we have brains

grrrly news 11/28

November 28, 2004 02:15 PM posted by lisa : track it (0)

As a Saudi woman living in the conservative religious state, Hanadi Hindi will be forbidden from driving to work in her new job

ACLU threatens
abstinence program

The American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to sue the state of Louisiana because a state website promoting abstinence mentions God.

Hidden toll of domestic violence

Domestic violence is grossly under-estimated by the public, according to campaigners who have started 16 days of raising awareness.

Record numbers of women with HIV

Nearly half of 37.2 million adults living with HIV are women, figures show.

Crime labs in disarray over DNA profiles, report says

Nearly two years after the U.S. government allocated $28.5 million to help state and local crime labs reduce a massive backlog of untested DNA samples, less than half of the money has been used, a Justice Department report said Monday.

The federal DNA initiative was touted as a way to speed up investigations into thousands of homicides, rapes and other crimes.

Illegal Abortions Rampant in Latin America

Five thousand women die from clandestine abortions every year in Latin America. It has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, despite its near-universal illegality.

Housework Gap Closes for Dual-Earner Couples

For a treat after the Thanksgiving meal, our commentators serve up a feast of statistics about men in dual-earner couples. Not only are these guys doing a lot more work around the house, they're even thinking up things to do with the kids.

Naked Female Anchor? Let's Hold the Show

A female TV news anchor in Ohio appeared naked on the air last week to cover an arts event. Michele Weldon, who teaches at the same journalism school that trained the anchor, explored why the incident was so regrettable.

Suffragists Knew How to Make a Stir on Holidays

If Thanksgiving finds you basting the turkey and feeling tied to the stove, take heart. Laura Schenone's backward glance at suffrage cookbooks reveals a proud tradition of female radicals in the kitchen

Nursing Shortage Threatens Health Care
Medical experts warn that a national nursing staff shortage is putting Americans' health at risk.

Want a successful protest in Mexico? Arm your women
This fall, when scores of Mazahua Indian women took up arms and marched on Mexico City, they caught the country's imagination. "Women warriors fight for their rights," newspapers declared in 72-point type after the Mazahuas, rifles slung over traditional satin dresses, stormed Congress. TV crews swarmed this impoverished valley for the scoop.

Net porn arrests hit erotic websites
THE national police campaign against child pornography has been blamed for a fall in visits to legal internet erotica sites.

Online erotica suppliers say visits to sites, and sales, have suffered because consumers are worried about inadvertently downloading illegal images

ACLU Shifts Argument in Oregon Gay Marriage Case
After Oregonians voted to ban same-sex marriages earlier this month, a gay rights advocate will no longer argue for same-sex marriage rights in the state's supreme court, activists said on Friday.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will instead argue for a legal civil unions between same-sex couples giving them the same rights and benefits as married couples.

Pro-Abortion Group Gets New Leader
The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has selected former Montana state legislator and State Superintendent of Education Nancy Keenan as its new president. She takes over for Elizabeth Cavendish, who had been Interim President since Kate Michelman stepped down in May 2004.

California businesses face mandatory sexual harassment training
A new law taking effect Jan. 1, 2005, will mandate that your company, if it employs 50 or more people, provide training for managers in this area.

Judges vote to disband Domestic Violence Court
The judge who presides over Domestic Violence Court is worried if the court is eliminated victims will have a harder time getting justice.
The dissolution of the court is under consideration after county judges voted 6-2 Friday to recommend it be disbanded.

Hate-crime chic
There are warnings of a rising tide of homophobia on both sides of the Atlantic. When a gay man was recently murdered on London's South Bank, newspapers grimly reported that there has been a 20 per cent rise in homophobic attacks in the capital over the past year. The re-election of George W Bush in America, and the sweeping rejection of gay marriage in state ballots, has sparked predictions of a 'new era of intolerance'

Women's lawsuit says she was sterilized without consent at 15-years-old
woman known only by the initials L.S. is suing the B.C. government claiming she was sterilized at the age of 15 without consent.
Her B.C. Supreme Court lawsuit says she was admitted to the Tranquille Hospital in Kamloops, B.C. under the Mental Health Act in June, 1974. The lawsuit claims in Dec., 1974 at 15-years-old she was "unlawfully sterilized by an irreversible surgical procedure at Royal Inland Hospital."

Global Aids Crisis Hinges on Women's Rights
The global battle against HIV/Aids will ultimately fail unless serious progress is made on women’s rights in the developing world, the UN says.

The pandemic is increasingly taking on a feminine face as it enters its globalization phase. The lack of women’s equality – from poverty and stunted education to rape and denial of women’s inheritance and property rights – is a major obstacle to victory over the virus, according to the latest global HIV status report published today.

Rolling Back Women's Rights
Dispensing with legislative niceties like holding hearings or full and open debate, President Bush and the Republican Congress have used the cover of a must-pass spending bill to mount a disgraceful sneak attack on women's health and freedom.

Women's groups warned about Depo Provera
This week, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer issued letters in both Canada and the United States warning about a serious health risk to women who use their long-acting, injectable contraceptive drug, Depo-Provera.
Pfizer announced that they will be warning doctors and women and adolescents who use Depo-Provera that the drug may cause a significant loss of bone mineral density, that the loss increases with duration, and that the loss may not be completely reversible

Hits and myths
A best-selling memoir about an honour killing in Jordan has been revealed as a fraud. Lebanese novelist Nada Jarrar wonders why so many people fell for it

What happens if Roe is overturned?
ABORTION DIDN'T GET much airtime in the 2004 presidential campaign, but after the votes were counted it didn't take long for the issue to bubble to the surface. The day after the election, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) called down the wrath of the freshly emboldened right wing of his party, and endangered his ascension to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, by letting slip that he thought it "unlikely" that nominees to the federal judiciary "who would change the right of a woman to choose" would be approved by the Senate.

Blonde jokes to be banned?
Blonde jokes are set to be banned in Hungary after blonde women staged an angry protest outside parliament.
The protestors handed in a petition claiming they were being discriminated against in every walk of life by bad taste blonde jokes.

Taken for granted
Documentary of 1977 National Women's Conference held in Houston reminds us that until recently, discrimination against women was the norm.

Dropping the Ball on Title IX
Eliminating the gender quota that has decimated men's college athletics had been a GOP platform issue, after all. Coaches, student athletes, parents, and educators had worked successfully for more than two years to focus media attention on the reckless harm of the department's enforcement methods. A presidential commission was appointed, composed mostly of luminaries from women's athletics, which handed Secretary Rod Paige a thoughtful report with common-sense recommendations. All that was required was his sign-off.

'Informed choice' is no choice at all
One of the most striking things about the UK government's White Paper on Public Health, published earlier this week, is its emphasis on choice. It is mentioned twice in the title alone - Choosing Health: Making Healthier Choices Easier - and 35 times in the paper itself. UK health secretary John Reid says the paper's 'starting point' (no less) is that people should be 'free' to make 'informed choices' about their lifestyles. Brushing aside howls of nanny statism from some quarters (and accusations of Not Doing Enough from others), Reid declared: 'We believe that, in a free society, men and women ultimately have the right within the law to choose their own lifestyle, even when it may damage their own health.'

What future for the family?
In between kicking ass on the stock exchange floor, exchanging trivia with girlfriends and conducting a transatlantic email affair, Kate Reddy, the heroine of Allison Pearson's cult working-mother novel I Don't Know How She Does It, bashes shop-bought mince pies with a rolling pin to make them look home-made for the sake of her daughter's school party (1). In between being a mother of four, a high-profile lawyer and the wife of the UK prime minister, Cherie Blair gets caught out on a dodgy property deal and pleads the pressures of 'juggling' work and family life.

Iraq, the Press, and the Election
The man who inspired the New York Times' mea culpa reveals why Iraq didn't topple Bush and how the current coverage still isn't cutting it

The Progressive Morality
If progressives communicate their values clearly, most people will recognize them as their own, and more deeply American than those currently put forth by conservatives.

Katastrophe: Hip Hop Against the Grain
In this original interview, the transgender emo-hopper takes on Eminem, heterosexism in the hip hop community and the point at which art and activism intersect.

Hollywood on Trial
Liberal Hollywood has been blamed for swinging moral values voters towards Bush. But could Whoopi's joke or Jennifer Aniston's expletive really have been so influential?

I Am Ro
Rising rapper JenRO exists at the unlikely intersection of queer, Latino, and gangsta worlds

Review of With Her Body by Nicola Griffith
The genre of science fiction often brings to my mind spaceships, colonization of distant galaxies, and Star Trek. But there’s another kind of sci-fi, and that’s the kind written by authors such as Nicola Griffith. Griffith’s sci-fi is far more speculative than space-opera, and instead of spaceships and Captain Kirk we have the sticky heat of an Atlanta dyke bar, the loneliness of an abandoned condominium complex, and the mystery of a South American jungle.

Women march against violence in Paris
Thousands of people demonstrated in central Paris on Saturday to demand legislation to protect women from violence, a month after a young Tunisian woman was stoned to death in southern France.
Numbered by police at 2,800 and organisers at 8,000, demonstrators walked peacefully from Paris' Bastille square to the rallying cry: "Humiliated, raped, beaten. Enough!"

Women bearing the brunt
Protecting the rights of women is a matter of fairness, social stability and public health. Improving the overall societal treatment of women and girls is one way to control the AIDS epidemic worldwide.
The United Nations' annual report on AIDS highlighted the growing number of women infected with HIV in every part of the world. Women account for nearly six of every 10 people living with HIV in Africa and more than half of those in East Asia.

Women's bodies re-viewed
New York — Now that Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues" has traveled the globe, her stomach has a thing or two to add.
Ensler, the woman who transformed the vagina from a hushed "down there" into a marquee word, has accepted her private parts.
But it was with some horror, she says, that she looked down at her "not-so-flat, post-40s stomach," and realized her self-hatred had simply crept upward.

Women in Alaska have better pay but poorer health
Alaska women average larger paychecks than women nationwide, but rank significantly lower for health and well-being, according to a new report.
The Institute of Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C., produces the biennial study that considers women in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The study compares such things as how many women in a particular state vote, how happy they are and how their salaries compare with male co-workers'.

TRUMP 'TOPPLES' WOMEN'S SHELTER
A group of homeless women who are on parole, battered, jobless or struggling with mental illness have gotten bad news from a shelter known for 25 years as an "oasis of hope" — You're evicted!
While a Donald Trump condo tower and a huge hotel-office-retail complex now under construction is making downtown White Plains upscale, the tiny Samaritan House shelter is being pushed out of its home in an old stone church.

10,000 women in 'help' appeal
THE Supreme Council for Women's complaints centre received over 10,000 pleas for help from women in Bahrain over its first three-year-term, it was revealed yesterday.
Out of these, over 7,000 have been processed by council authorities with the remaining 3,000 are still being sorted, said secretary general Dr Lulwa Al Awadhi.

Women of India Seeing Social Gains
After centuries of struggle, women in India are beginning to make some progress in the areas of gender equality and reproductive rights.

Femme nets can't figure out women
As cable television continues to shift audiences and ad dollars away from broadcast TV, the women's cable networks are among the few losing out. Once the No. 1 ad-supported cable channel, Lifetime has been stuck in fourth place for two years. Oxygen and WE barely register in the Nielsen ratings. All three networks have yet to develop a breakout hit that could do for them what Queer Eye for the Straight Guy did for Bravo.
To paraphrase Freud, it's not easy figuring out what women want

Gifts can re-energize girls' interest in science
If you plan to buy gifts for a young daughter or niece, consider getting her something that will spark an interest in science.
The Society of Women Engineers is concerned that girls tend to lose confidence in their science and math abilities between sixth and eighth grade.
The group says parents and other family members can give gifts that encourage girls' interest in science and technology.

Moms meet up
Linda Campbell acknowledges being both nervous and excited as she waits for others to arrive at a picnic shelter.
For three months the 35-year-old woman has been in contact with other stay-at-home moms through Meetup.com, a Web site that links people with common interests. This day she'll meet some of her cyberspace acquaintances in person for the first time and share a potluck lunch

« grrrly news 11/22 | whb homepage | Books »

your comments : post a new comment