ALSO SEE Feminism

Mon

23

Apr

2012

American Nuns Reject Vatican's Orders

Last week, the order came down from the Vatican. American nuns will have none of it. (photo: Addicting Info)
Last week, the order came down from the Vatican. American nuns will have none of it. (photo: Addicting Info)

From Reader Supported News 

By Wendy Gittleson, Addicting Info

23 April 12

 

Last week, the order came down from the Vatican. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization that represents 80% of the nuns in the US, was chastised for "focusing its work too much on poverty and economic injustice, while keeping ‘silent' on abortion and same-sex marriage."

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Mon

16

Apr

2012

New Arab order: In Morocco, uproar over marriage law tests Islamist government

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Thu

12

Apr

2012

Uzbekistan's policy of secretly sterilising women

he BBC has been told by doctors that Uzbekistan is running a secret programme to sterilise women - and has talked to women sterilised without their knowledge or consent.
he BBC has been told by doctors that Uzbekistan is running a secret programme to sterilise women - and has talked to women sterilised without their knowledge or consent.

From BBC United Kingdom 

Adolat has striking looks, a quiet voice and a secret that she finds deeply shameful. She knows what happened is not her fault, but she cannot help feeling guilty about it. Adolat comes from Uzbekistan, where life centres around children and a big family is the definition of personal success. Adolat thinks of herself as a failure.

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Tue

10

Apr

2012

Pope Benedict reaffirms ban on women priests, assails Austrian “call to disobedience”

(Pope Benedict XVI looks on as he leads the Chrismal mass in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican April 5, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi )
(Pope Benedict XVI looks on as he leads the Chrismal mass in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican April 5, 2012. REUTERS/Max Rossi )

From Reuters Faithworld

Pope Benedict has restated the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings. Benedict, who for decades before his 2005 election was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, delivered an unusually direct denunciation of disobedient priests in a sermon at a morning Mass on Holy Thursday, when the Church commemorates the day Christ instituted the priesthood.

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Tue

03

Apr

2012

Myanmar leader praises elections as ‘successful’

KHIN MAUNG WIN/AP Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, center, arrives at the headquarters of her National League for Democracy party Monday, April 2, 2012, in Yangon, Myanmar. Suu Kyi said she hopes her victory in a landmark election will mark
KHIN MAUNG WIN/AP Myanmar pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, center, arrives at the headquarters of her National League for Democracy party Monday, April 2, 2012, in Yangon, Myanmar. Suu Kyi said she hopes her victory in a landmark election will mark

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Myanmar's leader said Tuesday that elections won by democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi and her party were successful, issuing the first government endorsement of the historic polls.

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Thu

29

Mar

2012

Sandra Fluke, Nicolle Wallace, Chelsea Clinton And More Talk Women In Politics

Huffington Post Politics by brenna.cammeron@huffingtonpost.com

 

For Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who unwittingly stepped into the national spotlight when she argued the case for contraception coverage in front of Congress and was called a "slut" by Rush Limbaugh for her effort, the talk show host's slur wasn't only an insult. It was also an opportunity.

 

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Tue

27

Mar

2012

Patience Abbe, best-selling child author, dies at 87

The Washington Post

Patience Abbe was only 11 when the memoir she wrote with her two brothers, “Around the World in Eleven Years,” climbed onto the bestseller lists for grown-ups in 1936.

 

As the siblings recounted their nomadic childhood in Europe and subsequent move to America, their exuberance and unaffected observations charmed readers. Patience observed that a woman with children could always get a seat on a Paris bus “no matter how first the others were.”

 

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Wed

07

Mar

2012

Women in the World

UN's Bachelet takes stock of Women in the World

As some of the most powerful women in the world convene in New York for the third annual Women in the World meeting, the UN Women's agency is wrapping up its first year of operation. "The biggest challenges everywhere are political participation and economic empowerment -- and ending violence against women," said Michelle Bachelet, executive director of UN Women. 

 

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Fri

20

Jan

2012

The Million Moms Challenge: Helping Moms Around the World, One Story at a Time

Huffington Post

Terri Whitecraft


The statistics are staggering: Every 90 seconds, someone in the world dies during pregnancy or childbirth. That's 1000 women and girls every day. Yet experts say more than 80 percent of those deaths are preventable with access to basic medical care -- and that doesn't include the more than 1 million babies a year who are stillborn because their mothers did not receive needed medical care.

 

How can you NOT want to help?

 

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Wed

18

Jan

2012

Hope for Haiti's Women

Legal reforms look to protect Haitian women

Haiti's struggle to rebuild in the wake of the devastating January 2010 earthquake has included efforts to strengthen protections of the rights of women. The Ministry of Women's Affairs is working on draft legislation to better protect against gender-based violence. Amanda Klasing of Human Rights Watch writes, "[W]e must keep reminding ourselves and others that not everything in Haiti is going wrong. Women's rights leaders in Haiti are proving this again with their remarkable work to change the laws to guarantee justice and equality for women and girls."

From The Huffington Post

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Sat

26

Mar

2011

Breaking News:Geraldine Ferraro, first woman Vice Presidential candidate, is dead at age 75

----------------------------------------
Breaking News Alert: Breaking News:Geraldine Ferraro, first woman Vice Presidential candidate, is dead at age 75 
March 26, 2011 12:15:14 PM
----------------------------------------

Geraldine Anne Ferraro Zaccaro, 75, passed away Saturday morning at Massachusetts General Hospital, surrounded by her family. The cause of death was complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that she had battled for 12 years. 

Ms. Ferraro earned a place in history as the first woman and first Italian-American to run on a major party national ticket, serving as Walter Mondale’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1984 on the Democratic Party ticket. 

 

0 Comments

Mon

14

Mar

2011

Arab feminism In light of the revolutions across the Arab world

What challenges are women facing in this new political era?

 Riz Khan Last Modified: 02 Mar 2011 15:18 GMT

 

 

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Mon

14

Mar

2011

The Middle East feminist revolution

Women supporting women inevitably leads to women supporting revolution. In Tunisia and Tahrir Square, women were at the front and centre of organising and leading protests, demanding social change [GALLO/GETTY]
Women supporting women inevitably leads to women supporting revolution. In Tunisia and Tahrir Square, women were at the front and centre of organising and leading protests, demanding social change [GALLO/GETTY]

 

Al Jarezza

 

Women are not merely joining protests to topple dictators, 

 they are at the centre of demanding social change.

 

Among the most prevalent Western stereotypes about Muslim countries are those concerning Muslim women: doe-eyed, veiled, and submissive, exotically silent, gauzy inhabitants of imagined harems, closeted behind rigid gender roles. So where were these women in Tunisia and Egypt?

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Fri

18

Feb

2011

“It is the women who have the guts in Pakistan”

A woman lights a candle next to an image of the governor of Punjab Salman Taseer during a candlelight vigil in commemoration of Taseer. - Photo by Reuters (File Photo)
A woman lights a candle next to an image of the governor of Punjab Salman Taseer during a candlelight vigil in commemoration of Taseer. - Photo by Reuters (File Photo)

 

The men in Pakistan need to step it up

 

greatly when it comes to supporting

 

women in social activism.

 

 

 

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Mon

14

Feb

2011

Gabrielle Giffords Brain Injury: Doctors Work To Help Giffords' Brain Rewire Itself

The New York Times added a number of encouraging details on Sunday night, including Giffords beating one of her nurses at a game of tic-tac-toe and using music to recover her speech:
The New York Times added a number of encouraging details on Sunday night, including Giffords beating one of her nurses at a game of tic-tac-toe and using music to recover her speech:

AP/The Huffington Post 

First Posted: 02/14/11 02:26 AM Updated: 02/14/11 04:05 PM

 

NEW YORK -- Compared to a sleek new laptop, that three-pound mass of fatty tissue called the brain may not look like much. But when it's injured, it adapts and rewires its circuits in new ways.

 

That's the kind of flexibility that doctors and rehabilitation specialists hope to encourage in Gabrielle Giffords, the brain-injured Arizona congresswoman.

Details about her recovery have been thin. But members of her staff say she recently began speaking for the first time since the Jan. 8 attack by a gunman in Tucson. Brain injury patients who regain speech typically begin to do that about four to six weeks after the injury, experts say.

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Sun

17

Oct

2010

Omani Woman’s Day Celebration

Muscat, Oct 17 (ONA)-The celebrations to mark the Omani Woman's Day, which falls on  October 17th each year, commenced today by organizing the Omani Woman Forum "A partner in Development" at Al Bustan Palace Hotel, under the auspices of Dr. Ali bin Mohammed bin Moosa, Deputy Chairman of the CBO Board of Governors and Chairman of the Tender Board and lasts for two days.

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Sun

19

Sep

2010

Elizabeth Warren on Jon Stewart

Elizabeth Warren's Greatest Hits (video) Friday 17 September 2010

by: Jon Stewart  |  The Daily Show | Video

Elizabeth Warren, the liberal activist tapped by President Barack Obama to help start the consumer watchdog agency she first proposed, today said she would pull no punches to stand up for middle-class Americans. 

SEE Elizabeth Warren on The Daily Show

0 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”

 

This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”

 

Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.

 

The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.

 

And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.

 

Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.

 

But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.

 

Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.

 

So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.

 

In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.

 

Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.

 

Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”

 

There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.

 

“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.

 

Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.

 

There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.

 

________________________________

 

A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.

0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.

 

Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.

Zhou Family Ties

1 Comments

Fri

13

Nov

2015

Are Languages Products of their Environment?


shutterstock_222422665_151112


DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article: 


  Languages Are Products of Their Environments


The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different environments.

2 Comments

Tue

03

Jun

2014

The Case for Reparations

 

The Case for Reparations

 

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

 

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 21, 2014

 


Chapters

  1. I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
  2. II.  “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
  3. III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
  4. IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
  5. V. The Quiet Plunder
  6. VI. Making The Second Ghetto
  7. VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
  8. VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
  9. IX. Toward A New Country
  10. X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
0 Comments

Mon

02

Jun

2014

A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA

PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.

 

As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.

The New York Times

Sunday Review

By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014

 

A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks
A late 19th century family taking a stroll down a set of railroad tracks

Read More 0 Comments

Mon

21

Apr

2014

Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change

From The New York Times 

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD

APRIL 19, 2014

 

HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.

 

In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.





A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China.  Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests.  Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times
A visitor at the Zhou family's ancestral graves in Xiqliantou, eastern China. Intrigue surrounds the family after a spate of arrests. Sim Chi Yim for the New York Times

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