Archive
Reuters blog archive
from The Human Impact:
Extreme measures to “protect” daughters in India
Gurpreet Singh is a determined man. But he is an even more concerned father.
The 32-year-old investment adviser is leaving India and migrating to Australia. There is nothing new in that -- tens of thousands of professional Indians emigrate every year.
Unlike most of them, Singh’s reason for leaving is not the pursuit of greater economic returns, but a search for something increasingly perceived by parents to be lacking in India -- security for their daughters.
It was the gang rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in Delhi last December that jolted Singh, like millions of middle-class urban Indians, and awakened him to the brutalities women and girls face in this largely patriarchal country.
Since then he has been exposed to a torrent of daily news reports of the molestation, abduction and rape of women, and even more worryingly, of young girls, upsetting him so much that he felt he had little option but to fill in the Australian visa forms for himself, his wife and his three-year-old daughter.
from India Insight:
Updated: Delhi police helpline: if your stalking case is not urgent, please press 1
(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters Corp.)
Citizens First: those are the two words at the top of the Delhi Police department's website. An alternative could be: "first come, first served."
from Photographers Blog:
The SWAT of Salt Lake
Draper, Utah
By Jim Urquhart
It was four in the morning and for the second day in a row I found myself on the highway headed for a photo assignment before the sun rose. Still a bit tired and sore from the day before, I was however in a decent mood. The day before at the same hour I was trying to get to the start line of the Salt Lake City Marathon in the pouring rain, sleet and hail. On that morning I was assigned to photograph security efforts at the marathon, the first since the Boston Marathon bombing.
That day I covered prevention, this morning I was covering the team that are called in to help when the situation has already gone bad. The Salt Lake City Police Department SWAT team was going to be running candidates through an obstacle course as part of a test of physical fitness.
from India Insight:
Delhi police rightly targeted in gang rape case – Kiran Bedi
The gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi that sparked public outrage across the country has also put the spotlight on policing in India’s “rape capital”.
Kiran Bedi, a former police officer who won the Ramon Magsaysay award in 1994 for her work in the city, says the Dec. 16 gang rape could have been prevented.
from India Insight:
Delhi rape case and the need to revamp policing
"My father has called me 15 times since yesterday," a colleague told me today as New Delhi recovers from the shock of a woman being assaulted, gang-raped and thrown off a bus on Sunday night.
There were more comments from women on my Facebook feed: "It is a scary thought to go out for dinner at 9:15 pm"; "Men on Delhi streets can literally rape you with words ... met one giggling a** just now. Felt like picking a stone and hitting it right where it all starts from ..."
from The Great Debate UK:
The Leveson Whitewash
--Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.--
If you ask a lawyer what to do, he'll recommend a legal remedy – what do you expect? In the same way, many of our politicians have a background as lawyers, so no wonder we have such a proliferation of unnecessary laws. Besides, it does provide plenty of work for old pals…
from Photographers Blog:
A fallen cadet
Bogota, Colombia
By Jose Miguel Gomez
When a television journalist called to her cameraman to come running, I thought it was just to get a better angle of some VIP arriving to celebrate the 121st anniversary of the National Police, and the new graduating class of the academy. I’m farsighted and didn’t have my glasses on, but I did have a 400mm lens on the camera.
A few more moments went by and I still didn’t catch what the fuss was about, and the only colleague near me was busy shooting. That was when I spotted the cadet on the ground, apparently fainted in the middle of the ceremony, and I instinctively began photographing. Help was so slow in arriving that I was able to shoot from different angles this curious scene of a policewoman lying unconscious, face down on the ground in her best uniform. It was at least five minutes before a couple of police officers finally carried her away.
from The Great Debate UK:
Party political policing
--Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.--
I hope I am proved wrong, but I am afraid that the decision to introduce elected police commissioners will turn out in the long term to be the most damaging of all the stupid things this incompetent Government is doing. It is a fear that has been reinforced by the leaflet shoved through my door on the eve of the election. At the top, it has a bright red band reading “From...., your Labour Police and Crime Commissioner candidate” and a matching red ribbon at the bottom says “Vote Labour Thursday 15th November”.
from India Masala:
Department: Mr Varma, please spare us the trauma
In my head, I always imagine Ram Gopal Varma, sitting in his office, legs up on the table, going through a checklist on the last day of a film shoot. Hyperactive camera angle - check. Lots of fake blood - check. Added some element of "Satya", "Company" or "Sarkar" to the film - check. Leading ladies showing off cleavage - check.
How else do you explain a film like “Department”? That someone (Varma) thought they could make a film with such tacky production values, a convoluted and weak script, and some scenes that could be straight out of a soft-porn flick, and still convince a major studio to fund it and market it as a A-grade movie, is baffling.
