politics | I am so sick and tired of governments balancing budgets on the backs of the vulnerable... (Reply)

ENGLAND

Disability protesters go on a remote offensive
Many disabled people are horrified at the proposed changes to benefits but, for some, street protests are unrealistic. How are they getting their voices heard?

Kaliya Franklin sometimes wishes that she were campaigning to save the forests. "It's easy to campaign on trees because all we have to do is look at them and we can all agree that they are something really valuable for our future," she says.

Instead, she is fighting government cuts to disability benefits, an area that doesn't have the same universal appeal. Franklin and her colleague Rhydian Fôn James, through the website The Broken of Britain, are mounting an angry online battle to prevent proposed cuts to disability living allowance (DLA) and reforms to a range of other sickness and disability-related benefits.MORE

ZAMBIA

Young Voters Push Grassroots Issues to the Fore

Lusaka, Mar 22, 2011 (IPS) - Concina Haajila was only a year old in 1991 when Zambia turned from 27 years of autocracy and dictatorship to political pluralism and democratic governance. During the past 20 years she and millions of her peers have grown to adulthood and become disenchanted with the politics of their nation which have swung from an issue base to hero worship and personal purse enlargement.

"I intend to use my vote well by choosing leaders who will work for us as the youth in all areas where we have our own concerns," Haajila, who has just registered as a new voter, observed.

"That is why as the youth we need to encourage other youths to go and register as voters," explained Marko Mulenga, the executive director of 2410 - a civil society organisation for young people that has turned its full attention to voter registration ahead of national elections due in Zambia towards the end of this year. The national elections coming up in Zambia will see men and women fight for seats in local and municipal councils; parliament and of course the hot seat of president.
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WORLD ORGANIZATIONS

Q&A'Microfinance Is Much More Than Just Credit'

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 23, 2011 (IPS) - A day after U.S. assistant secretary of state for south and central Asian affairs Robert Blake appealed to the Bangladeshi government to reconsider its dismissal of 70-year-old microfinance guru Muhammad Yunus from the Grameen Bank, IPS spoke with the president and CEO of Women's World Banking (WWB), currently the most comprehensive network of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in the world.

Mary Ellen Iskenderian, who has worked with WWB for well over a decade, believes that what she calls a political smear campaign against Yunus has no bearing on the tangible changes provoked by MFIs.

She dismissed the notion, which is swiftly gaining momentum in many quarters, that microcredit is ineffective as a sustainable method of poverty alleviation and must be replaced.

Iskenderian argues that the long-term positive impact of MFIs and their projects in the global south will help to close the poverty gap and empower rural, third world women – a population who shoulders the brunt of structural inequality.

Excerpts from the interview follow. MORE

TRADE BETWEEN EU AND CARIBBEAN, AFRICA AND PACIFIC COUNTRIES

TRADE African NGOs Oppose Human Rights Clause in EPAs

GENEVA, Mar 22, 2011 (IPS) - Part of the delay in the finalisation of the economic partnership agreements (EPAs) is due to the so-called non-execution clause that gives the EU the power to take steps against its African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) trading partners if they violate human rights, democracy and good governance principles.

"African governments and civil society resist this clause because EPAs are commercial agreements where the two parties give and take," explains Cheikh Tidiane Dieye, the civil society representative of the West African EPA negotiating team.

"Furthermore, the clause is not reciprocal since West Africa would not be able to take steps against the EU if Senegalese immigrants in France are put in jail in violation of basic human rights principles, for example," he adds.
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INDIA

‘Reform legal rights of disabled people’

Activists and doctors are up in arms against two ministries taking completely opposite points of view on the legal rights of people with disabilities and mental illnesses. The Disability Rights Bill 2010 drafted by the ministry of social justice, which is out for public discussion, mentions full legal capacity to people with disability that include people living with mental illness. The Mental Health Care Bill 2010, also open currently for public debate, however, talks of providing restricted legal capacity to people living with mental illness.

According to estimated data, around 36 million people are living with severe mental illness. Since mental disability is considered the same as physical disability in India, experts working on bringing in reforms in existing laws say there is no need for two separate laws.MORE

CZECH REPUBLIC

Over 1,000 people with disabilities protest against social reforms in Prague, Brno

Prague/Brno, March 22 (CTK) - Over 1000 disabled and elderly people, their family members and supporters protested against the centre-right government's planned social care reform in Prague, according to police estimates, and about 200 held a similar protest meeting in Brno yesterday.

However, the organisers say some 3000 people participated in the rally in Prague held outside the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry.

It was organised by the National Disability Council (NRZP) that criticises the plans of Labour and Social Affairs Minister Jaromir Drabek (TOP 09).

The NRZP leadership warns that the reform would have a disastrous impact on the disabled.

However, the ministry argues that the planned measures are to secure a more efficient aid, prevent its abuse and simplify the system.

According to the NRZP, the planned measures are not to improve the position of the disabled but primarily to save finances.MORE

UGANDA
Muhame ends up on the wrong end of a $2,100 bill

It is not a lot of money (about $700 each) that the three plaintiffs were awarded by the Ugandan court but the symbolism cannot have escaped Giles Muhame and the rest of the gay detractors in Uganda.

Giles Muhame with his tawdry tabloid

Thus far, in the last 3 years, Ugandan gay activists have taken disparate anti-gay entities to court twice. They have won two times. December 2008 two lesbians were handed a $7,000 Christmas present by Justice Arach when she ruled that their human rights had been violated by government functionaries who barged into their home ostensibly looking for proof that they were gay. Then, last year, Giles Muhame opened a battle on another front by printing "100" pictures and names of "men of shame." He was taken to court for violating the privacy of the individuals named. He lost that case. He has now been asked to pay restitution. Muhame is lucky he wasn't sued by more of the men and women he named and/or whose photographs he printed. The 5 million shillings (about $2,100) he now has to pay will hurt his paper but he might yet survive as that is not a lot of money.

The lessons to us gay men and women seem clear.

The first one is that it makes sense to invest in fighting legal battles in Uganda's courts of law. MORE

VIETNAM

Union opens for people with disabilities

The Union for Disabled People’s Associations will make its debut on March 26 in Hanoi to help people with disabilities further integrate into the community and become engaged in mainstream activities.
Addressing the press briefing on March 22, provisional Deputy President Nguyen Ngoc Lam said the union will also create favourable conditions for communities and disabled people to help each other in daily life.

Together with making contributions, building and boosting the implementation of the State’s regulations on disabilities and the international convention on the rights of people with disabilities, the union will also represent Vietnamese disabled people in international organisations and will attend international cooperation conferences regarding disabled people.MORE

USA

The “Lesbian Until Graduation:” Now A New York Times Most Emailed Article!

So, really, there’s two different stories here: the story that the NYT was actually trying to report on, which is that same-sex relationships actually have a higher incidence among women who didn’t finish high school than women with higher educational degrees. But then there’s the second story, which is that the New York Times apparently thought gay relationships in college really were just about “experimentation.” Both deserve to be talked about.First of all, the facts:
…according to the new study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on 13,500 responses, almost 10 percent of women ages 22 to 44 with a bachelor’s degree said they had had a same-sex experience, compared with 15 percent of those with no high school diploma. Women with a high school diploma or some college, but no degree, fell in between.
Six percent of college-educated women reported oral sex with a same-sex partner, compared with 13 percent who did not complete high school.
There are a few reasons this could be. If I had to guess – and I shouldn’t be allowed to, because I am not a social scientist – I would guess that these women have been there in some population all along, but haven’t been sampled properly before.
As Amber Hollibaugh of Queers for Economic Justice says, “the results of the federal survey underscored how poor, minority and working-class lesbians had been overshadowed by the mainstream cultural image of lesbians as white professionals.”Basically, poor minority queer women with less than a high school education are about as invisible as it gets in America, and of course you’re going to overrepresent an activity in a population if it’s the only thing you’re looking at. MORE

INTERNATIONAL

MEDIA It's Still a Man's World, Especially at the Top

NEW YORK, Mar 23, 2011 (IPS) - Long known as a "boy's club", the worldwide media industry continues to struggle with gender equality, with new research showing women are still underrepresented in the majority of newsrooms across the globe.

The study, conducted over a two-year period for the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF), covered 170,000 people in the news media and involved interviews with 500 companies in 59 countries.

On average women are underrepresented in all media positions, in sectors ranging from news media ownership, publishing, governance, reporting, editing, photojournalism, and broadcast production. MORE

SPAIN

2009 Journeys: Spanish Village of Rainbow Weddings

In June 2005, Spain’s socialist government passed a law legalizing gay marriage and conferring the exact same rights and nomenclature — matrimonio in Spanish — to both homosexual and heterosexual unions. But soon after the law’s passage, several prominent and conservative mayors publicly declared that they would not perform gay marriages. Campillo’s nonprominent and liberal mayor, Francisco Maroto, who also happened to be openly gay, declared that he would perform them.

What happened next is the subject of a documentary film, “Campillo Sí, Quiero” (“Campillo Yes, I do”), which was produced and directed by Andrés Rubio and is making the rounds at gay and independent film festivals from Dublin to Buenos Aires. Shot over the span of a year, the film tells the story of how this hardscrabble hamlet, which was virtually abandoned 20 years ago, has been revived through a willingness to serve anyone who is willing to marry there. Saying “yes” to gay couples turns out to have lured straight ones as well and has spawned a wedding and tourism industry that coexists quite peacefully with the town’s rural character.MORE