The movement for reproductive justice sees women’s decision to have – or not have – children as a fundamental right. Should they choose to bear a child, women should have the right to care and provide for them; if they opt not to give birth, family planning services should be made available to enable women to space or prevent pregnancies.

In Cambodia, where women make up 60 percent of the population of 14 million people, this fundamental right is being trampled by insecure labour contracts, toxic working conditions and a near-total absence of maternity benefits for working mothers.

Take Cambodia’s garments industry, a massive sector that accounts for 80 percent of the country’s exports. A full 90 percent of the workforce is female, but labour rights have not accompanied employment opportunities.

Ever since the country entered into a liberalising agreement with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2005, long-term contracts have been edged out in favour of short term or fixed duration contracts (FDCs), the latter being far more popular among East Asian factory owners and western clothing brands like Gap, Walmart and H&M.

These informal arrangements “abuse garment workers’ reproductive rights,” Sophea Chrek, a former garment worker and technical assistant to the Workers Information Center (WIC) – which recently staged a fashion show to highlight the issue – told IPS.

“Women employed under FDCs for three to six months, or sometimes even one month, will not risk their job by having a baby. Usually, they choose to have an abortion…before the contract ends to ensure that the line leaders or supervisors are not aware of their pregnancy,” Chrek added.

According to Cambodian labour law, factories are supposed to provide maternity leave, but most get around this requirement with short contracts, which leave the estimated 600,000 workers vulnerable to employers’ whims.

Melissa Cockroft, a technical advisor on sexual and reproductive health, tells IPS that women without access to family planning services resort to unsafe and unregulated measures, such as using over-the-counter Chinese products to induce abortions.

These methods can be fatal, but women seem hesitant to avail themselves of NGO-provided free or discounted service at on-site infirmaries, which are less confidential.

Sometimes their grueling schedules, which include 10 to 12-hour workdays with only a short lunch break in between, keep them from making appointments. Many of these women, Cockroft says, are just too busy to even think of starting families.

Garment workers’ reticence to use reproductive services can be cultural too, as talking about sexual health is considered ‘shameful’ in traditional Cambodian society.

Cambodian law also stipulates that factories provide working mothers with childcare, but Cockroft says she has only seen one operational childcare facility during all her years as an advocate in the field.

For some women, the decision to leave their children at home emerges from a desire to spare them the grueling commute – many factory workers travel shoulder-to-shoulder in trucks or on compact wagons pulled by tuk tuks, ubiquitous motorcycle taxis, down Cambodia’s notoriously unsafe roads.

Very often, babies remain at home with their grandmothers in the countryside while their mothers go off to work in the city, where they earn roughly 100 dollars per month. Union leaders are trying to raise this minimum wage to 160 dollars.

In general, though, both Cockroft and Chrek say garment workers consider themselves “too poor” to have children.

Entertainers and street workers

The culmulative effects of tar sands development—from environmental degradation to transportation to emissions from burning—must be determined before Canada or the United States approve any more projects, a group of scientists argue in an op-ed published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Calling for a binational moratorium, the scientists—representing a number of North American universities including Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Northern Arizona University, the University of Calgary and the University of Waterloo—argue that governments must evaluate tar sands development projects, including the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines, “in the context of broader, integrated energy and climate strategies.”

“Anything less demonstrates flawed policies and failed leadership,” they write. “With such high stakes, our nations and the world cannot afford a series of ad hoc, fragmented decisions.”

The group continues:

The scientists say that current debate which presents each pipeline proposal as an “ultimatum” between environmental costs and economic success “artificially restricts discussions to only a fraction of the consequences of oil development.”

The letter comes just over a week after the Canadian government approved the construction of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline, which will carry 200 million barrels of tar sands crude each year from Alberta to an export terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia. 

“Reform is needed now,” the group adds, concluding: “Canada and the United States can avoid the tyranny of incremental decisions — and the lasting economic and environmental damage that poorly conceived choices will cause.”

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A new study has linked the economic recession to 10,000 suicides across North American and Europe, and revealed a “looming mental health crisis.”

Researchers from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine used data from the World Health Organization on suicides in Canada, the U.S. and 24 EU nations and found an increase in the number of suicides from 2008 to 2010.

The suicide rate increased by 4.8 percent in the U.S. between 2007 and 2010. In the EU, the rate rose by 6.5% by 2009 and stayed at that level.

The three factors the study found to be the biggest risk factors were job loss, home repossession and debt.

“There has been a substantial rise in suicides during the recession, greater than we would have anticipated based on previous trends,” stated Dr. Aaron Reeves of Oxford University’s Department of Sociology and lead author of the study.

A march on Staten Island in New York City is underway on Saturday where community members are voicing outrage over persistent patterns of police violence nationwide while they also commemorate the recent deaths of several black men at the hands of officers accused of using excessive force.

Organized by those mouring the recent killing of Eric Garner, who died after being aggressively tackled and choked by Staten Island police officers last month, the demonstration is also being joined by people from all over the country, including the parents of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old black teenager who was gunned down by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9. Brown’s death sparked more than two weeks of protests in Ferguson and a national dialogue about race, police accountability, and the increasingly militarized nature of local U.S. law enforcement.

“We hope it will be a success and people will understand why we’re doing it,” Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, told the New York Daily News on Friday. “We hope the people who are supposed to hear our outcry respond to it.”

The mother of Amadou Diallo, a man killed in a 1999 shooting by four NYPD officers, also spoke Saturday morning ahead of the march and said: “Police cannot judge our sons and execute them for no reason.”

Though streets were blocked off for the march and some businesses reportedly decided to close to avoid the expected crowds, the march was billed as peaceful rally. According to the Staten Island Advance news site—which is providing live coverage of the march— the early police presence attending the rally was “conspicuous but subdued.”

A video loop of protesters in Staten Island via Vine:

The near complete collection of transcribed notes of Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB official who defected to the UK with a trove of gathered Soviet intelligence information in the early nineties, have finally been made public.

After being held under lock and key by the Churchill Archives Centre at Cambridge University, the Mitrokhin files detail years of Soviet intelligence operations during the height of the Cold War, some of which led to high-profile espionage charges on both sides of the Atlantic.

Described by the FBI as ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source,’ the archive is viewable to the public for the first time on Monday.

“Mitrokhin dreamed of making this material public from 1972 until his death; it’s now happening in 2014,” said Professor Christopher Andrew, the only historian to date allowed access to the archive. “The inner workings of the KGB, its foreign intelligence operations and the foreign policy of Soviet-era Russia all lie within this extraordinary collection; the scale and nature of which gives unprecedented insight into the KGB’s activities throughout much of the Cold War.”

According to the Associated Press:

And the Guardian adds:

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Thousands of people are expected to rally in Detroit Friday afternoon to demand a moratorium on the city’s mass shut-offs of water to households, which they say has unleashed a public health emergency.

Dozens of local, national, and international organizations and unions are backing the march, which will call for an immediate renewal of water services to thousands of residences that have already been disconnected, with tens of thousands more slated to be next. “The more attention we can bring to this moment, the more likely we are to get action to alleviate a crisis that doesn’t have to happen,” Shea Howell of the communications working group for Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management and the People’s Water Board told Common Dreams.

The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) announced last month it is implementing a plan to escalate the disconnection of water to households that have fallen behind on their bills to 3,000 a month. Nearly half of all residents are behind on their water payments—a pool that is likely to expand further as the city continues to increase its water rates and cut public services, including welfare and public pensions.

“Cutting off water to community residents is a disgraceful attack on the basic human right of access to safe, clean water,” —Jean Ross, National Nurses United

As a result, thousands of Detroit residents are going without water, despite its close proximity to the Great Lakes—which account for over one-fifth of the surface fresh water in the world.

The disconnections have been condemned as a “violation of human rights” by a UN panel, with the UN expert on the right to adequate housing warning they “may be discriminatory” against African Americans. Many residents suspect the shut-offs are part of a plan to get rid of bad debts to privatize water services, and ultimately, drive residents out of this majority-black city to make way for gentrification and corporate profits.

But organizers say Detroiters are finding creative ways to resist the water shut-offs and help each other get by.

Friday morning, residents blocked the entrance to Homrich Inc., the company contracted by the city to shut off water to homes. According to Howell, the civil disobedience is still ongoing, with a standoff between protesters and police. The direct action follows a similar protest earlier this month, which led to the arrest of ten residents.