Physicians and public health advocates are urging the Kenyan government for immediate legalization of abortion, an issue they say is crucial to ensuring complete reproductive health care services to women. Abortion, which is illegal in Kenya except in cases where the woman’s health is endangered, is one of the top five major causes of maternal […]
Around 900 women students from 115 countries will pursue postgraduate studies at the International Women’s University in Hanover, Germany. The project, depicted as “innovative and unprecedented in form and character,” will end its four-month long pilot phase on October 15th during the world exhibition Expo 2000. The women’s university stresses an interdisciplinary form of study […]
MSNBC’s post-speech poll conducted last night showed 47% of voters favoring George W. Bush, and 36% favoring Al Gore. A 9-point gender gap showed in the poll, with 43% of women favoring Bush and 52% of men favoring Bush. While 40% of women favored Gore, only 31% of men favored Gore. In an earlier NBC/Wall […]
Despite his emphasis on being a “compassionate conservative” and opposing “divisive” politics, Texas Gov. George W. Bush plainly voiced an anti-abortion stance last night at the Republican National Convention. Bush vowed to promote “a culture that values life-the life of the elderly and the sick, the life of the young and the life of the […]
Vice President Al Gore is expected to announce his running mate early next week. According to the Washington Post, his top picks include Senator John Edwards (NC), Senator John Kerry (MA), Senator Joseph Lieberman (CT), House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (MS), and “long-shots” Senator Evan Bayh (IN) and Governor Jeanne Shaheen (NH). Experts do not […]
On Monday August 7 at 9 pm EDT, the cable TV network Lifetime will air “The Truth About Jane,” a film about a teenaged girl who comes out to herself and to her family as a lesbian. The film, by writer-director Lee Rose, was made with the guidance of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against […]
Pakistan’s military ruler stated that his government will continue to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, claiming that he did not want to antagonize the ethnic population living on either side of the border. The global community has condemned Pakistan’s support of the Taliban, which is known for its oppressive policy toward women and girls. […]
A U.S. soldier was sentenced to life without parole for sodomizing and murdering an 11-year-old Kosovo Albanian girl while on peacekeeping duty in Kosovo. Staff Sergeant Frank Ronghi pled guilty to sodomy and premeditated murder of the young girl, Merita Shabiu, shortly before the U.S. military court trial in Germany began on July 31st. In […]
Somali women, who have long been excluded from their country’s political scene, are celebrating a major gain in their movement to increase women’s representation in the nation’s highest levels of decision-making. Parliamentary members and representatives of nongovernmental organizations convened in Aarta, Somalia for a reconciliation conference, establishing a quota system in which 10 percent of […]
A Bosnian Muslim woman testifying in a civil lawsuit against the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs fainted in a federal court as she described her rape and torture during the Balkans conflict in 1992. She said that the soldiers, who wore photographs of their leader Radovan Karadzic, captured her and her two young children […]
The United Nations Chairman of the Security Council Sanctions committee on Sierra Leone announced on August 1st the composition of a panel that will examine the trade of diamonds for arms and other military material. Although the U.N. Security Council enacted a diamonds embargo, the illegal trade persists in diamond-rich Sierra Leone, where brutal rebel […]
Just endorsed by Planned Parenthood, and campaigning on her Senate opponent’s home turf, Hillary Rodham Clinton used the occasion to once again blast Representative Rick A. Lazio’s (R-NY) “multiple choice” stance on abortion. According to The New York Times, Clinton reiterated that Lazio is not pro-choice on abortion but “multiple choice.” While Lazio says he […]
Kansas voters want human evolution back on the state science standards. They want it so badly that Democrats switched parties just to vote in the Republican primary yesterday. They voted out three conservative candidates that supported last year’s decision to remove human evolution from the state’s standards and solely teach creationism. Along with their Democratic […]
Australian Prime Minister John Howard declared that children have the right to two parents, but not two same-sex parents. Howard announced plans to amend federal sex discrimination laws in order for state governments to ban in vitro fertilization for single women. “This issue involves…the right of children in our society to have … the care […]
What better way to start a new century than to attend the Feminist Expo 2000 (March 31-April 2 in Baltimore). From Afghanistan’s Taliban to the U.S.’s religious right, there were plenty of challenges for the 7,000 attendees to confront and even more causes to champion. The Feminist Majority Foundation, organizers of the Expo, sought to […]
Eight years ago a little-known quich Mayan activist from Guatemala won the Nobel Peace Prize. The soft-spoken woman, all of 33 years old, had been traveling the world for almost ten years, speaking out anywhere people would gather to listen. Her message was always the same: the civil war in Guatemala must be stopped and […]
Although Mench’s lawsuit is due in part to developments in the international legal community, the roots of her case stretch back to 1954, the year that Guatemala’s progressive president Jacobo Arbenz was toppled by a U.S.- backed coup. Low-level fighting ensued between Marxist guerrilla groups and the newly installed conservative government, which brutally suppressed the […]
An advisory panel on gender equality to Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori urged the Japanese government to enact legislation that would end domestic violence on July 31st. The Council for Gender Equality labeled domestic violence a criminal act, warning in its report that there is “not a moment to lose” in halting violence in the home. […]
Fifty three women and children were killed by uniformed men in Burundi when they refused to go to a government regroupment camp on July 22nd. The government has forced hundreds of tens of thousands of people into regroupment camps, claiming that their land is necessary to counter rebel forces. Burundi’s civil war has lasted seven […]
Since the fall of the Berlin wall ten years ago, Germany has suffered from rightist violence, and more recently, attacks against immigrants have increased. On July 27th Neo-nazi skinheads bombed Dusseldorf, wounding nine immigrants. The most violence incident occurred in the eastern town of Eisenach, where Neo-Nazis attacked African asylum seekers. In the last decade, […]
