Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Women's Views on News

Women's Views on News

Execution highlights concerns about Afghan aid deal

Posted: 09 Jul 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Credit: Young Women for Change

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

News of the execution of an Afghan woman accused of adultery by the Taliban will press home the need to secure guarantees about women’s rights as the US prepares to withdraw its troops in 2014.

After international leaders at a Tokyo conference tied billions of dollars of aid to the need to fight corruption, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that women should also “have the chance to benefit from and contribute to Afghanistan’s progress”.

But women’s rights activists will want firm guarantees after it emerged that a member of the Taliban shot dead a woman known as Najiba in front of a crowd of men in Qol village in Parwan province just north of the capital Kabul.

The Afghan government issued a statement saying it “strongly condemns this un-Islamic and inhuman action by those professional killers and has ordered the Parwan police to find the culprits and bring them to justice”.

But the campaign organisation Avaaz has also highlighted concerns about women’s access to justice after it emerged Afghan local police accused of raping and torturing a young woman called Lal Bibi have so far escaped punishment because of fears that the force’s image would be tarnished.

The case first came to light in June when the 18-year-old and her  family publicly accused police in Afghanistan's northern Kunduz province of raping her.

They claim that a local militia commander ordered his men to abduct her after after her cousin offended a member of his family and for five days she was chained to a wall, sexually assaulted and beaten.

Despite calls by President Hamid Karzai that the culprits be brought to justice and for the police unit involved to be disarmed, the National Security Council is reported to be reluctant to take action against one of the American-trained militias that are considered vital to hopes of establishing stability.

The decision of the girl's family to go public is rare, but they have also suggested that unless the men who raped the teenager are brought to justice they may kill her, or she may come under pressure to commit suicide.

At the conference in Tokyo, leaders of 70 nations agreed to Afghanistan's request for foreign assistance of $4 billion in development aid every year over the next four years.

The aid comes with a raft of conditions aimed at ensuring Afghanistan does more to combat corruption, to safeguard the democratic process and the rule of law and human rights including those of women.

Amnesty International Afghanistan researcher Horia Mosadiq, who took part in the conference, said that at this "critical moment” it was vital that there was confirmation that leaders commit to “credible and quantifiable benchmarks to monitor human rights progress such as freedom of expression and media, women's political participation, the number of schools open in an area, school attendance, women's access to healthcare and trends in maternal and infant mortality".

Campaigners highlighted the fact that the Afghan police force responsible for the rape depends heavily on foreign funding and urged donor countries to ensure that funds are not spent on a police force that acts with "appalling impunity" and is failing to protect women.

Avaaz supporters signed a petition demanding that countries attending the conference ensure strong guarantees to protect women's rights when pledging aid to the Afghan government.

"We urge you to ensure that any financial aid to Afghanistan is conditioned on an end to the blatant impunity that has resulted in the rape, abduction and torture of Lal Bibi by the Afghan Local Police. Afghan officials must immediately bring her rapists to justice and work to protect women across Afghanistan," the petition said.

Researchers try to solve mystery of Amelia Earhart disappearance

Posted: 09 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Helen Thompson
WVoN co-editor

Researchers from the University of Hawaii have begun an expedition to discover what happened to aviator Amelia Earhart.

The team left Honolulu on July 3 as part of a 26-day trip to Nikumaroro Island, Kiribati in the central Pacific on the premise that Earhart and her co-pilot, Fred Noonan, did not perish in a crash but landed safely and survived for some time on the uninhabited coral atoll.

Earhart and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937, while attempting to circumnavigate the globe in Earhart's Lockheed Elektra plane.

They last made radio contact while searching for their refueling stop, Howland Island, a small atoll over 3,000 kilometers southwest of Hawaii.

They never arrived and what happened to them has been theorized but never definitively proven.

Richard Gillespie, leader of the $1.3 million International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery mission, says that clues such as debris, human bones and radio transmissions from the vicinity of the atoll at the time of Earhart's disappearance led him to believe that she did not go down in her plane.

Gillespie cites discovered items such as a jar of anti-freckle cream and a clothing zip from the 1930s as well as a pocket knife resembling one Earhart owned.

Researchers have also found human bones, some too damaged to provide DNA evidence.

But in 1940 a British officer found a partial skeleton that doctors in Fiji eventually identified as belonging to a Caucasian female.

Once they arrive on Nikumaroro, the team will use a robotic submersible to search for the missing airplane in the surrounded ocean and search for more artifacts on the island itself.

Gillespie, who has been researching Earhart's disappearance for the last 24 years said, “We have hints as to how long she did survive.

“Based on the amount of bones, she survived a number of weeks, maybe months. This is a whole chapter in Amelia Earhart’s life that no one ever knew. It’s heroic stuff.”

Canadian nurses win huge gender discrimination pay settlement

Posted: 09 Jul 2012 05:30 AM PDT

Auveen Woods
WVoN co-editor

A group of 700 nurses in Canada have won a gender pay discrimination case against the Canadian federal government which may exceed $150 million.

The judgement marks the end of an arduous eight-year court battle by the nurses who work for the Canada Pension Plan (CPP).

“Today we can finally celebrate a huge victory for justice and equality,” Ruth Walden, the original complainant, said in a news release from the union.

Walden filed the initial complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 2004 and was soon joined by over 400 colleagues.

Walden and her largely female colleagues were paid between $50,000 and $60,000, per year, half as much as the male-dominated group of doctors who work at CPP, even though both groups perform the same duties by determining the eligibility of applicants for CPP disability benefits.

Moreover until last year the nurses were classified as program administrators, not as medical professionals, a distinction that denied them professional recognition.

This has changed since the human rights tribunal ordered the government to place them in a nursing category.

In 2007 a tribunal ruled that the pay disparity was due to gender discrimination. A second court  overturned the tribunal’s ruling in 2009 forcing the women to launch an appeal, which was successful.

It is not yet clear how many nurses will receive payments as the settlement covers three decades of gender discriminatory practices.

Lawyer Laurence Armstrong who represented many of the nurses believes the final settlement could reach over $200 million.

Each claimant is entitled to $2,000 for pain and suffering, and with additional payments to reduce taxes owed on the settlement payout, some long-serving nurses may receive over $250,000.

Gary Corbett, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada which represented the women, criticised the time it took to deal with the pay inequality.

He also said that the government’s 2009 Public Sector Equitable Compensation Act would make it harder to address allegations of gender discrimination in the future.

Despite their win the nurses are still being paid their discriminatory salaries.

“No going back” for Libyan women whatever elections bring

Posted: 09 Jul 2012 04:00 AM PDT

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

When over one million women enrolled to vote in Saturday's historic elections in Libya, politicians were forced to at least tailor their election campaigns to win their support.

High levels of voter registration among women and the success of activist Najud al-Kikhia in the council elections in Benghazi in May are said to have contributed to a growing awareness among parties that they need to field women candidates to win seats in the new General National Council.

But how much change does this represent in attitudes towards women? Alaa Murabit of Voice of Libyan Women, which campaigns for women in politics, was sceptical.

She acknowledged men had been paying attention to women voters in recent weeks and had "suddenly become pro-women", but she didn’t know how much of the interest was "honest”.

Women played an active role in the opposition to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's regime and in the uprising that began in February last year. But as with all the countries caught up in the Arab Spring, it is difficult to gauge women's position by elections alone.

The presence of women candidates doesn't automatically mean that their policies will be progressive, as WVoN patron Nawal El Saadawi pointed out recently in relation to Egypt's presidential elections (see WVoN story).

In the political jostling that has taken place since the downfall of Gaddafi's regime, men have appeared less enthusiastic about women playing a role in the new phase of rebuilding the country.

There are no women on the election commission, only one woman on the 102-strong national transitional council and two women ministers.

The weekend's national elections, the first in nearly 50 years, will determine the make-up of the 200-member General National Council which will form the interim government and draft a new constitution for Libya.

After plans for a quota for female candidates were rejected and a "zipper list" system adopted requiring women to be listed as every other candidate to ensure their representation, 625 women stood in the elections. Of those, 540 out of a total of 1,206 were party candidates.

The fact that only 85 stood as independent candidates – only 3.5 per cent of the 2,501 total – has fuelled concerns that women are not standing in their own right and may be put up by male relatives.

It's also been reported that the faces of female candidates on dozens of posters have been slashed or spray-painted out.

All this suggests that – as in the majority of countries around the world – women have some work to do before they gain equal representation.

But a generation of women who participated in the revolution say there is no going back.

Mervat Mhani, who spearheaded a campaign of civil disobedience against Gaddafi in Tripoli told Channel 4 News international editor Lindsey Hilsum:

"We're involved whether men like it or not.  We don't need to ask anyone's permission. The men say we don't have the experience to go into politics, but they don't have the experience either! We've all been living under dictatorship."

Commentators have argued that a key issue for women will be ensuring that they influence the writing of a new constitution.

Another will be changing the judicial code to ensure justice for women and girls who have been subjected to violence, including sexual violence.

Women in Libya who are raped can be prosecuted for adultery or coerced by judges to marry their rapist in order to restore "family honour".

This will have consequences for those women who were raped by Gaddafi’s troops during the uprising, including Libyan law student Iman al-Obeidi who first brought the possibility of the use of rape as a tool of war to international attention when she told foreign journalists that she had been held for two days and gang-raped by Gaddafi's soldiers (see WVoN stories).

Apart from testimonies of medical staff and confessions of soldiers, it has been difficult to establish if systematic and wide-scale rape took place as few women are prepared to talk openly about their experiences.

This has prompted some journalists to suggest that the claims were part of the campaign to gather support for NATO intervention in the conflict.

But as the case of al-Obeidi shows, the stigma of rape and the pressure women come under to keep silent about the crime is immense. Changes to the law that allow women who are raped access to justice will be an important barometer of change in the country.

Russian punk band Pussy Riot protest against ‘unlawful’ trial

Posted: 09 Jul 2012 02:30 AM PDT

Julie Tomlin
WVoN co-editor

The three imprisoned members of Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot are again on hunger strike after denouncing their trial due to begin today as "unlawful".

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich were arrested after performing a masked guerrilla performance of a song attacking President Vladimir Putin and corruption within the Orthodox Church on the altar of Moscow's Christ the Saviour cathedral in February.  (see WVoN stories).

Two fellow band members are still on the run while other band members continue to perform in Moscow.

The three arrested have already staged a hunger strike after they were refused bail despite the fact that two have young children (see WVoN story).

The decision to stage a further hunger strike came after officials at Moscow's Tagansky Court told them they had only until Monday to study the 2,800 pages of case documents ahead of their trial.

Tolokonnikova said she had only studied two of the seven volumes and was asking for the trial to be delayed until September to give her time to finish the remaining volumes.

"What I have studied proves there is no case against me. I need more time to study the materials, because my life depends on it,"she said. "I declare a hunger strike, because this is unlawful."

Nikolai Polozov, a lawyer for Alekhina said: "The case is full of procedural violations and they are trying to speed up the hearing to ensure that we don’t have time to respond to them all.”

Polozov is quoted elsewhere saying of the court that “Basically their job now is to hold the trial as fast as possible, hand down a sentence and send them to a prison colony.”

The case of the Pussy Riot members who have been refused bail since their arrest, has attracted international support and more recently high profile Russians have joined calls for them to be freed.

Over 100 Russian cultural figures, including some known for pro-government views signed an open letter calling for the release of the three band members:

“We see no legal basis or practical reason for the further isolation of these young women, who do not pose any real danger to society,” the letter said.

One of the signatories Alexander Ivanov, a popular musician, said he was concerned that the women could face up to seven years in prison if found guilty.

“It scares me that, for a rather unsuccessful, but extreme, cultural experiment, they want to jail them for so many years,” he said. “Artists need to have freedom.”

Ensuring better breast examinations

Posted: 09 Jul 2012 01:00 AM PDT

Paromita Pain
Freelance journalist

A recent study carried out by the non-profit research organisation, the Mayo Clinic, showed a drop of roughly six percent in the number of mammograms among women in their 40s. The numbers might seem low but as the researchers warn, it is significant.

Lorraine G. Olson agrees. Professor of mechanical engineering at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 45, which left her "stunned."

When her husband's prostate cancer was discovered a few months later, Dr Olson and he were inspired to change the way breast cancers are detected and therefore treated. Together they are working to create a robotic system that will make breast exams more accurate and comfortable.

Their device won't replace mammograms but can be used in conjunction with them, allowing more frequent testing and enabling younger women to go in for testing earlier.

"Mammograms work by compressing breast tissue and passing x-rays through to get images which are then examined for abnormalities. They aren't horribly painful. It's just that they can be uncomfortable and most don't do it until they absolutely have to" says Olson.

Mammograms also expose patients to radiation and are often not very accurate.

"There are lots of discussions centered on whether women in their 40s should go for regular mammograms. I would say 40 since I was diagnosed at 45 but ages to get tested are being pushed up because they want to limit patients' exposure to radiation. Also since mammograms are not always correct they cause a lot of false alarms" she adds.

Women are usually advised to do self-breast exams or to have a physical exam by a hospital physician to ensure early detection and treatment.

Olson explains: "You know the drill. You go to your doctor and he or she does the exam. It's here that our robotic structure comes in. The device will have a sensor which will press down gently and record the forces it feels.

“This way when you come back in a year there will be more than just a sketch of your records in your medical file. We are hoping to make this simple physical examination systematic, recordable and better equipped to make real predictions."

Mammograms work by measuring tissue density or the weight of tissue and this is not always very precise. "Cancer tissue is usually very stiff so it is tissue stiffness, not density, that leads to a more accurate diagnosis" says Olson.

She uses the example of cream cheese and cheddar cheese to explain her point.

"Cream cheese and cheddar cheese weigh the same but if you push the cheddar cheese it doesn't change very much inside, whereas the cream cheese can be squished all the way down. Our system works by pushing down on tissue and therefore is sensitive to stiffness. Cancerous tissue is believed to be up to 10 times stiffer than normal tissue" she says.

The sensor records the data for the breast tissue, and the computer is used to compare responses for cancerous tissue and healthy tissue and assesses the differences. "With the help of computer modeling we can draw up maps that will help us make more accurate diagnoses" says Olson.

She has worked on the project for nearly six years and is excited with the results. She wasn't always interested in issues of women's health; electrocardiography was her area of research.

"I wouldn't even go for a mammogram until my physician pushed me to it," she says, "Even when my cancer was first detected, I thought they were worrying about absolutely nothing. I was relatively young and was convinced that it was benign."

She knew little about breast cancer when she started but remembered a paper from a symposium that had mentioned methods other than mammography for breast exams. That piqued her interest.

Finding the resources at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) was fortunate because she is at the stage where "serious computational work" is necessary.

"My school is a small one with no large central computational facilities," she says. "TACC members were very supportive. I received computational help as well as consulting time. Without TACC, I couldn't have done this work."

A lot more work remains, most important of which is developing the hardware for the actual robotic device. Extensive testing on tissue phantoms (essentially tissues made of gelatin where tissue stiffness can be controlled) will then help refine the device.

And the best advantage if her research succeeds?

"The risk-free aspect of it," says Olson. "There is no radiation involved. People can have it done every year and at any age, even when they have their first annual exams."