Anti-abortion groups target IUD use

A rapid increase in the number of U.S. women turning to intrauterine devices to prevent pregnancy has prompted escalating attacks on the birth control method from groups that oppose abortion.

The next battle will be at the U.S. Supreme Court, which has agreed to consider a new religious challenge to contraceptives coverage under President Obama's healthcare law. Although the case deals broadly with whether religiously affiliated groups should be exempt from providing birth control coverage to their employees, some parties in the case have focused specifically on IUDs.

IUDs work primarily by preventing sperm from reaching an egg. But they have come under fire from anti-abortion groups because, in rare instances, they can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. Those who believe that life begins at conception consider blocking implantation to be terminating a pregnancy rather than preventing pregnancy.

“IUDs are a life-ending device,” said Mailee Smith, staff counsel for the Americans United for Life, which filed an amicus brief in support of the challenge before the high court. “The focus of these cases is that requiring any life-ending drug is in violation of the Religious Freedom Act.”

IUD use among U.S. women using contraceptives grew to 10.3 percent in 2012 from 2 percent in 2002, according to the Guttmacher Institute, making them the fastest growing birth-control method. Their popularity has grown as women recognized that newer versions of the device don't carry the same safety risks as a 1970s-era IUD known as the Dalkon Shield.

Now more than 10 percent of U.S. women using contraceptives use IUDs. Other forms of birth control, such as daily pills, are on the decline. 

Obama's Affordable Care Act has also boosted the use of intrauterine devices. The law requires insurers to fully cover birth control, including the entire $800 to $1000 cost for insertion of an IUD.

Should the high court agree with the plaintiffs and rule that they are exempt from the coverage, IUDs could become much more costly for women who work at such organizations, some legal experts say. As many as 3.5 million people worked at public charities with religious affiliations, according to 2013 data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics at The Urban Institute.

Planned Parenthood, long a target from religious groups for providing access to abortions, has also become a significant source of the devices, with IUD use by its patients up 57 percent between 2009 and 2013.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration created an exemption for houses of worship and some related organizations that object to funding birth control for employees, but now other types of religiously affiliated groups want similar waivers.

In 2014, the Supreme Court accepted the position of Hobby Lobby, a chain of craft stores owned by religious Christians, ruling that private companies that are closely-controlled could opt out of contraception coverage based on the owners' beliefs.

Hobby Lobby, among other things, objected to birth control that could prevent “an embryo from implanting in the womb,” including two types of IUDs, according to court documents.

The current high court case consolidates seven lawsuits filed by nonprofit groups with religious affiliations, such as colleges and retirement homes run by nuns. The ruling could be applied to more than 100 similar lawsuits, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of women, according to lawyers on both sides of the issue. Little Sisters of the Poor, one of the plaintiffs, has for example more than 2,000 employees.

The Obama administration has already allowed such nonprofit groups an exemption from providing birth control coverage, but created an accommodation that would still guarantee benefits to their employees.

Under the accommodation, nonprofits are required to notify their insurers, plan administrators or the federal Department of Health and Human Services that they object to the coverage. The insurance plan then directly offers employees separate contraceptive coverage. Organizations that fail to give notice face fines.

The groups that filed the cases now before the Supreme Court, including Geneva College and Priests for Life, contend that the notification requirements violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which says the government can't burden religious groups without a compelling reason.

Some of the organizations are challenging coverage for all forms of birth control while others focus only on methods that potentially interfere with fertilized eggs, including the so-called “morning-after pill” and IUDs.

Mark Rienzi, a lawyer with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents Little Sisters of the Poor, said that his clients feel that completing the paperwork would make them complicit in providing birth control. Filing for the accommodation would still trigger an offer of birth control coverage from an insurer, he said.

Houses of worship, he pointed out, do not need to complete paperwork or provide the coverage. “No one takes over their health plan and uses it to distribute the abortion-inducing drugs and contraceptives,” he said.

No matter what happens next year at the Supreme Court, the battle over the IUD is likely to continue.

“The stakes are very high,” said Aram Schvey, senior policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We know this kind of plan is effective. When people aren't burdened by cost, they choose more expensive, more dependable, longer-lasting contraceptives, like IUDs.”

Iraq: We don't need foreign troops to fight ISIL

Iraq has said that any deployment of foreign troops on its soil cannot happen without approval of its government.

Iraqi prime minister's comments came in repsonse to the earlier announcement by the United States Defense Secretary Ashton Carter that the US will deploy "specialised" troops to Iraq to help fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) group.

"We do not need foreign ground combat forces on Iraqi land," Abadi said in a statement on Tuesday.

"The Iraqi government stresses that any military operation or the deployment of any foreign forces - special or not - in any place in Iraq cannot happen without its approval and coordination and full respect of Iraqi sovereignty."

Speaking to the House Armed Services Committee, the Pentagon chief had said that a "specialised expeditionary targeting force" was being deployed to help Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces.

"In full coordination with the government of Iraq, we're deploying a specialised expeditionary targeting force to assist Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces and to put even more pressure on ISIL," Carter said on Tuesday.

"American special operators bring a unique suite of capabilities that make them force multipliers. They will help us garner valuable ground intelligence, further enhance our air campaign and, above all, enable local forces that can regain and then hold territory occupied by ISIL."

Carter added that the special forces would also be able to intervene in Syria, where Washington has already announced it is sending about 50 special operations troops.

Al Jazeera's Rosiland Jordan, reporting from the US capital, said that the number of additional troops to be sent is still unknown.

"We don't know yet how many forces are going to be deployed," she said. "The Iraqi government wants US troops to be helping with the effort and move ISIL off its territory.

"In Syria, the US president has approved a plan to send in special forces, but is doing so without the consent of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and that's something that has angered Assad since the coalition launched air strikes more than a year ago."

Carter's comments come as the British parliament prepares to debate whether the Royal Air Force should start bombing in Syria. Extra planes could be sent to Cyprus if MPs vote on whether to extend British military intervention against ISIL.

If successfully passed by the MPs on Wednesday, British fighter jets will be allowed to extend their campaign against ISIL fighters in Iraq to neighbouring Syria, where the group has its headquarters in the city of Raqqa.

David Cameron, the UK prime minister, called for military intervention in ISIL-held areas of Syria after the group's attacks in Paris on November 13, which left 130 people dead.

What MTV Is Calling the Generation After Millennials

Griffin Picciani, 14, doesn’t feel like a millennial. The New York City teenager looks at his early-20s cousins and easily recognizes the differences between his teenage years and theirs. Griffin only knows a black president. The video games he plays are miles away from the 8-bit consoles his cousins can remember. And perhaps most important, he and his friends can’t remember a time before Instagram and Snapchat.

“My age group has grown up with all of this social media at a much younger age,” Griffin says. “I think that’s given us a different perspective.”

Griffin is part of a generation that hasn’t been fully defined but appears to break from millennials—and one that doesn’t yet have a widely accepted name. MTV is looking to change that, and the network will announce a new name Wednesday: the Founders.

MTV President Sean Atkins says the name acknowledges that while millennials have disrupted society, it’s this new generation’s job to rebuild it. “They have this self-awareness that systems have been broken,” he told TIME ahead of the announcement. “But they can’t be the generation that says we’ll break it even more.”

There are, it turns out, a plethora of monikers for this new generation: Gen Z, iGen, Posts, Homeland Generation, ReGen, Plurals. But for MTV, the cable and satellite network which has been studying this generation for the last few years, none of those names represented what its researchers were seeing in surveys and data they’d been collecting. So in March 2015, the network asked more than 1,000 kids who were born after December 2000 what they should be called, generating 544 names including the Navigators, the Regenerators, the Builders, the Bridge Generation, and the winner, the Founders.

MTV is part of a growing number of media companies and marketers that have been trying to figure out what drives this group. Research is beginning to show that teenagers today are more pragmatic and independent than their millennial predecessors. They’re more likely to stand out than fit in. They’re digital natives who don’t know a time before being constantly plugged in. And they’re part of the most diverse generation in history, a generation that will soon be as coveted among marketers as millennials.

For MTV, which has seen significant ratings declines over the last couple years and recently named a new president to oversee new programming, the network plans to use the information it has gathered to tweak its shows to better reflect this group, which in the next few years will begin displacing millennials as it enters the network’s core demographic of 12 to 34 years old. MTV says its research shows that younger teens today see a world drastically disrupted. Facebook and Google have upended the news business. YouTube has disrupted television. Airbnb and Uber have unsettled long-established industries like hotels and taxis. The economy itself was disrupted by the Great Recession, creating a world in which their parents may have lost their jobs and family budgets are tight.

“They’re slightly more risk-averse,” says Jane Gould, MTV senior vice president of consumer insights and research. “They’ve grown up without a safety net.”

Generational experts and marketers have only just begun studying this generation, and most are finding similar traits. It will be the first generation parented largely by Generation X, often called latch-key kids thanks to the hands-off parenting style of the Greatest Generation. Those often-cynical Gen X parents appear to be imparting a realism onto their kids as opposed to a more optimistic, you-can-do-anything parenting style of their Baby Boomer parents.

Still, there’s no hard break between any generation, and some experts see this new group as merely the ultimate extension of millennials.

“We do not expect that this next generation is going to be anti-millennial,” says Neil Howe, a generational theorist and author of Generations and Millennials Rising, who has also coined the term “homelanders” for those coming after millennials. “You have a whole generation that is going to represent the extreme endpoint of where millennials were going in many respects: risk-averse, team-oriented, well-behaved.”

This fall, MTV started introducing new shows that are beginning to reflect these younger consumers, including Todrick starring Todrick Hall, who was cut from American Idol but has reinvented himself on YouTube and Broadway. Last year the network launched Faking It, which focuses on high schoolers who become popular by standing out, a character trait MTV researchers say this generation values. The biggest shift will show up next year in the ambitious scripted series The Shannara Chronicles, a fantasy series set inside a post-apocalyptic dystopian world.

“The Founders” generation is still in its early stages, and the perceptions being formed may change over time. MTV executives say they realize that and may rethink the name in the future. But for now, they’re sticking with Founders, a name Griffin, the New York City teenager, endorses.

“It definitely describes our generation,” he says. “And considering the other names out there, it’s a lot easier to remember.”

Good Samaritan 'Killed

Alison Wilson, 36, who was killed after intervening in a street argument

Alison Wilson was worried about the safety of a baby whose mother was arguing with Stephen Duggan near a chip shop in Widnes, Cheshire.

The 36-year-old witnessed the argument from a taxi with a male friend and thought it would be "less intimidating" if she stepped in, a jury at Liverpool Crown Court was told.

But Ms Wilson's attempt to act as peacemaker failed, with 28-year-old Duggan allegedly turning on her and the male friend.

Using a wine bottle as a weapon, he felled Anthony Tomlinson, 43, with a blow to the side of the head, the court heard.

The defendant then allegedly thrust the now-broken bottle into Ms Wilson's neck, severing her jugular vein.

The Good Samaritan died in hospital six days after the 7 March incident.

Prosecution lawyer Gordon Cole QC said: "We say that night this defendant was the aggressor. We say it was he who lost his temper. We say it was he who deliberately attacked both Alison Wilson and Anthony Tomlinson.

"This was, we say, not some sort of accident he (Duggan) may seek to make out.

"We make it clear we do not say he intended to kill Alison Wilson but we do say he intended to inflict really serious harm because to use a broken bottle to her head and neck when she presented no threat whatsoever shows he had lost his temper."

Duggan issued no warnings before he wielded the bottle, jurors were told.

The defendant, formerly of Water Street, Runcorn, previously pleaded guilty to manslaughter but the Crown did not accept the plea.

He denies murder and further counts of wounding with intent and assault occasioning actual bodily harm.

Beijing pollution: Schools keep children indoors

Pollution climbed to up to 35 times World Health Organisation safety levels on the third day of the city's "orange alert" - the second highest level.

Factories have been told to cut production and heavy duty trucks ordered off the roads.

It comes as President Xi Jinping attends the Paris climate conference.

Coal, used to power both Chinese factories and heat homes, is a major factor behind the smog, which has been exacerbated by humidity and a lack of wind.

A particularly cold November has meant a surge in coal burning, both in individuals' homes and by power plants. Most of China's power is coal-generated.

"The government is supposed to be tackling the pollution, so we need to see the effects. If in a few years the situation does not change, we will consider leaving," the Associated Press news agency quoted Yin Lina, a woman who had bought her young daughter to hospital, as saying.

A measure of pollution called PM2.5 - concentrations of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter - hit 900 micrograms per cubic meter in southern Beijing on Monday. The WHO recommends a maximum limit of 25 micrograms per cubic meter. 

Earlier this year, China's environment ministry announced that only eight of the country's 74 biggest cities had passed the government's basic air quality standards in 2014, and that many of the worst cities were in the northeast.

Chicago police superintendent fired by mayor amid outcry over video of shooting

The head of the Chicago Police Department has been fired amid widespread criticism over how authorities responded to the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer last year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) said he formally asked Garry F. McCarthy, the Chicago police superintendent, for his resignation on Tuesday morning, a week after video footage of the shooting was released and the officer was charged with murder.

“He has become an issue, rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction,” Emanuel said. He added that while he is loyal to McCarthy, whom he praised for his leadership of the department, the needs of the city are more important.

Anger has erupted in Chicago since authorities released footage of Jason Van Dyke, a city police officer, shooting Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old, last year.

Emanuel said he began talking to McCarthy on Sunday, after several days of heated protests, about “the undeniable fact that the public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded.”

When Emanuel announced McCarthy’s appointment in May 2011, he praised him as someone who proved “reducing crime and working closely with the community are not conflicting goals.”

McCarthy has spent more than three decades in law enforcement. Before coming to Chicago, he served as the police director in Newark and was an officer and deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department.

The same month his appointment in Chicago was announced, the Justice Department launched an investigation into the Newark police force. That review looked at reports of how officers used force and how complaints of excessive force that occurred before and after McCarthy took over the Chicago police force. The Justice Department said last year it had found “patterns of misconduct” in Newark, releasing a report that did not mention McCarthy, and reached an agreement with the city to have its force overseen by an independent monitor.

While Emanuel said he had “a lot of confidence in the work” McCarthy has done, he said the move was necessary to rebuild public trust and confidence in the police force.

City leaders and demonstrators have called for Emanuel to remove McCarthy, arguing that new leadership is needed to reassure a troubled public. Last week, a dozen members of the city council’s black caucus gathered to reiterate these calls for new leadership.

Emanuel’s decision to dismiss McCarthy also comes as there is growing public anxiety over a rise in violent crime in Chicago and other big cities across the country. Chicago has seen more than 2,700 shootings so far this year, topping the total for all of last year, and more than 430 of them have been fatal.

During an October meeting of more than 100 of the country’s top law enforcement officers and politicians in Washington, Emanuel said his police department has turned “fetal” due to the increased focus on how police use deadly force and demonstrations that have occurred after high-profile deaths at the hands of police. He also said this prompted officers to pull back from policing. That drew a rebuke for him back home, as the head of the police union argued that officers are not backing down.”

More recently, though, outrage has mounted over the long lag between McDonald’s death in October 2014 and last week’s release of the video and charges against Van Dyke. In the interim, Emanuel was reelected to a second term after an unexpected runoff.

Since the video’s release, Emanuel has said he fully supported McCarthy, a position he held publicly until word leaked shortly before the news conference that he had asked him to step down.

McCarthy acknowledged missteps, saying in an interview with NBC Chicago that the initial press release about the shooting, which said McDonald had continued to approach officers and disregarded orders to drop his knife, “was mistaken.”

In addition, a spokesman for the police union had said that McDonald lunged at police with a knife. Last week, that spokesman said he was relaying information told to him by other people on the scene and said he never spoke with Van Dyke.

But he said his authority in the Van Dyke case was limited as an outside agency and federal officials investigated what happened.

“The things that I have authority over are training, policy and supervision,” he said.

McCarthy also defended how the city has responded to the protests that have erupted since the shooting video was released last week, praising “incredible restraint by officers.”

However, calls for McCarthy’s ouster have continued in the days since the video was released. On Tuesday, the Chicago Sun-Times released an editorial saying McCarthy “has lost the trust and support of much of Chicago.”

In addition to announcing that McCarthy would step down, Emanuel also said he had created a task force focused on police accountability that was intended to improve independent oversight of the police and the way authorities respond to police officers who receive multiple complaints. The task force is also meant to determine if the city should change its policy of not releasing footage of police shootings.

This group’s recommendations will be presented to Emanuel and the Chicago City Council at the end of March, he said.

Japan resumes Antarctic whale hunt

After a judgment by an international court pressured Japan to stop hunting whales in Antarctica for a year, the country is scheduled to send whaling ships there again on Tuesday — resuming its position as the only country whaling in the icy Southern Ocean, according to the International Whaling Commission (IWC).

Japan plans to kill 333 minke whales each year for 12 years, a third of the number of whales it previously killed annually in Antarctica, in what government officials insist is a scientific research venture, not a commercial meat operation.

Large-scale whaling in Japan began after World War II, when meat was scarce, according to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation, a U.K.-based nonprofit. The Japanese government heavily subsidizes the industry, although, the organization says, demand for whale meat has fallen significantly over the past few decades.

Japan is not the only country with an active interest in whaling. Although an international moratorium on whaling was put into effect in 1986, Iceland and Norway continue commercial whaling. Whale hunting for research is regarded as separate from commercial whaling and is unaffected by the moratorium.

Patrick Ramage, the whale program director at International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, said minke whales were historically considered too small to be commercially viable for whalers. Many countries have “worked their way down from the blue whale through the fin whale, humpback whale and other species. It’s now the little guy — minke whale — that Japan is targeting.”

Australia took Japan to the United Nations International Court of Justice in The Hague over its Antarctic whaling activities. Last year the court ruled in favor of Australia and ordered Japan to halt its special permit program in the Antarctic, known as JARPA II. The court, which found that Japan was using its scientific research program to disguise commercial whaling, said that JARPA II involved the killing of 3,600 minke whales over several years and that “the scientific output to date appears limited.”

Japan halted its whaling operations in Antarctica because of the court's decision. But rather than let its Antarctic whaling operation fade away, Japan has apparently reinvented it with a program called the New Scientific Whale Research Program in the Antarctic Ocean (PDF), which it plans to launch on Tuesday.

An IWC spokeswoman said that when the commission’s scientific committee reviewed Japan’s newly named plan, “they didn’t agree whether the research Japan was proposing required lethal research or whether you could do it using nonlethal methods, for example, DNA.”

But anti-whaling activists say Japan is merely using the name change to continue whale hunting.

“In the absence of an agreed [minke whale] population estimate and with serious questions, both legal and scientific … Japan’s bureaucrats are nonetheless proceeding in returning to slaughter in the name of science in Antarctic waters this coming season,” said Ramage.

As populations of fish and other marine food sources decline worldwide because of overharvesting, various nations have increasingly looked southward to Antarctica’s less exploited and relatively plentiful waters. Although many countries consider the Southern Ocean a conservation area, others see it as a wide-open food resource.

A few weeks ago, the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources — a commission of 25 countries established to conserve Antarctic marine life — failed to reach an agreement about establishing marine protected areas in Antarctic waters after Russia refused to sign on to the measure.

“The minke whale population that is being hunted is considered to be sustainable,” said the IWC representative. “But obviously, it comes down to the numbers being hunted.”