Magic Statistics

The 2008 release of the US State Department’s annual Trafficking in Persons Report names Iran and Moldova as the worst in combating the vile trade.  Nations are listed in three tiers: Those making an acceptable effort to fight human trafficking are in Tier 1, while those doing a poor job are in Tier 3.

Virtually all of the nations of Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe are in Tier 2, while Russia and Tajikistan are on the so-called "watch list" of Tier-2 countries because they could slip to Tier 3. Uzbekistan is among four countries that have moved up. It used to be designated as a Tier-3 country, and now is on the Tier-2 "watch list." Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are in Tier 2, except for Turkmenistan, which is listed as a "special case" because of the lack of information from the country.

Georgia in classified as Tier 1, while Armenia and Azerbaijan are on Tier-2 "watch lists."
. . .
"Moldova fell to Tier 3 for the first time, reflecting its government's failure to tackle trafficking-related corruption, as reflected in the handling of several high-profile cases of complicity by government officials in trafficking," said Mark Lagon, the State Department's senior adviser on trafficking in persons. "This failure created a significant impediment to the government's ability to fight trafficking overall."

Mr Lagon named as the primary underlying cause of human trafficking the demand for sex workers.

Previous related posts:

• A new tactic in human trafficking schemes
• 800,000 persons trafficked across international borders every year
• Human trafficking in Eastern Europe
• US warned over human trafficking report: Don’t alienate Muslims

An expert in health law and policy told a Winnipeg conference that doctors do not have legal authority to order cessation of life-saving treatment against a patient’s wishes.

Dr. Jocelyn Downie, Canada Research chairwoman of health law and policy and professor of law and medicine at Dalhousie University, said there is no legal precedent that gives doctors the authority to remove a patient's feeding tube or ventilator against their wishes or to decide whether they meet a "minimum goal" to continue living.

She said judges in previous court cases involving do-not-resuscitate orders haven't ruled whether this power lies with doctors. The question of who decides, Downie said, is still wide open before the courts.

Downie's comments run counter to new guidelines issued by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba in February that say the final decision on whether to pull the plug on a patient rests with the doctor.

Those guidelines were also rejected by Judge Perry Schulman, who last February ordered Winnipeg’s Salvation Army Grace Hospital to continue treatment of 84-year-old Samuel Golubchuk.  Hospital doctors want to euthanise Mr Golubchuk, but his family insists that would contradict their Orthodox Jewish beliefs.

Dr Downie hits the nail on the head here:

"You are deciding as physicians what lives are worth living, and that's a moral judgment, it's not a medical judgment," Downie said. "It just goes too far, and that's dangerous."

Exactly.  Doctors lack the moral competence to decide whose life is worth living and whose isn’t.

Dr Bill Pope, the college’s registrar, disagrees with Dr Downie, claiming that Manitoba courts have accorded doctors the right to pull the plug against a patient’s wishes.  No supporting court citation is quoted, and that view flies in the face of Judge Schulman’s ruling that the hospital must maintain Mr Golubchuk’s treatment pending a full court hearing on his case.

Previous related post: Doctors ordered to keep Sam Golubchuk on life support

A Pakistan insurance company has fired one of its agents, a 30-year-old Christian who received death threats from Muslims after acting as a witness of a marriage between a Christian man and a Muslim woman.  When Islamic clerics found out that he worked for Eastern Federation Union, they rounded on the company.

[T]he clerics threatened the EFU executives saying that if the company did not punish Zahid, then they could not be held responsible for any attacks that might be carried out against the company and its staff.

On May 16, 2008, the company immediately called a staff meeting to discuss the actions that they could take against Zahid. The EFU executives included Zahid on the meeting, but ordered him to sit apart and be silent. The company decided quickly to fire Zahid and told him not to come in to work the following day.

The day after Zahid was fired, three men stopped him in the market and forced him to let them take his picture. Knowing that the men would use his picture to advertise his "un-Islamic activity," Zahid fled from his home and is now in hiding.

After Mr Zahid had escaped, a local cleric issued a fatwa, calling for him to be murdered on sight.  He now fears that he will have to live the rest of his life in hiding.

Previous related posts:

• Christian woman forced to convert to Islam, marry Muslim
• Burqa forced on Christian students in Pakistan
• Christians in Pakistan under intense pressure

A report released today by Statistics Canada shows that hate-motivated crime accounts for a tiny fraction of crimes committed in the country.  The report covered both crimes reported to police in 2006 and data gathered through a 2004 victimisation survey.

Young people aged 12-17 were disproportionately represented among those apprehended for committing hate crimes.

Hate-motivated incidents account for a relatively small proportion of both police-reported and self-reported crime. In both cases, race/ethnicity is the most common motivation for these crimes.

In 2006, police services covering 87% of Canada's population reported 892 hate-motivated crimes, of which 6 in 10 were motivated by race/ethnicity.

Another one-quarter of hate crimes were motivated by religion and 1 in 10 by sexual orientation. Hate crimes accounted for less than 1% of all criminal incidents reported by police.
. . .
Another measure of hate-motivated crime comes from the General Social Survey (GSS), which asks Canadians about their personal experiences of victimization and includes incidents not reported to police.

The most recent GSS data for 2004 showed that 3% of all self-reported incidents were believed to be motivated by hate. The GSS data also showed that race/ethnicity was the most common motivation for these crimes.

Of the 892 police-reported hate crimes, 327 were violent offences, 460 property offences, and 105 were other types of crime.

502 of the 892 were motivated by race, 220 by religion, and 80 by sexual orientation.  The rest had other or unknown motivations.

Blacks were the racial group most likely to be victimised by hate crime.

Among religious groups, 137 hate crimes against Jews were reported by police, almost three times as many as against Muslims (46).

Mohammed Elmasry, phantom complainant against Maclean’s over the Mark Steyn article, doesn’t believe the latter statistics.

Mohamed Elmasry, national president of Canadian Islamic Congress, suggested the report doesn't reflect reality, saying a lack of resources led to the community neglecting to report every single hate crime.

"The Muslim community was under great stress since 9/11," he said, adding that it exhausted its resources trying to report all the crimes.

Exhausted all resources trying to report 46 hate crimes to police during 2006?  Somehow I think Mr Elmasry and the CIC have more resources than that at their disposal.

The full Statistics Canada report can be read here (html) or here (pdf).

Just to be clear, the headline is not meant to imply that I think hate crime unimportant.  My point is that Canada has an admirable record in keeping a lid on a problem that seems to be getting out of hand elsewhere in the world. 

Source:

Statistics Canada (2008).  “Study: Hate-motivated crime”. The Daily, 9 June. Statistics Canada catalogue no. 11-001-XIE.
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/080609/d080609a.htm accessed 9 June 2008.

This came up on my Dilbert desk calendar the other day.  It does not reflect the situation in my office.

In my office, the wretched, incompetent, lazy miscreant is the one who’s quitting.

The countdown continues.

Previous related post: StatGuy announces retirement.

Researchers from the Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Centre at the University of Melbourne, Australia, have observed structural abnormalities in some areas of the brain in long-term heavy users of cannabis.

The scientists compared MRI images of 15 long-term cannabis consumers (smoked more than 5 joints a day for over 10 years) and 16 non-users.  Participants also took a memory test and underwent psychiatric assessments.

The hippocampus, thought to regulate emotion and memory, and the amygdala, involved with fear and aggression, tended to be smaller in cannabis users than in controls (volume was reduced by an average of 12 percent in the hippocampus and 7.1 percent in the amygdala). Cannabis use also was associated with sub-threshold symptoms of psychotic disorders.

Although this small-sample study shows only correlations between cannabis use and brain abnormalities, it should give pause to those who claim the substance is basically harmless and has no toxic effects on the brain.  As well, several recent scientific studies show that cannabis can have severe psychological effects.

The research was published in the June 2008 issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

Previous related posts:

• UK government to warn about cannabis mental illness danger
• Dramatic increase in mental illness among cannabis users
• Marijuana triggers schizophrenic and psychotic episodes
• Cannabis: Risk factor for schizophrenia