[Feminist Daily News]
Feminist Daily News Wire

Pakistani Women Gain Right to Choose Whom They Marry

Pakistan's highest court ruled that a Muslim woman can marry of her own free will without the permission of her parents or guardians. According to Voice of America, this decision overrules a Lahore High Court ruling that demanded that women need parental consent to marry. ... (please click link for rest of story)

My Comment: It's so weird to me... This country could have a woman president, and yet until a few days ago, women needed parental consent to marry... It reminds me of how Britain had seveal powerful and admired queens and yet many British women had few rights and freedoms... I find it to be a really strange disconnect in a society's mentality.

Afghan Women Demand Equal Rights For Women in Constitution

Female delegates attending Afghanistan's Loya Jirga succeeded in winning an agreement to replace the words "citizens of Afghanistan" with the expression "women and men" in one of the articles in the Constitution regarding education. The current draft lacks language that defines "citizens" as both women and men. According to Eurasia Net, female delegates are hoping that the replacement of "Afghan citizens" with "Afghan men and women" will be made throughout the constitution. ... (please click link for rest of story)

[Newsweek at MSNBC.com]

Raising Their Voices: Iraqi women are fighting prejudice to regain the rights lost under Saddam--and to win themselves a say in rebuilding their country
   By Maria Cristina Caballero
  While Iraqi women activists are fighting for equality, the majority of Baghdad's residents
  say they want women to adopt a more traditional role

Affra al-Barak spent seven years in an Iraqi prison because she spoke briefly with a man considered "suspicious" by Saddam Hussein's henchmen. In jail, she saw women hanged by their feet when they began menstruating so that, she says, they became "poisoned by the infection generated by their own blood." Many fellow prisoners were raped and tortured. ... (please click link for rest of story)

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[ t r u t h o u t ]

The Death of Horatio Alger
  By Paul Krugman
  The Nation, 05 Jan 2004 Edition

The other day I found myself reading a leftist rag that made outrageous claims about America. It said that we are becoming a society in which the poor tend to stay poor, no matter how hard they work; in which sons are much more likely to inherit the socioeconomic status of their father than they were a generation ago.

The name of the leftist rag? ... (please click link for rest of story)

[The Boston Globe]
12/15/2003

Op-ed: Squelching dissent in the name of security
 By David Cunningham

Despite the FBI's denials, recent disclosures of intelligence efforts against lawful antiwar protesters are strong reminders of the bureau's intensive undercover operations of the 1960s and '70s. Those counterintelligence operations, known as COINTELPRO, sought to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of targets that included communist organizations, civil rights groups, the Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Vietnam War protesters. While the current revelations are confined to the monitoring of perceived threats rather than active harassment, the broad sweep of the FBI's efforts should raise serious concerns over the bureau's motives and methods.

The New York Times has reported that these methods now include the use of "firsthand observation, informants, and public sources like the Internet" to gather "extensive information on the tactics, training, and organization of antiwar demonstrators." Bureau officials were careful to emphasize that this effort is not designed to monitor the masses of law-abiding protesters, but instead to target anarchists and other "extremist elements" likely to plot and carry out violent acts. But clearly their net was cast more broadly, as the FBI's weekly bulletin to local law enforcement officials contained information about legal movement tactics such as online fund-raising, passive monitoring of police arrests, and activist "training camps."

The sheer scope of these efforts closely parallels the organizational logic of COINTELPRO. In my analysis of more than 6,000 pages of FBI memos related to the anti-Vietnam War movement, I found that agents initiated more than 450 actions against hundreds of groups and individuals between 1968 and 1971. These actions ranged from faked anonymous letters to planted evidence to falsified media stories to massive surreptitious infiltration by informants. ... (please click link for rest of story)