Celebrating Women…At Home, Abroad and in Twitterland
So, Sunday was International Women’s Day 2015. The solar-powered plane took off on its first round-the-world flight, and I followed its adventures via social media. A pedigree dog at Crufts Dog Show in England was allegedly poisoned. Liverpool Football Club struggled to a dull goalless draw in the FA Cup. The FBI is investigating ISIS hacking Western websites.
And how were the world’s women? In Australia, a woman was stabbed to death walking in a Sydney park while talking to her husband in India on her cell phone. In Jamaica, a 71-year-old farmer in deep rural Cornwall Barracks went out to check on her chickens and was also stabbed to death. And so, sadly, the world turns.
Overseas, too, there were many challenging and extraordinary messages. It was quite a weekend, altogether. I saved some interesting posts on my Tweetdeck and might share some with you in future editions of…
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Crocodile Attacks in Tamarindo, Costa Rica
▶ Depeche Mode – Peace (with lyrics) – YouTube
Mexican mayoral candidate reportedly decapitated – body found on dirt road | World news | The Guardian
The body of a woman running for election as mayor of a small Mexican town has been discovered after she was kidnapped and reportedly decapitated in the same region where 43 student teachers disappeared last year.
Aidé Nava’s body was found on a dirt road in the beleaguered Mexican state of Guerrero on Tuesday night, hours after she was abducted by a group of armed men, Guerrero’s chief prosecutor Miguel Angel Godínez told Milenio TV.
With Plan to Walk Across DMZ, Women Aim for Peace in Korea – NYTimes.com
Suzy Kim, a professor of Korean history at Rutgers University who is another main organizer, said the group had yet to hear anything from the South Korean government side. South Korean officials declined to comment on the proposal Wednesday.
The group’s intent is to walk across the DMZ, from North to South, on May 24, International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament.
Ms. Kim credited the original idea to Ms. Ahn, who founded a group called Women De-Militarize the Zone a few years ago. “She had been thinking of how neglected the women’s role had been” in attempting to solve the Korean impasse, Ms. Kim said.
Ms. Ahn’s website, WomenCrossDMZ.org, said the planned walk was meant as a “symbolic act of peace.”
Thirty female peace activists from around the world are the core group of walkers. They include Ms. Steinem’s fellow honorary co-chairwoman, Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a 1976 Nobel Peace laureate from Northern Ireland, who helped organize enormous peace demonstrations, mostly of women, that crossed sectarian lines and helped end the bloodshed there.
Another organizer, Leymah Gbowee, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her work in leading a women’s peace movement that brought an end to civil war in Liberia in 2003 and led to the eventual exile, and successful war-crimes prosecution, of President Charles G. Taylor.
Ms. Kim acknowledged that the currently high level of North-South hostility, coupled with the North’s regular denunciations of the United States, the South’s principal ally, was “not a climate to achieve an agreement” to replace the armistice.
“On the other hand, the kind of deadlock we’re in makes it all the more important and necessary in not being O.K. with the status quo,” she said.
via With Plan to Walk Across DMZ, Women Aim for Peace in Korea – NYTimes.com.
California is punishing low-income people for having children
Studies show that family caps do not reduce the number of children women have. What they do is deepen the poverty rate of single mothers and children. In fact, California now has one of the worst rates of child poverty rates in the nation under the Maximum Family Grant.
Essentially, this policy punishes women for being low-income, but does nothing to help them escape the cycle of poverty. Thankfully, California lawmakers are currently working on their third attempt to repeal the policy. Hopefully the other 15 states where family caps exist will follow suit and do the work of legislative bodies, not legislating bodies.
via California is punishing low-income people for having children.
Suspected case of bird flu in Arkansas | MEAT+POULTRY
For example, all live poultry, hatching eggs, domesticated waterfowl, waterfowl being transported into Arkansas or other avian species must be accompanied by an official veterinary certificate stating the birds were examined and declared free of any signs of highly pathogenic avian influenza strains H5 and H7. Also, any personnel from a foreign country or an area known or suspected of having a bird-flu outbreak must be quarantined for three days from live poultry or other avian species. Individual companies are responsible for enforcing the quarantine protocol.
You Shall Procreate: Attacks on Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Iran | Amnesty International USA
Women in Iran could face significant restrictions on their use of contraceptives and be further excluded from the labour market unless they have had a child if two proposed laws are approved, says a new report by Amnesty International.

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