Author: storiesinamerica

Cross posted at StoriesinAmerica and Daily Kos

Grab a drink, this compilation is depressing…
Facts and Figures on U.S. Women

Population: As of July 1, 2004, there were 149.1 million females in the United States. There were 144.5 males.

Education: 31 percent of women ages 25 to 29 years had attained a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2004, which exceeded that of men in this age range (26 percent).

Businesses: There were 6.5 million women-owned businesses in 2002, up 20 percent from 1997.

Earnings: Women 15 and older, who worked full time, year-round, earned 77 cents for every $1 their male counterparts earned in 2004. This amount is up from 76 cents for every dollar in 2003.

Voting: 65 percent of female citizens reported that they voted in the 2004 presidential election, which was higher than the 62 percent of their male counterparts who cast a ballot.

Military: As of Sept. 30, 2004, women made up 15 of the armed forces. In 1950, women comprised fewer than 2 percent.

Source: US Census

General

*March is Women’s History Month, a federally recognized, nationwide celebration that encourages all Americans to reflect on the ways in which women have shaped U.S. history. But how did this celebration come to be, and why is it held in March?
Source: Cnn.com

*Women of color in the sciences are celebrated in a new book that aims to inspire the next generation. But educators and some of the featured scientists worry that recent gains for black female scientists are vulnerable to unraveling.
Source: Women’s eNews

*Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame when the former Newark Eagles co-owner was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues chosen Monday by a special committee.
Source: AP

*Without any public notice, the US Environmental Protection Agency has rewritten its proposed rule on human experiments to authorize chemical testing on fetal tissue, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The change will allow pesticide and chemical companies to conduct experiments on aborted fetuses to buttress lobbying efforts for relaxation of federal regulation and increases in allowable dosage levels for its products.
Source: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility

Politics

*President Bush, who embraced AmeriCorps as part of his “compassionate conservative” agenda in 2001, now wants to shut down a part of the national service program that his administration has deemed “ineffective.” Beginning next year, the White House would reduce funding for the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps from $27 million to $5 million with the goal of closing it down, according to the president’s budget. About 81 full-time staff members would lose their jobs.
Source: Washington Post

*Bucking rising sentiment against illegal immigrants, Congress recently voted to increase protections for undocumented immigrants trapped in abusive relationships or sex-trade networks. President Bush signed these amendments into an existing law in January, giving abused undocumented women greater options for obtaining legal status and escaping perilous circumstances, according to two attorneys who spoke Friday in Sacramento at a workshop for social workers and law enforcement representatives from around the state.
Source: Sacramento Bee

*The Bush administration will oppose a U.N.-backed resolution calling for the creation of a council to expose the world’s worst human rights abusers, John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Monday.
Source: Washington Post

Economic Justice

*For the second straight year, personal savings have been in the red, a phenomenon that has only happened once before, at the height of the Great Depression. Research conducted by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the indebtedness of US households has risen nearly 36 percent over the last four years. As a result, the gulf between the “haves” and “have nots” is reaching crisis proportions.
Source: In These Times

In The Courts

*A 20-year-old legal fight over protests outside abortion clinics ended Tuesday with the Supreme Court ruling that federal extortion and racketeering laws cannot be used against demonstrators. The 8-0 decision was a setback for abortion clinics that were buoyed when the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept their case alive two years ago despite the high court’s 2003 ruling that had cleared the way for lifting a nationwide injunction on anti-abortion leader Joseph Scheidler and others.
Source: AP

*Senior Food and Drug Administration officials must testify about the federal agency’s failure to decide whether a controversial emergency contraceptive pill may be sold without a prescription, a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled late Friday. The decision by Magistrate Viktor Pohorelsky came in response to FDA legal efforts to keep secret the agency’s discussions and correspondence about the pill, called Plan B.
Source: Newsday

Reproductive Rights

*Stay out of South Dakota. That’s the message one pro-choice group has for its supporters. The Wisconsin-based Women’s Medical Fund is calling for a boycott of South Dakota tourism if Governor Mike Rounds signs a bill banning most abortions. It’s the state’s second largest industry, but South Dakota tourism could see a drop in visitors who don’t support a ban on abortion.
Source: Keloland.com

*Abortion opponents say they are babies. Pro-choice activists call them fetuses. Whatever the label, Kay Frost says, the tiny beings put on quite a show during ultrasounds at the AA Pregnancy Help Center — an anti-abortion facility in Lexington. Across the country, anti-abortion activists are now using medical technology to persuade women to carry their pregnancies to term. Some abortion-rights activists have criticized the use of sonograms, saying they put inappropriate pressure on women. “It’s a manipulative tool,” said Ginny Copenhefer, a former lobbyist with the Kentucky Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. “I don’t think it’s fair to heap guilt on them because they feel they have to terminate a pregnancy. That’s just the most cruel form of abuse that I can imagine.”
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader

*The [New York] Legislature on Monday supported a new bill that would allow pharmacists to offer the “morning after” contraceptive pill to girls and women without prescription. Lawmakers said the new version addresses most of the concerns that led to Gov. George Pataki’s veto of an earlier bill.
Source: Newsday

International

*If you are a woman in the Darfur region of Sudan who has been raped and you want to lay a charge, it is virtually certain that legal officers will automatically reduce your allegation to one of assault. If you persevere with your rape accusation, you will be told to do the impossible and provide four male witnesses to support your charge. As a result, sexual violence goes almost totally unpunished and is one of the biggest violations of women’s rights in Darfur. It is why members of my organisation, the African Women’s Development and Communications Network, FEMNET, and of other women’s rights groups in Africa have high hopes that the new International Criminal Court in The Hague will be able to change the situation.
Source: Institute for War & Peace Reporting

*A small but burgeoning group of young Italians are turning to Catholicism with new fervor, suggesting a reversal of Catholicism’s decades-long decline in Italy. Sister Cristina is one of 550 young Italian women who joined the country’s 7,500 cloistered nuns in 2005 – a dramatic increase from the 350 who became nuns in 2003. Vatican officials say the sudden rise in Italian monasticism mirrors a resurgence in Catholicism among young Italians during recent years.
Source: Christian Science Monitor

*A record number of women are serving in parliaments worldwide, but they only account for just over 16% of all MPs.
Source: BBC

*The world is beginning to understand that integrating women and girls into the life of a nation is the surest path to economic growth and development, a top U.N. official told an annual meeting that analyzes the global status of women.
Source: Reuters

*In Africa, the increased participation of women in politics is helping legislatures look more like their own societies and less like exclusive men’s clubs.  The conclusions were presented in a study by the Geneva-based Inter-Parliamentary Union.  It’s participating in a series of discussions during the annual meeting of the 50th Session of the U-N Commission on the Status of Women, C-S-W, in New York City.
Source: VOA

*A mysterious source was feared to have bought every copy of a best-selling novel that caused sensation and scandal in Saudi Arabia. Banat al Riyadh, or the Girls of Riyadh, written by Rajaa al Sanea, about the lives of four well-to-do women in the Saudi capital, was on exhibit with other Dar al Saqi publications at the Riyadh International Book Fair. However, a representative for the publishing house denied the book had sold-out.
Source: Asharq Alawsat

Cross-posted at StoriesinAmerica

Even Bush, the man whose family used to support Planned Parenthood, says the South Dakota law, which will require a girl who is raped by her father to have the baby, believes the it goes too far:

Bush is “pro-life with three exceptions,” McClellan said.

Those exceptions are rape, incest or when a woman’s life is endangered. The South Dakota bill only allows abortion in the last case.

“The president believes we ought to be working to build a culture of life in America and we have taken practical, commonsense steps to help reduce the number of abortions in America,” McClellan said.

Ah yes, building a culture of life with cluster bombs.
Back to South Dakota. Here’s a story about Mrs. X, a woman who never thought she’d ever have an abortion, until she found out her baby had Down syndrome. Her doctor said the baby didn’t have a chance at long-term survival and would “never leave the hospital.”

“We spent a lot of time crying and praying. We asked ourselves if it was fair to bring a child into the world only to have him live a short life filled with discomfort and pain. Would it also be fair to our firstborn for us to be in the hospital continuously? These are the questions we struggled with and we asked God to guide us.”

The couple decided on an abortion, but they were not ready for what lay ahead.

“I guess we thought that it would be different if you were having an abortion for medical reasons. We thought that the procedure would be performed in a hospital, but it wasn’t. We were sent to the same abortion office in Amherst that everyone else goes to, the one with the protesters outside,” said Mrs. X.

One protester, in particular, drew the ire of Mrs. X and her husband.

“They make them stand out by the road, so you have to drive by them like it’s some sort of perp walk. They were all holding signs and reciting prayers. One old woman had a sign that said ‘Your baby is healthy, don’t kill it.’ I wanted to jump out of the car and scream at her, ‘No, my baby is not healthy. How dare you suppose such a thing? How dare you judge me?'”

The experience has changed Mrs. X’s opinion about the anti-choice, anti-women crowd:

“They paint it as all so simple, so black-and-white. They want a woman to have her baby, no matter the circumstances. Then what? Who will adopt those unwanted babies? Have you ever looked at those adoption ads in the newspaper? ‘Couple seeks healthy, white newborn.’ What about the unhealthy babies? What about the non-white babies? Who will care for them? I never hear that answer presented.”

Mrs. X also has a message for the South Dakota Legislature and, in the near future, the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

“Unless a person has had to lie on that table and feel what it’s like to have an abortion, they shouldn’t have a say as to what another woman can or cannot do with her body. There is a reason it is called pro-choice. It’s because no one is pro-abortion. You can’t go through what I did and ever want to have to live through it again.”

She continued, “But a woman needs to have a choice, and have it be her and her partner’s choice alone, as to what is best in their situation. I pray to God that none of the women holding up those signs in front of abortion clinics are ever put into the position that I was. But if they are, I also pray that they’ll still have the right to decide for themselves what they should do.”

If the South Dakota law is upheld, women like Mrs. X will be forced to find an abortion provider in another state, but poor women who can’t afford to travel and take time off from work will be forced into back alleys.

Cross posted at StoriesinAmerica

With all eyes on Bush’s BS, the following stories get little to no coverage. I try to compile this list daily.
General

*Out of all the major studio-financed films released in the United States last year, only three — Bewitched, Aeon Flux and North Country — were directed by women.
Source: Miami Herald

*Wendy Wasserstein’s “Uncommon Women and Others,” which was initially aired during PBS’ 1978 Great Performances season, will be rebroadcast in April.
Source: Playbill

*The federal government agreed to stop funding a nationwide program that promotes teen abstinence to settle a lawsuit alleging the money was used for Christian proselytizing. The agreement was reached Wednesday between the Department of Health and Human Services and the American Civil Liberties Union. Under the deal, the Silver Ring Thing program won’t be eligible for more funding unless it ensures the money won’t be used for religious purposes. “Public funds were being used to fund a road show, really, to convert teens to Christianity,” said Julie Sternberg, an ACLU attorney.
Source: AP

Politics

*Unmarried women hold solidly progressive views and would vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates if they voted regularly, according to a new poll released this week by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. The survey was sponsored by the Women’s Voices. Women Vote. Action Fund (WVWVAF) to explore the reasons that 20 million single women did not vote in the 2004 election. WVWVAF is dedicated to raising awareness among single women, who represent a quarter of all Americans of voting age.
Source: Feminist Wire

In the Workplace

*Why women have not achieved parity with men in the workplace continues to bewitch experts. Yet, insights to the mystery may be readily available in the widely popular Harry Potter series.
Source: Christian Science Monitor

Reproductive Rights

*Filling a void left by the Food and Drug Administration’s inability to decide whether to make the “morning-after” pill available without a prescription, nearly every state is or soon will be wrestling with legislation that would expand or restrict access to the drug. More than 60 bills have been filed in state legislatures already this year, and that follows an already busy 2005 session on emergency contraception. The resulting tug of war is creating an availability map for the pill that looks increasingly similar to the map of “red states” and “blue states” in the past two presidential elections — with increased access in the blue states and greater restrictions in the red ones.
Source: Washington Post

*Thousands of women suffer long and short-term disabilities because of complications resulting from illegal abortions performed in private clinics and homes each year. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), in low-income countries, approximately 200 women die each day as a result of unsafe abortions.
Source: Daily Times

International

*The gender pay gap between men and women in Britain is the worst in Europe, with female workers earning on average 17 percent less than their male counterparts, an offical report said.
Source: AFP

*Iraq’s interior minister says he believes American journalist Jill Carroll is alive and will be released. The deadline set by the Ann Arbor native’s kidnappers passed at midnight.
Source: AP

*Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth is not enough to ensure everyone has a job, so young people are encouraged to set up businesses – men and women. So young Saudis are being encouraged to set up their own businesses – and not just young Saudi men.
Source: BBC

*Australian couples are traveling to the United States for in-vitro fertilization so they can select the sex of their baby. The couples are spending up to $25,000 to use a controversial embryo sex screening procedure that is banned in Australia, the Melbourne Herald Sun reported.
Source: UPI

*1091 honor killings were committed in Turkey in the past 5 years, said Turkish Parliamentary Investigation Commission which was set up to probe honor killings. The commission will submit a report on honor killings soon. The report includes the reasons of violence against women and proposals to prevent such violence.
Source: TurkishPress.com

Cross-posted at StoriesinAmerica:

South Dakota’s governor is expected to sign a law banning all abortion, even in cases of rape or incest. Abortion is also illegal in Ghana, except for cases involving rape and incest, or if the woman can prove she is mentally ill. Ghanaian market trader, Esinam, 42, tells the BBC why she decided to have an illegal abortion at a back-street clinic in Accra, after she got pregnant for the fourth time despite using birth control. “My husband and I can barely look after our three children on the little income we have. How could we afford to feed another mouth?” She was four months pregnant when she had the back-street abortion.

I had thought the procedure would be done in an operating theatre but it wasn’t. It was just an ordinary room.

Even though I realised it wasn’t a proper clinic, I was still determined to go through with the termination. I had no choice.

The ‘doctor’ asked me to undress and lie down. After an examination, he inserted some metal instruments into my vagina. He didn’t give me any aesthetic – he just began removing things from my body.

I didn’t see anything, but felt a pulling sensation. The pain was unbearable, but I muffled my screams.

I did not allow myself to fully express my pain. I felt guilty about the whole thing, but the idea of bringing up another child in abject poverty convinced me I had made the right decision.

After fifteen minutes of ‘surgery’, he inserted a white tablet into my vagina. He told me that this would cause the remaining foetal parts to eventually discharge.

That night, she bled profusely and was taken to the hospital. When she regained consciousness, she was told her womb was rotten and had been removed. “I cannot have any more children and if I had lost any more blood, I would have died. I am very grateful to the doctor and his team at Accra’s Ridge Hospital who saved my life.”

“At Cook Country Hospital in Chicago, approximately 5,000 women a year came in with injuries and bleeding resulting from illegal abortions, mostly self-induced abortions,” Leslie Reagan, the author of When Abortion Was a Crime, said in an interview with DissidentVoice. “They had an entire ward dedicated to taking care of people in that situation. Those wards pretty much closed up around the country once abortion was legalized.”

Prior to Roe v. Wade, as many as 5,000 American women died annually as a direct result of unsafe abortions, according to NARAL.

The anti-women crowd is turning the Hand Maids Tale into non-fiction. In the book, doctors that provide abortions are hanged; in South Dakota, they will go to jail. Abortion is just the beginning.

I’m trying to compile a list like this on a daily basis (most focus on women’s issues). With so much attention on Bush’s mishaps, too many important issues are falling through the cracks. Cross-posted at StoriesinAmerica
General

A little more than a year since Harvard University President Lawrence Summers ignited a furor by suggesting women may lack the aptitude for science and math, the first names coming up as his possible successor are mostly women. Harvard German professor Judith Ryan, one of the leaders of the anti-Summers faction, said it would be “delightful” if Harvard had its first woman president.
Source: Bloomberg

Reproductive Rights

An Indiana Senate committee gutted two emotionally charged bills that could have shut down abortion clinics and required doctors to tell women that life begins at conception. The most significant provision now is a new requirement that doctors tell women seeking an abortion that there are families waiting and willing to adopt. Already, doctors must inform women about alternatives to abortion, including adoption, the risks of the procedure and that an ultrasound of their fetus is available.
Source: The Indianapolis Star

The FDA is about to begin a new review of the abortion pill RU-486, which some have blamed for the sudden deaths of four American women. A scientific review of the cases fails to definitively link the drug to the fatalities.
Source: Women’s eNews

Economic Justice/In the Workplace

Women and minorities are still sharply underrepresented in America’s corporate board rooms, according to a survey released by recruiting firm Spencer Stuart on Tuesday. A study of 2,357 directors of the top 200 Standard & Poor’s 500 companies found that 16 percent of the directors are women and 15 percent are minorities.
Source: Reuters

Economist and author Sylvia Ann Hewlett said women are still being shortchanged in the work force and companies need to look for an alternative to the “white male model.”
Source: AZCenteral.com

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace. The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that the drop in inflation-adjusted incomes left the average family income at $70,700 in 2004. The median, or point where half the families earned more and half less, did rise slightly in 2004 after adjusting for inflation to $43,200, up 1.6 percent from the 2001 level.
Source: AP

As the economy has steadily grown over the past four years, so too has the number of Americans going hungry. America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest charitable food distribution network, is now providing help to more than 25 million people, an 8 percent increase over 2001, the last time the organization did a major survey of its more than 200 food banks in all 50 states.
Source: Christian Science Monitor

International

An Iraqi television reporter famed for the courage of her work on the frontline was among the victims of the country’s latest paroxysm of violence. Atwar Bahjat, 30, was sent yesterday to the city of Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, to cover the bombing of a revered Shia shrine. She took with her a three-strong crew, but no bodyguards, despite the fact that dozens of foreign and Iraqi journalists have been killed during the war.
Source: Times Online

Since the summer of 2002, septuagenarian Fazel Hadi Shinwari has run Afghanistan’s Supreme Court like the respected Islamic scholar he is. He has banned the Afghan feminist Sima Samar from holding a cabinet position, after she reportedly said she didn’t believe in Islamic sharia law. He has banned an Afghan TV station for showing what he called “half-naked singers and obscene scenes from movies.” He has also spoken against coeducation; has supported the employment of women (if they wear head scarves); and ordered the arrest of an Afghan journalist who suggested that, in some cases, the Koran was open to interpretation.
Source: Christian Science Monitor

As the Ugandan president and his challengers prepare for a showdown at the polls tomorrow, the country’s first lady is also running for election after a campaign which has seen women politicians making remarkable progress. Janet Museveni, 57, is making her first foray into politics by running as a parliamentary candidate in rural Ruhama in western Uganda. On a continent where men have dominated post-independence politics, the past year has seen the beginnings of a gender shift.
Source: Guardian

The French parliament adopted a law aimed at guaranteeing equal pay rights for women, who earn on average one fifth less than their male counterparts. A national review, to be carried out in three years’ time, will decide whether to introduce financial penalties for offending employers.
Source: AFP

A three-month long rights campaign in Jordan has revealed that women are unable to seek access to justice due to financial burdens and social norms. “Either because of limited financial resources or social stigma, some women abandon their rights,” said Jordanian rights advocate Najah Enab from Mizan, a local NGO which organised the campaign. “It’s not easy to have access to justice when you’re poor. You need a lawyer, and not everyone can afford this.”
Source: IRIN

The following articles illustrate the woefully inadequate treatment of returning veterans. With all the money being spent on the war, surely the government has the funds to hire more than one psychologist trained in treating post-traumatic stress disorder for all returning veterans who live between Los Angeles and San Francisco, including Jeffrey Lehner, a 40-year-old Marine sergeant who recently shot himself and his father:

He had joined the Marines enthusiastically, he told me, and served as a flight mechanic for eight years. Not long after 9/11, he began helping to fly materials into Afghanistan with the first wave of U.S. troops.

In the beginning, Jeff supported the administration’s policies in the region. But over time, that began to change. As we talked, Jeff brought out an album of photos from Afghanistan. He pointed to a series of photographs of a trailer and several huts behind a barbed-wire fence; these were taken, he said, outside a U.S. military camp not far from the Kandahar airport. He told me that young Afghans — some visible in blue jumpsuits in his photos — had been rounded up and brought to the site by a CIA special operations team. The CIA officers made no great secret of what they were doing, he said, but were dismissive of the Marines and pulled rank when challenged.

Jeff said he had been told by soldiers who had been present that the detainees were being interrogated and tortured, and that they were sometimes given psychotropic drugs. Some, he believed, had died in custody. What disturbed him most, he said, was that the detainees were not Taliban fighters or associates of Osama bin Laden. “By the time we got there,” Jeff said, “the serious fighters were long gone.”

Jeff had other stories to tell as well. He said the CIA team had put detainees in cargo containers aboard planes and interrogated them while circling in the air. He’d been on board some of these flights, he said, and was deeply disturbed by what he’d seen.

His case was compounded, his friends said, by strong feelings of “survivor’s guilt” involving the crash of a KC-130 transport plane into a mountain in January 2002 — killing eight men in his unit. He’d been scheduled to be on the flight and had been reassigned at the last minute. As part of the ground crew that attended to the plane’s maintenance, he blamed himself. Afterward, he went to the debris site to recover remains. He found his fellow soldiers’ bodies unrecognizable. He also told me he was deeply shaken by the collateral damage he saw to civilians from U.S. air attacks — especially the shrapnel wounding of so many Afghan children.

Jeff told me that he often couldn’t sleep at night, thinking about what he had seen and heard. He had gone to Afghanistan a social drinker but came home, like so many veterans, a problem drinker. And he admitted self-medicating with drugs. He was seeking help — and just days after we met, he drove 100 miles to enter a treatment program in Los Angeles. But the Veterans Affairs hospital’s PTSD ward was full, he told me, so he was placed in a lockdown ward for schizophrenics, which only aggravated his isolation and despair.

In another tragic killing that possibly could have been prevented if appropriate intervention measures were in place, a 19-year-old vet has been accused of stabbing his 18-year-old wife 71 times with knives and a meat cleaver:

Spc. Brandon Bare, 19, of Wilkesboro, N.C., was charged with premeditated murder and indecent acts related to the mutilation of his wife’s remains.

Bare had returned to Fort Lewis from Iraq in April to recuperate from cuts and internal ear injuries in a grenade attack on his Stryker brigade unit in Mosul. He was there as a machine-gunner with the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division.

His wife, Nabila Bare, 18, was killed July 12.

“The murder was premeditated, deliberate and savage,” prosecutor Capt. Scott DiRocco said in January during Bare’s Article 32 hearing, similar to a preliminary hearing in civilian court. “He did not stop after he killed her.”

Bare’s lawyer said there was nothing to show the killing was planned.

“What this looks like … is an act of rage, or some sort of other unexplainable act,” defense attorney Capt. Patrick O’Brien said.

Witnesses testified that Bare had enrolled in treatment programs for anger management and combat stress after his return from Iraq. He had said he was having trouble controlling his anger and didn’t like his wife going out and partying, said Michael Collins, a nurse and case manager at Madigan Army Medical Center.

A day before his wife was found dead in the couple’s kitchen, Bare told his rear detachment commander Capt. Mickey Traugutt that he was taking a new prescription that made it hard to get up and that he had missed a treatment.

A 2005 study by the Department of Veterans Affairs found that out of nearly 170,000 Iraq veterans about 34,000 were diagnosed with psychological disorders. You would think the current ‘support our troops’ president would spend his precious time publicizing this issue and ensuring resources are in place to deal with the escalating problems. Instead, he’s attending a $500-per-plate luncheon for Indiana Rep. Chris Chocola today. He’ll be posing for photos with those who pay $4,000 per person or $6,000 per couple. Thanks again for the tax cut, Mr. Bush.

With all eyes still on Dick and his gun, a lot of stories are falling thru the cracks. Unfortunately, stories about women’s issues (I know they aren’t just women’s issues) are often ignored altogether.

A new study by the World Association for Christian Communication, a non-governmental organization that promotes communication for social change, found that while women make up 52 percent of the world’s population, they make up only 21 percent of news subjects. The findings are based on news items appearing on a single day (Feb. 16, 2005). Almost 13,000 news items were surveyed on that day in 76 countries.

Here’s an overview. I try to do this daily at StoriesinAmerica.
*Male US representatives (Republican and Democrat) with daughters are more likely to vote in favor of women’s issues than those who are without daughters, according to a Yale University study. The more daughters a congressman has, the more likely he is to vote for reproductive rights. In order to conduct a similar study about women in politics, we need to elect more moms.
Source: Washington Post

*The South Dakota legislature has approved a measure to require abortion clinics to be licensed and inspected. Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls operates the only abortion clinic in the entire state.
Source: AP

*Women hold fewer than a quarter of the top jobs in state governments around the country and have made few gains in the last eight years, according to the Center for Women in Government & Civil Society at the University at Albany. From 1998 and 2005, the percentage of women in state government leadership positions rose from 23.1 percent to 24.7 percent. The positions include statewide elected officials, state legislators, high court judges, department heads, and governors’ office top advisers. “In 40 percent of the states, when you look across the top leadership positions in all three branches of government, women’s shares have remained level or increased very modestly. After reporting for almost 10 years these very modest gains for women, I have come to believe it is a very persistent social phenomenon,” she said. “The problem does not appear to be going away,” said Judith Saidel, the study’s project director.
Source: AP

*A female employee in San Diego was told that her pregnancy was costing her company too much money and that it would pay for her to have an abortion. It’s an extreme example, but advocates say the workplace is still tough on pregnant women.
Source: Women’s eNews

*The pay gap between men and women continues: women make about 76 1/2 cents for every dollar men make for doing the same job. That’s up from about 63 cents three decades ago. A study conducted by the National Association for Female Executives looked at more than 100 jobs in 20 industries nationwide and found that in 2004, men earned more in all areas, including those professions where women tend to thrive. Women high school teachers, for example, earned an average of $42,848, compared to $49,660 for men who have the same tenure and credentials. The survey also found that women marketing and sales managers earned $46,696 in 2004, compared with $74,932 for men; women physicians and surgeons earned $50,856, compared with $97,448 for men; women securities, commodities and financial services sales agents earned $33,853, compared with $60,736 for men. “The fact is the gap has closed so little in the last 30 years that, at this rate, we’ll catch up in a century,” says Betty Spence, president of the National Association for Female Executives. “It’s really disheartening.”
Source: North Jersey Media Group

*A Polish woman who suffered severe health problems after being denied an abortion is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights. Alicja Tysiac sought an abortion after three ophthalmologists predicted that carrying her child to term would likely further damage her failing eyesight. But the same three specialists, as well as a gynecologist, refused to authorize an abortion. When she gave birth, Tysiac’s eye condition worsened dramatically as a result of retinal hemorrhage. Tysiac, a single mother to her three children, can now see no more than 12 feet in front of her.
Source: Feminist Majority Foundation

On March 8th, International Women’s Day and March 20th, the three-year anniversary of the Iraq war, Global Exchange and CODEPINK plan to highlight the issue of women and war:

Iraqi women have paid a high price for the war and occupation of their country. As Haifa Zangara wrote in an article for Alternet last summer, “Iraqi women were long the most liberated in the Middle East. Occupation has confined them to their homes. A typical Iraqi woman’s day begins with the struggle to get the basics: electricity, petrol or a cylinder of gas, fresh water, food and medication. It ends with a sigh of relief for surviving death threats and violent attacks. For a majority of Iraqi women, simply venturing into the streets harbors the possibility of attack or kidnapping for profit or revenge.”

Few people in the United States have any idea of the impact of the war and occupation of Iraq on the daily lives of Iraqis, much less its impact on women. For this reason, CODEPINK and Global Exchange are trying to bring Iraqi women to the United States to tell their stories to journalists, policy makers and the general public. Knowing how powerful Cindy Sheehan’s story has been in helping Americans understand the real cost of war, imagine what it would mean if Americans could hear first-hand from Iraqi women whose stories are similar to Cindy’s.

Maybe that’s why the US State Department rejected the visa applications for two of the Iraqi women.

According to Global Exchange, the US State Department rejected visa applications for Anwar Kadhim Jawad and Vivian Salim Mati, who were invited to speak during the week of International Women’s Day.

Anwar Kadhim Jawad, her husband and their four children were driving down the road from their house in Baghdad when they were suddenly caught in a hail of bullets from US soldiers. There was no checkpoint and no warning before their car was attacked. Anwar’s husband, son and two daughters were shot dead. Only Anwar, who was pregnant at the time, and her 14-year-old daughter, survived. The US Army compensated her with $11,000, but her loss is incalculable and her grief immeasurable.

Vivian Salim Mati and her husband decided to flee their home when the US military began bombing their neighborhood in Baghdad in the first months of the invasion. They grabbed their children and jumped in the car. Vivian’s husband was driving, and their three children were sitting in the back. They were driving down a side street when they crossed paths with a US tank. The US soldier atop the tank began shooting at them. Vivian’s husband and three children were killed right away. Vivian was hurt but still alive. She got out of the car, screaming, ‘Help me! Help me!’, but the soldiers just kept shooting, Miraculously, Vivian survived but she carries her grief with her every day.

Ironically, the reason given for the visa rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country.

If you believe these women deserve to be heard, call the State Department at: 202.647.4000 and ask for the office of Condoleeza Rice. Tell her office that Anwar Kadhim Jawad and Vivian Salim Mati are two of the Iraqi women invited to Washington DC on March 8 by CODEPINK, but they were denied their visas by the US Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Demand that her office intervene and grant these women their visas.

Click here if you’d rather email a message.

In March 2004, a group of women from Afghanistan left their country for the first time to spend a month in California. Unfortunately, their trip didn’t get much press. Meeting these women was an incredible experience. Read about it here.

For photos of all your favorite liberal talk show hosts, visit: StoriesinAmerica.

“I admit it — the liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.”
William Kristol, as reported by the New Yorker, 5/22/95
(Yes, it’s an old quote, but it’s still true.)
From the Washington Monthly:

If you’re up early on Sunday mornings in Washington, you can observe a weekly ritual. Around 9am, a string of chauffeured town cars and SUVs pulls up outside the NBC studio on Nebraska Avenue in Northwest Washington where “Meet the Press” is recorded, and out tumble government officials and politicians, reporters, and pundits. They scan the weekend papers over coffee in the green room, catch up with the women who apply their make-up, and wait for their chance to spin or pontificate. One thing you might notice about these select individuals-other than the fact that there are very few women-is that lately they are mostly conservative.

Which leads to another Sunday morning ritual: American liberals yelling at their televisions.

No, liberals, it’s not your imagination. “Meet the Press” and the other Sunday political talk shows really have leaned more to the right in recent years. At Media Matters for America, we looked at every one of the 7,000 guests who appeared on the three major Sunday shows from 1997 through 2005-Bill Clinton’s second term, George W. Bush’s first term, and the last year. We found that the left has of late found itself outnumbered, in some ways substantially, on the television shows that define the Washington conventional wisdom. Liberals are already a disturbingly rare species among what Calvin Trillin refers to as the “Sabbath Gasbags.” And in some debates-the war in Iraq, for example-they are in danger of becoming extinct.

Cross posted with a photo of Uncle Cheney at StoriesinAmerica:

The party of small government and fiscal responsibility claims it has no choice but to cut funding for Medicare and Medicaid, violence against women programs, women’s health services, battered women’s shelters, an elderly nutrition plan, programs for veterans and student loans, but it could care less about the billions being stolen in Iraq. More than $50 billion has gone to private contractors hired to guard bases, drive trucks, feed and shelter the troops and rebuild the country we bombed.

How is the money being spent? Tonight’s 60 Minutes took a look:

When U.S. troops entered Baghdad in the spring of 2003, there was no electricity, widespread looting and little evidence of postwar planning. With the American military stretched to the limit, the Pentagon set up the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to govern the country under Ambassador Paul Bremer, who began hiring private companies to secure and rebuild the country.

There were no banks or wire transfers to pay them, no bean counters to keep track of the money. Just vaults and footlockers stuffed with billions of dollars in cash.

“Fresh, new, crisp, unspent, just-printed $100 bills. It was the Wild West,” recalls Frank Willis, who was the No. 2 man at the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Ministry of Transportation.

The money was a mixture of Iraqi oil revenues, war booty and U.S. government funds earmarked for the coalition authority. Whenever cash was needed, someone went down to the vault with a wheelbarrow or gunny sacks.

“Those are $100,000 bricks of $100 bills and that’s $2 million there,” Willis explains, looking at a photo of brick-shaped stacks of money wrapped in plastic. “This, in fact, is a payment that we made on the 1st of August to a company called Custer Battles.”

Willis says the bricks of money were also sometimes referred to as footballs “…because we passed them around in little pickup games in our office,” he says laughing.

Asked if he has any evidence that the accounting system was a little loose, Willis says, “I would describe it as nonexistent.”

According to the report, the $2 million was given to Custer Battles to provide security at Baghdad International Airport.

The company had been started by Scott Custer, a former Army Ranger and Mike Battles, an unsuccessful congressional candidate from Rhode Island who claimed to be active in the Republican Party and have connections at the White House. They arrived in Baghdad with no money. Yet within a year they landed $100 million in contracts.

Complaints about the performance of Custer Battle began immediately. “And the contract looked to me like something that you and I would write over a bottle of vodka,” Ballard says. “Complete with all the spelling and syntax errors and annexes, to be filled in later. They presented it the next day, and they got awarded a $15 million contract.”

Despite numerous complaints, the Coalition Authority gave Custer Battles a glowing review and gave them a contract to supply logistical support for a program to replace Iraq’s currency.

Meantime, Custer Battles set up sham companies in the Cayman Islands to fabricate phony invoices totaling nearly $10 million of work, when the actual cost was $4 million.

How is the Republican-controlled government dealing with these abuses to Iraqis and American taxpayers?

To date, the only action taken against them has been a one-year suspension from receiving government contracts; it has since expired.

“I think what’s happening over there is an orgy of greed here with contractors,” says North Dakota Sen. Byron Dorgan.

He is the chairman of the Democratic Party Policy Committee, and says Custer Battles is small potatoes compared to behemoths like Halliburton and its subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), which have collected half of all the money awarded to contractors in Iraq, and, according to Department of Defense auditors, have over-billed taxpayers more than a billion dollars.

Dorgan’s committee has held hearings and heard testimony that Halliburton has overcharged for meals, and fuel and gouged taxpayers on items like hand towels.

“Instead of buying a white towel, which would be $1.60, this company said, ‘No, no, no. Put, embroidery our logo on it. Five bucks,’ ” says Dorgan. “So, what’s the difference? Well, the American taxpayer’s gonna pay the bill.”

Halliburton says the towels were embroidered to keep them from being stolen or lost, and that allegations it over-billed by a billion dollars are exaggerated. But Dorgan says none of this is being seriously investigated.

He says he has called for full, congressional inquiries into alleged abuses by Halliburton and other contractors, but they have been defeated by the Republican majority in straight party line votes.

Republicans are too busy ripping Democrats for revealing a secret to the enemy: we wiretap phone calls.

For more on Custer Battles, click here.