I have participated in international medical trips in El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, and though I have never encountered any real danger - and I don’t count crossing an old, rackety bridge 200 feet above the ground, Indiana Jones style, as such - :
The United Nations says that international aid work is one of the world’s most hazardous professions, in which humanitarian workers are constantly threatened with — or victims of — kidnappings, harassment, detention and deadly violence.
A U.N. study, currently before the 192-member General Assembly, points out that hundreds of aid workers and U.N. humanitarian personnel continue to face risks in some of the world’s major trouble spots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel and Haiti.
“By any measure,” says U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “international aid work is a dangerous profession.”
By dangerous jobs I mean civilian jobs, not U.S. soldiers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a comparison of on-the-job death rates in the top 10 most hazardous civilian occupations would place aid workers at number five after loggers (92.4 per 100,000 workers), pilots (92.4), fishermen (86.4) and structural iron and steel workers (47.0). I would add “reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan” as well but I can’t find the statistics for that one yet.
As if women weren’t discriminated enough. One of the most common factors of discrimination is via marital status. Men reading this blog might think, that’s just a bunch of bull. :
Only 22 states and Puerto Rico specifically prohibit employers from inquiring about applicants’ marital status. That means “maternal profiling” is a real problem for many women.
Just ask Kiki Peppard. […] But Pennsylvania is one of those many states that says nothing against the practice, which in the absence of a federal prohibition, makes it perfectly OK. In fact, those were usually among the first questions asked, she said, and many hiring managers ended the encounter soon after she honestly answered them.
“You have to understand how humiliating it was to be denied employment because I was a mother, and how humbling it was to not know where your next meal is coming from, and that as a woman in this country, you really are treated as worthless,” she said.
As you might imagine, the mainstream media barely covers any related developments, if at all:
For 12 years Peppard, a single mother, has campaigned to get Pennsylvania to make it illegal for employers to ask about an applicant’s marital or familial status. Last week, on Nov. 30, the bill died its most recent death when committee chairmen refused to allow it to move to the floor of the state House and Senate for a vote.
This bill has not only failed with legislators, it’s also been pretty much of a non-starter with the press. Peppard says–and my own Web searches confirm–there was no coverage of the bill’s most recent failure. […] She spent six years trying to get Pennsylvania legislators to sponsor a bill against maternal profiling in interviews and the next six trying to get the bill passed into law.
She says she has been contacting reporters from the very beginning, but after all that time she can count the news sightings on just about two hands and most of that is coming from the alternative or independent press.
One break came her way when made her story a centerpiece of their cause to improve U.S. motherhood conditions. Peppard is heavily featured in the activist group’s 2006 documentary “The Motherhood Manifesto,” based on the book of the same name by MomsRising co-founders Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, who also published a Mother’s Day piece about Peppard this year in the Nation. MomsRising blogger Cooper Munroe also got an op-ed about Peppard published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sept. 27.
How typical. By the way, visit the when you have a chance.
“Security firmly in place, Clinton Fein’s latest exhibition, Torture, scheduled to open at Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco on January 4, 2007, is a shocking and defiant exploration of America’s approach to torture under the Bush administration,” the press release states.
The exhibition consists of “a series of staged and digitally manipulated photographic images” which “recreate infamous torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, transforming diffuse, muted and low-resolution images into large-scale, vivid, powerful and frightening reproductions.”
Artist Fein was born in South Africa, and according , he is “closely identified with his controversial web site, Annoy.com and his notable Supreme Court victory against Janet Reno, Attorney General of the United States, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act in 1997, where Fein’s right to disseminate his art was upheld in a landmark victory for First Amendment rights.”
And just what types of pictures he plans on exhibiting? Here are two of them:
And then you wonder why I think George W. Bush is a war criminal.
This is an intriguing article linking conflict, the arms trade, poverty, disease and climate change all into one. Think this is far-fetched? Welcome to the real world, where everything is interconnected. The title, is not just change in the environment:
It’s been a bloody first half of the dry season in Uganda’s Karamoja region. October to February is the time when grass turns brittle, mud dries and cracks, and competition for scarce resources increases. More than 40 people have died in recent weeks in fighting between Karimojong warriors and the Ugandan Army in the arid northeast of the country.
The semi-nomadic Karimojong are pastoralists who protect their cows, violently if necessary. The warriors are well-armed, and this has put them on a collision course with Uganda’s government. But the recent clashes are a symptom of more universal problems.
As elsewhere in Africa, the population in eastern Uganda continues to grow as the environment deteriorates, putting more and more pressure on a land that grows ever drier. At a United Nations conference on climate change held in neighboring Kenya last month, environmentalists warned that Africa would bear the brunt of global warming.
With more people forced to share fewer resources, experts warn that conflict will increase. “Climate change will hit pastoral communities very hard,” says Grace Akumu, executive director of environmental pressure group Climate Network Africa. “The conflict is already getting out of hand and we are going to see an increase in this insecurity.”
At 24, Abbas has lived long enough to witness the greater part of the violent clashes in Sudan. She is a “Lost Girl” of Sudan–a genocide survivor–and was a part of the first group of female refugees granted U.S. asylum in 1999.
Her sad assessment of other Lost Girls was echoed in a 2003 congressional report by the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which found the young women’s young male refugee counterparts–who outnumber them roughly by 38 to 1–faring much better. Sudanese “Lost Boys” were making substantial strides in achieving independence, the report found, with employment rates 18 percent higher than among male U.S. counterparts. Lost Girls, by contrast, lag U.S. female counterparts by 25 percent.
I honestly don’t know, but she wouldn’t be happy. From the Independent:
In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem - but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.
Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. “What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured,” she says.
[…]They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”
Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.
[…]Since Fadia’s delivery, in 2002, the United Nations confirms that a total of 36 babies have died because their mothers were detained during labour at Israeli checkpoints. All across Bethlehem - all across the West Bank - there are women whose pregnancies are being disturbed, or worse, by the military occupation of their land.
When most children in industrialized countries get Sony PSPs, movies and other videos games,
Ahmed Ghazi has little reason to stock Christmas toys at his shop in Fallujah. He knows what children want these days.
“It is best for us to import toys such as guns and tanks because they are most saleable in Iraq to little boys,” Ghazi told IPS. “Children try to imitate what they see out of their windows.”
And there are particular imports for girls, too, he said. “Girls prefer crying dolls to others that dance or play music and songs.”
As children in the United States and around the world celebrate Christmas, and prepare to celebrate the New Year, children in Iraq occupy a quite different world, with toys to match.
Much has been written about the physical health of Iraq’s population. But what about their mental health, especially of Iraqi children?
The difficulties of children have become particularly noticeable this year. “The only things they have on their minds are guns, bullets, death and a fear of the U.S. occupation,” Maruan Abdullah, spokesman for the Association of Psychologists of Iraq told reporters at the launch of a study in February this year.
The report warned that “children in Iraq are seriously suffering psychologically with all the insecurity, especially with the fear of kidnapping and explosions.”
The API surveyed more than 1,000 children throughout Iraq over a four-month period and found that “92 percent of the children examined were found to have learning impediments, largely attributable to the current climate of fear and insecurity.”
With nearly half of Iraq’s population under 18 years of age, the devastating impact of the violent and chaotic occupation is that much greater. Three wars since 1980, a refugee crisis of staggering proportions, loss of family members, suicide attacks, car bombs and the constant threat of home raids by occupation soldiers or death squads have meant that young Iraqis are shattered physically and mentally.
As early as April 2003, the United Nations Children’s Fund had estimated that half a million Iraqi children had been traumatized by the U.S.-led invasion. The situation has degenerated drastically since then.
A report issued by Iraq’s Ministry of Education earlier this year found that 64 children had been killed and 57 wounded in 417 attacks on schools within just a four-month period. In all 47 children were kidnapped on their way to or from school over the period.
But at least, Iraqi children must think highly of the United States, right? Wrong.
Teachers and social workers say children have begun to nurse a strong hatred of the United States. No more is the United States the image of a good life.
“Children have lost hope in the United States and the Iraqi government after the situation has only worsened every day,” Abdul Wahid Nathum, researcher for an Iraqi NGO which assists children told IPS in Baghdad (he did not want the organisation to be named).
“Their understanding of the ongoing events is incredible,” he said. “It is probably because the elder members of the family keep talking politics and watching news. Talking to a 12-year-old child, one would be surprised by the huge amount of news inside his head, which is not right.”
As a future pediatrician, these developments deeply disturb me. This type of trauma takes years and years to heal, and time is something Iraqis don’t seem to have on their side. And this is in addition to the critical refugee crisis that is taking place in Iraq, which I have talked about :
Children do not go out much to play, and they are not sure of home any more. The United Nations estimates that more than 100,000 Iraqis are fleeing the country every month. The number of Iraqis living in other Arab countries is now more than 1.8 million. There are in addition more than 1.6 million internally displaced people within Iraq.
The group Refugees International says that the increasing number of people fleeing Iraq means that this refugee crisis might soon overtake that in Darfur. And children suffer most from leaving, and they suffer most where they go.
Now I don’t know why a newspaper publishes certain articles - maybe the chief editor was on vacation, or truly nothing else was happening in the world (yeah right) - but yesterday’s article in the Washington Post, , is one of the biggest pieces of trash ever published.
Take this small bit of sheer journalistic genius:
There are moments that make you question your fundamental assumptions about the world. One of them took place a few days ago, when news emerged that Monica Lewinsky had just graduated from the London School of Economics.
She did not!!
Lewinsky, 33, is known more for her audacious coquetry than for her intellectual heft, and the notion of her earning a master of science degree in social psychology at the prestigious London university is jarring, akin to finding a rip in the time-space continuum, or discovering that Kim Jong Il is a natural blond.
The emphasis above is NOT mine, it actually appeared that way in the article. Read the rest of the article to grasp the level to which the Washington Post, and the U.S. media, has fallen (basically, people who are “dumb” but are actually “smart”, in all of its immature glory). I never understood why the media focused so much on Monica Lewinsky - oh yes, I remember now, she had an intimate relationship with the president of the United States. The rabid right-wing was so obsessed that a woman had a blowjob. She was not dumb or stupid, but young and immature. She screwed up, so what? Dubya screws up all the fucking time with consequences U.S. soldiers take to the grave, and nobody says anything to him.
This article provides us with 2 Christmas thoughts we can take home. Number one is, of course, that the journalistic bar was set so low that the fact that she was EVER news reflects very poorly on the Washington Post judgment, and again on the U.S. media as a whole. The fact that she is covered NOW is amazing at all. Is it not true that president Bush’s actions are far more serious than any of president Clinton’s misdeamenors?
Which reminds me, when the hell are we going to have an “impeachment watch” on the front of every American newspaper? Do the media think we are stupid? Are we supposed to weigh more heavily some sexual escapades than the current administration lies that led us to an illegal war, more than 600,000 innocent Iraqi dead, nearly 3,000 American soldiers and more than 20,000 injured? Give me a break! Now that the impeachment bar has been set so low, why don’t the media live up to it and carry it out to its logical conclusion?
The second thought is that a women can’t seem to be smart and have sex at the same time. Either she is a sexual object or she is an intellectual. Wow, a girl that had a blowjob can’t graduate from college? That a women can’t be pretty and smart as well? Look conservative wingnuts, she interned for the president. Whatever she did afterwards in said position, one has to be quite smart to get into that position in the first place. Many, if not all, of White House interns graduate with advanced degrees and get high-paying jobs. I graduated with honors from college and go to medical school, which is not easy, so the notion that a White House intern, much less a woman, somehow was able to graduate with an advanced degree is so stupid that it could only come from a right-wing idiot.
Expect plenty of Monica-bashing as the 2008 presidential elections come close.
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Make that best articles as well. From the current Esquire Magazine, :
I could be perfectly fine without kids. If my wife wants kids, that’s fine, too. It’s not an issue because of this. But I plan on wearing my prosthetics most all the time. And if I have those on, I’m not going to be able to carry my kids. I can’t really bend over because it’ll throw my balance off. So I’m not going to be able to pick up my kids. So you’re walking through the park and they don’t want to walk, they want to be carried. Sorry, I can’t do it. I’ve thought about that a lot. It’s going to be hard.
He just lost 3 limbs, but is still upbeat about life, about accomplishing more in life - his life did not stop. He must be courageous to pose in the cover of a magazine like that - not because of his amputee status, but because the .
If this magazine cover does not stop you in your tracks, nothing will.
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Update #2:
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