Fatu Kekula

A story posted publicly by A Mighty Girl on Facebook:

The incredible story of 22-year-old Liberian nursing student Fatu Kekula, who used trash bags to protect herself from Ebola while saving the lives of her family members, inspired people around the world last fall. Fatu’s innovative “trash bag method” was widely praised and is even being taught by aid workers to other West Africans caring for sick loved ones without standard protective gear. But with most schools closed in the country due to the epidemic, Fatu was unsure how she would finish her nursing training. Now, with the help of international supporters, Fatu has the opportunity to finish her education at one of the premier nursing schools in the United States. [Read more…]

“I am not sure why you feel the need to protect him”

I guess I should adjust my opinion of Judd Apatow. I had thought of him as one of the pillars of Bro-world, whose citizens generally seem oblivious to the existence of women as anything other than platforms for genitalia. But that doesn’t seem to cohere well with his attitude to Bill Cosby.

If you’ve followed director Judd Apatow’s Twitter musings for the last several weeks, his views on the rape allegations against Bill Cosby won’t come as a huge surprise.

But over the weekend, Apatow went on a lengthy anti-Cosby rampage. He slammed Cosby’s “cold” defenders for siding with the comedian. He compared Cosby’s lack of conviction in a court of law to Hitler dying without being convicted of murder. And he labeled Cosby “a rapist” and “a monster.” [Read more…]

Just children

A great comic on the whole “let’s make a special pink fluffy version of this toy for girls” approach to toy-making and -marketing. Maritsa Patrinos is the artist.

“Why do girls need their own Legos?”

“We wanted Legos to appeal to girls more.”

Why not just make them appeal to children? Just children?

There’s no need to sell tricycle for girls and tricycles for boys. There’s no need to sell baseball bats or wagons or toy cars or stuffed animals or train sets or dolls or in fact anything for girls or for boys. There’s no need for all this shepherding and herding and nudging. Leave us alone. Let us play with whatever we want to play with, and keep your ideas about what’s “gender appropriate” to yourself.

Dossiers on trolls

Sweden has a tv journalist who confronts internet trolls, Robert Aschberg.

The goal of Troll Hunter is not to rid the Internet of every troll. “The agenda is to raise hell about all the hate on the Net,” he says. “To start a discussion.” Back at the Troll Hunter office, a whiteboard organized Aschberg’s agenda. Dossiers on other trolls were tacked up in two rows: a pair of teens who anonymously slander their high school classmates on Instagram, a politician who runs a racist website, a male law student who stole the identity of a young woman to entice another man into an online relationship. In a sign of the issue’s resonance in Sweden, a pithy neologism has been coined to encompass all these forms of online nastiness: näthat (“Net hate”). Troll Hunter, which has become a minor hit for its brash tackling of näthat, is currently filming its second season.

It is generally no longer acceptable in public life to hurl slurs at women or minorities, to rally around the idea that some humans are inherently worth less than others, or to terrorize vulnerable people. But old-school hate is having a sort of renaissance online, and in the countries thought to be furthest beyond it. [Read more…]

The literacy rate for 15-24 year-old women is 32%

A woman member of parliament in Afghanistan, Shukria Barakzai, escaped death in a suicide bombing last November.

Barakzai, who rose to prominence when she ran underground schools for girls when the Taliban ruled the country, says both the previous Afghan government and its Western benefactors have failed to defend the hard-won rights of women.

“For me, what they do to support women’s rights is just lip service, nothing more than that,” says Barakzai, interviewed in hospital where she was recovering from burns to the left side of her face and her left hand from the attack.

[Read more…]

She had looked through the door

My first awareness of Mark Danner, I think, was reading his long article in the New Yorker The Truth of El Mozote, about a massacre by the army of El Salvador. The full article is on his website. That was December 1993. I kept the magazine sitting around for months because of the cover.

1993_12_06

I’ll share a little, because it’s all connected. This wasn’t about Osama bin Laden, it was about the Cold War and the military versus the guerillas, but it was the US behaving badly again. We backed the military despite knowing it was up to its armpits in atrocities.

[Read more…]

A burden for many families

Tahmima Anam on early marriage in Bangladesh.

A recent study by the development organization Plan Bangladesh and the nonprofit International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, showed that 64 percent of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of 18. Early marriage and early motherhood are the cause of a host of social and health problems, from a greater incidence of domestic violence to an increased risk of child and maternal mortality. Young brides stop going to school (according to Unicef, 5.6 million Bangladeshi children have dropped out of education early because of marriage) and thus have fewer opportunities for employment, and, crucially, little knowledge of their rights within marriage. [Read more…]

They were essentially without any relevant experience

Mark Danner talks to Hugh Eaken at the New York Review blog about the CIA torture program.

Danner notes that the Senate’s report on the program contains a lot that was already known, but tells it “in appalling detail that we hadn’t seen before.”

The relentlessness, day in day out, of these techniques; the totality of their effect when taken together—walling, close-confinement, water-dousing, waterboarding, the newly revealed “rectal rehydration,” and various other disgusting and depraved things—is recounted in numbing, revolting detail. The effect can only be conveyed by a full reading, through page after awful page of this five-hundred-page document, which is after all less than 10 percent of the report itself.

[Read more…]