Planet Earth stands on the cusp of disaster and people should no longer take it for granted that their children and grandchildren will survive in the environmentally degraded world of the 21st century. This is not the doom-laden talk of green activists but the considered opinion of 1,300 leading scientists from 95 countries who will today publish a detailed assessment of the state of the world at the start of the new millennium.

The Independent

Lovely news for a thursday morning...as the birds chirp and oh..wait yup they're still chirping, just couldn't hear them over the car starting up in the driveway...Seems like it won't be long till a Silent Spring

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An Egyptian stabbed a Hungarian man and woman, slightly wounding them, after the couple kissed while pausing for a photograph near a mosque at Cairo's popular tourist bazaar, police said Tuesday. Canoe News

So wow, where does it stop really...will it be open season on bare headed women...on people who look at each other a little too long...public hangings for married couples who hold hands in public??

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Johnnie Cochran has passed away...for those who only know him as O.J. Simpson's lawyer here's a little more about him on Democracy Now

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Earthquake

Another earthquake has hit the region that caused the December Tsunami...This earthquake is 8.7 while the last one was 9.5...both way above average..there is an alert out for people to expect a possible Tsunami...However, because this quake hit a deeper location than the last one, there is a lesser chance of that happening, hopefully---Today's quake happened just off the Sumatran coast in Indonesia...
---
Aid to the victims of the last Tsunami are still short $4Billion which world governments had promised and not yet paid...Four times more women died in the last Tsunami than men, mostly because they were waiting for fishermen at the shore and were working in shops, or at home---300,000 human beings lost their lives the in the December tsunami---Child trafficking has become a huge problem due to many children being orphaned after the last Tsunami.
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For more go to the report at the US Geological Survey site---BBC---Reuters---The Guardian
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The alert is out in Indonesia, Thailand, South India including Kerala and all the nearby countries..
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Agencies helping Tsunami Victims: Doctors Without Borders---Oxfam---IRC---Ricky Martin Foundation---Save The Children---Habitat for Humanity---SOS Childrens Villages...

Beirut Burning

The articles coming from some US sources would love to have the positive events in Beirut -calls for independence, solidarity of the people etc..(if any such things really exist) - be a result of their invasion of Iraq. At least that way something could be salvaged of what many see as a very costly mistake...This way they can say it was so that democracy could flourish across the Middle East that their young men and women died while killing other men and women...
Is that what's really happening? Is this the domino effect of democracy and free markets? Or are history and life and politics a little more complicated than just the idea of nations acting like copycats and having one big single reason for taking the steps that they take..
And then, events are not all that beautiful after all...Ya Beirut...Car bombs, Lebanese and Syrians trading angry words, hatred on the airwaves, people cancelling trips to Beirut, restaurants telling their staff they will call them if they need them and closing down, like other businesses, sectarianism rearing its ugly head...what will we look back on a month or a year down the line..which path will our brothers and sisters in Lebanon and our brothers and sisters in Syria have taken?

For now these are the headlines...
Beirut Car Bomb, Third This Month, Kills Two, Injures Eight Bloomberg
UN report sparks mixed reactions among citizens Daily Star

Memories of war, fear and friendship in my home city, where time has stood still The Independent

Murder of Mr Lebanon continues to poison political air The Independent

What the Lebanese fear most is not Syria's army but a power vacuum The Independent

It is not democracy that's on the march in the Middle East The Guardian

The road to Damascus Le Monde Diplomatique

Weapons of mass deception revisited AL-Ahram

‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’ E. Burke

Hotel Rwanda is one of those films that we need to take a look at as soon as we can...

"Hotel Rwanda is an act of memory against forgetting, a reminder to the world -- from presidents and policy makers to ordinary people in front of their TVs--that it turned away as 800,000 people were butchered, in plain sight, in 100 days. (There's a quiet but telling moment in the film where an American photojournalist, on viewing film footage of a massacre, sadly observes, " "people will see it, say 'Oh, that's awful,' and go back to their dinners." And so it proved.) And it's a summons to act now -- to give meaning to the words "Never again." " From Mother Jones magazine

If you want to learn more about what happened in Rwanda

• Read the book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (available in Kwt Bookshop)
• Take a look at PBS's extremely informative site about the Rwandan genocide: The Triumph of Evil
• Romeo Dallaire was the UN official who defied orders and decided to stay in Rwanda to help stop the violence..he has written Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda about witnessing the genocide.
• Visit the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
• Read THE RWANDA CRISIS by Gerard Prunier
• Watch "Forsaken Cries." Available from Amnesty USA, http://www.amnestyusa.org/. A documentary examining the genocide in Rwanda.

Never Again?

Right NOW: More than 1.6 million people – 80 percent of northern Uganda’s entire population – have been displaced and now live in squalid conditions.---16 million Congolese are going hungry, more than two million have been displaced by the war and in some parts of the country, two out of five children are dying in infancy. ---In Somalia: two million people displaced or killed since civil war erupted in 1990 and close to five million people estimated to be without access to clean water or health care

Heart of the Congo Is a documentary about the humanitarian efforts there...2.5 million people have died in the DR Congo in the past 3 YEARS-that's 2283 human beings A DAY! All while we are lucky enough to eat, relax, watch tv, shop, laugh with our families and enjoy our lives...

• Let's not forget that we are good at forgetting, so let's keep remembering and keep looking for ways to help and places to help..
• Ask: why do millions die in the Congo and yet no humanitarian Intervention takes place ? Why have hundreds of thousands been slaughtered and almost two million made refugees in Darfur while no one seriously intervenes to stop it? Why does the world not shine a light on this type of genocide/terrorism/murder? Why is the humanitarian crisis in these places not on our screens as often as places where it's in the interest of the big countries to intervene? These are invisible conflicts, suffering that is kept from the rest of the world, let's not ignore these people please.
• Amnesty and Oxfam have a campaign to Control Arms
• Support Women for Women International: They work in the Congo, Rwanda, Iraq and other conflict zones.(thank god Oprah finally did an episode about the DR Congo)
• Support Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Amnesty.
• DO NOT buy conflict diamonds. Learn how to avoid buying diamonds that came at the cost of people's lives.
• Learn more about conflicts in Africa.

Interview with Boutros Boutros Ghali:
TIME: What problems do we cause?
Boutros-Ghali: We say we have 16 members in the Security Council: the 15 members plus cnn. Long-term work doesn't interest you because the span of attention of the public is limited. Out of 20 peacekeeping operations, you are interested in one or two. Two years ago, it was Mogadishu. Now it is Sarajevo. Tomorrow it will be Haiti. And because of the limelight on one or two, I am not able to obtain the soldiers or the money or the attention for the 17 other operations. Nobody was taking care of what was going on in Rwanda. It was one of my personal greatest failures.

"Kuwait's minister of Islamic affairs said Monday his ministry would shortly issue a new fatwa, entrusting the emir to rule on a controversy over whether to give women political rights. "The fatwa panel met recently and discussed the viewpoint of Islam on women's political rights ... It concluded that the issue is a bone of contention and that the ruler should have the final say on it," Abdullah al-Maatuk told reporters in Parliament.
He said the fatwa would
be signed and released
next Saturday.
The new fatwa would replace one issued in 1985 which clearly stated that Islam forbids women from voting and contesting parliamentary elections."

Daily Star

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"since 1995 at least fourteen countries--including Mexico, Rwanda, Indonesia, France, Bosnia and Herzegovina--have set aside at least 30 percent of government seats for women...

Beijing Betrayed, a report just out from the Women's Environment and Development Organization, lambastes governments around the world for failing to live up to their commitments: "Many women in all regions are actually worse off than they were ten years ago." The Nation

We are one of those governments and we got a nice telling off in the report...

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"On International Women's Day, Rita Henley Jensen reflects on her recent trip to Saudi Arabia, where feisty, educated women are challenging the nation's system of strict gender apartheid."

Read about it here.. and guys, if even Saudi beats us then shame on us is the greatest understatment ever spoken.

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In these weeks where lectures and talks and activism have been the main course for many of us that hope for development, change, freedom, peace, equality, justice and all the other things that our battered souls are reaching for...I couldn't help but wonder why I haven't heard an inspiring, energetic speaker in Kuwait, address a crowd with the passion and dedication that can transform them into dreamers and revolutionaries and into an unstoppable force that can make things happen..ok maybe I am asking for too much and more than that, I hope that maybe I just haven't been to the right places...instead of the same tired faces, saying the same tired words to the same yawning handful of supporters that bothered to turn up at a lecture, I have been craving people with a knack for speaking with overpowering love for the cause, with humour and presicion and explosiveness and with an awe for the sacredness of a community of people asking for justice.
Has anyone out there been to such a speech, heard anyone inject life and love into a crowd? If so where and when is this person/are these people going to speak again? I say speakers, because there is nothing more wonderful than that electrifying buzz that goes through a crowd when someone has hit exactly the right chords to make them light up and feel alive. You can get it with reading, but that is usually a solitary practice...when a bunch of people all experience that moment of wonder together, it's pretty beautiful. I feel like we need that kind of fuel, so that it's not just disparate groups trying to keep themselves motivated. Just like we need the dedicated workers and writers and planners and organisers (some of which we have, but maybe not as much as the opposition does) we need the catalysts, the people who light the fire under the whole lovely experiment and get it going.
If anyone out there knows people like that, please point me in the right direction, because I want some inspiration.

In between the first burst of clapping and the second...before we got ungraciously escorted outta there... 

The freedom train rolling into the Majlis 

All ages, all walks of life...same message- Political Rights NOW! 

Exactly 

Singing the freedom song..can't get it out of my head now. 

The young democrats waving and shaming the parliament (Democratic Circle) 

Our chorus leader and other activists 

Our sisters in black...always there to support women's rights..good for them. 

I woke up on this 'morning after', and was waiting for that feeling where you can actually get out of bed and start the day...I need to snooze a lot you see...and so, in between all the different alarm clocks going off at different times, I was going through all the events of yesterday...cheery young activists, determined senior citizen activists, blue all over the place..idiotically rude MP's and then shock that people would applaud, like that is the worst thing that happened in that room..I know, I know, they had a rule book, or at least a rule paper that they had to follow..sure..we're ok with that cause we are peaceful folk...we know what's right and we will keep asking for it, even if we stumble along the way...because yesterday was about the beautiful singing..the nice day and the fact that there were ladybugs all over the place..you know that they're a good luck sign..especially if one landed on any of you lucky people...I wish there were more people out there yesterday, even though I thought the number was great, I just know so many people that should have been out there but weren't...and I know it would have been good for their souls, to be brothers and sisters and friends and comrades on a sunny day out in front of the building that looked out onto a family of people demanding to be heard...and being so sweet about it too...That's what went through my head on this morning after..
so as i slowly crawled out of my half awake state i saw a purple piece of paper sticking out of a cardboard box that I have been avoiding for ages...and the purple paper suddenly caught my eye after over a year of being there, ignored...here's what was on that paper..it made me laugh a little..and I figured it wanted to be looked at today, of all days..

Because woman's work is never done and is underpaid or unpaid or boring or repetitious and we're the first to get fired and what we look like is more important than what we do and if we get raped it's our fault and if we get beaten we must have provoked it and if we raise our voices we're nagging bitches and if we enjoy sex we're nymphos and if we don't we're frigid and if we love women it's because we can't get a "real" man and if we ask our doctor too many questions we're neurotic and/or pushy and if we expect childcare we're selfish and if we stand up for our rights we're aggressive and "unfeminine" and if we don't we're typical weak females and if we want to get married we're out to trap a man and if we don't we're unnatural and because we still can't get an adequate safe contraceptive but men can walk on the moon and if we can't cope or don't want a pregnancy we're made to feel guilty about abortion and for lots and lots of other reasons we are part of the women's liberation movement.

Happy Inernational Women's Day!

One woman, as a single drop of water, may appear ineffectual, but beware the powerful physics of cohesion. The rising evolutionary wave, whose time has come, is unstoppable.
A 21st Century Feminine-ismKeynote Address to be Given at the "Gather the Women" Celebration on March 8th, 2005
by Victoria Covell

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Who's writing about yesterday?: The Feminist Majority Foundation--Ms. Magazine---Calcutta Telegraph--Morocco Times--Swissinfo--Reuters--NYNewsday--CNN--Guardian

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Today, MARCH 8 2005, is International Women's Day...

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Yesterday, March 7th, was also the "fortieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday - the historic voting rights march in Selma, Alabama...On March 7, 1965, Alabama State Troopers and Dallas County Sheriff's deputies used billy clubs, tears gas and cattle prods to stop some 600 black marchers from reaching Montgomery in a bid for voting rights." Democracy Now

السلطان يهدد بالنزول إلى الشارع

اذا سمحت الجهات المعنية بحشد ناشطات سياسيات امام مجلس الامة اثناء انعقاد جلسة الغد, فانهم »سيملأون شارع الخليج, غدا

ايضا بالشعب الكويتي الرافض لقانون المرأة

....

الحكومة بدت ديكتاتورية في ادارتها لموضوع حقوق المرأة, اذ حاولت فرض توجه بعينه على المجتمع وباتت وكأنها تدار من قوى خارجية تحرك البلد كما تريد

In the same paper

الحكومة انتهت من اعداد دراسة حول حقوق المرأة كشفت عن ان 70 في المئة من المواطنين يؤيدون هذه الحقوق, فيما يعارضها اقل من 30 في المئة, مشيرا الى ان هذه الدراسة ستوزع على النواب قريبا

Both from Today's

السياسة

Summary of the above in English: Members of political Islamist groups threaten to get people opposed to women's rights out onto the street if permission is given to supporters of women's rights to go assemble in front of the parliament building. They also suggest that the government is forcing women's rights on a public that doesn't want it.

In the same paper, a government study reveals that 70% of the public support women's rights and less than 30% oppose it.

Even Meryl Streep is now criticising us for our country's discrimination against women...and when it comes from the Queen of the screen..isn't it time to start listening?

Of course even more importantly she was making the comments as a board member of the group Equality Now and on the occassion of the launch of a new UN report on discrimination.


You can get Equality Now shirts---You can join the Equality Now global campaign---Take a look at their list of discriminatory laws worldwide---Take a look at the Beijing Declaration appraisal page, this is the declaration in which countries promised to eliminate all forms of discrimination against women by 2005.

On Monday there will be a Solidarity gathering at 8am in front of the Parliament Building, on the beach to support women's rights. The instructions are to wear blue. My additions are to tell everyone from your grandparents to your neighbours to come and be together peacefully in support of a country that should act like it deserves to be part of the world community.

Want to catch up on your women's rights education?

Books:
Speaking in God's Name: Islamic Law Authority and Women by Khaled Abou El-Fadl : Legal Expert in Islamic jurisprudence, writes beautifully.

The Second Sex By Simone de Beauvoir: It's a classic, and a book that is part of western feminist history. It asked important questions that are still relevant for some societies like ours.

Women in Kuwait : The Politics of Gender Haya Al-Mughni

Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran Ziba Mir-Hosseini

Arab Women: Between Defiance and Restraint. Editor Suha Sabbagh.

Legal:

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
The Kuwaiti Constitution

Four infants aged between several months and two years old have been accused of looting! Their bail was $50, how's that for a court that will believe anything---Here's and article about the way bloggers blew the lid off the Gannon scandal

The violence in Iraq is causing a lot of psychological damage, a moving article describes the sad state of mental health and of those who are supposed to treat it..

Learning, the easy way:
Here are some links to sites that make learning fun and easy--Sparknotes summarises topics like astronomy and biology and maths along with philosophy and literature if you want to look up something or brush up on something you forgot---The Teaching company provides audio lectures by professors on a wide range of subjects, which can make your commute a learning experience---want to learn Japanese Kanji script, here's a game you play that teaches you---want to learn about famous authors check out these highlights of their life and work at the Guardian