Posts from ‘September, 2009’

On the morning of June 15, 2004, in Ahmedabad, in the state of Gujarat in India, Ishrat Jahan and three others were killed by police. In India, these events are commonly referred to as encounters. The government claimed that Ishrat Jahan was “India’s first woman terrorist”. A recent magistrate report suggests that Jahan was simply [...]

Like a lot of people growing up, I got nervous speaking in public and got the obligatory suggestion from some adult that I picture the audience in their underwear.  The idea was that if I was standing in front of naked or mostly naked people, I couldn’t possibly be the most self-conscious person in the [...]

There was a stampede in Jakarta, Indonesia today. Few agencies have reported it, I’ve found only one. Thirteen people are reported injured, and it is reported that the thousands who gathered for free food and cash handouts, to mark the end of Ramadan, were overwhelmingly women and children.
Human stampedes are reported throughout the year, everywhere. [...]

“Eclipsed” Last 10 days! See it now!
Written by Danai Gurira, directed by Liesl Tommy, world premier at the Woolly Mammoth, Washington, DC, until September 27, 2009 
In case you’re only going to read this one paragraph, I’m going to jump the gun. Don’t be put off by the subject of this play – five Liberian women [...]

On September 11th the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) discovered that domestic violence is legally considered a ‘pre-existing condition’ in eight states and the District of Columbia and therefore a reason to deny health insurance.  The issue, however, is not new and in fact the Senate HELP committee voted on the issue in 2006; 10 [...]

Sexual and gender based violence in Africa 
A New ACAS Bulletin edited by Daniel Moshenberg 
This Bulletin began in response to news reports of “corrective” and “curative” gang rapes of lesbians in South Africa. These were then followed by news reports of a study in South Africa that found that one in four men in South Africa [...]

A new subset of genetics—“epigenetics”—appeared on the horizon in the 1990s and has been getting a lot of attention lately because it suggests some fascinating and frightening things about how “lifestyles and environment can change the way our genes are expressed” over the course of our lifetime. It has even reintroduced the once discredited idea [...]

At this time four years ago, New Orleans residents of color were being hunted like animals by white citizens and National Guardsmen alike as the waters of Katrina receded… 
…and now ZA has its own “shoot to kill” policy. On the anniversary of 9/11, it really makes me wonder about how “we” define terrorism. Brutality by the [...]

It’s Labor Day weekend in the United States, and I’ve been thinking of the names, words, and voices that are consistently dropped out of the public accounts of workers and of labor. They’re stories that are deemed not worth telling or selling. Who decides the value of a story or the worth of a person [...]

 Last Wednesday, August 28th, residents of the 200 block of Q St. NW in Washington, DC were shocked by a brutal assault against two women, one of whom was killed.  Violence is nothing alien to DC, the District was once known as the ‘murder capital’ of the U.S., but this act stands out.  The motive, [...]