraqi casualty figures, was twice as long as the first and was posted on the Department of Defense Web site on Oct. 13.

Colonel Venable said information on civilians was included in the October report “as a result of specific questions posed by Congressional staffers during briefings.”

“We were very interested in it,” said Timothy Rieser, an aide to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who sponsored the amendment to the fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Bill that calls for casualty details. “After denying that they keep these statistics, it gives the Congress something concrete to ask them about,” Mr. Rieser said.

The bar graph was made public, but the data underlying it was not, so the figures used for this article were derived from measuring the bars. Colonel Venable said the information had been classified because it could allow insurgents to assess the effectiveness of their attacks. Mr. Dardagan questioned the secrecy, citing regular releases of American deaths.

“We now know that the U.S. military does keep records of Iraqi civilian deaths,” Mr. Dardagan said. “There seems to be no obvious reason for keeping them a secret.”

Previously, the military said its records were so incomplete that it would not release any data. In July, Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, said, “We do not have the ability to get accurate data. We do not have visibility all over Iraq in every location.”

After months of playing down casualty counts, the inclusion of the numbers in the report seemed to be an acknowledgment of their importance for the military, which has also begun to regularly report tallies of insurgents killed in American operations.

“You can say everything you want about the numbers not mattering,” said Sarah Sewall, a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. But the report shows that “we recognize they are important tools for understanding.”

There have been some separate attempts at tallying Iraqis killed by American troops. Mohamed al-Musawi, director of the Iraqi Human Rights Organization, said in an interview this week that he had documented 589 Iraqis killed by Americans in Baghdad since 2003.

The military began compiling its figures on casualties stemming from insurgents in June 2003, Col. Venable said.

Units are required to write reports after they respond to attacks, but they are allowed to decide which details to include.

American military officials have said attacks against Americans and Iraqis have been averaging 85 a day for much of the past year.

It is not clear what proportion of attacks American forces respond to, but Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a spokesman for the American military here, said Thursday that forces respond “whenever we can.”

Civilians have moved to center stage in wars since the beginning of the 20th century. A 2001 study on civilians in war by the International Committee of the Red Cross showed a shift in a stark statistic: In World War I, 9 soldiers were killed for every civilian, while in today’s wars 10 civilians die for every soldier.

Civilians are important allies for states trying to prevail in wars against violent insurgencies, and the inclusion of the figures in the report seemed to be an acknowledgment of that, Ms. Sewall said.

American forces take measures to avoid civilian casualties, warning local residents with leaflets and loudspeaker announcements before they begin operations against insurgents.

“I don’t question that the intent is one of fighting well,” Ms. Sewall said. “The interesting question is: why wouldn’t an institution be interested in evaluating its success in minimizing civilian harm?”