http://thepartisanbaker.com/starters/
step by step guide on making a sour dough starter
http://thepartisanbaker.com/starters/#Chapter%201
Monday, April 23, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Uzbekistan - forced sterilisation
Uzbekistan's policy of secretly sterilising women
12 April 2012 Last updated at 01:19http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17612550
The BBC has been told by doctors that Uzbekistan is running a secret programme to sterilise women - and has talked to women sterilised without their knowledge or consent.
Adolat has striking looks, a quiet voice and a secret that she finds deeply shameful.
She knows what happened is not her fault, but she cannot help feeling guilty about it.
Adolat comes from Uzbekistan, where life centres around children and a big family is the definition of personal success. Adolat thinks of herself as a failure.
"What am I after what happened to me?" she says as her hand strokes her daughter's hair - the girl whose birth changed Adolat's life.
"I always dreamed of having four - two daughters and two sons - but after my second daughter I couldn't get pregnant," she says.
She went to see a doctor and found out that she had been sterilised after giving birth to her daughter by Caesarean section.
"I was shocked. I cried and asked: 'But why? How could they do this?' The doctor said, 'That's the law in Uzbekistan.'"
Sterilisation is not, officially, the law in Uzbekistan.
But evidence gathered by the BBC suggests that the Uzbek authorities have run a programme over the last two years to sterilise women across the country, often without their knowledge.
Foreign journalists are not welcome in Uzbekistan, and in late February of this year the authorities deported me from the country. I met Adolat and many other Uzbek women in the relative safety of neighbouring Kazakhstan. I also gathered testimony by telephone and email, and in recordings brought out of the country by courier.
None of the women wanted to give their real names but they come from different parts of Uzbekistan and their stories are consistent with those of doctors and medical professionals inside the country.
"Every year we are presented with a plan. Every doctor is told how many women we are expected to give contraception to; how many women are to be sterilised," says a gynaecologist from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent.
Like all doctors I interviewed, she spoke on a condition of anonymity. Talking to a foreign journalist could result in a prison term, in a country where torture in detention is the norm.
"There is a quota. My quota is four women a month," she says.
Two other medical sources suggest that there is especially strong pressure on doctors in rural areas of Uzbekistan, where some gynaecologists are expected to sterilise up to eight women per week.
"Once or twice a month, sometimes more often, a nurse from the local clinic comes to my house trying to get me to the hospital to have the operation," says a mother of three in the Jizzakh region of Uzbekistan.
"Now it's free, but later you will have to pay for it, so do it now," the nurse tells the mother.
Another mother says she experienced months of mysterious pain and heavy bleeding following the birth of her son. Then she had an ultrasound check and discovered that her uterus had been removed.
"They just said to me, 'What do you need more children for? You already have two,'" she says.
The BBC gathered similar testimony from the Ferghana Valley, the Bukhara region and two villages near the capital Tashkent.
According to a source at the Ministry of Health, the sterilisation programme is intended to control Uzbekistan's growing population, which is officially held to be about 28m people. Some demographers are sceptical, however, pointing to the large numbers of people who have emigrated since the last census in 1989, when the population stood at around 20m.
"We are talking about tens of thousands of women being sterilised throughout the country," says Sukhrob Ismailov, who runs the Expert Working Group, one of very few non-governmental organisations operating in Uzbekistan.
In 2010, the Expert Working Group conducted a seven-month-long survey of medical professionals, and gathered evidence of some 80,000 sterilisations over the period, but there is no way of verifying the number and some of the procedures were carried out with the patient's consent.
The first cases of forced sterilisation were reported in 2005, by Gulbakhor Turaeva - a pathologist working in the city of Andijan who noticed that uteruses of young, healthy women were being brought to a mortuary where she worked.
After gathering evidence of 200 forced sterilisations, by tracing women from whom the uteruses were removed, she went public with her findings and asked her bosses for an explanation. Instead they sacked her.
In 2007 Turaeva went to jail, accused of smuggling opposition literature into the country. Like many others, she refused to be interviewed for this report because of fears for her and her children's safety.
The women who were interviewed did not want to be identified In 2007, the United Nations Committee Against Torture also reported forcible sterilisations and hysterectomies in Uzbekistan, and the number of cases of forced sterilisation appeared to fall.
But according to medical sources, in 2009 and 2010 the Uzbek government issued directives ordering clinics to be equipped to perform voluntary surgical contraception. In 2009, doctors from the capital were also despatched to rural areas to increase the availability of sterilisation services.
There is evidence that the number of sterilisations then began to rise again.
"On paper, sterilisations should be voluntary, but women don't really get a choice," says a senior doctor from a provincial hospital, who wished to remain unnamed.
"It's very easy to manipulate a woman, especially if she is poor. You can say that her health will suffer if she has more children. You can tell her that sterilisation is best for her. Or you can just do the operation."
Several doctors I spoke to say that in the last two years there has been a dramatic increase in Caesarean sections, which provide surgeons with an easy opportunity to sterilise the mother. These doctors dispute official statements that only 6.8% of women give birth through C-sections.
"Rules on Caesareans used to be very strict, but now I believe 80% of women give birth through C-sections. This makes it very easy to perform a sterilisation and tie the fallopian tubes," says a chief surgeon at a hospital near the capital, Tashkent.
Uzbekistan: Infant and maternal deaths
- Uzbekistan ranked 140th out of 194 countries in terms of infant mortality in 2005-2010, according to data from the UN Population Division
- This put it just behind Laos, Madagascar and Bolivia, and just ahead of Bangladesh, Ghana and Papua New Guinea
- Figures from the UN Population Fund indicate that Uzbekistan had a maternal mortality ratio of 30 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2008 - a 44% improvement on 1990
- This ratio put it level with Iran, just ahead of Albania and Malaysia (31) and just behind Armenia (29), Romania and Uruguay (27)
Several doctors and medical professionals said forced sterilisation is not only a means of population control but also a bizarre short-cut to lowering maternal and infant mortality rates.
"It's a simple formula - less women give birth, less of them die," said one surgeon.
The result is that his helps the country to improve its ranking in international league tables for maternal and infant mortality.
"Uzbekistan seems to be obsessed with numbers and international rankings," says Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
"I think it's typical of dictatorships that need to construct a narrative built on something other than the truth."
Swerdlow believes foreign governments could do more. Until recently Uzbek President Islam Karimov was a pariah in the West, but in recent years both the US and the EU have lifted sanctions, including a US ban on arms sales.
This is apparently related to America's worsening relationship with Pakistan and Nato's increased use of routes through Central Asia, including Uzbekistan, to get supplies and troops in and out of Afghanistan.
Continue reading the main story 
Islam Karimov
- Born 1938, became first secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1989 and president of the Uzbek Socialist Republic in 1990
- Elected president of independent Uzbekistan in 1991 with 86% of the vote, re-elected in 2000 with 92%, and again in 2007 with 88%
- Mr Karimov has been accused of using the threat of Islamic militancy to justify authoritarianism
A number of Western dignitaries have visited Uzbekistan in recent months, but few have made any public comment on the country's human rights record.
"Karimov has managed to get to the point in his relationship with the West when there are no consequences for his actions and human rights abuses," says Swerdlow.
"There is a deafening silence when it comes to human rights. Reports of forced sterilisation add urgency to breaking this silence."
In a written reply to the BBC's request for comment, the Uzbek government said the allegations of a forced sterilisation programme were slanderous and bore no relation to reality.
The government also said that surgical contraception was not widespread and was carried out only on a voluntary basis, after consultation with a specialist and with the written consent of both parents.
The Uzbek government stressed that Uzbekistan's record in protecting mothers and babies is excellent and could be considered a model for countries around the world.
However, Nigora is among many for whom forced sterilisation is a reality. She had an emergency C-section. A day later she was told she had been sterilised. On the same day, her newborn died.
Nigora is 24 and will never have children.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
Article: on privitisation of NHS via backdoor
'Healthy competition’ in the NHS is a sick joke
Real health choice under the NHS reform Bill doesn't exist, and the so-called market is a mockery.
7:00AM BST 09 Apr 2012
'On March 27 the NHS reform Bill – or to give it its official name, the Health and Social Care Bill – received Royal Assent and became law. With the ink barely dry on Her Majesty’s signature, the carving up of the NHS has begun. Virgin Care has won a £500 million contract to provide community services across Surrey and began running these services, as well as the county’s prison healthcare, on April 1.
This was no April Fool’s joke, though I had to smile at the thought of Virgin managing sexual health clinics. In reality, the joke may be on all of us, as Richard Branson’s company becomes one of the first of many vultures to start picking over the rich, tender flesh of the NHS now that it has been splayed open by the Bill.
His daughter, Holly Branson, was a few years below me at medical school. I remember thinking how good it was that someone steeped in privilege had seemingly decided to dedicate her life to serving other people. I had a vision – somewhat idealised, I know – of her working in the East End, providing care to the deprived and poverty-stricken. But no. After a brief stint as a junior doctor at a London hospital, she quit the NHS to work for her father. It saddens me to see someone who underwent the same training I did stand by as their family business profits from the sick and undermines the very institution that provided them with their education.
Richard Branson likes to be thought of as an affable, benign maverick, on his way to becoming a national treasure. He’s the cuddly face of corporate Britain. But just because he has a beard and looks like Noel Edmonds does not mean his multinational business is any less aggressive and expansionist than the next.
What the Virgin Care takeover in Surrey really exposes are the two fundamental lies that have been peddled by the Government over the past year in attempts to manage the PR disaster that was the NHS Reform Bill. The first is the flat denial that the Bill represented any sort of privatisation of the NHS, despite it being obvious to anyone who read it that this is precisely what it was.
This is really about semantics. In theory, the NHS will still exist for patients in Surrey. They will still pay their National Insurance contributions, and access to services will still be free at the point of use – for the time being at least. This is what the Government means when it says it will protect the NHS. But for residents of Surrey, and soon for the rest of us, the NHS will just be a nominal logo, an institution reduced from being the chief provider of heath services in this country with one of the biggest workforces in the world, to an anachronistic insurance scheme, divorced from the actual delivery of any care. It will become a bureaucratic governing body dishing out public money to private companies. Even the doctors and nurses who work in Surrey’s hospitals and healthcare centres taken over by Virgin Care are no longer employed by the NHS and instead have had to become corporate lackeys. They had no choice: a Virgin Care spokesman confirmed to me that if they didn’t want to work for the company when it took over services from the NHS, their only option was to resign.
The second thing this exposes is the lunacy of the concept of choice within a nationalised healthcare system. The emphasis on choice was something that was repeated ad nauseam by ministers in an attempt to sugar the bitterest aspects of the Bill. The legislation would provide choice, we were assured. Everyone likes choice, don’t they? And we all nodded in innocent agreement.
I have argued before that in a healthcare setting, choice is a misnomer: all hospitals should provide an excellent level of care because so many people – the old, the infirm – are unable to exercise choice because of geographical or physical limitations. But only now that we can see the shape of the NHS Bill can we truly assess what choice actually means.
What real choice did the people of Surrey have in who provided their community health services? The answer: none. The choice was made by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who use “public consultation” as a fig leaf for fundamentally changing the nature of how healthcare is delivered.
Increasingly, the details of these decisions and the contracts that are drawn up are deemed commercially sensitive, so we are not privy to what is happening to our NHS and our money. For example, what providers other than Virgin might be an option for Surrey residents? After all, it’s about choice, isn’t it? The answer, again, is none. The good folk of Surrey haven’t been allowed to exercise a choice between providers – it’s Virgin Care or nothing. This isn’t a market in the true capitalist sense. This is a perverse, warped and corrupt reading of market principles. If we are going to open up healthcare in this country to the market, at least let’s do it properly, rather than handing out these whopping amounts of public cash to corporations that are also handed a captive consumer base. There’s no choice here.
It reminds me of the other market that Virgin has colonised: parts of the rail network. You often hear people complain about the cost of fares, the atrocious service and cramped conditions they have to endure. I’m lucky that I don’t have to commute, so I have not paid particular attention to this in the past. Then, last year, I did a book signing at a small, independent bookshop in Bramhall, near Manchester. I arrived at London’s Euston station mid-afternoon and went to the self-service ticket desk. I keyed in the details for a ticket to return later that night – £296. I stared at the screen in disbelief: was that a ticket to Bramhall by way of the Seychelles? It transpired that leaving at 4.30pm meant I was travelling at peak time. I had no choice but to swallow hard and pay up, just as countless others have to. Of course, the train was full, so I’d paid nearly £300 for the privilege of standing for two and half hours. There were no other train operators to choose from; no competition to drive up quality and push down prices. Just a dreadful service at extortionate cost.
Rail travel, like community health services, is not a fungible good – it cannot be exchanged for something else. You can’t travel to a different destination from the one you need to get to and you can’t seek treatment for a different condition to the one you have.
In these circumstances, choice doesn’t exist and it makes a mockery of a so-called market. The people of Surrey did not vote for this change or for their NHS to be gutted and served on a silver platter to Virgin Care. But this signals the shape of the NHS to come, and with such rich pickings, I doubt there will be many delays.'
Monday, April 02, 2012
Loss of the right to privacy...
'Backlash grows over GCHQ 'snooping'
Press Association – 13 hours agoDavid Cameron is facing a growing backbench backlash over plans for a major expansion of the Government's powers to monitor the email exchanges and website visits of every person in the UK.
Under legislation expected in next month's Queen's Speech, internet companies will be instructed to install hardware enabling GCHQ - the Government's electronic "listening" agency - to examine "on demand" any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed, in "real time" without a warrant.
A previous attempt to introduce a similar law was abandoned by the former Labour government in 2006 in the face of fierce opposition from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats as well as civil liberties groups. Senior MPs from both coalition parties lined up to condemn the move by ministers to revive the plan.
The Home Office argued that the measure was "vital" to combat terrorism and organised crime and stressed a warrant would be needed in order to access the content of the communications they were monitoring.
However that did little to allay the concerns of critics who said the authorities would still be able to trace who people were in contact with and how often and for how long they were communicating.
"It is not focusing on terrorists or on criminals. It is absolutely everybody. Historically governments have been kept out of our private lives," said Conservative former shadow home secretary David Davis.
"Our freedom and privacy has been protected by using the courts by saying 'If you want to intercept, if you want to look at something, fine, if it is a terrorist or a criminal go and ask a magistrate and you'll get your approval'. You shouldn't go beyond that in a decent, civilised society but that is what is being proposed.
"They don't need this law to protect us. This is an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary innocent people in vast numbers. Frankly, they shouldn't have that power."
Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti warned that it would undermine the coalition's commitment to human rights if it went ahead with the plan.
"There is an element of whoever you vote for the empire strikes back," she said. "This is more ambitious than anything that has been done before. The coalition bound itself together in the language of civil liberties. Do they still mean it?" '
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/monitoring-expansion-proposed-231042436.html
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