Massive demo against sexist violence in Madrid

Cross-posted from Little Green Footballs.

‘We want to win the future. We want a country against sexist violence.’

This is very moving to see in both its size and the breath of support behind it.

Tens of thousands of people have marched in the Spanish capital Madrid to condemn violence against women.

The rally, organised by feminist groups, was attended by representatives of all the main political parties.

Activists dressed in black laid on the ground to remember hundreds of women murdered over the years in what they described as “macho terrorism”.

They said laws against domestic abuse should be extended to include all violence against women.

One estimate put the number of those who took part in Saturday’s march at more than 20,000, the BBC’s Tom Burridge in Madrid reports.

Trade unions and non-governmental organisations from across Spain also joined the event. Some participants reportedly flew in from the Balearic and Canary islands.

“I think it’s important that people like me demonstrate today, because I’m an example of a woman who’s been able to get out of domestic violence,” participant Olga Aranza was quoted as saying by the Associated Press television.

“And that means that all abused women can also get out violence and that they deserve a better life. You really can get out,” she added.

More: Violence against women: Madrid stages big protest march

Video tweets after the jump.

Obama's Kenyan hit trip

If you're an American you possibly have no idea about this but President Obama just knocked it out of the park in Kenya.

Obviously the first "Kenyan-American" president was going to be well received but Obama's speeches addressing Kenya's problems and extolling its strengths and uplifting its future have been extremely well received. That is if my timeline of Kenyans on social media is anything to go by.

Kenya has a booming technology sector, which I have written about extensively, and Obama paid it a visit. The more that the rest of the world knows about African science and technology the better. He just boosted that.

In the speech above he raised a series of issues which the Kenyans I know know need to be raised. Issues like corruption, tribalism and the status of women.

Nancy Le Tourneau has noticed the Obama feminist foreign policy and noticed these clips from his speech:

Treating women as second-class citizens is a bad tradition. It holds you back. There’s no excuse for sexual assault or domestic violence. There’s no reason that young girls should suffer genital mutilation. There’s no place in civilized society for the early or forced marriage of children. These traditions may date back centuries; they have no place in the 21st century.

These are issues of right and wrong in any culture. But they're also issues of success and failure. Any nation that fails to educate its girls or employ its women and allow them to maximize their potential is doomed to fall behind in the global economy.

I also think his staunch defence of LGBT rights in the context of human rights and of diversity as strength - which is what Obama did - will pay out across Africa. It absolutely did not derail the visit and anyone saying so is a fool.

There's a lead in in the video before his sis Auma appears to introduce him (and she's great) but the music in the stadium's pretty good. Heck, we are in Africa after all.

Gun fetishism hits new low

One of the arguments being advanced by US gun fetishists post Sandy Hook is that if you regulate guns you stop women defending themselves from rape.

This may be a Madison Avenue-sourced, audience-broadening approach, as the gun manufacturers increasingly find their front organisations on the defensive, as the 'their sending the black helicopters for your guns!' war cry finds less and less resonance. But it's out there.

One commentator took to the Fox News bear pit after she'd writen that encouraging women to buy guns is hardly a best-practice rape-prevention strategy.

Zerlina Maxwell made the same point that women, all sorts of women, have been making for a looong time now:

I think that the entire conversation is wrong. I don’t want anybody to be telling women anything. I don’t want men to be telling me what to wear and how to act, not to drink. And I don’t, honestly, want you to tell me that I needed a gun in order to prevent my rape. In my case, don’t tell me if I’d only had a gun, I wouldn’t have been raped. Don’t put it on me to prevent the rape.

She pointed out that there is plenty of evidence that rape prevention is a-real-thing:

Men can stop rape and men can stop violence, they train young men to not rape.

This exasperated the Fox host: "You think you can tell a rapist to stop doing what he’s doing?"

Then all hell broke lose.

The wingnuts thought that she had argued for "forcing all men to go through ‘do not rape’ classes". This was a typical headline: Democratic Strategist’s Shocking Claim: Women Don’t Need Guns for Self-Defense, Just Tell Men ‘Not to Rape Women’ (she never said the former and WTF is the latter idea 'shocking?).

What was especially telling about the reaction is that one of the ideas advanced by gun nuts post Sandy Hook was - don't look there, look over here! - that America has a cultural problem with violence (video games, Hollywood) and fails to deal with mental health problems. Yet when someone who isn't from their camp advances a solution to a gun violence problem they get:

Bombared by conservatives on Facebook and Twitter purposefully misquoting and misunderstanding my point in order to call me dumb, bitch, idiot, and at worst threaten to gang rape common sense into me.

On blog chicksontheright.com the 'ridicule' of Maxwell was defended through believing that:

Her entire argument was about why women SHOULDN'T DEFEND THEMSELVES WITH GUNS.

No, it was:

Men can stop rape and men can stop violence, they train young men to not rape

Like they do through prevention campaigns like one called 'Don’t be that guy' in Canada which led to a ten percent drop in sexual assault rates. Or the efforts of anti-rape campaigners in South Africa. Or these Americans saying that Men Can Stop Rape.

Part of the immediate context for this peculiar, American insanity is that - post Sandy Hook - milquetoast gun control is actually winning in some places. In Colorado for example, and underneath that 'Shocking Claim' headline was a link to one of that conservative news website's related articles: Colorado Dem to Rape Survivor: A Gun Wouldn’t Have Helped You Against Rapist Because ‘Statistics Are Not on Your Side’).

More 'shock' ensues as someone dares repeats the facts that guns get turned on their owners, shoot innocents and result in increased suicides. Another fact: The gun manufacturer lobby really doesn't want those realities known so one of their targets has been scientists surveying the carnage and producing statistics.

When we (that is Brits, Australians and actually many Americans) know that mass ownership of guns produces carnage the senselessness of American gun fetishism - 'founding fathers!' 'liberty!' 'cold, dead hands! - reaches its all-pervasive zenith, a low perhaps only seen for what it is from afar, as Maxwell herself writes:

If a woman chooses to go out and buy a legal gun for self-defense, that’s fine.

Update: BBC investigative programme Panorama has 'America's Gun Addiction' tonight. Here is a clip from the show of them going undercover at a Texas gun show:

Sarkozy's burqa ban busted

And you think we (the west) can comment on this without a little, er, hypocrisy being involved. The Daily Show thinks otherwise ...

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Burka Ban
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Jason Jones in Iran

Online action to oppose domestic violence

This is great, and seemingly successful: I got a very swift response from my MP and a pointer to the action they'd taken - strongly due to the response this online campaign generated.

Less swift response (still waiting) from the CEO of my local council ...

Go sign up.

The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women

Fabulous.

Indians outraged at an attack on women for drinking in a bar have gathered together to send a provocative gift of underwear to right-wing activists.

More than 5,000 people, including men, have joined the Facebook group, which calls itself the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women.

The group says it will give the pink underwear to Sri Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram) on Valentine's Day on Saturday.

It was blamed for the bar attack in the southern city of Mangalore last month.

Pramod Mutalik, who heads the little known Ram Sena and is now on bail after he was held following the attack, has said it is "not acceptable" for women to go to bars in India.

He has also said his men will protest against Valentine's Day on Saturday.

The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women, which was formed on Facebook last Thursday, has also exhorted women to "walk to the nearest pub and buy a drink" on Valentine's Day.

A spokeswoman for the group, Nisha Susan, told the BBC it was giving chaddis (Hindi colloquial for underwear) as they alluded to a prominent Hindu right-wing group whose khaki-shorts-wearing cadres were often derisively called "chaddi wallahs" (chaddi wearers).

"We chose the colour pink because it is a frivolous colour," she said.

thepinkchaddicampaign

Who said 'weaker sex'?

Streep on sexism

'Oscars: 26 men and one women = normal. 26 women and one man = what the f**k'

You go girlfriend. Love her.

Beware! Malicious valentine's e-cards

HT: Jack

Women are from Venus

Quite astonishing, and in lots of ways refreshing, report from Davos by Arianna Huffington:

My night started with a really special all-women's dinner on top of the Davos mountain, hosted by Wendi Murdoch and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, to raise awareness, pledges, and support for improving maternal health and infant mortality around the world.

I walked to take the funicular up to the mountain with Baroness Shriti Vadera, the Business Minister in Gordon Brown's government. I noticed that one of her fingers was bandaged, and asked her what had happened. "I cut it," she said, "and then did nothing about it for ten days, until it got really bad."

"Wasn't it hurting?"

"In what I'm doing," she replied, "I'm dealing with so much pain every day that I didn't notice mine." Maybe because we were going to an all-women's dinner, I wondered if that was a comment that would only be made by a woman business minister! In fact, the whole evening had a confessional air, mixing the personal and the political -- including the CEO of Pepsi tossing her prepared remarks and talking about how haunted she has been by the image she had seen of a hungry child rummaging for food. And that came after she had confessed that after years of always wearing the same suit in different fabrics and colors, she got out of her comfort zone for the first time as she was dressing for the dinner and wore something completely different that she had bought years ago and had left languishing in her closet. To much appreciative applause, she did a turn to show us her sleek black-and-white dress and coat. Then she went on to tell us what Pepsi is doing to alleviate hunger.

Sarah Brown, Britain's first lady, who spoke, called it the "new face of feminism," while Melinda Gates spoke passionately about the fact that "at the end of the day, what matters is not how much money I gave, or how much I cared but what kind of impact I had... how many lives did I lift up?"

The evening, which began on a personal note from Wendi Murdoch, recounting how her grandmother had died while giving birth to her mother, ended on another personal note when Sarah Brown turned to Cheri Blair and, from the podium, lauded the work and example set by the woman she succeeded at Downing Street. There was a hush in the room, as many of those present were aware of how the two women had barely been on speaking terms. So altogether a great evening, demonstrating both the need to take action to help women around the world and the value of setting aside grudges closer to home.

"Institutional sexism"? Whassat?

Alaska Women Reject Palin

Back from a short break to this news: a huge ‘Alaska Women Reject Palin’ Rally.

I say news, but no-one is covering it except the local press. And I say huge - it was huge for Alaska. This is some of Mudflats report of today's (Sunday's) rally in Anchorage:

The rally was organized by a small group of women, talking over coffee. It made me wonder what other things have started with small groups of women talking over coffee. It’s probably an impressive list. These women hatched the plan, printed up flyers, posted them around town, and sent notices to local media outlets. One of those media outlets was KBYR radio, home of Eddie Burke, a long-time uber-conservative Anchorage talk show host. Turns out that Eddie Burke not only announced the rally, but called the people who planned to attend the rally “a bunch of socialist baby-killing maggots”, and read the home phone numbers of the organizers aloud over the air, urging listeners to call and tell them what they thought. The women, of course, received many nasty, harassing and threatening messages.

....

Never, have I seen anything like it in my 17 and a half years living in Anchorage. The organizers had someone walk the rally with a counter, and they clicked off well over 1400 people (not including the 90 counter-demonstrators). This was the biggest political rally ever, in the history of the state. I was absolutely stunned. The second most amazing thing is how many people honked and gave the thumbs up as they drove by. And even those that didn’t honk looked wide-eyed and awe-struck at the huge crowd that was growing by the minute. This just doesn’t happen here.

...

So, if you’ve been doing the math… Yes. The Alaska Women Reject Palin rally was significantly bigger than Palin’s rally that got all the national media coverage! So take heart.

Todays' New York Times has an extensive piece on Palin's past. Two of the books she tried to get removed from library? 'Daddy's Roommate' and 'Pastor I Am Gay'.

Update: Late to it but now some of the MSM is covering the rally.

Harriett vs Hillary

Here's a benchmark Harriett. That's the intro, here's the speech. Top that.

It's not like toff £100k holiday Cameroon should offer much of a problem? What's he done for women?

Imagine Labour ever introducing Harriet Harman, let alone any other woman, like this.

Imagine Labour ever capturing millions of women as Hillary has.

Look on Labour on YouTube and weep.

“Women hold up half the sky”

Notes

Barry in Hawaii.

When Barry visited London, Cameron gave him a box of CDs including albums by the Smiths, Radiohead and Lily Allen. Er, this is not Obama's taste. (Head. Hands ... )

Interesting ... The BBC's crap US election coverage last week had Hillary Clinton atop its list of possible 'Obama running mates'. Now it's flipped to Joe Biden atop and Hillary a-bottom.

Shameless.

As you may have noticed I'm a bit interested in the US election. So the coming week in Denver at the Democrat national convention has especially drawn my interest, in particular what Hillary and her fans will do. Maureen Dowd thinks she'll shit stir and I think she may be right - given that she's yet to slap down her more rabid supporters, aka PUMAs ('party unity, my ass'), and despite them being very few in number and turning into a Roveite Republican black-op.

The reason she lost has been analysed and the internal memos leaked: it was an incredibly badly run campaign.

Dowd's killer quote:

“A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

Biden has a mouth on him. See Huffpost's video highlights.

According to this article in Africa Confidential, most of the Mugabe regime's ill-gotten gains are being ferreted out of Zimbabwe via UK and South African banks, ending up in either Malaysia or China.

It is this outflow of capital that is more than anything else destroying Zimbabwe's economy. Zimbabwe's capital exporters have intensified their operations as political and economic conditions have deteriorated, promoting a cycle of decline.

Regarding the talks, Zimbabweans have just 'a small measure of weariness and a massive dose of wariness'

Meanwhile, Mugabe's supporters latest tactic is poisoning.

In Haiti people are eating mud cakes.

Israeli civic organisation B'tselem has been giving out camcorders to people in the West Bank to record attacks by settlers and the IDF. Says more than a thousand words and some have already had play on Israeli TV with subsequent slaps on the wrist to soldiers shooting people in the foot and the like.

Here's one. 'Settlers attack shepherds in Southern Hebron Hills'.



Salon's Glenn Greenwald has been the best source on the really odd story about the so-called anthrax attacker. This is ongoing.

UPDATE: Nature, the preeminent journal of science, has an Editorial today (headlined: "Case Not Closed") echoing Sen. Grassley's demand for "a full congressional or independent enquiry into this case"; arguing that "the absence of such a full disclosure can only feed suspicions that the FBI has again targeted an innocent man in this case";

How much public money is a gold medal worth?

In Beijing, each gold medal has cost Australia at least $50 million, says Kevin Norton, a professor of exercise science at the University of South Australia. Or, to put it another way, $12 million came out of the public purse for each medal of any colour. Now we're told these sums are a pittance compared with what is needed to maintain our ranking in London.

What is it with Liverpool? The only big UK city not to host a gay pride and, says, one councillor "homophobia is endemic". This comes in the wake of a underreported killing of a gay teen where the killers got bail.

This story perked me up. I'm out of touch with the state of HIV drugs but according to The Indie cocktails are such now that takers can expect something approaching a normal life expectancy. This isn't everyone and like many of my generation who lived through the worst I fear for the young who are seroconverting in record numbers. But this is progress.

Aw yeah. We can destroy the world and we can be funky whilst doing it!



Quote of the moment:

'It is one thing, and a good thing, to arrest the man, Karadzic,' [Fikret Alic] says. 'He was the big war criminal, the man with the idea for all that happened. But it is another thing to arrest the idea. Karadzic's ideas live on in the existence of Republika Srpska, and if this is all about joining the European Union, for the Republika Srpska to join the EU would be like Europe admitting a part of Germany that still agreed with Hitler, just because it is in Europe. I have rebuilt the house you are staying in now, but in 1992 it was burned while my grandmother was inside - she is one of the 3,205 people still missing - and I was taken to Omarska. No one has ever said sorry for what they did, no one has ever helped us to return and the authorities oppose outright any monument in Omarska to what they did.'

And on a much lighter note when asked 'How do you relax?' sez Dizee Rascal 'A blow job relaxes me'.

Scrapbook clips catch up

The U.S. Embassy in London is running a series of forums about the election and held one May15th about the web impact: Digital Politics - Effects of the Information Age on the 2008 U.S. Election and Beyond.

Unfortunately they worked with YouGov and ft.com and the implementation is awful. First, the video is an obvious add-on to a live event, the sound is terrible (smartcom:tv production), the sell is about watching live, not watching later. No links to speakers texts or speakers notes. And it's not embeddable.

Pity because it was excellent.

Phil Noble, who runs PoliticsOnline, predicted that Obama will raise $1 billion online and put 5-6 million organisers on the streets in November. Andrew Chadwick from University of London spoke about why the UK is lagging. He reminded people about the video conversations going on around politics (which is happening here) and how the predictions missed this, thinking slick would rule. He highlights difference in political environments and how the US is more pluralistic, and we're more vertical. He points at UK candidate selection as dragging us down but sees some hope in the decline of party membership 'incentivising' parties to reach out.

In his very pessimistic speech Jimmy Leach, former No. 10 digital guru, noted that Boris' website the day after the Mayoral election simply noted 'this site will no longer be updated'. He links this to politicians cynical attitude; 'putting the tools away' once elected, take them out again in five years time. He also notes how out of touch politicians are with the basics, Blair sent his first text message after he left office! "If they don't get it they aren't going to try unless they absolutely have to". He also says that "amongst the machinery of government the enthusiasm isn't there".

Definitely worth a view if you can cope with crap sound.

TheyWorkForYou.com has started an initiative to add video from the House of Commons to their site, so you can see what your MP is saying. It's not possible to automate, so they're asking for volunteers (aka crowd-sourcing). Marking the video is easy to do and you can contribute ten minutes and that helps.

Andy Key from Hampshire CC sourced some hard numbers on online take-up for secondary school admissions. "Hackney were top of the form for online secondary school applications, with 85.3%; Medway were at the bottom with 1.1%. " As I commented, I wasn't aware Medway was that 'poor' and Hackney that 'rich'.

Actually, it wasn't the Sun wot won it. Sun readers did — Martin Kettle needles at Brown's courting of the Daily Mail and reminds that: "People choose a newspaper that suits and reflects them culturally. One of the ways it reflects them is political stance - though it is by no means the only one, as politicians like to believe. If politics were all, why would a quarter of Mail readers vote Labour, as they do? Only a fool would say that newspapers have absolutely no influence at all on politics, or say that there is no reason whatever why politicians should try to get good coverage in newspapers. But the rewards to politicians from such efforts are marginal at best."

Follow up on the BBC Trust report from the BBC Web Team. Others have picked up on the linking issue and their positive view on BBC blogging. No one though seems to be picking up my point on their attack on embedding.

My dad got me watching a rah-rah BBC doc on Scots Oil (Video). Jeremy Leggett, a solar champion, says it was so flawed it shouldn't have been screened. The chutzpah I noticed was the endless recitation of how 'no-one is reporting this Scottish success' from a reporter for the channel which would be most responsible for that non-reporting!

Hillary supporters for McCain, oh god. And you could hear some of them booing her at her - great, really - concession speech, even at this point: "don't go there .. the stakes are too high."

LA Times says that McCain's Web gap is showing. But it is starting to close, RNC ads and supporters vids are getting circulated and views in the low hundreds of thousands. They're all character hit pieces (Wright/Rizco) or experience vs. inexperience. The pump pieces for McCain are weirdly unsuccessful though.

The web is having a fascinating impact on Egyptian politics, both big P and little p. YouTube has been used to fight against violence against women. Much of this activity was by bloggers - see the Egyptian Blogs Aggregator. Alaa Abd El Fattah: "Through the aggregator, blogs were used to recruit for and engage with the pro-democracy movement Kefaya, to organize protests, strikes and sit-ins. The aggregator became a platform for various ambitious campaigns, from election monitoring to a broad anti-torture movement." Some bloggers, like just released Karim el-Beheiri, have been jailed and tortured for this work. Now that Facebook is being used to actually organise anti-government protests - about food and oil prices and the gap between rich and poor - the government is considering shutting it down.

Another Bush legacy. Rural America is not online and it's because of the power of lobbyists distorting the market. "The shortcomings of the U.S. broadband market are tremendous - more than 10 million U.S. households remain un-served, while nearly 50 million homes are priced out of subscribing to broadband services - and the social and economic consequences are dire ... The U.S. stands alone among OECD countries without a national broadband program." In Australia this was a major election issue.

Like with the US's 'rendition' planes, aviation enthusiasts have tracked and now set up a Google Map to follow what Silicon Valley Insider calls 'the Google party plane'.

Great line from Etre's newsletter about what's called familiarity blindness, how the brain learns to screen out the familiar, which is why you won't see the letter 'f' in 'of' if given a paragraph and asked to count the number of 'f''s (you won't, I promise you). "It doesn't matter whether you're a web designer, programmer, marketer, manager or CEO, if you are involved in a website's development, you are oblivious to the majority of its flaws. Familiarity blindness means that your nose is pressed so firmly against a tree trunk, that you simply cannot see the forest around you."

Mnemonic from Maureen Dowd: "I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket."

Line of the week from a man (Richard Godwin) about Sex and the City: "But in the end, it comes down to the shoes. I used to imagine the world would be a more peaceful and just place if it were run by women. Sex and the City suggests a more Orwellian vision: a Jimmy Choo stamping on the human face forever."

Mirror to be the first national newspaper killed by the web?

I always notice what the Mirror's up to simply because I used to work for their boss, Sly Bailey, who's one of the most prominent women in business now.

I can still visualise that 'caught in headlights' crossed with bland arrogance look she had from the days when NME publisher IPC Media lost a s**tload of cash in the dotcom boom. Mainly because they took the bland assurances of the sorts of webbie reptiles which flourished then at face value ... and forgot web basics and weren't interested anyhoo.

She's now been with the Mirror for years and has tolerated the most amateurish website on Fleet St also for years. Classic 'La La, I'm not listening' activity ... She never learnt a thing in eight years, it appears.

Just like Michael Grade and ITV, it sounds like she's still getting this back to front. You get the eyeballs, that gives you the revenue. Murdoch got that way back. Conclusion: will the Mirror be the first national newspaper killed by the web?

Trinity Mirror has acquired online web design and development consultancy Rippleffect Studio as part of a plan to diversify revenue streams and increase its interest in sport and leisure media.
The company was bought for an initial £3.2 million with a further £2.6 million conditional on success over the next three years.
Its clients already include Everton, Southampton, Celtic and Fulham football clubs, along with a host of other leisure retail groups.
The acquisition enables Trinity to branch into e-marketing and link other online services with its existing printed sports publications, which includes match-day programmes for several Premier League football clubs.
"This acquisition brings together Trinity Mirror's specialist sports publications and Rippleffect's specialist sports web development under one roof enabling us to substantially grow our revenues in this important sector," said Sly Bailey, Trinity Mirror CEO.
Rippleffect is expected to generate revenues of around £3 million in its first year of ownership, Trinity said in a press release.

All too late for the paper ...

Hat tip: journalism.co.uk

'I could not make my peace with the power imbalance'

“Ruth Henderson,” a former booking agent for incredibly high-priced Manhattan 'call girls' explains how it all works for Pajamas Media.

Show me a rich and powerful man between the ages of 35 and 60 who has never paid an escort for sex, and I will show you a man who is a very rare exception.

Why would a rich, powerful and handsome man pay for extra-marital sex? Aren’t there tons of women waiting to throw themselves at him for free? Yes, there are. But those women always want something: they want attention, intimacy and romance. They want to enjoy the high of sleeping with a powerful man. Escorts don’t want or care about any of those things.

The simple act of ordering up an anonymously pretty 22 year-old girl to do your bidding in the salubrious confines of a luxury hotel suite is an act of power.

'Difficult clients'

Take, for example, the CEO of an international airline who was a cocaine freak. Once a month, usually over a weekend, he would check into a suite at the Pierre, call the agency and book a dozen or so girls. He would book the girls for four hours each, staggered over the following two days. According to the girls, all he did was sit half-naked on his bed next to a mountain of cocaine, which he snorted constantly while crying about his divorce and the stress he endured at work. As the hours progressed, he would become increasingly paranoid and irrational.

I did not inquire into the fate of the girls who sort of faded away. I did not want to hear about their loneliness and poverty.

So the value of the escorts declined rapidly as they aged. Meanwhile, the value of the clients increased because they accumulated more money and more power. I could not make my peace with the power imbalance.

I had a really hard time dealing with the dawning understanding that the very men I’d been taught to value — my peers, as it were — were pretty atavistic types. They seemed to prefer whores in the bedroom and ladies in the salon.

Elliott Spitzer's wife

The mask of hypocritical social propriety has been ripped off. Her female friends are all looking at their husbands, knowing that they dodged a bullet. And Mrs. Spitzer must figure out how to maintain her dignity in the face of mainstream America’s hypocritical opprobrium.

Does anyone really think 'that doesn't happen in the UK'? Are these rich men the ones that Harriet Harman has in her sights or just kerb-crawlers?

Her crusade, and it is a crusade, will also inadvertently recriminalise some gay men, which won't be lost on some police. Something Ms. Harman doesn't give a shit about — somewhat of a tradition with some feminists.

As a former HIV prevention frontline worker, I know as well that crusades just drives human activity like prostitution further away from services like needle exchange and sexual health. Again, Harman doesn't seem to give a stuff.

Prostitution is never going to disappear. It should be legalised and regulated. The best way to challenge that 'power imbalance'.

More online women entrepreneurs would boost our economy

"Women need to know that even if they have never programmed a line of code in their lives, there is a great variety of user-friendly tech solutions to explore and implement, allowing people from all walks of life to reinvent themselves as entrepreneurs."
Amy Tiemann

~~~~

I was struck by a line in a Mail On Sunday article about Julia Reynolds, the women responsible for transforming Tesco's clothes operation — she's moving to a dotcom.

The article is about how she couldn't stand the macho dickheads running Tesco any longer and was packing her trunk and leaving.

"I'd just had my fill of chest-beating alpha males. I had some of the most horrendous things said to me and it is only now that I can laugh about them."

She remembers comments such as, 'Who the f*** are you to be driving a [nice] car like that?' and 'Who the f*** do you think you are to have a big job like that?'

What interested me is that she'd choosen a dotcom, online retailer figleaves.com — something she said she wouldn't have entertained only two years ago.

Obviously, this isn't 2001 and the general business viability of dotcoms in the UK is pretty well established now. Or is it? A BBC Money Programme story last week looked at a women dotcom entrepeneur and she related just how difficult it was to get start-up capital. She finally found 'angel' investors but it was very hard and you were left wondering if being a woman was a hindrance with getting investors.

Women's relationship with the web is evolving. In 2007, eMarketer predicted there would be 97.2 million U.S. female Internet users aged 3 and older, or 51.7 per cent of the total online population.

A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls — it describes them as a new breed of “super-communicators”.

• Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs
• 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys
• Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of boys of the same age
• But boys are twice as likely to post videos online

Hitwise estimate that almost 55% of all British users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%.

Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of Nintendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%). The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) says that women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (31 per cent) than boys age 17 or younger (20 per cent).

According to the US National Foundation of Women Business Owners (NFWBO):

• 26% of the 9.1 million women-owned businesses in the U.S now have homepages (compared to 16% of men business owners).
  
• 17% of women business owners now cite business growth as is the most important reason for using new technology, compared to just 10% of men business owners.

There is quite a history of women's involvement in dotcoms. Most famously there's Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder of Lastminute.com, Natalie Massenet, who set up the popular shopping site Net-a-Porter, Julie Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited, Karen Derby, founder of Simplyswitch.com, Sally Robinson, a farmer's wife from Yorkshire who started an online business selling bras, and Lopa Patel, founder of redhotcurry.com.

But Carol Dukes, ex-managing director of EMAP online and Carlton online, cautions about the focus on so-called 'dotcomdivas'.

If you look at the actual numbers of women doing start-ups, there are very few of us - maybe three out of 100 companies. We are still treated like a freak show: "Check it out! It's a woman running an Internet company!" There are women opening hairdressing salons, shops and PR agencies and nobody turns a hair.

I had a look to see what the government is doing in this area. There appears to be a lot of concern - and funding - to improve the numbers of women scientists and engineers, but not web entrepreneurs. In sharp contrast to the States, there doesn't appear to be much coming from government which is aimed specifically at women. What I did find on the primary service, BusinessLink, specifically about the web and women, was one broken link.

Internet-based businesses are described as perfect for women who need to juggle family commitments and need flexible working.

Research, commissioned by insurance group AXA found that 34% of new and expectant women were planning to set up their own business from home.

The most popular ways of doing this were to use the web and email to carry on offering professional skills like accountancy on a consultancy basis, or to move into retail - buying or selling goods on email or launching a mail order service.

Shriti Vadera MP:

Getting more women into business is a challenge, not just for gender equality but for national economic success. We would have 700,000 more businesses if proportionally as many British women as American women started businesses

Shaa Wasmund, a serial entrepreneur who has worked with inventor and business tycoon James Dyson says.

We need to completely and utterly rethink business support. It needs to be overhauled right the way up from the Learning and Skills Council up to the small business advisory services like Business Link.

These services need to be real and relevant for women, not just run by civil servants.

More use of technology, particularly the internet, is the key to this, she says.

Better government support for women web entrepreneurs isn't about 'PC' — it's about growing the economy and making the most of all the talents.

Google Reader clips catch up

• Helping funders find you online
  Dave Wilcox interview with US-based consultant John Kenyon on nonprofit fundraising.
• The power of information
  V. interesting speech by egov Minister Tom Watson.
• Attacking the great digital divide
  Sydney Morning Herald explains the difficulties and opportunities in providing IT for remote communities: bugs and floods.
• Oops! 'Ferry crash' unstitches Google maps
  The perils of 'stitching' in GMaps.
• To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You
  New York Times front-page on the developments in ad targeting.
• Can you blog away the blues?
  Psychological benefits of blogging.
• Rainbow over Palestine
  Palestinians now have an LGBT organisation.
• Off the Record? Not Unless You Agree Ahead of Time
  John Battelle's take on the Scotsman/Obama campaign episode.
• How Are Candidates Spending Their Money Online?
  From TechPresident.
• Search within a site: A tale of teleportation
  New tweak from Google.
• Richard Pope’s GroupsNearYou.com launches
  Another bit of MySociety genius.
• Newsweek Advances Andrew Keen's Ignorance
  It lives!
• Download: The True Story of the Internet
  New Discovery Channel documentary.
• Countering British Government Paranoia
  Americans liking anti-camera actions.
• Facebook study group equals cheating?
  Scary story from a Canadian University.
• “The web and I” - a reflection
  Amusing speech from an old-time Civil Service Head.
• Local search in the UK
  Apparently, Google has taken this over too.
• Watchfire WebXact and Bobby Online are dead!
• Botanicalls Twitter
  Reaaally loving your plants.
• Justine Lam on Ron Paul's Networked Campaign
  "We didn't coordinate that at all".
• Labourspace: great idea, awful execution
  Say it, Simon.
• Error message
  Tekkie take on Obama vs. Clinton.
• No10’s new recruit is a geek
  Sloooow progress.
• Blogging While Female: 5 Conservative Women Bloggers Talk
• Chris Kelly: McCain Sex Scandal Blonde Missing -- Day 12
  Very, very funny.
• mySociety’s Freedom of Information site goes live
  Yet more MySociety genius.
• Bespoke vs Off-the-shelf - watching the BBC blogs comment problems
  Really why it isn't working.
• New Media Awards 2007 Finalists
  From the New Stateman.
• Web lifeline for mums is big business
  Onto a winner.
• Obama's Million Donors: Why They're Important
  Changing the ballpark.
• the Missing proof
  Twitter @ work.
• Info links for government communicators
  Useful links.
• Tories need friends
  .. on Facebook.
• Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert
  Be very afraid ...
• Rupert Murdoch's black sheep
  Is the WSJ pushing it's luck?
• What gov webbies can do to improve awareness of their published consultations
  Jeremy Gould on the ball.

Rewriting history over Rwanda

Asked in Iowa what decisions his wife had disagreed with Bill Clinton said that:

She had wanted the United States to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 ... Had he listened to his wife, Clinton said, things might have been different.

"I believe if I had moved we might have saved at least a third of those lives," he said. "I think she clearly would have done that."

He went on to explain how America, which did intervene in the former Yugoslavia, could only take on so much at once. But not acting in Rwanda, he suggested, was a mistake his wife wouldn't make.

Asked about that claim Hillary said:

It is. It is true. And, you know, I believe that our government failed. We obviously didn't have a lot of good options. It moved very quickly. It was a difficult, terrible genocide to try to get our arms around and to do something to try to stem or prevent. It didn't happen, and that is something that the president has apologized for, and I think that for me, it was one of the most poignant and difficult experiences, when I met with Rwandan refugees in Kampala, Uganda, shortly after the genocide ended, and I personally apologized to women whose arms had been hacked off, who had seen their husbands and their children murdered before their very eyes and were at the bottom of piles of bodies. And then when I was able to go to Rwanda and be part of expressing our deep regrets, because we didn't speak out adequately enough, and we certainly didn't take action.

This is rewriting history. Nowhere in all of the extensive literature on the subject is Hillary mentioned once. Not only that but it is not true that "we obviously didn't have a lot of good options."

The giveaway is the claim that she pressed for military intervention because that was never an option, coming right after 'Black Hawk Down' in Mogadishu. But it's worse than that because the US actively opposed peacekeeping and failed to take any action whatsoever.

Samantha Power, the just-resigned Obama foreign policy adviser, wrote extensively about this and detailed what they didn't do and what they did do:

• The US led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda.
• It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements.
  
• It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide.
  
• And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act.
  
• The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective."
  

The Americans weren't alone. The British, the French, the Belgians and much of the rest of Africa all either didn't do anything or actively stopped aid. They all looked for their own interests and none had any interest in stopping genocide.

It was Britain's ambassador to the UN, Sir David Hannay, who proposed that the UN reduce its force. A year after the slaughter, the Foreign Office sent a letter to an international inquiry saying that it still did not accept the term genocide, seeing discussion on whether the massacres constituted genocide as "sterile". Then Ministers John Major, Douglas Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker have never even been asked about their role.

Virtually no-one emerges heroically (Canadian peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire is one and his view on Clinton's claims would be interesting to hear). In fact I would urge anyone to make themselves read the harrowing background as an object lesson in international power politics and its victims - a million of them in Rwanda. There's a blog which covers the 100 days before and during the slaughter in detail. 'A People Betrayed' by Linda Melvern is very good.

For Hillary to now try to adopt that heroic mantle is, as commentators have noted, worse than 'monstrous'.

Annan dispels ghosts of Rwanda / Saving baby Brian

Kofi Annan has succeeded in securing the power-sharing agreement which will end Kenya's crisis and the violence.

In this, he dispels the ghost of Rwanda.

If you read the background, virtually no-one and no country comes out well. Bill Clinton, most prominently, has publicly got on his knees to apologise for what he didn't do. Then UN GenSec Boutros Boutros Ghali hasn't. Neither has John Major or Douglas Hurd, to my knowledge. The heroes of Rwanda are very, very few. I am sure that Annan, amongst others, is literally haunted by people hacked to death. That would be very African.

The agreement has received universal support across the Kenyan blogosphere, although the still unresolved issues which it throws up, mainly to do with the Constitution, worry some.

Gordon Brown made a particularly patronising statement about it:

"Kenya's leaders have reached a power-sharing agreement that represents a triumph for peace and diplomacy, and a renunciation of the violence that has scarred a country of such enormous potential".

iHaveNoTribe.com - I Am Kenyan

I think blogs have played a role in pushing democrats and anti-tribalists to the fore. This has helped greatly to undermine the power-dealers behind the scene, dramatically changing information sources. Evidence of this could be seen in the attempts by those in-power to inject themselves into the blogosphere.

Mwananchi Mkenya has analysed the deal and makes some interesting points:

There are some who would like to claim that Kenya’s Democracy was a sham and that the ongoing crisis is evidence that democracy never really took root in Kenya.

I couldn’t disagree more!

CDF [Constituency Development Funds]: This has been an incredible triumph for home-grown democracy even though I would like to see the process of allocation further democraticed. I’m keen to find out exactly what ODM [opposition]proposes to change about CDF

The fact that Kenyans came out to vote in massive numbers, in direct contrast, for example, to what happens in the U.S. where only about 40% of the eligible population even bothers to vote.

Organizations such as the Kenya Human Rights Commission still function in Kenya. I remember a time when nobody could even investigate such things… A vibrant civil society is critical to democracy and Kenya certainly has not lost that!

Kenya Blog Awards 2008
This post looks further at the growth of the blogosphere

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Operation Saving Baby Brian

Joseph Karoki's photo blog was where I originally saw this photo


This women is Grace Mungai. She was shot to death by police in her home. The baby in the crib is called Brian. The photo was republished around the world — though not, to my knowledge, in the UK.

Joseph wanted to do something and tracked her family down. He has raised the money to lay her to rest.

He is now raising money to support Brian — here's how you can help make a difference for one person.

Joseph:

Thank you for donating and drop me a line at josephkaroki@hotmail.com and let me know that you have supported Baby Brian and I will keep you personally informed of how your donation changed Brian’s life.

To Donate using Paypal go to VUMA KENYA and click on the PAYPAL BUTTON under Baby Brian’s picture.

For direct Bank Deposits in the US:

Bank Name: Citizens Bank
Account name: Vuma Kenya Initiative
Account number: 1311-791-911
Routing number: 211-070-175

For Bank Deposits in Kenya:

Bank Name: EQUITY Bank
Account Name: Jeremiah Mungai
Account No: 0200190674408
ID No. 7156255.

As Sharon O would say, 'every little helps'.