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	Ongoing reports of state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience by Rick Feneley, Joel Keep SBS News, agencies China   China promised to stop harvesting executed prisoners organs a year and a half ago, but a visiting investigator claims it is still killing as many as 100,000 people a year for body parts, report Rick Feneley, Joel Keep for SBS News.   China had confirmed it used the organs of death-row prisoners but has long denied claims of the mass killing of minorities like Uighurs, Tibetans, Christians and Falun Gong adherents, too.   But United States human-rights investigator Ethan Gutmann says the sheer number of transplants, gathered from China''s own records and sources, reveals the truth.   "This new evidence we have is actually quite explosive," Mr Gutmann tells SBS about his investigation with human rights lawyer David Matas and human rights activist David Kilgour into the number of transplants occurring in hospitals per year.   He says his team calculated 100,000 "without breaking a sweat", contrasting Chinese official figures of 10,000. "We found this astounding and shocking."   He has testified to the US Congress. It passed a motion of concern six weeks ago about "persistent and credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience." Visit the related web page
	Till Death Do Us Part by Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, agencies   Till Death Do Us Part, by Doug Pardue, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes, Natalie Caula Hauff, Grace Beahm, J. Emory Parker, Chris Hanclosky, and Maureen Hartshorn.   This comprehensive five-part print and multimedia series exposes South Carolina as a state where more than 300 women died from domestic abuse over the past decade while political leaders did little to stem the violence.   Judges called “Till Death Do Us Part” “extraordinarily powerful,” “so thoroughly reported and well written as to feel like the definitive work on domestic violence in South Carolina.” Originally published in the Post & Courier in August, 2014. Watch a supplemental video series featuring survivors of domestic violence.   More than 300 women were shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, bludgeoned or burned to death over the past decade by men in South Carolina, dying at a rate of one every 12 days while the state does little to stem the carnage from domestic abuse.   More than three times as many women have died here at the hands of current or former lovers than the number of State soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.   It’s a staggering toll that for more than 15 years has placed South Carolina among the top 10 states nationally in the rate of women killed by men. The state topped the list on three occasions, including this past year, when it posted a murder rate for women that was more than double the national rate.   Awash in guns, saddled with ineffective laws and lacking enough shelters for the battered, South Carolina is a state where the deck is stacked against women trapped in the cycle of abuse, a Post and Courier investigation has found.   Couple this with deep-rooted beliefs about the sanctity of marriage and the place of women in the home, and the vows “till death do us part” take on a sinister tone.   The beat of killings has remained a constant in South Carolina, even as domestic violence rates have tumbled 64 percent nationwide over the past two decades, according to an analysis of crime statistics by the newspaper. This blood has spilled in every corner of the state, from beach towns and mountain hamlets to farming villages and sprawling urban centers, cutting across racial, ethnic and economic lines.   Interviews with more than 100 victims, counselors, police, prosecutors and judges reveal an ingrained, multi-generational problem in South Carolina, where abusive behavior is passed down from parents to their children. Yet the problem essentially remains a silent epidemic, a private matter that is seldom discussed outside the home until someone is seriously hurt.   “We have the notion that what goes on between a couple is just between the couple and is none of our business,” said 9th Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, chief prosecutor for Charleston and Berkeley counties.   “Where that analysis goes wrong is we have to remember that couple is training their little boy that this is how he treats women and training their little girl that this is what she should expect from her man. The cycle is just perpetual.”   South Carolina is hardly alone in dealing with domestic violence. Nationwide, an average of three women are killed by a current or former lover every day. Other states are moving forward with reform measures, but South Carolina has largely remained idle while its domestic murder rate consistently ranks among the nation’s worst.   Though state officials have long lamented the high death toll for women, lawmakers have put little money into prevention programs and have resisted efforts to toughen penalties for abusers. This past year alone, a dozen measures to combat domestic violence died in the Legislature.   When asked, most state legislators profess deep concern over domestic violence. Yet they maintain a legal system in which a man can earn five years in prison for abusing his dog but a maximum of just 30 days in jail for beating his wife or girlfriend on a first offense.   Many states have harsher penalties. Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee, for example, set the maximum jail stay for the same crime at six months. In Georgia and Alabama it is a year.   This extra time behind bars not only serves as a deterrent but also can save lives, according to counselors, prosecutors and academics. Studies have shown that the risk of being killed by an angry lover declines three months after separation and drops sharply after a year’s time.   More than a third of those charged in South Carolina domestic killings over the past decade had at least one prior arrest for criminal domestic violence or assault.   More than 70 percent of those people had multiple prior arrests on those charges, with one man alone charged with a dozen domestic assaults. The majority spent just days in jail as a result of those crimes.   * Access this multimedia series via the link below.   Mexico City, July 28, 2015 (Reuters)   Mexican state hands down historic sentence for femicide.   Five men in northern Mexico were sentenced to an unprecedented 697 years in prison for the gender-driven killing of 11 women, in a state where hundreds of young women have been murdered since 1990.   The sentence was the longest-ever given for a femicide, the killing of a woman due to her gender and was based on scientific evidence, said an official at the attorney general"s office in the state of Chihuahua, home of the border city of Ciudad Juarez, which in 2008 recorded one woman missing each day.   In addition to prison time of nearly 700 years each, those sentenced also have to pay a total of 9 million pesos ($550,000) in damages to the families of the victims, whose bodies were found in 2012.   Authorities have prosecuted some of the cases but have not always handed down long prison sentences due to the ambiguity around declaring femicides, and also to the overall high rate of impunity in the country, where many crimes go unpunished.   Mexico"s Supreme Court in March for the first time ordered that a case be probed as a femicide, after prosecutors in the State of Mexico initially labeled it a suicide, based on an investigation seen as plagued by anomalies.   The National Citizen Femicide Observatory, a coalition of human rights groups, believes that some 3,892 women were murdered in Mexico between 2012 and 2013, but only 16 percent of cases were investigated as femicides.   http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/15598 http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13916 http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/ngos/CDDandCMDPDH_forthesession_Mexico_CEDAW52.pdf Visit the related web page
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