1% of the titled land in the world is owned by women

A baby girl born in the UK is likely to live to 81 – but if she is born in Swaziland, she is likely to die at 39

70% of the 1.2 bn people living in poverty are women and children

21% of the world’s managers are female

62% of unpaid family workers are female

9% of judges, 10% of company directors and 10% of top police officers in the UK are women

Women comprise 55% of the world’s population aged over 60 years old and 65% of those aged over 80

£970,000 is the difference between lifetime earnings of men and women in the UK finance sector

85m girls worldwide are unable to attend school, compared with 45m boys. In Chad, just 4% of girls go to school.

700,000,000 women are without adequate food, water, sanitation, health care or education (compared with 400,000,000 men)

Women in full-time jobs earn an average 17% less than British men

Women in part-time jobs earn an average 42% less than British men

67% of all illiterate adults are women

1,440 women die each day during childbirth (a rate of one death every minute)

1 in 7 women in Ethiopia die in pregnancy or childbirth (it is one in 19,000 in Britain)

In the US, 35% of lawyers are women but just 5% are partners in law firms

In the EU, women comprise 3% of chief execs of major companies

12 is the number of world leaders who are women (out of 191 members of the United Nations)

Men directed 9 out of every 10 films made in 2004
independent.co.uk

UN: Women denied representation, making war on poverty hard to win
Millions of women around the world, including those in the UK and other Western countries, are being denied effective representation because of the low numbers of female politicians, judges and employers, the United Nations has warned.

Campaigners say that unless urgent action is taken on the status of women, the Millennium Development Goals on reducing poverty, infant deaths and standards of education will not be met.

To mark International Women’s Day, the UN has published a report that says rates of female participation in governments across the developed and developing world are still appallingly low. The report says that for women to be adequately represented in their country, at least 30 per cent of parliamentary seats should have a female representative.

NEW DELHI, March 7 — Bombs exploded in a crowded Hindu temple and a railway station in the holy city of Varanasi on Tuesday evening, killing at least 15 people and raising fears of retaliatory violence against India’s minority Muslim population. Authorities appealed for calm and police officers in major cities were placed on high alert.

Even before the blasts, communal tensions had been rising in India. Angry Muslim protests against President Bush, who visited India last week, as well as against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, first published in a Danish newspaper, have erupted into violence in several cities.

The first blast Tuesday ripped through the Sankat Mochan temple shortly after 6 p.m. as Hindu devotees gathered to make offerings to the monkey god Hanuman, Indian news agencies reported. Among the dead was a bridegroom who had come to seek the deity’s blessings, according to the Press Trust of India news service. Tuesday evening is the traditional time for visiting the temple.

The second explosion came minutes later at the railway station. The blast left a foot-deep crater, shattered windows and splattered the station with blood and body parts, the Press Trust reported. Four more unexploded bombs were found at another site next to the Ganges River.

In an interview with the Reuters news agency, Navneet Sikera, senior superintendent of police in Varanasi, put the death toll at 15, with 60 injured. The Press Trust said 20 people had died, including 14 at the train station. [Five people died overnight of injuries, according to a police official cited by the Associated Press.]
washingtonpost.com

Under pressure from President Jacques Chirac, the main French television channel, TF1, has appointed a black journalist as “substitute” presenter of the country’s most-watched news bulletin.

From July, Harry Roselmack, 32, will become the first non-white person to present a prime-time, mainstream television news programme on France’s most-watched channel, TF1.

During the rioting by multiracial suburban gangs of young people in November last year, French television companies were criticised for their failure to present an ethnically diverse picture of French society.

Although journalists of Arab or African origin, such as Roselmack, have presented the news on minor channels or out of prime time, the main news bulletins have been an all-white preserve.

This was said to reinforce the sense of alienation felt by black and Arab youths in poor, French suburbs.

After the riots, President Chirac urged all the French media, and especially television companies, to make greater effort to hire journalists from ethnic minorities.
independent.co.uk

More than 20 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of famine in conditions which the head of the World Food Programme (WFP) described yesterday as the worst in his experience.

James Morris, executive director of the WFP, the UN’s food aid organisation, was in London yesterday to warn the international community that millions of people in Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Tanzania are now at risk because of drought.
guardian.co.uk

We cannot tolerate children dying for a glass of water
Nobody reading this started the day with a two-mile hike to collect the family’s daily water supply from a stream. None of us will suffer the indignity of using a plastic bag for a toilet. And our children don’t die for want of a glass of clean water.

Aw I don’t know…look what we tolerate already.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – If the Netherlands becomes the first European country to ban the burqa and other Muslim face veils this month, Hope says she’ll resort to wearing a surgical mask to dress in accordance with her religious beliefs.

“I’ll wear one of those things they wore during the SARS epidemic if I have to,” said the Dutch-born Muslim, one of about 50 women in the Netherlands who wear the head-to-toe burqa or the niqab, a face veil that conceals everything but the eyes.

“I’m very practical,” the 22-year-old added.

Last December, parliament voted to forbid women from wearing the burqa or any Muslim face coverings in public, justifying the move in part as a security measure.

The cabinet is awaiting the results of a study into the legality of such a ban under European human rights laws, before making its final decision. The results are expected in the second half of this month.
news.yahoo.com

The British Foreign Office has appointed a controversial Israeli government adviser to one of its most sensitive posts as head of the legal department.

Advice from Daniel Bethlehem QC in 2002 to the then Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, led Israel to block a UN inquiry into the battle of Jenin. The Israeli refusal to cooperate was widely condemned at the time by various human rights organisations.

Mr Bethlehem, who was Israel’s external legal adviser, also took the lead for the Israeli government at the International court of justice in The Hague in 2004 to defend the barrier being built along the West Bank. Israel lost the case.
guardian.co.uk

An Israeli special operations team is working undercover in Iran, according to a report Sunday in a British newspaper.

The soldiers are on a mission to prevent the Iranians from succeeding in their bid to develop a nuclear weapon. They are involved in locating uranium enrichment facilities in Iran, according to the British Sunday Times, and are currently based in neighboring northern Iraq.

The United States is supporting the move, says the paper.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an oblique reference to the operation on Sunday in his video address to the annual AIPAC conference in the U.S. He warned that Israel would not be able to stop the Iranians on its own, adding his hope that the international community, led by the U.S., would impose sanctions on Iran. He said the country is a threat to the modern world.

Defense Minister Sha’ul Mofaz also spoke on Sunday about the issue. He said that Iran poses a major threat to Israel, and that the verbal hostility coming out of Tehran is something that needs to be closely monitored.
israelnationalnews.com

Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrike on Gaza
On Monday evening, 6 March 2006, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) carried out another extra-judicial execution in Gaza City, leaving 5 Palestinians, including three children and two members of the al-Quds Brigades, dead. In addition, 12 civilian bystanders, including 6 children, were injured.

This latest attack comes following decisions taken by the Israeli political and military establishments to target Palestinian resistance activists, in response to the launching of locally made rockets from the OPT at Israel.

According to investigations conducted by PCHR, at approximately 16:55 on Monday, 6 March 2006, an IOF aircraft launched a missile at a civilian car (white Peugeot) that was travelling on a side road in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood in the northeast of Gaza City. The car was destroyed. Two members of the al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad, who had been travelling in the car, and 3 children that had been passing nearby, were instantly killed: Muneer Mohammed Mohammed Sukkar, 29, from the al-Shojaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City; Ashraf ‘Ali Shallouf, 25, from the al-Shojaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City; Ra’ed Ahmed al-Batash, 11; Mahmoud Ahmed al-Batash, 17; and Ahmed al-Swaifi, 14.

In addition, 12 civilian bystanders, including 6 children and the father of 2 of the victims, were injured by shrapnel.

…Transneft, the state-controlled pipeline operator, is set to build the 2,500-mile pipeline, which would run from Taishet in eastern Siberia to the Pacific coast. With an annual capacity of 80 million tons of crude, it would allow Russia to increase its oil exports to China, Japan and other Asia-Pacific economies.

The $11.5 billion project is a strategic goal of President Vladimir Putin’s government, which wants to diversify the country’s export network and build Russia into an energy superpower.
washingtonpost.com

ISTANBUL — Turkey is reviving its long-deferred quest for nuclear power, pressed both by serious energy shortfalls within its own borders and by strident nuclear ambitions in neighboring Iran that threaten to upset a regional balance of power.

“The rise in oil prices and the need for multiple sources of energy make our need for nuclear energy an utmost priority,” Energy Minister Hilmi Guler said last month in announcing plans to build as many as five atomic energy plants. The first, to be located on the Black Sea at Sinop, would come on line in 2012 and ease Turkey’s costly dependence on natural gas, 90 percent of which arrives by pipeline from Russia and Iran.

With a rapidly expanding economy, a population of 70 million and scarce petroleum deposits, Turkey appears to be a logical candidate for nuclear power. Guler, who made his remarks while visiting a nuclear plant in Virginia, said the new Turkish reactors could provide about a tenth of the 54,000 megawatts the country expects to need over the next two decades.
washingtonpost.com

It should be obvious, considering the photo to the left, who John Bolton, the Straussian neocon “representative” to the United Nations, works for—the American-Israel Political Action Committee. “U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is ‘beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat,’” in other words the Pentagon is preparing to shock and awe Iran, maybe later this month, but probably down the road, sooner before later.

“Bolton reaffirmed that the United States does not see the security council moving quickly to impose sanctions on Iran, but he pointedly noted that ‘many other governments have begun to include the word sanctions in their discourse on Iran,’ implying they may take action outside the security council.” As was the case with the Iraq invasion, the United Nations is considered irrelevant. “Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?” Bush asked the Security Council in September, 2002, a couple months before his neocon handlers invaded Iraq. Bolton is setting up a re-run.

Recall Condi’s Boy Friday, neocon national security adviser Stephen Hadley, suspected of the vicious outing of Valerie Plame, telling AIPAC last November that the “spread of democracy [i.e., invading various Arab and Muslim countries] will make the Middle East a safer neighborhood for Israel. An American retreat from Iraq, on the other hand, would only strengthen the terrorists who seek the enslavement of Iraq and the eventual destruction of Israel.” In other words, the two thousand plus (and actually closer to 10,000) Americans killed in Iraq were sacrificed to make a “safer neighborhood for Israel.”
kurtnimmo.com