One of world's top spammers arrested
By Gene Johnson, Associated Press
SEATTLE — A 27-year-old man described as one of the world's most prolific spammers was arrested Wednesday, and federal authorities said computer users across the Web could notice a decrease in the amount of junk e-mail.
Robert Alan Soloway is accused of using networks of compromised "zombie" computers to send out millions upon millions of spam e-mails.
"He's one of the top 10 spammers in the world," said Tim Cranton, a Microsoft lawyer who is senior director of the company's Worldwide Internet Safety Programs. "He's a huge problem for our customers. This is a very good day."
A federal grand jury last week returned a 35-count indictment against Soloway charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering.
Soloway pleaded not guilty Wednesday afternoon to all charges after a judge determined that — even with four bank accounts seized by the government — he was sufficiently well off to pay for his own lawyer.
FIND MORE STORIES IN: Wednesday | SEATTLE | Internet marketing | Spamhaus
He has been living in a ritzy apartment and drives an expensive Mercedes convertible, said prosecutor Kathryn Warma. Prosecutors are seeking to have him forfeit $773,000 they say he made from his business, Newport Internet Marketing.
A public defender who represented him for Wednesday's hearing declined to comment.
Prosecutors say Soloway used computers infected with malicious code to send out millions of junk e-mails since 2003. The computers are called "zombies" because owners typically have no idea their machines have been infected.
He continued his activities even after Microsoft won a $7 million civil judgment against him in 2005 and the operator of a small Internet service provider in Oklahoma won a $10 million judgment, prosecutors said.
U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan said Wednesday that the case is the first in the country in which federal prosecutors have used identity theft statutes to prosecute a spammer for taking over someone else's Internet domain name. Soloway could face decades in prison, though prosecutors said they have not calculated what guideline sentencing range he might face.
The investigation began when the authorities began receiving hundreds of complaints about Soloway, who had been featured on a list of known spammers kept by The Spamhaus Project, an international anti-spam organization.
The Santa Barbara County, Calif., Department of Social Services said it was spending $1,000 a week to fight the spam it was receiving, and other businesses and individuals complained of having their reputations damaged when it appeared spam was originating from their computers.
"This is not just a nuisance. This is way beyond a nuisance," Warma said.
Soloway used the networks of compromised computers to send out unsolicited bulk e-mails urging people to use his Internet marketing company to advertise their products, authorities said.
People who clicked on a link in the e-mail were directed to his website. There, Soloway advertised his ability to send out as many as 20 million e-mail advertisements over 15 days for $495, the indictment said.
The Spamhaus Project rejoiced at his arrest.
"Soloway has been a long-term nuisance on the Internet — both in terms of the spam he sent, and the people he duped to use his spam service," organizers wrote on Spamhaus.org.
Soloway remained in federal detention pending a hearing Monday.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Dr. Kevorkian Getting Out as Assisted-Suicide Poll Infuriates Disability Activists
By Rebecca White
© DiversityInc 2007 ®
Tomorrow's release of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the famed "Dr. Death," raises the issue of assisted suicide again and has some disability activists enraged. What's making it even more contentious is a recent poll alleging growing sympathy among Americans for this practice.
His parole comes after serving eight years of a 10- to 20-year sentence for the second-degree murder of Thomas Youk in 1998. Kevorkian reportedly has assisted the suicide of 130 people.
The furor over Kevorkian's release is being led by Not Dead Yet, a national disability organization that views assisted suicide as the "ultimate form of discrimination (that) has been ignored by most media and courts." The organization states that "For some, a disabled person's suicidal cry for help was ignored, misinterpreted, or even exploited by the right-to-die movement."
Not Dead Yet is up in arms over another issue as well. A May 22-24 Associated Press Ipsos Poll of 1,000 adults on the right to die found that 48 percent thought that assisted suicide should be legal and 53 percent believed Kevorkian should not have been jailed for assisting terminally ill people in ending their own lives.
Not Dead Yet disagreed with the way the poll asked the question, believing they were biased.
"The [poll] question misinforms the respondent about the nature of the crime Kevorkian was convicted of and also mischaracterizes the health status of the majority of people who died at his hands," says Stephen Drake, Not Dead Yet's research analyst. "As anyone who watched the '60 Minutes' telecast knows Kevorkian directly injected lethal chemicals into Youk. This is not assistance."
Drake refers to the videotape of Youk's death aired on "60 Minutes." The tape showed that Youk was unable to press the button that would deliver the fatal drugs
to his system. Instead, Kevorkian did it for him. This was proof for the courts that Kevorkian had overstepped legal boundaries, and he was sent to jail in 1999.
According to the National Right to Life, Kevorkian's other assisted suicides were just as inappropriate. "Autopsies performed revealed that more than half of
Kevorkian's 130 known victims were not terminally ill. Most were disabled with conditions such as multiple sclerosis. In fact, several had no serious physical illnesses that could be determined upon autopsy," wrote Wesley J. Smith, a keynote speaker at the upcoming NRLC '2007 convention.
Kevorkian's release is sure to create media frenzy. Upon his release, Kevorkian plans to continue fighting for the legalization of assisted suicide. As of now, Oregon is the only state that has an assisted-suicide law.
"It's got to be legalized," Kevorkian said in a phone interview from prison aired on Monday by a Detroit TV station. "I'll work to have it legalized. But I won't break any laws doing it."
Kevorkian is set to appear on "60 Minutes" on June 3. The show will feature an interview with Mike Wallace.
Burke Balch, director of the Powell Center for Medical Ethics at the National Right to Life Committee and an assisted suicide opponent, feels the publicity created could lead to plausible change if more is done to offer hospice care and pain treatment for terminally ill people. "The solution here is not to kill people who are getting inadequate pain management, but to remove barriers to adequate pain management."
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Mexican Activists Protests Women's Objectification - Booed Miss America
Miss Japan crowned Miss Universe 2007
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Riyo Mori, a 20-year-old dancer from Japan who hopes to someday open an international dance school, was crowned Miss Universe 2007 Monday night.
Miss USA Rachel Smith, who slipped and fell to the floor during the evening gown competition and was jeered by the Mexican audience during the interview phase, was the contest's fourth runner-up.
Mori nervously grabbed the hands of first runner-up, Natalia Guimaraes of Brazil, just before the winner was announced. She was trembling in awe as the diamond-and pearl-studded crown was placed on her head.
Mori, from the small town of Shizuoka at the base of Mount Fuji, won the cheers of the Mexico City audience when she opened her interview, saying "Hola, Mexico!"
"I learned how to always be happy, be patient and to be positive, and this is what I want to teach to the next generation," she said during the interview competition.
The daughter of a dance school manager, Mori said her grandmother told her as a child that she wanted her to be Miss Japan before she turned 20.
"From the very beginning, I entered the competition with high hopes and an unswerving determination to make this dream a reality," she said in a pre-competition interview.
Smith, whose chances may have been dimmed by her fall, was booed during her interview and several audience members chanted "Mexico! Mexico!" until she spoke in Spanish, saying "Buenas noches Mexico. Muchas gracias!" which earned her applause. Mexico has a fierce rivalry with its northern neighbor.
Also finishing in the top five were second runner-up Ly Jonaitis of Venezuela and third runner-up Honey Lee of Korea.
The winner travels the world for a year on behalf of charities and pageant sponsors.
Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza of Puerto Rico crowned her successor at the end of the two-hour telecast with the headpiece valued at US$250,000 (euro186,000).
"To the next Miss Universe, take advantage of this great opportunity," Rivera said during her parting remarks.
The 15 finalists from a field of 77 contestants were announced early in Monday's show. They were picked last week during preliminary judging in the contest's swimsuit, evening gown and interview categories, but their names were not announced until Monday, allowing all 77 to be introduced to the television audience.
As soon as the final 15 had been selected, they immediately strutted across the stage in animal-print bikinis for the swimsuit competition to the music of Mexican pop group RBD.
After the evening gown competition, five contestants were eliminated, and the judges chose the winner from the five remaining.
Missing from this year's contest was Miss Sweden, whose country is one of the few to win the crown three times. Isabel Lestapier Winqvist, 20, dropped out because many Swedes say the competition, airing from Mexico City's National Auditorium, does not represent the modern woman.
Hours before the pageant began, dozens of protesters held a mock ceremony in downtown Mexico City that featured "Miss Marijuana," "Miss Sexual Health" and "Miss Human Rights" and other candidates with obscenities written across their sashes. The group yelled "Neither ugly nor beautiful, should a woman be considered an object!"
Pageant organizers say the Miss Universe contest carefully selects women who are intelligent, well-mannered and cultured.
The program was hosted by 1999 Miss Teen USA Vanessa Minnillo and Extra weekend correspondent Mario Lopez and was expected to be viewed by more than 600 million people in more than 180 countries.
The celebrity judges included actor James Kyson Lee, model Lindsay Clubine, Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, rocker Dave Navarro, Olympic figure skating champion Michelle Kwan, celebrity hairstylist Ken Paves, fashion designer Marc Bouwer, Project Runway judge andElle magazine fashion director Nina Garcia and former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres.
The pageant was last held in Mexico City in 1993, when Torres was crowned.
Poor youths sleep in Japan's Net cafes
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Associated Press
TOKYO — It's almost midnight as Ryo settles into a reclining chair for the night, a can of tea and a pack of cigarettes at his side, a construction job awaiting him in the morning.
For the time being, this cramped cubicle at an Internet cafe — with its TV and flickering PC monitor — is home.
Ryo, who refused to give his full name, is part of what experts believe is a new social strata in Japan — poor, young people who live out of cheap, 24-hour Internet cafes to escape the streets.
ON DEADLINE: McRefugees take over 24-hour burger joints
Though there are no reliable numbers, experts warn a growing number of younger Japanese are sleeping in cheap Net cafes like Ichigo, where Ryo, who is 30, spends five nights a week. He stays with a friend on weekends.
The rising number of people like Ryo, known as "Internet cafe refugees," has raised enough concern that the Health Ministry is preparing to study the 1,300 Internet cafes nationwide.
Last year, 13 people contracted tuberculosis at an Internet cafe just west of Tokyo that health officials suspect originated from the cafe's homeless population, said Tomohiro Uchino of the Health Ministry's social welfare department.
"The phenomenon raises many issues in terms of health, labor and welfare," said Uchino. "The problem is that we don't yet have an accurate picture of how many homeless people there are in Internet cafes, how they got there, or how the government can intervene," he said.
Behind the rise of Net refugees is Japan's ballooning population of young people who hop from one temporary job to the next.
They are believed to number more than 2 million — a byproduct of the economic crisis that hit Japan a decade ago, as well as a shift in values among younger generations less ready to conform to the corporate work ethic of their parents and grandparents.
Ryo said part of the reason he ended up homeless was an expensive interest in reggae music. In his twenties, he staged reggae events with his friends and even took trips to Los Angeles to study with musicians there. But then his savings ran dry, he said.
In a city where a tiny studio apartment rarely costs less than $825 a month, the cafes appeal to people like Ryo because staying overnight costs only a fraction of that.
At Ichigo, clients pay 82 cents an hour for a small cubicle equipped with a reclining chair, computer and TV. Many cafes offer free refills of soft drinks; some even have showers. But it's hardly a comfortable environment: The air is stale with cigarette smoke and there is a constant whine of computers, TVs and ventilation fans.
The urban refugees are modern-day versions of the day laborers of Osaka and other big Japanese cities who fueled the tumultuous economic growth of the 1960s — an underclass that lodged in cheap hostels and who were rounded up each morning to work at nearby construction sites.
Some inhabitants of Net cafes also find work by the day, albeit in a more technology-savvy form. Many rely on their cellphones to arrange casual jobs, according to Makoto Yuasa, who heads a homeless support center in Tokyo.
The arrangement means workers are not required to provide a set address, Yuasa said. However, the casual nature of the work means such workers often receive minimal wages and no training, social security or health insurance.
"With some job agencies, you get a call or an e-mail the night before, telling you where to turn up to work the next day," Yuasa said. "Many are menial cleaning or factory jobs that don't lead anywhere."
A government survey released earlier this year found about 18,500 homeless people across Japan, mostly aged 40 or older. That was down 27% from a similar survey four years ago. But the Net cafe refugees phenomenon signals the existence of hidden forms of homelessness in Japan, especially among younger people, Yuasa said.
The refuges sought out by homeless young people are not limited to Internet cafes. They also congregate in all-night saunas and the more traditional flop-houses, where the older homeless people able to afford any form of lodging are also more likely to be found.
Young people have even been spotted catching up on sleep at the country's 900 McDonald's restaurants open round-the-clock, according to local media reports. The media has dubbed them "McRefugees."
"We don't think this is a big problem at this point," said Kazuyuki Hagiwara, a spokesman at McDonald's Holdings Company Japan. "Our staff patrol stores at night and close off unneeded sections, and people who look like they are using our stores only to sleep are sometimes asked to leave."
Poor youths sleep in Japan's Net cafes
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Associated Press
TOKYO — It's almost midnight as Ryo settles into a reclining chair for the night, a can of tea and a pack of cigarettes at his side, a construction job awaiting him in the morning.
For the time being, this cramped cubicle at an Internet cafe — with its TV and flickering PC monitor — is home.
Ryo, who refused to give his full name, is part of what experts believe is a new social strata in Japan — poor, young people who live out of cheap, 24-hour Internet cafes to escape the streets.
ON DEADLINE: McRefugees take over 24-hour burger joints
Though there are no reliable numbers, experts warn a growing number of younger Japanese are sleeping in cheap Net cafes like Ichigo, where Ryo, who is 30, spends five nights a week. He stays with a friend on weekends.
The rising number of people like Ryo, known as "Internet cafe refugees," has raised enough concern that the Health Ministry is preparing to study the 1,300 Internet cafes nationwide.
Last year, 13 people contracted tuberculosis at an Internet cafe just west of Tokyo that health officials suspect originated from the cafe's homeless population, said Tomohiro Uchino of the Health Ministry's social welfare department.
"The phenomenon raises many issues in terms of health, labor and welfare," said Uchino. "The problem is that we don't yet have an accurate picture of how many homeless people there are in Internet cafes, how they got there, or how the government can intervene," he said.
Behind the rise of Net refugees is Japan's ballooning population of young people who hop from one temporary job to the next.
They are believed to number more than 2 million — a byproduct of the economic crisis that hit Japan a decade ago, as well as a shift in values among younger generations less ready to conform to the corporate work ethic of their parents and grandparents.
Ryo said part of the reason he ended up homeless was an expensive interest in reggae music. In his twenties, he staged reggae events with his friends and even took trips to Los Angeles to study with musicians there. But then his savings ran dry, he said.
In a city where a tiny studio apartment rarely costs less than $825 a month, the cafes appeal to people like Ryo because staying overnight costs only a fraction of that.
At Ichigo, clients pay 82 cents an hour for a small cubicle equipped with a reclining chair, computer and TV. Many cafes offer free refills of soft drinks; some even have showers. But it's hardly a comfortable environment: The air is stale with cigarette smoke and there is a constant whine of computers, TVs and ventilation fans.
The urban refugees are modern-day versions of the day laborers of Osaka and other big Japanese cities who fueled the tumultuous economic growth of the 1960s — an underclass that lodged in cheap hostels and who were rounded up each morning to work at nearby construction sites.
Some inhabitants of Net cafes also find work by the day, albeit in a more technology-savvy form. Many rely on their cellphones to arrange casual jobs, according to Makoto Yuasa, who heads a homeless support center in Tokyo.
The arrangement means workers are not required to provide a set address, Yuasa said. However, the casual nature of the work means such workers often receive minimal wages and no training, social security or health insurance.
"With some job agencies, you get a call or an e-mail the night before, telling you where to turn up to work the next day," Yuasa said. "Many are menial cleaning or factory jobs that don't lead anywhere."
A government survey released earlier this year found about 18,500 homeless people across Japan, mostly aged 40 or older. That was down 27% from a similar survey four years ago. But the Net cafe refugees phenomenon signals the existence of hidden forms of homelessness in Japan, especially among younger people, Yuasa said.
The refuges sought out by homeless young people are not limited to Internet cafes. They also congregate in all-night saunas and the more traditional flop-houses, where the older homeless people able to afford any form of lodging are also more likely to be found.
Young people have even been spotted catching up on sleep at the country's 900 McDonald's restaurants open round-the-clock, according to local media reports. The media has dubbed them "McRefugees."
"We don't think this is a big problem at this point," said Kazuyuki Hagiwara, a spokesman at McDonald's Holdings Company Japan. "Our staff patrol stores at night and close off unneeded sections, and people who look like they are using our stores only to sleep are sometimes asked to leave."
May 29, 2007
Desperate Iraqi Refugees Turn to Sex Trade in Syria
By KATHERINE ZOEPF
MARABA, Syria — Back home in Iraq, Umm Hiba’s daughter was a devout schoolgirl, modest in her dress and serious about her studies. Hiba, who is now 16, wore the hijab, or Islamic head scarf, and rose early each day to say the dawn prayer before classes.
But that was before militias began threatening their Baghdad neighborhood and Umm Hiba and her daughter fled to Syria last spring. There were no jobs, and Umm Hiba’s elderly father developed complications related to his diabetes.
Desperate, Umm Hiba followed the advice of an Iraqi acquaintance and took her daughter to work at a nightclub along a highway known for prostitution. “We Iraqis used to be a proud people,” she said over the frantic blare of the club’s speakers. She pointed out her daughter, dancing among about two dozen other girls on the stage, wearing a pink silk dress with spaghetti straps, her frail shoulders bathed in colored light.
As Umm Hiba watched, a middle-aged man climbed onto the platform and began to dance jerkily, arms flailing, among the girls.
“During the war we lost everything,” she said. “We even lost our honor.” She insisted on being identified by only part of her name — Umm Hiba means mother of Hiba.
For anyone living in Damascus these days, the fact that some Iraqi refugees are selling sex or working in sex clubs is difficult to ignore.
Even in central Damascus, men freely talk of being approached by pimps trawling for customers outside juice shops and shawarma sandwich stalls, and of women walking up to passing men, an act unthinkable in Arab culture, and asking in Iraqi-accented Arabic if the men would like to “have a cup of tea.”
By day the road that leads from Damascus to the historic convent at Saidnaya is often choked with Christian and Muslim pilgrims hoping for one of the miracles attributed to a portrait of the Virgin Mary at the convent. But as any Damascene taxi driver can tell you, the Maraba section of this fabled pilgrim road is fast becoming better known for its brisk trade in Iraqi prostitutes.
Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.
According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.
Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”
Aid workers say thousands of Iraqi women work as prostitutes in Syria, and point out that as violence in Iraq has increased, the refugee population has come to include more female-headed households and unaccompanied women.
“So many of the Iraqi women arriving now are living on their own with their children because the men in their families were killed or kidnapped,” said Sister Marie-Claude Naddaf, a Syrian nun at the Good Shepherd convent in Damascus, which helps Iraqi refugees.
She said the convent had surveyed Iraqi refugees living in Masaken Barzeh, on the outskirts of Damascus, and found 119 female-headed households in one small neighborhood. Some of the women, seeking work outside the home for the first time and living in a country with high unemployment, find that their only marketable asset is their bodies.
“I met three sisters-in-law recently who were living together and all prostituting themselves,” Sister Marie-Claude said. “They would go out on alternate nights — each woman took her turn — and then divide the money to feed all the children.”
For more than three years after the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi prostitution in Syria, like any prostitution, was a forbidden topic for Syria’s government. Like drug abuse, the sex trade tends to be referred to in the local news media as acts against public decency. But Dietrun Günther, an official at the United Nations refugee agency’s Damascus office, said the government was finally breaking its silence.
“We’re especially concerned that there are young girls involved, and that they’re being forced, even smuggled into Syria in some cases,” Ms. Günther said. “We’ve had special talks with the Syrian government about prostitution.” She called the officials’ new openness “a great step.”
Mouna Asaad, a Syrian women’s rights lawyer, said the government had been blindsided by the scale of the arriving Iraqi refugee population. Syria does not require visas for citizens of Arab countries, and its government had pledged to assist needy Iraqis. But this country of 19 million was ill equipped to cope with the sudden arrival of hundreds of thousands of them, Ms. Asaad said.
“Sometimes you see whole families living this way, the girls pimped by the mother or aunt,” she said. “But prostitution isn’t the only problem. Our schools are overcrowded, and the prices of services, food and transportation have all risen. We don’t have the proper infrastructure to deal with this. We don’t have shelters or health centers that these women can go to. And because of the situation in Iraq, Syria is careful not to deport these women.”
Most of the semi-organized prostitution takes place on the outskirts of the capital, in nightclubs known as casinos — a local euphemism, because no gambling occurs.
At Al Rawabi, an expensive nightclub in Al Hami, there is even a floor show with an Iraqi theme. One recent evening, waiters brought out trays of snacks: French fries and grilled chicken hearts wrapped in foil folded into diamond shapes. A 10-piece band warmed up, and an M.C. gave the traditionally overwrought introduction in Arabic: “I give you the honey of all stages, the stealer of all hearts, the most golden throat, the glamorous artist: Maria!”
Maria, a buxom young woman, climbed onto the stage and began an anguished-sounding ballad. “After Iraq I have no homeland,” she sang. “I’m ready to go crawling on my knees back to Iraq.” Four other women, all wearing variations on leopard print, gyrated on stage, swinging their hair in wild circles. The stage lights had been fitted with colored gel filters that lent the women’s skin a greenish cast.
Al Rawabi’s customers watched Maria calmly, leaning back in their chairs and drinking Johnnie Walker Black. The large room smelled strongly of sweat mingled with the apple tobacco from scores of water pipes. When Maria finished singing, no one clapped.
She picked up the microphone again and began what she called a salute to Iraq, naming many of the Iraqi women in the club and, indicating one of the women in leopard print who had danced with her, “most especially my best friend, Sahar.”
After the dancers filed offstage and scattered around the room to talk to customers, Sahar told a visitor she was from the Dora district of Baghdad but had left “because of the troubles.” Now, she said she would leave the club with him for $200.
Aid workers say $50 to $70 is considered a good night’s wage for an Iraqi prostitute working in Damascus. And some of the Iraqi dancers in the crowded casinos of Damascus suburbs earn much less.
In Maraba, Umm Hiba would not say how much money her daughter took home at the end of a night. Noticing her reluctance, the club’s manager, who introduced himself as Hassan, broke in proudly.
“We make sure that each girl has a minimum of 500 lira at the end of each night, no matter how bad business is,” he said, mentioning a sum of about $10. “We are sympathetic to the situation of the Iraqi people. And we try to give some extra help to the girls whose families are in special difficulties.”
Umm Hiba shook her head. “It’s true that the managers here are good, that they’re helping us and not stealing the girls’ money,” she said. “But I’m so angry.
“Do you think we’re happy that these men from the gulf are seeing our daughters’ naked bodies?”
Most so-called casinos do not appear to directly broker arrangements between prostitutes and their customers. Zafer, a waiter at the club where Hiba works, said that the club earned money through sales of food and alcohol and that the dancers were encouraged to sit with male customers and order drinks to increase revenues.
Zafer, who spoke on condition that only his first name be used, refused to discuss specific women and girls at the club, but said that most of them did sell sexual favors. “They have an hourly rate,” he said. “And they have regular customers.”
Inexpensive Iraqi prostitutes have helped to make Syria a popular destination for sex tourists from wealthier countries in the Middle East. In the club’s parking lot, nearly half of the cars had Saudi license plates.
From Damascus it is only about six hours by car, passing through Jordan, to the Saudi border. Syria, where it is relatively easy to buy alcohol and dance with women, is popular as a low-cost weekend destination for groups of Saudi men.
And though some women of other nationalities, including Russians and Moroccans, still work as prostitutes in Damascus, Abeer, a 23-year-old from Baghdad working at the same club as Hiba, explained that the arriving Iraqis had pushed many of them out of business.
“From what I’ve seen, 70 percent to 80 percent of the girls working this business in Damascus today are Iraqis,” she said. “The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they’ll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.”
Monday, May 28, 2007
Iraqi Women the Worse for War
By Kasia Anderson, Truthdig
Posted on May 28, 2007,
Remember those photos of Iraqi women triumphantly raising freshly inked fingers for Western cameras after voting in their new "democracy"? They were presented to the world by the U.S. government as an indication of a policy that would liberate Iraqi women and men. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, according to Iraqi women's rights activist Yanar Mohammed, who argues that the situation for women in her country has significantly worsened since the American invasion in 2003.
Despite his immense failings and unforgivable atrocities, Saddam Hussein ran an essentially secular government that gave women more educational, professional and social freedoms than does the current regime. This is a source of chagrin to people like Mohammed who detested the dictatorship but fear that the future will only bring new restrictions and greater oppression for Iraq's women under the guise of "democracy."
On April 14, Yanar Mohammed was honored by the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization that warned the world about what the Taliban was doing to women and girls in Afghanistan long before the U.S. decided to take military action. As one of four special guests at the foundation's Global Women's Rights Awards, she was able to speak out about the many battles that she and other members of her activist group, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, are fighting on behalf of women in their country, risking their lives on a daily basis for their cause.
Mohammed tells Kasia Anderson about her mission and explains how the current state of affairs for Iraqi women differs from the picture painted by many Western media outlets.
Kasia Anderson: Can you tell us in your own words about your work [with the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq], how you started and what issues are most important to your cause right now?
Yanar Mohammed: After this war started on Iraq I immediately decided to go back to set up an organization and to be the voice for free women there, and since the beginning, in my organization, we decided to do demonstrations, to do campaigns, to make petitions, and to see whatever is needed. And it started with speaking out against the human trafficking of women, and we were the first to demonstrate. It was a few months after the [March 2003] beginning of the war -- in August 2003 -- we started that.
But later on, our work was mainly on sheltering women from honor killings, and also on seeking out the reports of women's trafficking, and later on in the last two years we found out -- especially after the breakout of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, we found out that it is very important to have a presence in all the women's prisons and see what's happening there. So, we managed to become regular visitors to the central prison -- it's called Khadamiyah, a women's prison, and we interviewed all the women in there, and we found out terrible things happening before they reached the prison.
Six of them, actually, spoke out about being assaulted, about being raped, some of them serially raped by the staff of the police station before they reached the prison. So, we decided: This is a program that we will have to pursue immediately. And the surprise here is that most of this work we do with very minimal funding -- mostly depending on volunteer work.
Anderson: How did the onset of the Iraq war change things for Iraqi women, specifically? I would imagine that there would be an increase in particular forms of oppression and violence once things became more volatile and uncertain. ...
Mohammed: Well, although people on this part of the world think that Iraqi women are liberated, actually, we have lost all of the achievements or all the status that we used to have. It is no longer safe to leave your house and get groceries. We're not speaking here about a young woman trying to reach the university, because that is beginning to get too difficult. We're not speaking here about women who are trying to go back and forth to work and even those of my friends who do that already because they have to -- many of the police at work are being killed for sectarian reasons.
So, you have to witness all sorts of atrocities just going back and forth to work, and if there is this new [policy] of Sunni and Shiite, checking all the IDs of people, you leave the house and you do not guarantee that you come back safe.
Anderson: And I know that the markets are one particular target for bombers -- repeated targets for bombers -- when people are just trying to shop and go about their business.
Mohammed: Well, all the districts of Baghdad have witnessed bombing, and it's like the bombings move from one neighborhood to the other every month, so ... I moved my residence from one place to another, but I found out they're all unsafe.
Anderson: What is your hope now for your organization -- to move into new areas of social and political concern? Or are you going to keep building up what you're working on now?
Mohammed: Actually, we always try to be ahead of the atrocities happening. It started with sheltering; then, it extended to the matter of the trafficking of women. The third thing is that we went into the prisons and we are watching for women's self-esteem to be respected in there. And finally we found out that if you do not put women's rights in context, you have done nothing.
So, we have started a youth initiative where we are inviting youth from the Sunni and the Shiite areas and making poetry events where we tell them: "The subject matter of the event is about women, is about love, is about hope," and we are witnessing very good results -- that the youth do not want to be recruited for a civil war, do not want to kill each other, but there are very few alternatives for them out there, and the few democrat, seculars and outspoken women aren't really supported.
This is the reason that I visit L.A. and speak to our friends at the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine, trying to seek support so we can survive as a project and as a voice, because, surprisingly, this war on Iraq brought all the support for the fundamentalists, for the extremists, who are new in the country, who are not the original people of the country, and they made them strong against us -- the women and the freedom-loving people of Iraq.
Anderson: Besides the mistaken notion that women in Iraq are enjoying more freedom now than before the beginning of the current war, which tends to be a party line over here, what other misconceptions about what's going on in actuality in Iraq do you feel you could disabuse us of on this end?
Mohammed: Well, the myth of democracy has killed already half a million Iraqis, and if it were giving us real democracy, where people are represented according to their political affiliations or their economic understanding or their social justice affiliations, that would have been understood. But the way Iraqis are represented is according to their religion and their ethnicities. It is as if the U.S. administration is trying to tell the whole world that Iraqis are not entitled to political understanding or political activity.
The political formula that was forwarded to us is a total insult for a part of the world where the politics are very much thriving and all kinds of politics -- with the dawn of the war, thousands of political parties have registered. And they all wanted to be competing, or let's say running into democracy, but who was empowered, who was supported? It's mostly the religious and mostly the ethnic groups, and the women's groups?
The U.S. administration wasn't really interested to speak to, let's say, free women's groups. They preferred to bring decorative factors to the parliament, where they look like women, but they all voted for a constitution that is against women. And the constitution at this moment has imposed Shariah law upon us, when in the times before the war we had more of a secular constitution that respected women's rights. So, it's one more thing lost for this war.
Anderson: Can you respond to the claims made by U.S. politicians talking about how well the reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going?
Mohammed: Well, you know, the billions of dollars that we hear should have reached Iraq and been spent for the reconstruction -- well, we don't see any reconstruction. Whatever they have tried to construct, like the electricity generators and water supply and all of that -- they have been blown away by the resistance over and over again, so they stopped doing those.
Anderson: Those are particular targets for the resistance?
Mohammed: Yes, yes, because they do not like to see the country run in the American way. So, the answer here is that it cannot be solved by money. There is a political issue to be solved, and later on the reconstruction follows.
We're not saying that money should not be spent on the reconstruction, but the political issues have really stopped, and there is absolutely no communication, and all of the solutions are reaching a dead end. So, all talk of reconstruction is nonsense at this point. We have not seen any buildings reconstructed in Iraq. I wonder what they're talking about.
Anderson: And the utilities are, at this point, shot?
Mohammed: Nothing! We get electricity one hour in the morning and one hour at night, and in the last two days there was no electricity. We did not see any new buildings built, unless they are inside the Green Zone, where we cannot see them.
Anderson: And there was a wall being constructed in April. ...
Mohammed: Not one wall -- there are 10 layers of concrete walls that we have to be searched over and over until we reach the Green Zone. So, maybe there is some reconstruction in there, but I've been there and I haven't seen really much. So where are these billions going? I have no answer, but I think they are going somewhere else.
By Kasia Anderson, Truthdig
Posted on May 28, 2007,
Remember those photos of Iraqi women triumphantly raising freshly inked fingers for Western cameras after voting in their new "democracy"? They were presented to the world by the U.S. government as an indication of a policy that would liberate Iraqi women and men. Well, it didn't quite work out that way, according to Iraqi women's rights activist Yanar Mohammed, who argues that the situation for women in her country has significantly worsened since the American invasion in 2003.
Despite his immense failings and unforgivable atrocities, Saddam Hussein ran an essentially secular government that gave women more educational, professional and social freedoms than does the current regime. This is a source of chagrin to people like Mohammed who detested the dictatorship but fear that the future will only bring new restrictions and greater oppression for Iraq's women under the guise of "democracy."
On April 14, Yanar Mohammed was honored by the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization that warned the world about what the Taliban was doing to women and girls in Afghanistan long before the U.S. decided to take military action. As one of four special guests at the foundation's Global Women's Rights Awards, she was able to speak out about the many battles that she and other members of her activist group, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, are fighting on behalf of women in their country, risking their lives on a daily basis for their cause.
Mohammed tells Kasia Anderson about her mission and explains how the current state of affairs for Iraqi women differs from the picture painted by many Western media outlets.
Kasia Anderson: Can you tell us in your own words about your work [with the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq], how you started and what issues are most important to your cause right now?
Yanar Mohammed: After this war started on Iraq I immediately decided to go back to set up an organization and to be the voice for free women there, and since the beginning, in my organization, we decided to do demonstrations, to do campaigns, to make petitions, and to see whatever is needed. And it started with speaking out against the human trafficking of women, and we were the first to demonstrate. It was a few months after the [March 2003] beginning of the war -- in August 2003 -- we started that.
But later on, our work was mainly on sheltering women from honor killings, and also on seeking out the reports of women's trafficking, and later on in the last two years we found out -- especially after the breakout of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, we found out that it is very important to have a presence in all the women's prisons and see what's happening there. So, we managed to become regular visitors to the central prison -- it's called Khadamiyah, a women's prison, and we interviewed all the women in there, and we found out terrible things happening before they reached the prison.
Six of them, actually, spoke out about being assaulted, about being raped, some of them serially raped by the staff of the police station before they reached the prison. So, we decided: This is a program that we will have to pursue immediately. And the surprise here is that most of this work we do with very minimal funding -- mostly depending on volunteer work.
Anderson: How did the onset of the Iraq war change things for Iraqi women, specifically? I would imagine that there would be an increase in particular forms of oppression and violence once things became more volatile and uncertain. ...
Mohammed: Well, although people on this part of the world think that Iraqi women are liberated, actually, we have lost all of the achievements or all the status that we used to have. It is no longer safe to leave your house and get groceries. We're not speaking here about a young woman trying to reach the university, because that is beginning to get too difficult. We're not speaking here about women who are trying to go back and forth to work and even those of my friends who do that already because they have to -- many of the police at work are being killed for sectarian reasons.
So, you have to witness all sorts of atrocities just going back and forth to work, and if there is this new [policy] of Sunni and Shiite, checking all the IDs of people, you leave the house and you do not guarantee that you come back safe.
Anderson: And I know that the markets are one particular target for bombers -- repeated targets for bombers -- when people are just trying to shop and go about their business.
Mohammed: Well, all the districts of Baghdad have witnessed bombing, and it's like the bombings move from one neighborhood to the other every month, so ... I moved my residence from one place to another, but I found out they're all unsafe.
Anderson: What is your hope now for your organization -- to move into new areas of social and political concern? Or are you going to keep building up what you're working on now?
Mohammed: Actually, we always try to be ahead of the atrocities happening. It started with sheltering; then, it extended to the matter of the trafficking of women. The third thing is that we went into the prisons and we are watching for women's self-esteem to be respected in there. And finally we found out that if you do not put women's rights in context, you have done nothing.
So, we have started a youth initiative where we are inviting youth from the Sunni and the Shiite areas and making poetry events where we tell them: "The subject matter of the event is about women, is about love, is about hope," and we are witnessing very good results -- that the youth do not want to be recruited for a civil war, do not want to kill each other, but there are very few alternatives for them out there, and the few democrat, seculars and outspoken women aren't really supported.
This is the reason that I visit L.A. and speak to our friends at the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine, trying to seek support so we can survive as a project and as a voice, because, surprisingly, this war on Iraq brought all the support for the fundamentalists, for the extremists, who are new in the country, who are not the original people of the country, and they made them strong against us -- the women and the freedom-loving people of Iraq.
Anderson: Besides the mistaken notion that women in Iraq are enjoying more freedom now than before the beginning of the current war, which tends to be a party line over here, what other misconceptions about what's going on in actuality in Iraq do you feel you could disabuse us of on this end?
Mohammed: Well, the myth of democracy has killed already half a million Iraqis, and if it were giving us real democracy, where people are represented according to their political affiliations or their economic understanding or their social justice affiliations, that would have been understood. But the way Iraqis are represented is according to their religion and their ethnicities. It is as if the U.S. administration is trying to tell the whole world that Iraqis are not entitled to political understanding or political activity.
The political formula that was forwarded to us is a total insult for a part of the world where the politics are very much thriving and all kinds of politics -- with the dawn of the war, thousands of political parties have registered. And they all wanted to be competing, or let's say running into democracy, but who was empowered, who was supported? It's mostly the religious and mostly the ethnic groups, and the women's groups?
The U.S. administration wasn't really interested to speak to, let's say, free women's groups. They preferred to bring decorative factors to the parliament, where they look like women, but they all voted for a constitution that is against women. And the constitution at this moment has imposed Shariah law upon us, when in the times before the war we had more of a secular constitution that respected women's rights. So, it's one more thing lost for this war.
Anderson: Can you respond to the claims made by U.S. politicians talking about how well the reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going?
Mohammed: Well, you know, the billions of dollars that we hear should have reached Iraq and been spent for the reconstruction -- well, we don't see any reconstruction. Whatever they have tried to construct, like the electricity generators and water supply and all of that -- they have been blown away by the resistance over and over again, so they stopped doing those.
Anderson: Those are particular targets for the resistance?
Mohammed: Yes, yes, because they do not like to see the country run in the American way. So, the answer here is that it cannot be solved by money. There is a political issue to be solved, and later on the reconstruction follows.
We're not saying that money should not be spent on the reconstruction, but the political issues have really stopped, and there is absolutely no communication, and all of the solutions are reaching a dead end. So, all talk of reconstruction is nonsense at this point. We have not seen any buildings reconstructed in Iraq. I wonder what they're talking about.
Anderson: And the utilities are, at this point, shot?
Mohammed: Nothing! We get electricity one hour in the morning and one hour at night, and in the last two days there was no electricity. We did not see any new buildings built, unless they are inside the Green Zone, where we cannot see them.
Anderson: And there was a wall being constructed in April. ...
Mohammed: Not one wall -- there are 10 layers of concrete walls that we have to be searched over and over until we reach the Green Zone. So, maybe there is some reconstruction in there, but I've been there and I haven't seen really much. So where are these billions going? I have no answer, but I think they are going somewhere else.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
More Americans Have Close Friend or Relative Who's GLBT
By the Editors of DiversityInc
© DiversityInc 2007 ®
Here's a simple truth: Many Americans have a close friend or family member who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT). New research brings this point home and shows increasing support for GLBT rights.
For businesses, this means paying keen attention to being perceived as GLBT supportive in both the workplace and the marketplace. For more on how companies reach GLBT-friendly consumers, Subscribe Now to read the upcoming July/August issue of DiversityInc magazine.
A study released yesterday by the Pew Research Center finds that 41 percent of Americans say they have a close friend or family member who is gay (Pew's term, which includes all GLBT people). The poll of 2,007 randomly selected adults conducted from Dec. 12, 2006 to Jan. 9, 2007 found 41 percent of whites, 39 percent of blacks and 38 percent of Latinos said they had someone close to them who is gay. The poll did not break down race/ethnicity for Asians, Native Americans or Pacific Islanders.
Of those surveyed, 46 percent of those 18-29 reported having someone close to them who is gay, 45 percent of those 30 to 49, 42 percent of those 50 to 64, and 24 percent of those older than 65.
Why is this important? GLBT-friendly people are far more supportive of GLBT-friendly issues and companies known as being GLBT-friendly. The Pew survey proves this point. Those who say they have a family member or close friend who is gay are more than twice as likely (55 percent to 25 percent) to support gay marriage as those who don't. When asked if school boards should fire teachers who are GLBT, only 15 percent of those who have a gay person close to them say yes versus 38 percent of those who don't.
The openly GLBT population in this country is increasing as more people are willing to go public with their orientation. The Census Bureau found there were 15.3 million people (5.1 percent of the U.S. population), who said they were in same-sex households in 2006 and that is expected to increase to 16.3 million by 2011 . GLBT groups generally say that the number is about 10 percent of the population. GLBT buying power is expected to increase to grow from $660.2 billion in 2005 to $835.3 billion in 2011, a cumulative growth of 26.5 percent, according to research by Witeck-Combs Communications. Those figures do not include GBLT supporters, those people surveyed in the Pew study.
A 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation Survey found 64 percent of Americans report knowing a GLBT person. Research by Packaged Facts shows that 72 percent of straight employees think it is important to work for a company with a written non-discrimination policy that includes orientation, up from 63 percent in 2002.
All of The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® include orientation in their non-discrimination polices and offer domestic-partner benefits for same-sex couples.
By the Editors of DiversityInc
© DiversityInc 2007 ®
Here's a simple truth: Many Americans have a close friend or family member who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (GLBT). New research brings this point home and shows increasing support for GLBT rights.
For businesses, this means paying keen attention to being perceived as GLBT supportive in both the workplace and the marketplace. For more on how companies reach GLBT-friendly consumers, Subscribe Now to read the upcoming July/August issue of DiversityInc magazine.
A study released yesterday by the Pew Research Center finds that 41 percent of Americans say they have a close friend or family member who is gay (Pew's term, which includes all GLBT people). The poll of 2,007 randomly selected adults conducted from Dec. 12, 2006 to Jan. 9, 2007 found 41 percent of whites, 39 percent of blacks and 38 percent of Latinos said they had someone close to them who is gay. The poll did not break down race/ethnicity for Asians, Native Americans or Pacific Islanders.
Of those surveyed, 46 percent of those 18-29 reported having someone close to them who is gay, 45 percent of those 30 to 49, 42 percent of those 50 to 64, and 24 percent of those older than 65.
Why is this important? GLBT-friendly people are far more supportive of GLBT-friendly issues and companies known as being GLBT-friendly. The Pew survey proves this point. Those who say they have a family member or close friend who is gay are more than twice as likely (55 percent to 25 percent) to support gay marriage as those who don't. When asked if school boards should fire teachers who are GLBT, only 15 percent of those who have a gay person close to them say yes versus 38 percent of those who don't.
The openly GLBT population in this country is increasing as more people are willing to go public with their orientation. The Census Bureau found there were 15.3 million people (5.1 percent of the U.S. population), who said they were in same-sex households in 2006 and that is expected to increase to 16.3 million by 2011 . GLBT groups generally say that the number is about 10 percent of the population. GLBT buying power is expected to increase to grow from $660.2 billion in 2005 to $835.3 billion in 2011, a cumulative growth of 26.5 percent, according to research by Witeck-Combs Communications. Those figures do not include GBLT supporters, those people surveyed in the Pew study.
A 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation Survey found 64 percent of Americans report knowing a GLBT person. Research by Packaged Facts shows that 72 percent of straight employees think it is important to work for a company with a written non-discrimination policy that includes orientation, up from 63 percent in 2002.
All of The 2007 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity® include orientation in their non-discrimination polices and offer domestic-partner benefits for same-sex couples.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Women Under Attack: The Talibanization of Iraq
By Bay Fang, Ms. Magazine
Posted on May 9, 2007,
Yanar Mohammed returned to Iraq from Canada in 2003 because she thought the veil of tyranny had finally been lifted from her native country. She and two other women started the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), with the goal of fighting for women's rights.
But since those days, her OWFI cofounders have fled the country, and Mohammed herself has received numerous death threats for her work. OWFI, one of the few remaining nongovernmental organizations left in Iraq, has been forced to operate in complete secrecy.
"We live in a state of continuous fear -- if our hair shows on the street, if we're not veiled enough at work," says Mohammed, 47. "It's a new experience for women in Iraq. After four years, it's turned into Afghanistan under the Taliban."
Throughout much of recent history, Iraq was one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East for women. These rights diminished somewhat after the 1991 Gulf War, partly because of Saddam Hussein's new embrace of Islamic tribal law as a way of consolidating power, and partly due to the United Nations' sanctions against the regime. Still, as bad as it was during Saddam's time, women's well-being and security have sharply deteriorated since the fall of his regime.
Furthermore, extremists in both Sunni and Shiite areas have taken over pockets of the country and imposed their own Taliban-like laws on the population. Women college students are stopped and harassed on campuses, so going to school is a risk. Islamist "misery gangs" regularly patrol the streets in many areas, beating and harassing women who are not "properly" dressed or behaved.
Zainab Salbi also grew up in Iraq, experiencing firsthand the oppression of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime as the daughter of Saddam's pilot. When Hussein was toppled, she too began traveling back to Iraq to work for women's rights.
"The violence during Saddam's time was ... committed by the government, Saddam's family, people in power. Now the violence is ... being committed by everyone around you," says Salbi, who founded the group Women for Women International in 1993. That organization now operates in nine countries, including Iraq, to help women survivors of war and civil strife rebuild their lives.
But today, most of her friends have left the country. Women for Women International keeps its locations secret and takes all sorts of security precautions. Salbi herself stopped traveling back to her homeland two years ago. "At first I was able to say I knew 10, 20 women who had been assassinated," she says. "Now, I've lost count. ... They are pharmacists, professors, reporters, activists ..."
"Often, the first salvo in a war for theocracy is a systematic attack on women and minorities who represent or demand an alternative or competing vision for society," wrote Yifat Susskind, Iraq coordinator of the international human- and women's-rights organization MADRE, in a report she authored on "gender apartheid" in Iraq. "These initial targets are usually the most marginalized and, therefore, most vulnerable members of society, and once they are dealt with, fundamentalist forces then proceed towards less vulnerable targets."
In some parts of Baghdad, like the Shiite slum of Sadr City, religious courts following strict interpretations of sharia law have become the de facto authority. "We used to have a government that was almost secular. It had one dictator," says Yanar Mohammed. "Now we have almost 60 dictators -- Islamists who think of women as forces of evil. This is what is called the democratization of Iraq."
Women make up 31 percent of the Iraq National Assembly, but nearly half of the women parliamentarians ran on the list of the Shiite alliance -- the group with major U.S. support -- and they have had to toe the conservative line of their party. Some of the women parliamentarians could be forces for moderation and progress, but the dangerous political environment of targeted assassinations has prevented them from being very outspoken.
Increased violence against women in the streets has had a parallel effect on the increase in domestic violence, including "honor" killings. In response to the rise in domestic violence, OWFI has set up women's shelters in four cities around the country. If the shelters cannot protect a woman, an "underground railroad" network helps her escape the country and set up a new life.
For those remaining in Iraq, a recent survey by the United Nations Development Programme shows one-third live in poverty and 5 percent in extreme poverty -- a sharp deterioration from before the 2003 invasion. Women generally have a harder time finding work in Iraq, and years of war have left an estimated half million widows in the country, according to OWFI.
The few women activists still in Iraq feel that time is running out. "Both violence and progress often start with women," says Salbi. "A classic example was with the Taliban -- they started with violence against women, and everyone looked the other way ... but eventually everyone suffered. We need to take this moment to raise the world's attention. Iraqi women are holding up, but they can't hold it on their own -- they need us to help."
For the rest of this story, get the Spring issue of Ms. magazine, available now on newsstands or by subscription at www.msmagazine.com. For more information on organizations assisting women in Iraq, and how you can help, visit the websites of Global Fund for Women, MADRE and Women for Women International.
By Bay Fang, Ms. Magazine
Posted on May 9, 2007,
Yanar Mohammed returned to Iraq from Canada in 2003 because she thought the veil of tyranny had finally been lifted from her native country. She and two other women started the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), with the goal of fighting for women's rights.
But since those days, her OWFI cofounders have fled the country, and Mohammed herself has received numerous death threats for her work. OWFI, one of the few remaining nongovernmental organizations left in Iraq, has been forced to operate in complete secrecy.
"We live in a state of continuous fear -- if our hair shows on the street, if we're not veiled enough at work," says Mohammed, 47. "It's a new experience for women in Iraq. After four years, it's turned into Afghanistan under the Taliban."
Throughout much of recent history, Iraq was one of the most progressive countries in the Middle East for women. These rights diminished somewhat after the 1991 Gulf War, partly because of Saddam Hussein's new embrace of Islamic tribal law as a way of consolidating power, and partly due to the United Nations' sanctions against the regime. Still, as bad as it was during Saddam's time, women's well-being and security have sharply deteriorated since the fall of his regime.
Furthermore, extremists in both Sunni and Shiite areas have taken over pockets of the country and imposed their own Taliban-like laws on the population. Women college students are stopped and harassed on campuses, so going to school is a risk. Islamist "misery gangs" regularly patrol the streets in many areas, beating and harassing women who are not "properly" dressed or behaved.
Zainab Salbi also grew up in Iraq, experiencing firsthand the oppression of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime as the daughter of Saddam's pilot. When Hussein was toppled, she too began traveling back to Iraq to work for women's rights.
"The violence during Saddam's time was ... committed by the government, Saddam's family, people in power. Now the violence is ... being committed by everyone around you," says Salbi, who founded the group Women for Women International in 1993. That organization now operates in nine countries, including Iraq, to help women survivors of war and civil strife rebuild their lives.
But today, most of her friends have left the country. Women for Women International keeps its locations secret and takes all sorts of security precautions. Salbi herself stopped traveling back to her homeland two years ago. "At first I was able to say I knew 10, 20 women who had been assassinated," she says. "Now, I've lost count. ... They are pharmacists, professors, reporters, activists ..."
"Often, the first salvo in a war for theocracy is a systematic attack on women and minorities who represent or demand an alternative or competing vision for society," wrote Yifat Susskind, Iraq coordinator of the international human- and women's-rights organization MADRE, in a report she authored on "gender apartheid" in Iraq. "These initial targets are usually the most marginalized and, therefore, most vulnerable members of society, and once they are dealt with, fundamentalist forces then proceed towards less vulnerable targets."
In some parts of Baghdad, like the Shiite slum of Sadr City, religious courts following strict interpretations of sharia law have become the de facto authority. "We used to have a government that was almost secular. It had one dictator," says Yanar Mohammed. "Now we have almost 60 dictators -- Islamists who think of women as forces of evil. This is what is called the democratization of Iraq."
Women make up 31 percent of the Iraq National Assembly, but nearly half of the women parliamentarians ran on the list of the Shiite alliance -- the group with major U.S. support -- and they have had to toe the conservative line of their party. Some of the women parliamentarians could be forces for moderation and progress, but the dangerous political environment of targeted assassinations has prevented them from being very outspoken.
Increased violence against women in the streets has had a parallel effect on the increase in domestic violence, including "honor" killings. In response to the rise in domestic violence, OWFI has set up women's shelters in four cities around the country. If the shelters cannot protect a woman, an "underground railroad" network helps her escape the country and set up a new life.
For those remaining in Iraq, a recent survey by the United Nations Development Programme shows one-third live in poverty and 5 percent in extreme poverty -- a sharp deterioration from before the 2003 invasion. Women generally have a harder time finding work in Iraq, and years of war have left an estimated half million widows in the country, according to OWFI.
The few women activists still in Iraq feel that time is running out. "Both violence and progress often start with women," says Salbi. "A classic example was with the Taliban -- they started with violence against women, and everyone looked the other way ... but eventually everyone suffered. We need to take this moment to raise the world's attention. Iraqi women are holding up, but they can't hold it on their own -- they need us to help."
For the rest of this story, get the Spring issue of Ms. magazine, available now on newsstands or by subscription at www.msmagazine.com. For more information on organizations assisting women in Iraq, and how you can help, visit the websites of Global Fund for Women, MADRE and Women for Women International.
May 16, 2007
Jerry Falwell, Moral Majority Founder, Dies at 73
By PETER APPLEBOME
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, the fundamentalist preacher who founded the Moral Majority and brought the language and passions of religious conservatives into the hurly-burly of American politics, died yesterday in Lynchburg, Va. He was 73.
His death was announced by Liberty University, in Lynchburg, where Mr. Falwell, its founder, was chancellor. The university said the cause had not been determined, adding that he died in a hospital after being found unconscious yesterday morning in his university office.
Mr. Falwell went from a Baptist preacher in Lynchburg to a powerful force in electoral politics, at home in both the millennial world of fundamentalist Christianity and the earthly blood sport of the political arena. As much as anyone, he helped create the religious right as a political force, defined the issues that would energize it for decades and cemented its ties to the Republican Party.
He came to prominence first as a religious broadcaster through his “Old-Time Gospel Hour” and then, in 1979, as the leader of the Moral Majority, an organization whose very name drew a vivid line in the sand of American politics. After the organization disbanded a decade later, he remained a familiar and powerful figure, supporting Republicans like George W. Bush, mobilizing conservatives and finding his way into a thicket of controversies. And he built institutions and groomed leaders — including his two sons, who will succeed him in two important positions.
Mr. Falwell grew up in a household that he described as a battleground between the forces of God and the powers of Satan. In his public life he often had to walk a line between the certitudes of fundamentalist religion, in which the word of God was absolute and inviolate, and the ambiguities of mainstream politics, in which a message warmly received at his Thomas Road Baptist Church might not play as well on “NBC Nightly News.”
As a result, he was a lightning rod for controversy and caricature. After the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, he apologized for calling Muhammad a terrorist and for suggesting that the attacks had reflected God’s judgment on a nation spiritually weakened by the American Civil Liberties Union, providers of abortion and supporters of gay rights. He was ridiculed for an article in his National Liberty Journal suggesting that Tinky Winky, a character in the “Teletubbies” children’s show, could be a hidden homosexual signal because the character was purple, had a triangle on his head and carried a handbag.
Behind the controversies was a shrewd, savvy operator with an original vision for effecting political and moral change. He rallied religious conservatives to the political arena at a time when most fundamentalists and other conservative religious leaders were inclined to stay away. And he helped pulled off what had once seemed an impossible task: uniting religious conservatives from many faiths and doctrines by emphasizing what they had in common.
He had many failures as well as successes and always remained a divisive figure, demonized on the left in much the way Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, or Jane Fonda were on the right. Even so, political experts agree he was enormously influential.
“Behind the idea of the Moral Majority was this notion that there could be a coalition of these different religious groups that all agree on abortion and homosexuality and other issues even if they never agreed on how to read the Bible or the nature of God,” said John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and an expert on religious conservatives.
“That was a real innovation,” Mr. Green continued, “And even if that’s an idea that did not completely originate with Falwell, it’s certainly an idea he developed and championed independently of others. It was a very important insight, and it’s had a huge influence on American politics.”
Seeds of Faith
Jerry Falwell was born Aug. 11, 1933, in Lynchburg. His ancestors there dated back to 1669, and his more immediate ones lived as if characters in the pageant of sin and redemption that formed his world view.
His paternal grandfather, Charles W. Falwell, embittered by the death of his wife and a favorite nephew, was a vocal and decisive atheist who refused to go to church and ridiculed those who did.
His father, Carey H. Falwell, was a flamboyant entrepreneur who opened his first grocery store when he was 22. He was soon operating 17 service stations, many with little restaurants and stores attached. He built oil storage tanks and owned an oil company and in 1927 began American Bus Lines, supplying old battery-operated movie projectors to show Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy movies to riders.
Later, he turned to bootlegging liquor, among other enterprises. His best-known business was the Merry Garden Dance Hall and Dining Room, high on a Virginia hilltop, which became the center of Virginia’s swing society. Carey Falwell, too, had no use for religion. He was left shaken forever by an episode in which he shot his brother to death. He became a heavy drinker and died of liver disease at the age of 55.
On the other hand, Mr. Falwell’s mother, the former Helen Beasley, was deeply religious. Every Sunday when he awoke, Mr. Falwell recalled, Charles Fuller’s “Old-Fashioned Revival Hour” was ringing out from the radio.
“It was my mother who planted the seeds of faith in me from the moment I was born,” Mr. Falwell said in his autobiography, “Strength for the Journey.”
What he saw in his own family, he said, was the battle between God and the Enemy, the malignant force just as real and just as determined to produce evil as God is to create good. It was the Enemy who destroyed his father and grandfather, he said, and God whose grace ennobled his mother.
In his telling, Mr. Falwell chose God on Jan. 20, 1952, when he was 18. It was an experience, he said, not of blinding lights and heavenly voices. “God came quietly into Mom’s kitchen” and answered her prayers, he said.
He declared his acceptance of Christ that night at the Park Avenue Baptist Church in Lynchburg, on an evening in which he also first saw the woman who would become his wife, the church pianist, Macel Pate. The next day he bought a Bible, a Bible dictionary and James Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Two months later, he decided he wanted to become a minister and spread the word.
He transferred from Lynchburg College, where he had hoped to study mechanical engineering, to Baptist Bible College in Springfield, Mo. Returning home, he decided to start his own church, an experience that melded his mother’s faith with his father’s entrepreneurial instincts. He started the Thomas Road Baptist Church with $1,000 and an initial congregation of 35 adults and their families in an abandoned building that had housed the Donald Duck Bottling Company.
Mr. Falwell began building his church in 1956 much as he would build a political movement. Carrying a yellow legal pad and a Bible, he set out to visit 100 homes a day, knocking on doors to seek members. Soon after the church opened, he began a half-hour daily radio broadcast. Six months later, he broadcast his first televised version of the “Old-Time Gospel Hour.” He was struck by how effective the radio and television broadcasts were in drawing new members.
“Television made me a kind of instant celebrity,” he wrote. “People were fascinated that they could see and hear me preach that same night in person.” On the church’s first anniversary, in 1957, 864 people showed up to worship, and he felt he was on his way. The church grew. Anticipating the megachurches to come, it morphed into a social service dynamo, with a home for alcoholics, a burgeoning Christian Academy, summer camps and worldwide missions.
In 1971, Mr. Falwell established Liberty University, originally Liberty Baptist College, with the intent of making it a national university for fundamentalist Christians. The same year, when the “Old-Time Gospel Hour” began broadcasting nationally from his church’s sanctuary, he gained a national audience at a time when televised evangelism was exploding.
Political Action
There were reversals as well. A lawsuit in July 1973 by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission accused the church of “fraud and deceit” and “gross insolvency” in the selling of $6.6 million worth of bonds for church expansion and services. The charges were dropped a month later after a United States District Court found that there had been no intentional wrongdoing.
As the cultural passions and transformations of the 1960s and ‘70s swept the nation, Mr. Falwell, like many religious leaders, struggled with what role to play. He saw ministers joining the civil rights movement and was unimpressed.
“Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners,” he said in a sermon titled “Ministers and Marchers” in March 1964. “If as much effort could be put into winning people to Jesus across the land as is being exerted in the present civil rights movement, America would be turned upside down for God.”
His position reflected his opposition at the time to the civil rights movement and his loyalty to a long fundamentalist tradition in which the faithful believed their role was to cater to the soul, not to the transitory tides of politics.
But Mr. Falwell said the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, produced an enormous change in him. Soon he began preaching against the ruling and calling for Christians to become involved in political action.
In 1977, he supported the singer Anita Bryant’s efforts to repeal an ordinance granting equal rights to gay men and lesbians in Dade County, Fla. The next year, he played a similar role in California. He urged churches to register voters and for religious conservatives to campaign for candidates who supported their positions. He organized “I Love America” rallies, blending patriotism and conservative values; students at Liberty University produced their own upbeat presentations around the country.
As he told it, at a meeting of conservatives in his office in 1979, Paul M. Weyrich, the commentator and activist, said to him: “Jerry, there is in America a moral majority that agrees about the basic issues. But they aren’t organized.”
To Mr. Falwell, that suggested a movement encompassing more than just evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. He envisioned one that would also include other Protestants, Catholics, Jews, even atheists, all with a similar agenda on abortion, gay rights, patriotism and moral values.
“I was convinced,” he wrote, “that there was a ‘moral majority’ out there among these more than 200 million Americans sufficient in number to turn back the flood tide of moral permissiveness, family breakdown and general capitulation to evil and to foreign policies such as Marxism-Leninism.”
The movement, he said, would be pro-life, pro-traditional family, pro-moral and pro-American — precisely the kind of broad agenda that could unite conservatives of different faiths and backgrounds. His agenda also included fervent support for Israel, even if his relations with Jews were often rocky; in 1999, for example, he apologized for saying that the Antichrist was probably alive and if so would be in the form of a male Jew.
The Moral Majority, he said, had a basic goal in building its membership: “Get them saved, baptized and registered.” He held up a Bible at political rallies, telling followers: “If a man stands by this book, vote for him. If he doesn’t, don’t.” Within three years of the Moral Majority’s founding, he boasted of a $10 million budget, 100,000 trained clergymen and several million volunteers.
In 1980, the Moral Majority was credited with playing a role in the election of Ronald Reagan and in dozens of Congressional races. The election gave resounding evidence of the potential of religious conservatives in politics. They themselves were electrified by their influence, but many others were alarmed, fearing an intolerant movement of lockstep zealots voting en masse for the preachers’ designated candidates.
A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale University in 1981, accused the Moral Majority and other conservative groups of a “radical assault” on the nation’s political values.
“A self-proclaimed Moral Majority and its satellite of client groups, cunning in the use of a native blend of old intimidation and new technology, threaten the values” of the nation, Mr. Giamatti told Yale’s entering freshman class of 1985. He called the organization “angry at change, rigid in the application of chauvinistic slogans, absolutistic in morality.”
But many of those who defend mixing religion and politics, not all of them conservatives, say it is a form of bigotry to seek to deny religious conservatives their voice in the political process.
Mr. Falwell disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989, saying “our mission is accomplished.” But he remained a lightning rod. While running for the Republican presidential nomination against George W. Bush in 2000, Senator John McCain of Arizona characterized Mr. Falwell and the evangelist Pat Robertson as “forces of evil” and called them “agents of intolerance.” He soon apologized, but the remarks, believed to have alienated the party’s base, were seen as enormously damaging to his candidacy. The two men later reconciled. Last year, Mr. McCain delivered the commencement address at Liberty University.
For all the controversy, Mr. Falwell was often an unconvincing villain. His manner was patient and affable. His sermons had little of the white-hot menace of those of his contemporaries like Jimmy Swaggart. He shared podiums with Senator Kennedy, appeared at hostile college campuses and in 1984 spent an evening before a crowd full of hecklers at Town Hall in New York, probably not changing many minds but nevertheless expressing good will. He seemed “about as menacing as the corner grocer,” the conservative writer Joseph Sobran wrote in National Review in 1980.
Many experts say his role as a direct participant in politics may have peaked with the Moral Majority. Others, like Ralph Reed and Karl Rove, were even more successful in taking Mr. Falwell’s ideas and translating them into lasting political power and influence. But he never left the public eye, whether trying to rescue the foundering PTL ministry in the late 1980s, seeing his libel suit against Larry Flynt go to the Supreme Court or describing President Bill Clinton as an “ungodly liar.”
Culture vs. Politics
It could be argued that he affected electoral politics more than mainstream culture. The Moral Majority, for instance, began a campaign to “clean up” television programs in the 1980s, but no one viewed the initiative as a great success. After President Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial, Mr. Weyrich wrote his supporters to say that maybe there was not a “moral majority” after all.
For all Mr. Falwell’s influence on the world stage, home always remained Lynchburg and his church. Last year the church moved to grand and vast new quarters in Lynchburg, with a membership of about 22,000.
Besides his wife, Macel, whom he married in 1958, Mr. Falwell is survived by two sons, Jerry Jr., of Goode, Va., who will succeed his father as Liberty University’s chancellor, and the Rev. Jonathan Falwell, of Lynchburg, who will become senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church; a daughter, Jeannie Savas, a surgeon, of Richmond; a fraternal twin brother, Gene, of Rustburg, Va.; and eight grandchildren.
To the end of his life, Mr. Falwell remained active at Liberty University, expanding the campus by buying surrounding land and erecting buildings. And he continued to participate in the political discourse, meeting with prospective Republican candidates for president in the 2008 campaign and inviting them to speak at Liberty.
He preached every Sunday and remained openly political in his sermons, declaring, for example, that the election of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to the presidency would represent a grave threat to the country.
He surprised some critics, who felt his views on some social issues, like gay rights, had moderated over time.
But, at his core, he remained through his career what he was at the beginning: a preacher and moralist, a believer in the Bible’s literal truth, with convictions about religious and social issues rooted in his reading of Scripture.
So there was no distinction at all between his view of the political and the spiritual. “We are born into a war zone where the forces of God do battle with the forces of evil,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Sometimes we get trapped, pinned down in the crossfire. And in the heat of that noisy, distracting battle, two voices call out for us to follow. Satan wants to lead us into death. God wants to lead us into life eternal.”
Margalit Fox contributed reporting.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Indian actress files appeal in Gere case
NEW DELHI (AP) — Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty asked the Supreme Court on Monday to shift an obscenity case against her and Hollywood star Richard Gere to a nearby court so she can fight the allegations, her lawyer said.
Shetty asked the court to transfer jurisdiction over the case to Mumbai, where she lives, lawyer Anand Grover said.
A judge in the northwestern Indian city of Jaipur issued an arrest warrant last month for Gere and summoned Shetty to his court, saying that Gere's kissing of the actress at a public AIDS awareness event in New Delhi contravened India's strict public obscenity laws.
The judge has since been transferred from his post, and official charges have not yet been lodged.
The Supreme Court will rule on the issue Tuesday, Grover said. Both defendants would be affected by any shift of venue.
"In the meantime, the court should stay proceedings against Shetty," he said, adding that he was not representing Gere in the case.
It was not immediately clear if Gere would be represented by an Indian attorney.
Public displays of affection are largely taboo in India, and the kiss drew an outcry among Hindu hard-liners, with rallies against the actors held in several cities. But the judge's arrest order also drew harsh criticism in India, with some lawyers saying it had no legal merit and made the country look ridiculous.
Gere, 57, apologized for any offense he may have caused. But he also said the whole controversy was manufactured by a small hard-line political party.
Gere, who left shortly after the kiss, is a frequent visitor to India, promoting health issues and the cause of Tibetan exiles. The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has his headquarters in the northern Indian town of Dharmsala.
Shetty, a well-known actress in India, became an international star after her appearance on the British reality show Celebrity Big Brother.
A fellow contestant, Jade Goody, sparked international headlines by allegedly making racist comments to Shetty, 31. The comments sparked public outrage in Britain and India and Shetty went on to win the competition.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Angelina Jolie touches on home front
By Lorena Blas, USA TODAY
While Brad Pitt stumps for the green scene, careful not to say a word about his private life, his partner, Angelina Jolie, doesn't mind sharing some details about home life with their four children: Maddox, 5, Zahara, 2, Shiloh, 11 months, and new addition Pax, 3.
MORE: Brad gaga over 'green' houses
Jolie, 31, brought Pax home from Vietnam in March. She tells June's Reader's Digest how she and Pitt, 43, are juggling parenting duties. "We've tried to figure out a lot of private time for each of them. When everybody goes to bed, we give Mad time. When everybody is at school, we give Shiloh time. In between, Z and Pax each get special time. And on Sundays, we have a big family sleep," when the kids get in bed with their parents and watch a movie. "We're talking about having to build a bigger bed!"
This month, the couple's youngest turns 1, and Jolie says that she planned her pregnancy with Shiloh. "I always said I was happy never to have a child biologically. (Brad) told me he hadn't given up that thought. Then … after Z came home (from Ethiopia), I saw Brad with her and Mad, and I realized how much he loved them, that a biological child would not in any way be a threat."
Asked if she adopted Pax so Maddox (from Cambodia) would have a brother who looks like him, Jolie replies that, after Shiloh's birth, "somebody in the house looked like Mommy and Daddy. It became clear to us that it might be important to have somebody around who is similar to the other children so they have a connection."
Family is important to Jolie, whose mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died in January. Jolie says that her mother lived long enough to see her "grow up to be quite happy."
Indeed, Jolie says, "Yesterday, picking up the kids from school, Brad turned around in the car, and there were three of (their kids). He couldn't stop laughing. We love them and are having a great time."
Reader's Digest is on stands May 22.
By Lorena Blas, USA TODAY
While Brad Pitt stumps for the green scene, careful not to say a word about his private life, his partner, Angelina Jolie, doesn't mind sharing some details about home life with their four children: Maddox, 5, Zahara, 2, Shiloh, 11 months, and new addition Pax, 3.
MORE: Brad gaga over 'green' houses
Jolie, 31, brought Pax home from Vietnam in March. She tells June's Reader's Digest how she and Pitt, 43, are juggling parenting duties. "We've tried to figure out a lot of private time for each of them. When everybody goes to bed, we give Mad time. When everybody is at school, we give Shiloh time. In between, Z and Pax each get special time. And on Sundays, we have a big family sleep," when the kids get in bed with their parents and watch a movie. "We're talking about having to build a bigger bed!"
This month, the couple's youngest turns 1, and Jolie says that she planned her pregnancy with Shiloh. "I always said I was happy never to have a child biologically. (Brad) told me he hadn't given up that thought. Then … after Z came home (from Ethiopia), I saw Brad with her and Mad, and I realized how much he loved them, that a biological child would not in any way be a threat."
Asked if she adopted Pax so Maddox (from Cambodia) would have a brother who looks like him, Jolie replies that, after Shiloh's birth, "somebody in the house looked like Mommy and Daddy. It became clear to us that it might be important to have somebody around who is similar to the other children so they have a connection."
Family is important to Jolie, whose mother, Marcheline Bertrand, died in January. Jolie says that her mother lived long enough to see her "grow up to be quite happy."
Indeed, Jolie says, "Yesterday, picking up the kids from school, Brad turned around in the car, and there were three of (their kids). He couldn't stop laughing. We love them and are having a great time."
Reader's Digest is on stands May 22.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Nigeria: Six Nigerian, 108 Others Feared Dead
5 May 2007
Posted to the web 6 May 2007
Ahmed I Shekarau
Six Nigerians have been confirmed to be among 114 people on board a Kenya Airways plane, which reportedly crashed yesterday in southern cameroon.
The flight which originated in Ivory Coast, was reported missing yesterday after it failed to arrive in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.
Cameroon state radio said the plane came down south of Doula, the commercial capital although Kenya Aurways had as at yesterday only confirmed that it was missing.
The BBC reported that people from atleast 23 different nationalities were onboard, including 35 Camerooninas, 15 Indians, nine Kenyans who were members of crew, seven South Africans and five Britons, the airline said.
Nigeria, China and Ivory Coast had six nationals each onboard the crashed plane, while the Niger republic had three of its citizens.
But the identities of the six Nigerians on board the crashed aircraft could not be ascertained up to press time yesterday.
Spokesman of Nigeria's Minister of State in charge of Air Transportation, Bayo Oladeji said government was yet to get official report on the identities of the nation's citizens on board the craft.
Mr. Oladeji who sought time to make further inquiries from other top aviation officials told Sunday Trust yesterday, that government was still awaiting report on the identities of those involved. He, however, advised our reporter to check with offices of either Cameroon Airlines or the Kenya Airways.
Other countries whose nationals are confirmed to be on board the Kenya Airways jet were the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Equatorial Guinea, each of which had two, while Ghana; Sweden, Togo, Mali, Switzerland, Comoros, Egypt, Mauritius, Senegal, Congo, Tanzania, US and Burkina Faso had one national each on board the ill-fated jet, according to the manifest released yesterday by the airline.
Reports indicate that the identities of three of the passengers on board were not known as at yesterday.
The BBC reported that Kenya's national carrier had a good safety record. However, 169 people died when one of its planes crashed in 2000.
The BBC's Karen Allen in Nairobi said the Boeing 737-800 involved in yesterday's incident was just six months old and was part of a new fleet bought by the airline.
According to reports, Flight KQ 507 originated in Abidjan in Ivory Coast and left Douala in Cameroon at 0005 local time (0105 GMT) yesterday. It was due to arrive in Nairobi at 0615 (0315 GMT).
Kenya Airways said the last communication with the missing plane was received by the control tower in Douala, on Cameroon's coast, shortly after take-off.
Cameroon radio initially said the plane came down near Niete, South along the coast from Douala, although later reports suggested the crash had happened further inland.
"The search location has now been centred around 100kms (62 miles) south-west of [Cameroon's political capital] Yaounde," Kenyan Airways chief executive Titus Naikuni told a news conference.
He said an extensive search of the area by low-flying aircraft had found nothing, and a second search team was on its way to the site. Poor weather was reported to have hampered the rescue effort.
Kenyan Transport Minister Chirau Ali Makwere - who was leading a team of Kenya Airways and government officials to Douala said it was too early to determine what had happened to the plane.
"We need to get information from the technical experts as to whether it was occasioned by the weather or pilot error or mechanical fault," he was quoted by the Associated Press (AP) as saying.
A crisis management centre has been set up in Nairobi. A number of worried friends and relatives have been gathering at the capital's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
"We had been told to sit and wait," one relative of a missing passenger told AFP news agency.
"A lot of people are crying, pe-ople are asking what is happening."
The Kenya Airways website said the fleet is 23 strong. It is 26%-owned by Air France KLM's Dutch company KLM.
In January 2000 a Kenya Airways plane crashed into the sea after taking off from Abidjan airport in Ivory Coast killing 169 people. There were 10 survivors.
5 May 2007
Posted to the web 6 May 2007
Ahmed I Shekarau
Six Nigerians have been confirmed to be among 114 people on board a Kenya Airways plane, which reportedly crashed yesterday in southern cameroon.
The flight which originated in Ivory Coast, was reported missing yesterday after it failed to arrive in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.
Cameroon state radio said the plane came down south of Doula, the commercial capital although Kenya Aurways had as at yesterday only confirmed that it was missing.
The BBC reported that people from atleast 23 different nationalities were onboard, including 35 Camerooninas, 15 Indians, nine Kenyans who were members of crew, seven South Africans and five Britons, the airline said.
Nigeria, China and Ivory Coast had six nationals each onboard the crashed plane, while the Niger republic had three of its citizens.
But the identities of the six Nigerians on board the crashed aircraft could not be ascertained up to press time yesterday.
Spokesman of Nigeria's Minister of State in charge of Air Transportation, Bayo Oladeji said government was yet to get official report on the identities of the nation's citizens on board the craft.
Mr. Oladeji who sought time to make further inquiries from other top aviation officials told Sunday Trust yesterday, that government was still awaiting report on the identities of those involved. He, however, advised our reporter to check with offices of either Cameroon Airlines or the Kenya Airways.
Other countries whose nationals are confirmed to be on board the Kenya Airways jet were the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Equatorial Guinea, each of which had two, while Ghana; Sweden, Togo, Mali, Switzerland, Comoros, Egypt, Mauritius, Senegal, Congo, Tanzania, US and Burkina Faso had one national each on board the ill-fated jet, according to the manifest released yesterday by the airline.
Reports indicate that the identities of three of the passengers on board were not known as at yesterday.
The BBC reported that Kenya's national carrier had a good safety record. However, 169 people died when one of its planes crashed in 2000.
The BBC's Karen Allen in Nairobi said the Boeing 737-800 involved in yesterday's incident was just six months old and was part of a new fleet bought by the airline.
According to reports, Flight KQ 507 originated in Abidjan in Ivory Coast and left Douala in Cameroon at 0005 local time (0105 GMT) yesterday. It was due to arrive in Nairobi at 0615 (0315 GMT).
Kenya Airways said the last communication with the missing plane was received by the control tower in Douala, on Cameroon's coast, shortly after take-off.
Cameroon radio initially said the plane came down near Niete, South along the coast from Douala, although later reports suggested the crash had happened further inland.
"The search location has now been centred around 100kms (62 miles) south-west of [Cameroon's political capital] Yaounde," Kenyan Airways chief executive Titus Naikuni told a news conference.
He said an extensive search of the area by low-flying aircraft had found nothing, and a second search team was on its way to the site. Poor weather was reported to have hampered the rescue effort.
Kenyan Transport Minister Chirau Ali Makwere - who was leading a team of Kenya Airways and government officials to Douala said it was too early to determine what had happened to the plane.
"We need to get information from the technical experts as to whether it was occasioned by the weather or pilot error or mechanical fault," he was quoted by the Associated Press (AP) as saying.
A crisis management centre has been set up in Nairobi. A number of worried friends and relatives have been gathering at the capital's Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.
"We had been told to sit and wait," one relative of a missing passenger told AFP news agency.
"A lot of people are crying, pe-ople are asking what is happening."
The Kenya Airways website said the fleet is 23 strong. It is 26%-owned by Air France KLM's Dutch company KLM.
In January 2000 a Kenya Airways plane crashed into the sea after taking off from Abidjan airport in Ivory Coast killing 169 people. There were 10 survivors.
Relatives wait after hearing the news of the missing Kenya Airways plane at Jomo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi, Kenya, on Saturday.
(Sayyid Azim/Associated Press)
114 feared dead in crash of Kenya Airways plane
Last Updated: Saturday, May 5, 2007 | 8:15 AM ET
CBC News
A Kenya Airways flight carrying 114 people crashed Saturday near the border between Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, an area of heavy forest and swamps.
"It was due to arrive in the morning here in Nairobi at 6:15. Unfortunately the aircraft has not arrived," Titus Naikuni, Kenya Airways CEO, told reporters on Saturday.
The control tower in the city of Douala, Cameroon, where the flight originated, received a distress call just after the midnight take-off, Naikuni said.
That was the last message from the plane, a new Boeing 737-800 that had been in service just six months.
Most of the passengers were West African, along with several Europeans, Indians, and one American. There were no Canadians on the flight, Kenya Airways said.
Weather may have been the cause of the crash. Naikuni said the flight took off an hour late because of heavy rain.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Words of Purpose
"Take time to get away and nurture your relationship. Often we speak of women serving their husbands, but one important way men can do this is by serving their wives. Unfortunately in our society men who serve their wives are often called 'weak' or 'punks.' I know I've had guys tease me and call me weak. Meanwhile, my marriage is growing by leaps and bounds and they're not married anymore."
Actor Courtney B. Vance, husband of actress Angela Bassett, in their autobiography Friends: A Love Story
Angela Bassett's Beginnings
Below is an excerpt of her autobiography with her husband, actor Courtney B. Vance
What a glamorous life actress Angela Bassett seems to have, paved with red carpets, furnished with award statuettes, and graced with a handsome celebrity spouse. However, before the storybook marriage and the Oscar nod for her role as Tina Turner in What's Love Got To Do With It, she was a girl growing up in the South during the 1960s and 1970s on church hymns and The Jackson 5. Green-apple Jolly Ranchers and Lady Sings the Blues were among her favorite indulgences. Does any of this strike a chord with you? Then read the following excerpt of Bassett's new book with her husband Courtney B. Vance (co-written with NiaOnline's own Hilary Beard). Friends: A Love Story (Kimani Press, $24.95) tells the tale of how the two actors' lives intertwined to form one of Hollywood's most enduring romances. However, it starts with the story of Bassett's childhood. It's a tale that is at turns heartbreaking (she describes instances of molestation elsewhere in the book) and achingly familiar. Read on…
My mother may have struggled in school and early in her life, but she had an excellence about her and passed it on to us. Mama didn't want us to suffer her fate and she would tell us as much. She made sure we looked nice. She made sure we did well in school. She raised us up to love God. On Sundays we would walk together to Stewart Memorial CME Church where we attended Sunday school and service. I was part of the youth choir and had a great time singing. Ma was a deaconess. She sang in the adult choir. Her favorite song is "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," which she sang as a high soprano with her typical melodrama. I would be so embarrassed. One of my favorite memories is watching Papa [my grandfather] sing "Take Your Troubles to the Lord and Leave Them There" while he was standing in front of the altar of his church. He took this white handkerchief out of his pocket and threw it across his shoulder like it represented his burdens weighing down on him real heavily. When he finished the song--Take your burdens to the Lord and leave them there--he took the handkerchief off his shoulder, threw it over the altar with a flourish and turned on his heel and walked away lighter. I remember sitting there rapt. "Wow, Papa!" It was great acting and great theater. I come from a very dramatic family.
At home I played with my baby dolls and cut out patterns for them. I had lots of dolls. When I was a little girl I had White dolls--that's all there were. I remember little Black girls with White baby dolls. But after James Brown came out with "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," I remember Black dolls coming out on the market. Aunt Golden sent me and D'nette these two Black baby dolls--they were two or three feet tall. You could hold their hands and walk with them. I always thought the Black baby dolls were pretty; it was nice to see a baby doll that looked just like me. We'd comb their hair then my cousin cut their hair--then we needed new dolls. There were some Black girls who still wanted White dolls--that's what they were used to. Personally, I never had Barbie dolls because they didn't look like me.
We watched Julia, Bonanza, The Monkees and Tarzan on TV. Mom would have us sing and perform together Motown hits that were popular on the radio. The latest single would come out, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" or "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," or "You Got Me Going in Circles," and she'd have us act it out. Then one of the ladies in the neighborhood who liked kids helped us form a little dance group. We'd make up dances and sing to songs like "Kung Fu Fighting" and perform them at the local Delta Sigma Theta mixer. I laugh when I think back on how much all this would aid me as a lip-syncher later in life. Mom would also take us to the movies. We saw Lady Sings the Blues, which my sister loved--after she saw it we had to learn all the Diana Ross songs. We also saw The Ten Commandments and Superfly. I was in love with the Jackson 5 and daydreamed I would marry one of them--probably whoever had the cutest, roundest Afro at the time. In my imagination we would have children and live in a real house.
This excerpt of Chapter 1 ("I Ain't Average") of Friends: A Love Story was provided courtesy of Kimani Press.
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