I have to wonder if this would have been preventable, if there had been total acceptance of trans folkz..

what if there was no shame, no hate..

would this person been driven to react in such a manner?

without fear just maybe they could have lived a loving relationship...?.. its to bad in this environment of gender centrism and trans/ homo - phobia we will never know, they will never know.


Man(sic) gets life for campsite murder
By Janet Kelley, New Era Staff Writer
Lancaster New Era


LANCASTER COUNTY, PA - A transsexual convicted of murdering another man had only one thing to say at his sentencing Monday.


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Beaverton favors law banning discrimination
The council supports an ordinance to make it illegal to discriminate against gay or transgender people
DAVID R. ANDERSON


BEAVERTON -- Members of the city's sexual minority community became a majority for a night as the City Council voiced unanimous support for an ordinance to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Of 20 people who testified during an hourlong public hearing Monday night, 10 were gays, lesbians or transgender people from the Beaverton area. One person testified against the ordinance.

Most backers of the ordinance told the council it is largely symbolic, but it will help create a safer community at a time when discrimination persists.

"I want to be considered equal, just as equal as my neighbors, the people I attend church with," said Lisa Lane, who lives in Beaverton with her lesbian partner and two children. "I want that for my children more than I can say."


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Lesotho has 90 000 Aids orphans, says report
Maseru, Lesotho


An estimated 15% of babies born in Lesotho become infected with HIV each year, the Lesotho government and the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said on Wednesday.

Unicef and the government released a mid-term review on Wednesday of their programme of cooperation for 2002 to 2007. The review notes that a baby born to an HIV-positive mother has a 25% to 35% chance of becoming infected during birth or through breast-feeding.

"Between 5 000 and 7 000 children born every year ... are infected with HIV, the majority through mother-to-child-transmission," reads the report.

The report notes an increasing number of abandoned and institutionalised children in Lesotho


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World ; UNICEF calls on nations to overcome hurdles to gender equality in education


World News, Acknowledging that HIV/AIDS, conflict and deepening poverty have eroded gains in enrolling more girls in school in many countries, the head of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has called on nations to respect promises made to ensure that girls and boys receive the same educational opportunities.

"We must not allow the promise of education for all to become another broken promise," Executive Director Carol Bellamy told the high-level meeting on Education for All, convened annually by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its partners, yesterday in Brasilia, Brazil.


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Gay Marriage: Next Steps in National Fight
by Andrew Davis


Six months after gay and lesbian couples won the right to marry in Massachusetts, opponents of same-sex marriage struck back, with voters in 11 states approving constitutional amendments making marriage an exclusively heterosexual institution.

Voters in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah all approved the amendments by double-digit margins. The closest race came in Oregon, where gay-rights groups concentrated much of their effort and money and thought they had the best chance of winning. Opponents of the amendment raised about $2.8 million, enough to run TV and radio ads in the Beaver State and outspend pro-amendment forces, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task


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Propping up the patriarchy
Neo-liberalism is a soulless ideology that preaches greed and power über alles.
by Judy Rebick


Pity the poor world. George W. Bush is once again President of the United States. For those of us who try to analyze such things rationally, it is tough to understand. The economy is in the tank, the war in Iraq is a disaster and master villain Osama bin Laden remains at large. What exactly has Bush done to deserve re-election?

But this election was not about reason; it was about fear and hatred.

About a month ago, an American cousin came north to visit my elderly mother. He's about ten years older than I and grew up in Florida. Today he is a religious Jew, working with an engineering firm in New York City. He supported Bush. His explanation included the most overt racism I've heard in a long time. “We should round up all the Muslims and put them in internment camps like we did with the Japanese during World War II,” he told us. A Jew supporting internment camps. That's when I had an idea of what was coming in this election.

It's not that Bush has hoodwinked Americans; it is that he has mobilized them using fear and hatred, racism and homophobia. In a strange way, Bush's support comes from the same place as Osama bin Laden's. Neo-liberalism is a soulless ideology that preaches greed and power über alles. The appeal of religious fundamentalism whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish is to speak to those who have not benefited from the drive to greed and profit with a simple message of right and wrong, good and evil. In the case of Bush, the moralism is a cover for the same neo-liberal policies. In both cases, propping up patriarchy through violence and the oppression of women is the central operating dictum. Tariq Ali calls it the Clash of Fundamentalisms in his 2002 book of that name. In a complicated world, we are right and they are evil is a simple and powerful message.


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Anwar seeks privacy provision in Malaysia gay laws
Agence France-Presse


KUALA LUMPUR Malaysia's laws on homosexuality need to be amended, says the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, whose conviction and nine-year jail sentence for sodomy were recently overturned on appeal.

Anwar, who spent six years in prison on a separate charge of abusing his position to cover up homosexual offenses, spoke out on what he called a "sensitive" issue in an interview.

Anwar, a popular politician who was widely expected to be Malaysia's prime minister by now, maintained, as he has done since his arrest in 1998, that the charges against him were trumped up to destroy his political career.

But while insisting on his innocence and acknowledging that most people in mainly Muslim Malaysia objected to homosexuality, he said people's privacy needed to be protected.


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American Resistance
by Manuel Valenzuela
www.dissidentvoice.org
Valid Outrage


If you are still upset at the resounding defeat of humanity that occurred on November 2, 2004 you have every right to be.  On that day billions of us lost a most important battle through both the vote of the ignorant, unenlightened among us and the systemic fraudulent manipulation of electronic-voting machines which, it is becoming more and more apparent, helped steal victory, for the second time in four years, for George W. Bush and the Republican/corporatist party.  The consequences on America and the world of such tragedy may inevitably set us back to the dark ages and to a meeting with a most ominous destiny. 

You should be outraged that so many fellow Americans were methodically conditioned to vote against their own interests and for the benefit of the corporate world, sending the world a message of backwardness, of warmongering, of ignorance and thirst for violence.  Americans of all varieties should be incensed that so many gave George Bush a thumbs-up mandate for the feeble leadership, incompetence, violence and killing of the past and the ineptitude, violence, war, division, terror, criminality that is sure to come.  By voting Bush back into office we have lost all respect in the world, we have become the terrorists we fear, the war criminals we loathe and have allowed for the continued slaughter of untold thousands through the weapons of mass destruction we are so proud to manufacture.