Skip to main content

Hilary [er, the Sec. of State]....on women

Whatever one might think of Hilary Clinton, she certainly isn't shy in coming forward in saying her piece.

Writing for the TimesOnLine, the Secretary of State proclaims that the position of women is at the heart of US foreign policy:

"At this moment women are rescuing girls from brothels in Cambodia, campaigning for public office in Kuwait, healing mothers injured in childbirth in Ethiopia, running schools for refugees from Burma and rebuilding homes in the aftermath of earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. In cities and villages, countries and continents, women are running domestic violence shelters and fighting human-trafficking. Without recognition or fanfare, and often with little support, women are working to improve the quality of their lives and the lives of all people.

Women around the world have answered a call to action. Fifteen years ago delegates from 189 countries met in Beijing for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women. It was a call to action to the global community to work for the laws, reforms and social change necessary to ensure that women and girls everywhere have the opportunities to fulfill their God-given potential and contribute to the progress and prosperity of their societies.

Their efforts are paying off. Today more girls worldwide are in school. More women hold jobs and serve in public office. And more countries have passed laws recognising women’s equality, although for too many, laws that exist on the books are not yet borne out in their daily lives.

But our progress is far from complete. Women are still the majority of the world’s poor, uneducated, unhealthy and unfed. They are the majority of the world’s farmers, but are often forbidden to own the land they cultivate or to access credit to make those farms profitable. Women care for the world’s sick, but women and girls are less likely to get treatment when they themselves are sick. They rarely cause armed conflicts but always suffer their consequences and are often excluded from peace negotiations. And violence against women remains a global pandemic."

Continue reading here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...