Again, Sweden does not _have_ a consent requirement. There have been discussions about changing the law to include that, but that is not the law today.
As he did not lie when asked about protection and she did not object it was not rape as Swedish law would currently classify rape.
And they weren't surrendered to the US, they were surrendered to Egypt via the US.
They were surrendered to CIA agents at the request of the CIA. The CIA prefers to torture their victims outside the US.
It turned into one of the biggest judicial scandals in Swedish history, receiving widespread protest and condemnation.
And yet, despite being widely regarded as violating multiple laws, somehow nobody was actually convicted of anything. No functionaries, no officials, no politicians. So, yeah, violate the law and send people to get tortured and the newspapers will write a few articles about how bad you are and some will walk past you with a clenched fist in their pocket. Scary. That really wont happen again.
2) It led to a reform of not just Swedish but EU-wide extradition law, making it so that a mere promise of not torturing isn't enough, the country has to have a track record of not torturing.
And violating that will get you... a mean article in a newspaper and some angry glares?
3) The victims were offered by Sweden a large financial compensation package and Swedish residence.
Yeah, paid for by the tax payers. Oh, no, we'll have to give tax payer money to someone for violating their rights. We'll get cushy speaking appointments and nice educations for our kids in the US. But oh, no, tax payer money...
4) Swedish attitudes against the US rendition program
Most likely the Swedish security agencies got fed up with getting snickered at and played for total fools. I doubt it had much to do with ethics.
No country has a spotless record, but Sweden has among the highest ranked judicial systems on Earth.
... based on reported public perception. Swedes like to have a very high opinion of their country and government. They get very surprised when confronted with objective measures of education and discover how far they've fallen or discovering they get much better healthcare when on vacation out of the country. Filtering out self-satisfaction bias would be an interesting exercise.
Sweden has the world's best whistleblower protections and one of the most restrictive extradition treaties in Europe
Which means... what? If nobody is even prosecuted when torture protections are violated the law isn't worth the paper it's written on. Unless Thomas Bodström, Göran Persson and the responsible people in the security agencies are actually prosecuted and thrown in jail for what they did to the Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery it doesn't matter what the law says, because they are above the law. With politicians and security agencies above the law, Sweden cannot be trusted to enforce the laws they claim to have.
Svea Court of Appeals held a full court hearing, with a jury, a review of all the evidence
Apart from libel or press freedom cases, there is no jury system in Sweden.
One, you can't get "retroactive consent", it has to be present from the beginning.
Sweden does not have a consent requirement. Rape is defined as either the victim being incapacitated or sexual acts against the explicit objections of the victim. As she woke up, she does not fall under the incapacitated requirement, as she did not clearly object despite him being honest about the lack of protection there was no violation with her objecting. The facts of the case simply will not result in a rape conviction unless significant changes in judicial interpretation is done, and that would, lacking actual changes in law, stretch the interpretative ability of the courts quite a bit.
Three, the reason she'd been refusing unprotected sex was paranoia about STDs, and it was already too late, she'd have to go to the hospital either way (just ignoring the "shock" aspect, which I can tell you is *very* real; it was already too late. As her ex boyfriend of 2 1/2 years testified, she was so paranoid about unprotected sex that she not once allowed it in their entire relationship, and *still* made him get an STD test.
The STD aspect was the sole reason she felt bad at all, as far as the initial statements took it. And in the light of this case it's quite amusing that the Swedish government is most likely to remove the information requirement on HIV infectees so it will be legal to have sex with someone without first informing them about being HIV positive. When people like SW feel possible HIV exposure is a far worse violation than what a feminist prosecutor for political purposes wants to claim is rape, that's really going to go down well when someone like SW finds out they've been exposed without being told...
"I have a daughter who like science and want's to be a game designer. I see how she has it stacked against her compared to my son."
In what way? If she gets through her education and can demonstrate that she's even remotely competent, she'll get hired simply due to being female. At least a minimum level of gender balance in the work force is a bonus to company social dynamics; too high concentration of either gender and you start getting a culture drift into extremes that enhance the worst aspects of some gendered trait expressions. Keep a certain level of balance and moderation tendencies will keep the culture decent either way. IT has so few women that the imbalance aspect itself can be a good reason to take on female prospective hires if they are at all available and capable of doing the job.
Now of course after the last few years it's become fairly obvious that one will have to do some research and interview probing to avoid hiring somone like Adria Richards, Rose Eveleth, Julie Ann Horvath or Matthew Garrett. The damage they'll cause through toxic interpersonal relationships will outstrip any productivity by massive amounts. Unless you have found an insurance policy that will actually reimburse you for F60.3 damage to your company. But that has nothing to do with gender.
Yes, but gendered bigotry against men is widely considered to be "in bounds" by society in general so the problem here is that internet commenters need to get in line and understand that it's only ok to harrass and send rape and death threats to men. Being men, they don't have feelings anyway and if they do they need to man up.
Or whatever.
It's utterly disgusting when they try to frame this as an issue to resolve 'cyberbullying'. Blatantly disregarding all those who avoid 'real world bullying' by being able to anonymously publish thoughts and opinions on the internet.
It is not a good thing that, for many, it's more convenient to be anonymous or pseudonymous if you're part of a sexual, political or religious minority, but it is a reality. Forcing all those individuals to shut up or risk facing real life consequences up to and including physical abuse does much more harm than learning to ignore the bluster of random anonymous internet bullies.
Modern health care can improve chances significantly. As long as the half-dozen beds available for intensive care and organ support at a hospital aren't already busy.
If there was an actual outbreak with a significant number of infected needing treatment at the same time we'd do better than Africa with a few percent, and possibly a bit more by using antibodies from recovered infected which is probably easier to do in a modern setting, but barring actual cures it would fall apart completely faced with anything near the number of cases they have in Africa.
With the way she is behaving, it's obviously become a prestige issue for her so I don't think she could be trusted to report symptoms if she had them. Of course, if she's out to discredit the honour system of self-reporting she's certainly rather effective.
With HIV you basically need to inject infected blood. Single exposures through other pathways are very unlikely to infect you and outside of risk groups it simply doesn't transmit that fast: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/policie...
Over the contagious lifespan of Ebola it's far more likely to spread, it isn't dependent on highly intimate contact and infection risk cannot be mitigated or made negligible without significant protective equipment. Most humans can go through the day without having sex with even one casual stranger, but it's a bit harder to ensure you're not touched by anyone or touch anything they've touched.
HIV kills more people than Ebola... for the moment. But if, at any time, as many humans have Ebola as have HIV today and we don't have an effective treatment then we would be months away from the death of at least half of all humans alive from Ebola alone and probably another couple of billions from socio economic disasters. Not as smart as HIV because that would probably be the end of Ebola for many centuries, but that's not very comforting.
Even allowing anyone who has been in any type of unprotected contact with an infectious Ebola patient to leave quarantine at all before incubation time has run out is a complete screw up. Unless they have a camera and a thermometer stuck to them, the phase when they go from maybe infected to contagious risks exposing hundreds of potential contacts that you can't trace.
Taking chances, not erring on the side of caution, is what leads to burning up the perfectly good airplane. Letting the exposed potential infectees move about freely is what risks having to burn everything they touch some time in the future. With this, the costs of mistakes are huge, and better take things seriously when we're talking about inconveniencing a few people for a months, blockading a few countries and having government flights for aid personnel while we search for useful treatments, rather than having to discuss whether we're serious enough when it's about enforcing martial law and quarantining and burning down city blocks later. Because that will cost a whole lot more.
This is the strange thing. It isn't like no one knew of the ebola threat, unless you didn't watch television, listen to the news, or use the internet.
It isn't that strange. Because if you did listen to the news or watch television, then no, you didn't know about the 'threat', because what has been repeated time after time is 'there is no threat, relax, we can deal with this, we're prepared'. Nigeria probably had a quite different message running through both media and government knowing that they have one single chance to stop this and that's at the source. Screw up a single thing and the preview of what happens was available next door.
Some like to think our health care standards make a difference, that the West is more civilized and it can't happen here. But the thing is, after a few ICU places and a few quarantine beds, modern medicine is left with aspirin and electrolytes as far as 'treatment' goes which doesn't give us much edge on African medicine. This needs to be taken as seriously in the developed world as it does in Nigeria, and we need to get useful treatments available _now_.
Frankly, the main difference is probably that Nigeria took it seriously because they thought there was a massive risk that this was going to turn into an unmitigated disaster for the country. They were thoroughly terrified that any slip at any point would result in anything from a massive death toll to the end of the country.
In most western countries the message is 'yeah, don't worry, we can deal with it'. That attitude will permeate not only the public but the organizations whose job it is to deal with the problem. And the result of that is what we see in Dallas. Organisations that do not take it seriously, potential infected people getting told 'yeah, go sit on a plane, your symptoms probably aren't that serious anyway, a couple of hundred more to trace and spread over the continent isn't an issue if it does turn out to be serious', etc.
If you do have sex with someone with HIV it's about 99.9% that you won't get it. Ebola is more like 1000x worse.
Ebola is vastly more infectious than HIV. With HIV you basically need to get blood with a viral load injected to have any certainty of getting it. Transmission rates with vaginal intercourse are in the rates of far below 1% per act. More than half the pregnancies don't even transmit the virus to the baby.
Compare that with Ebola where the virus is in basically present in infectious levels in every bodily fluid spread around to the extent that hospital personnel don't even know how they got it.
HIV, lick it, you'll still be fine. Ebola, touch anything they've touched and all bets are off.
Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine
