Truly Equal

Now let’s get something straight here. I think Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, has the same bloated ego as President Bush, and is clearly taking advantage of the civil war in Iraq to gain more influence in the region. And at times, he does make some sense, like in his “open letter to the American people.”

What gets me about the whole Iran debacle is that all the focus is on Iran’s nuclear program, and how it is such a threat to the world. Fine, but what the f@*k do we do about this?

TEHRAN, Dec 4 (IPS) - Currently, in Iran, there are nine women sentenced to death by stoning on charges of adultery, compared to two men for the same offence — highlighting the fact that this barbaric mode of execution is primarily a women’s issue.

[…]Stoning is more a women’s issue because, according to Islamic laws, a man can have four permanent wives and any number of temporary wives.

When caught in adulterous relationships, men can always claim to have been in a temporary marriage contract with the woman involved –provided she is not already married to someone else. Temporary marriage contracts, for hours or months or years, can be easily made between the partners. A married woman cannot escape stoning in the same way.

You rarely hear about this in the media. People still stone women to death, and somehow that doesn’t require an immediate intervention by the U.N. Security Council. But make a couple of radioactive watches, and watch out. Iran is a threat all right - to the countries that already have nuclear weapons, and don’t want more competition. Guess who has the biggest arsenal on planet Earth? The country that bitches loudest about it: the U.S.

Well, it was about damn time, don’t you think?

President Bush - in one of those rare, correct things he does from time to time - has just signed an executive order making it unnecessary for HIV visitors and tourists to obtain such a waiver.

For the uninitiated, people who are HIV/AIDS positive cannot enter the U.S. without a special waiver. Anyone who has filed for an immigrant visa (or knows someone who does) is quite familiar with this process. Part of the process is complete medical examination, complete with bloodwork. The results get sent straight to the U.S. embassy in question. If you are HIV/AIDS positive, the chances of getting your visa approved are zilch.

Imagine the following scenarios. If someone wants to lawfully immigrate to the U.S., but has AIDS, well then, he/she better pay a coyote anywhere from $2000-$5000 USD, because that visa is never going to get approved. If a woman is a victim of say, the rape and violence women experience during the conflict in Darfur, and requests political asylum, this request might get denied (notice I say might, as I’m not an immigration lawyer). So much for human rights!

And if some prominent HIV/AIDS activists would want to plan or attend an international AIDS conference in the U.S., those activists need waivers.

Because of the rule, organizers of the biannual International AIDS Conferences have not held a gathering in the United States since 1990, when San Francisco hosted the event.

And you wonder why there’s so much stigma against AIDS in the U.S.

By the way, this was actually started by Bill Clinton when he was president. It is a complete irony that the man that started this policy is now, literally, a global force against AIDS. And while President Bush deserves kudos for this, the one who deserves it even more is the new Global AIDS Coordinator, Dr. Mark Dybul, a gay physician who has treated AIDS patients in San Francisco. Yes, the one the religious right condemned because he not only had the guts to bring his homosexual partner, Jason Claire, to the swearing in ceremony by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but brought Claire’s mother as well! Dr. Rice referred to Mr. Claire’s mother as “mother-in-law.”

Oh, and Laura Bush was there as well.

From a couple of days ago (Nov. 26 I think). Please forward around widely.

In all a very interesting read!

The U.S. is 22 on the list by the way.

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http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Gender Gap/index.htm

The Global Gender Gap Report 2006

Watch an interview with author, Saadia Zahidi, Economist and Head, Women Leaders Programme

The Nordic countries, Sweden (1), Norway (2), Finland (3) and Iceland (4), top the latest Gender Gap Index. Germany (5), the Philippines (6), New Zealand (7), Denmark (8), the United Kingdom (9) and Ireland (10) complete the top 10 countries with the smallest “gender gap”.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2006 covers all current and candidate European Union countries, 20 from Latin America and the Caribbean, over 20 from sub-Saharan Africa and 10 from the Arab world. Together, the 115 economies cover over 90% of the world’s population. The index mainly uses publicly available “hard data” indicators drawn from international organizations and some qualitative information from the Forum’s own Executive Opinion Survey. The Global Gender Gap Report 2006 includes an innovative new methodology including detailed profiles of each economy that provide insight into the economic, legal and social aspects of the gender gap. The Report measures the size of the gender gap in four critical areas of inequality between men and women:

1. Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels and access to high-skilled employment

2. Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education

3. Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures

4. Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio

This year marks an important progression in the Report’s methodology, with the adoption of a new tool that focuses on the relative size of the gender gap rather than levels of women’s empowerment and access. The new methodology is the result of collaboration between Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University, Laura D. Tyson, Dean of the London Business School and Saadia Zahidi, Head of the World Economic Forum’s Women Leaders Programme.

My first posting… welcome to my blog!

Here is a great article from TomPaine.com, which highlights the sheer ignorance and arrogance of the U.S. when it comes to global warming. And England & Australia aren’t exactly saints, if you know what I mean. Mark my words for it: Africa will be the first country to truly experience the full effects of global warming.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/12/04/africa_is_burning.php

Africa Is Burning
Roxanne Lawson and Elizabeth Bast
December 04, 2006

Elizabeth Bast is an International Policy Analyst at Friends of the Earth-U.S. Roxanne Lawson is an International Policy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth.

The effects of the Great Warming are not fairly shared. Fourteen percent of the world’s population lives in the 57 countries on the African continent. However, because the majority of Africans live with little to no access to electricity and personal transport usage is among the world’s lowest, Africans contribute only 3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

The United States, conversely, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, contributes nearly 25 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas pollution annually. In the United States, with our consumption of electricity, our ecologically harmful industries and our 230 million passenger vehicles, we are literally fueling the destruction of the planet’s environment.

Last month, at the United Nations Climate Change summit in Nairobi, Kenya, climate change experts from around the globe reported to 165 countries on the impacts of global warming, which will be felt most harshly by poor developing countries. If that weren’t bad enough, the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern recently released a report that suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20 percent over the next 50 years. From the report and the summit, it is clear that climate change is as much a humanitarian, security and economic issue as an environmental one.

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