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grrrly news 8/10

August 10, 2003 03:45 PM posted by lisa : track it (0)

The Disappearing Women of Chihuahua City
The hills of Sierra Nombre de Dios are rocky and hard to climb. "The last journalist didn't make it to the top," says Patricia Cervantes as she parks her pick-up truck at the base of the hills. This is her second trip to the site where two female bodies were found over a week ago by a group of teenagers on a hike. The police claim one of them is her 19-year old daughter, Neyra Azucena.
The dead women are just the most recent victims in a complicated story of murder and corruption that has enveloped Chihuahua City. While the world's attention has been fixed on the mass murders in Juarez, few have paid attention to the 16 women who have vanished into thin air in this Mexican state capital less than five hours south of the border.

Arianna Jumps in the Fray
Columnist and pundit Arianna Huffington joined hundreds of other candidates in the race for governor of California brought on by a recall petition against the sitting governor, Gray Davis. On August 5, on the eve of her official announcement, TomPaine.com Editor John Moyers interviewed Huffington. Here's an edited version of that interview.

Secrets and Cries
"What if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split apart." When she wrote those words, poet Muriel Rukeyser must have been envisioning Tricia Rose's new book "Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy" (Farrar Straus Giroux), in which a chorus of women rip stereotypes of black female sexuality to shreds.

Afghanistan: Troubles Persist, NATO to Assume Control of ISAF
As the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) readies to take control of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on Monday, Afghanistan continues to struggle amidst growing attacks on aid workers and law enforcement officers in its provinces. Despite repeated calls by the United Nations (UN), Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and progressive organizations including the Feminist Majority, ISAF remains confined within Kabul. At his farewell press conference this week, outgoing ISAF commander Lt. Gen. Norbert van Heyst of Germany credited ISAF for securing the capital city of Kabul; however, "What I really want to do is to wake up the international community to do each and every thing to provide security in the province," reported the Agence France Presse.

Report: Bush Administration is Targeting Progressive Non-Profits
A new report reveals a disturbing pattern: the Bush administration is targeting non-profits that criticize the government. The report by OMB Watch, a nonpartisan non-profit that monitors government and non-profit issues, found that the Bush administration is attacking the non-profit sector in three ways: imposing limits on non-profit speech, targeting non-profit advocacy, and implementing the USA Patriot Act, which gives the government unprecedented surveillance powers. "If you disagree with the administration on ideological grounds, they're going to come down with a hammer," Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, told the Village Voice. "This has huge implications for the free flow of speech in this country."

Jamaica: Legislators Propose Virginity Tests and Forced Sterilization
Two legislators in Jamaica have proposed that schoolgirls undergo virginity tests and recommended forced sterilization for young women with three or more children to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Legislator Sharon Hay-Webster suggested sterilization at a Parliamentary session expressing that the breakdown of family values in Jamaica has led to an increase in teenage pregnancy and welfare burdens, according to the Associated Press.

City ties 'family values'
to 'homophobia'
The city of Oakland barred two employees from advertising an informal group that respects "the natural family, marriage and family values," contending the bulletin-board flyer was "homophobic."

Bush asserts marriage is between man, woman
President George W. Bush said Wednesday he supports the traditional vision of marriage and government lawyers are working on a law spelling it out.
Bush, who is heavily backed by conservative religious groups, suggested he wants to take the United States in the opposite direction of Canada, where federal legislation endorsing same-sex unions could become law within months.

Gay Bishop-Elect Wins 1st of 2 Last Votes
New Hampshire clergyman moved a step closer Sunday to becoming the first openly gay elected bishop in the Episcopal Church, winning one of two final votes required to be confirmed.
The House of Deputies, a legislative body composed of clergy and lay people, voted to approve the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. He faces a final vote Monday in the House of Bishops.

W. Va. Ads: Bad Female Habits Harm Babies
It's a scene that seldom needs to be staged: Two women in jeans, puffing and sipping the hours away in a crowded bar
They are players in a local commercial that will begin airing in late August or early September with a warning to women of childbearing age: Prepare your body for pregnancy even if you aren't planning one.

Topless 3-year-old makes waves at pool
It may be all right for girls to bathe topless in pools in, say, Brazil, but don't try going topless at a water park in Detroit -- even if you're only 3 years old.
Karima Sorel and her daughter Suhayla Smith, 3, learned that the hard way Wednesday when security guards at Wayne County's Chandler Park Family Aquatic Park called police on Sorel because she allowed her daughter to play in the pool topless.

Church homosexual stance illegal?
Catholics who hand out a Vatican publication that calls homosexual activity "evil" could be prosecuted for incitement to hatred under Irish law, a civil rights group claims.
The 12-page booklet states Catholics, particularly politicians, have a duty to oppose attempts to legalize same-sex unions, the Irish Times reported.

For Whom the Poll Tolls
Pro-life women shift to majority, trumpets the Washington Times. Other concerns come in "way ahead of preserving abortion rights," USA Today declares. "Progress and Perils," the latest poll commissioned by Faye Wattleton's Center for the Advancement of Women (CAW), had social conservatives dancing in the streets, and no wonder: Fifty-one percent of women, it claims, now favor banning abortion completely or restricting it to cases of rape, incest or to save a woman's life.

Rape shield laws aren't foolproof

Moving on Just Fine
Patricia Beninato spent January 22, 2003, the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, in an Internet chat room, discussing the ruling’s significance. During the course of the exchange, something struck her. Virtually every participant became uneasy when asked to acknowledge the positive aspects of abortion.

Beninato was aghast. “The pro-choice crowd was deferring to the pro-life crowd. I couldn’t believe it. Yeah, abortion is a wake-up call. When I got pregnant I told myself I’d better be more vigilant about who I sleep with and how I use birth control. But there are millions of us who’ve had abortions who are not in a corner screaming about pain, guilt, or how old the baby would be if we’d had it. There are lots of us who’ve gone on with our lives just fine, with no regrets.”

Along comes Mary Magdalene debate again
Mary Magdalene is back. Not that she ever really went away, but every now and then she's thrust into the spotlight, the canon's cover girl for a lively debate about women, sex, feminism and the church. Her latest starring role comes in the blockbuster thriller The Da Vinci Code.

Fear and loathing
It's these punitive religious and sexual mores which underpin institutionalised violence against women; they help to create the conditions in which prostitution becomes a dangerous, coercive, exploitative, drug and crime-fuelled business.

Muted Voices From The Killing Fields Of Iraq

According to Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have simply disappeared since the early 1980s. Despite the varied nationalities and ethnic and religious backgrounds of these victims, almost all of them had one thing in common: they were male.

Ex-Girlfriend Says Police Shielded Battering Cop
The case of Mitzie Grabner shows why domestic-violence cases against law enforcers can be especially tough to prosecute. Advocates call the police report on her charges a cover-up and have pushed to reopen the case.

Women's Top Worry Is Domestic Violence
A recent poll shows that abortion rights are no longer a prime worry of women. Instead, domestic violence and sexual assault have moved to the forefront of women's concerns.

Relief Agencies to Involve Men in Women's Health
Relief organizations are changing their tack from treating women's health as a women-only concern. Now, organizations in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia are involving men in female health.

Same-Sex Parents Spring Open Gender Traps
The Pope and U.S. president aside, same-sex parents are gaining wider rights and acceptance. Along the way they are helping to make "parenting"--unbound by traditional sex-role connotations--the operative verb in childrearing

Bush's Picks Ultra-Conservative Again for Federal Bench
President Bush Friday nominated Californian Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., second only to the Supreme Court in power and prestige, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Brown is considered the most outspoken conservative member of the California Supreme Court. The 54-year-old justice is perhaps best known for her 2000 decision upholding Proposition 209, the voter-approved initiative that bans preferential treatment for women and minorities in public contracts, hiring and college admissions. If approved, Brown will take a seat on the bench often a potential steppingstone to the U.S. Supreme Court. Brown is one of a handful of judges the Bush administration is rumored to be considering once an opening occurs on the nation's highest court.

Anti-Choice Groups Cybersquat to Promote Cause
A graphic picture of a decapitated fetus greets users at a Web site for James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. Another site, purportedly promoting Republican Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, instead bashes the senator's position on abortion rights and provides Internet links to Web sites operated by anti-choice groups.

Women Offer Haven to Abortion Seekers
A network of women in New York provides temporary shelter to women who have no where to stay while they are in the city to undergo second-trimester abortions.

Women protest over Afghan security
A thousand women protesters have gathered in the Afghan capital, Kabul, to call for action to improve security in the country

More women work in nontraditional professions
We’ve come a long way from the old adage, "A woman’s place is in the home."

How about a woman’s place is in the welding shop? Or the fire department? Or a construction site?

Any of those descriptions would be accurate: Women are moving in increasing numbers into jobs once considered off-limits.

Victims of fashion
Sexy power shoes are an essential female accessory, but they can be torture to wear. So women are resorting to an extreme solution - surgery.

'I say girls can shoot'
Don’t tell Alexandra Lienhart that girls can’t shoot, because the 8-year-old will promptly bring out her pink bow and multi-colored arrows and prove you wrong.

‘These girls are tough, they made it to the top’
THESE girls are tough. Otherwise they would never have made it to the top. Some of those Navy lads with whom we climbed Kamet last month wouldn’t have been able to summit this peak," said Pasang Dorjee, one of the guides on the Indian Mountaineering Foundation’s all-women expedition to Argan Kangri (6789 m) in Ladakh this July. The expedition was part of the commemoration of the golden jubilee celebrations of the first ascent of the Everest.

Girls taking up tobacco worldwide
Government anti-tobacco campaigns should target girls and women as recent surveys show teenage girls smoking almost as much as boys in many regions, officials told a conference on smoking Thursday.
A report released at the 12th World Conference on Tobacco found that the gender gap in tobacco consumption among youths is closing in many regions.
The report found no significant differences between cigarette smoking rates of 13- to 15-year-olds in more than half of the 150 countries studied in the global survey, the first of its kind.

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