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| WOMEN TODAY |
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The technique separates sperm into two groups -- those that carry the X-chromosome (which leads to a female baby) and those that carry the Y-chromosome (which produces a male baby). The process was developed in the early 1990s by the Genetics & IVF Institute in Fairfax, and last week's opening of a MicroSort laboratory in Laguna Hills marks the company's first expansion.
The expansion brings with it not only a seemingly effective way to select a child's gender -- it also highlights a host of ethical and practical considerations that accompany sex selection, especially for the majority of families who use the technique for nonmedical reasons.
 SunSpot.net (Baltimore)
In Iraq war, women would serve closer to front lines than in past 3-3-03
Changes in law and policy since the Persian Gulf war have opened up thousands more positions to women. In Iraq, women would serve in greater numbers, closer to front-line combat and more integrated into core operations than in any previous U.S. military conflict.
Unlike the gulf war of 1991, women would probably be in the cockpits of fighter jets, bombers and Apache attack helicopters during an opening air assault. And women such as Jenni would probably be in armed reconnaissance aircraft that scout enemy troops and targets.
WashingtonTimes
Abortion sides upset at plans for funds 3-3-03
A Bush administration decision to provide funding from an expanded AIDS program to overseas clinics that also promote abortion has roiled both sides in the long-standing battle over abortion policy.
To pro-life forces, the decision overturns an effort going back to the Reagan administration to deny U.S. taxpayer funds to organizations that fund or promote abortions overseas, such as Planned Parenthood.
But pro-choice groups are upset that groups accepting the funds will be prohibited from discussing abortion with patients while carrying out AIDS counseling funded by the United States. Such groups are calling the plan "expensive, unwelcome and immoral."
Washington Post
Ashcroft Reconsiders Asylum Granted to Abused Guatemalan 3-3-03
The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and other immigrant and women's groups say they fear Ashcroft intends to issue new regulations that would severely restrict women fleeing gender-based persecution, such as honor killings and sexual slavery as well as domestic violence, from obtaining asylum. In a letter to Ashcroft on Thursday, 48 House Democrats and one independent urged him to abandon any such plans.
Ashcroft remains in charge of decisions about immigration law despite the transfer of the INS from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security.
Nan Keohane was the first among a new generation of women to lead the nation's best universities. She did it with a strong background as a feminist scholar and as an alumna and president of an elite New England women's college. But she never thought of herself as a "woman president."
Others call her a national role model, someone who paved the way for a new crop of powerful female leaders in higher education.
"There is no doubt that her success at Duke made it possible for women in other places across the country to move into leadership positions," said Molly Broad, president of the 16-campus UNC system.
NYTimes
Pentagon Faces New Questions on Old Problem 3-2-03
Early last year, a panel created in part to help address the problem of sexual assault within the military found itself under fire.
Five former chairwomen of the panel urged Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resist pressure to disband it from conservative administration advisers, who said they thought the panel was fostering what one called "radical feminism" and was no longer needed because women had been fully integrated into the military.
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WOMEN
INTERNATIONAL |
Love, fellow-feeling, understanding and empathy are the positive aspects inherent in peace. Incidentally these are the very qualities intrinsic to women’s nature and when given due recognition, these become the empowering influences transforming women’s vulnerability and victim status into women’spower. As Martha Segna, the peace activist, puts it, "we will never have peace through a military solution – never." What is required is to build a "culture of peace" in which women should be given the central role to play.
More than 100 women have endured being walked on by a priest wearing shoes with nails in their soles during a festival in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
The women lay face down in front of the procession as the priest, in an apparent trance, walked over their backs.
The women were thought to have subjected themselves to the ritual as an act of devotion and penance.
BBC News
Malaysia bans female screen kiss 3-3-03
Footage of women kissing each other in Oscar-nominated movie The Hours has been banned by film censors from being shown in Malaysia.
The head of the country's Film Censorship Board said it was protecting "the interests of the country and people from bad influences and negative elements shown in films".
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| THINKING
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NYTimes
Protect Women, Stop a disease 3-3-03
More money to fight AIDS is both welcome and necessary. But its effectiveness depends on how well it helps the primary victims of AIDS in the most highly affected areas: women and teenage girls.
Fifty percent of those infected worldwide, and 58 percent of AIDS victims in sub-Saharan Africa, are women. If we are serious about combating this plague, women must be empowered so that they can defend themselves against the men who are infecting and abandoning them. The administration has failed to do anything significant in this critical area.
Guardian UK
Tackling the sex slave trade 3-2-03
By John Gibb
This trade in human beings is a global problem of staggering human dimensions. As many as four million people are trafficked worldwide each year as victims of forced labour or commercial sexual exploitation, leaving a trail of devastated lives. Too many are women and children forced into pornography or prostitution.
This is modern day slavery. From Nigeria to Italy, from Albania to Moldova, from countries in Asia to Western Europe to the United States, no nation is untouched and every country is linked in a chain of greed, corruption, exploitation, and violence. It is everybody's problem.
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| WOMEN'S HEALTH |
The Globe and Mail
Timing of estrogen therapy for women crucial 3-3-03
Post-menopausal women need not shun hormone replacement therapy in all cases, a new study says.
Although hordes of women ceased the treatment after a large-scale study last summer by the Women's Health Initiative indicated that HRT actually increased the risk of breast cancer, stroke, heart disease and other disorders, Monday's research paper says the timing of when to start the drugs is what women should consider.
BBC News
Women 'wired for worry' 3-3-03
Researchers
Women have lower levels of a crucial enzyme
The biochemistry of women's brains makes them more vulnerable to stress and anxiety, researchers have found.
They have shown that women have lower levels of a brain chemical that controls anxiety.
Having less of the chemical, an enzyme called COMT, appears to make a person more anxious and highly strung.
Washington Post
Experimental Pill Puts Menstruation on Hold 3-3-03
. . . even before it lands on pharmacy shelves, Seasonale has become the focus of controversym sparking dbate over what's "natural," whether it's wise to manipulate a woman's reproductive cycle with hormones for a long time, and whether Seasonale is the latest manifestation of the biases society has historically had against menstruation.
USA Today
Recommendation: 10% of calories from sugar 3-2-03
People should get no more than 10% of their calories from sugar, experts say in a major new report Monday on how to stem the global epidemic of obesity-linked diseases.
The study is the most significant in more than a decade on what the world should be doing about its diet.. . The food industry immediately decried the document, insisting more exercise is the key to ending obesity.
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DESIGN STUDIO |
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It's odd hearing Thom Mayne dismiss paper architecture. For much of his career he was famous for being one of the best--and most esoteric--paper architects in the country. He designed brilliant major works--an art center for Emory University; a golf clubhouse in Chiba, Japan; studios for MTV--that were never built, though other architects saw them in magazines like Progressive Architecture. Mayne did build several small projects--mostly homes and restaurants--for the architectural cognoscenti, but, he says, this time was immensely frustrating. He would scream at clients and became famous for his explosive temper. "None of my clients would recommend me," he says. "At the beginning of your work, you're defining who you are artistically. It's intensely confrontational and radical."
If you think this week's announcement that Studio Daniel Libeskind has been selected to redesign the World Trade Center site is a victory for architecture, you are partly right.
But the design selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. was not the same design that was unveiled to the public. Both teams were forced to significantly revise their proposals to meet conditions set by the development corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
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STYLE.COM
Vogue and W online
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| CREATORS
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Washington Post
Pall Bearers 3-3-03
Well, it's not really just that, because these clothes on models who glare their way down a runway quite often are the crystallization of a business agenda, popular culture, politics and a host of disjointed thoughts that happen to be floating in the air. But as designers here have been unveiling their fall 2003 collections, a sense of frustration with everything that they cannot control -- politics, economics, the possibility of war and all its accompanying paranoia involving plastic sheeting and fear of flying -- has caused them to virtually throw up their hands. "I'm embarrassed to be an American," Ford said.
Like everyone else, designers are searching for something to do, a way to make themselves useful and relevant. For the finale of the D&G show last week, the designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana sent out a parade of models dressed in rainbow-striped tank tops emblazoned with the word pace -- Italian for "peace." (It was a long way from a little more than a year ago, when the D&G finale featured a row of models dressed in shirts that read "I H NY.")
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Newsweek
Bush and God 3-10-03
George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone.
HIS TEXT ISN’T news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.” The author is Oswald Chambers, and, under the circumstances, the historical echoes are loud. A Scotsman and itinerant Baptist preacher, Chambers died in November 1917 as he was bringing the Gospel to Australian and New Zealand soldiers massed in Egypt. By Christmas they had helped to wrest Palestine from the Turks, and captured Jerusalem for the British Empire at the end of World War I.
USNews
Sticking to his guns 3-10-03
Bush is as committed to removing the Iraqi despot as he is to any goal of his presidency. "He is in a zone," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told U.S. News. "He is comfortable. He is resolute. He knows what he wants to do. It's a question of whether Iraq will completely disarm and whether or not the U.N. will act."
"Take 'em out." This kind of certainty worries some of Bush's critics. "In many ways, he's an evangelist," historian Robert Dallek says. "He is not prone to deep thinking. He thinks he has all the right answers, that the Lord is on his side, and that he's doing God's work."
USNews
Separated By More Than An Ocean 3-10-03
Despite the breadth and sharpness of current European anti-Americanism, questions about its depth, causes, and likely consequences abound. Josef Joffe, editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, laments that the contretemps over ousting Saddam has already claimed three victims: "Europe, NATO, and the U.S.-German relationship." That's vastly overstated, contends French political scientist Patrick Chamorel, who insists that "core anti-Americanism" has not grown in France, or Europe as a whole, in the past 10 years. "In general," he says, "there is just opposition to the personality and language of President Bush and to the policy on Iraq."
LATimes
The World Casts a Critical Eye on Bush's Style of Diplomacy 3-3-03
"In an era when allied cooperation is essential in the war against terrorism, we cannot afford to shrug off negative public opinion overseas as uninformed or irrelevant," Lugar said at a hearing last week. "The governments of most nations respond to public opinion, whether it is demonstrated in the voting booths or in the streets."
"The responsibility of leadership is to persuade, not to impugn the motives of those who disagree with you," Hagel said. The administration is "seen as bullying people. You can't do that to democracies. You can't do that to partners and allies. It just isn't going to work."
Bush and his aides, not surprisingly, push back.
In the ashen aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush committed himself and the nation to a global fight against terrorism that he warned would be long, shadowy and unconventional — and whose outcome might not be known for years.
Now, with hundreds of thousands of American troops poised to fight Iraq, Mr. Bush stands on the apparent eve of a far more conventional and concrete conflict, one on which he has wagered not only his historical reputation but his immediate political future, for better or worse.
Charlotte Beers, the State Department official and former advertising executive who tried to improve the image of the United States abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks, has resigned for health reasons, the State Department said on Monday.
Beers, under secretary of state for public diplomacy since 2001, has been the driving force behind controversial advertising designed to improve the image of the United States among Arabs and Muslims around the world.
Observer UK
Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war 3-2-03
The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.
Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.
It not the first time the Bush administration has appeared to reorder the world with a turn of phrase. First the ''axis of evil'' united Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. More recently, ''old Europe'' was severed from ''new Europe'' in the sniffy pronouncement of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. According to this supposed distinction, old Europe-France, Germany, and Belgium-is pacifist, anti-American, noisy, and irrelevant. New Europe-the formerly communist countries east of Berlin-is muscular, loyal, and receptive to all things American, from McDonald's franchises to preemptive war.
The Iraq question seems to exist on the far side of a looking glass where everyone turns into his opposite. The State Department and the C.I.A., considered the moderate wing of the Bush foreign policy apparatus, favor working through Iraq's traditional politics, which would mean removing Saddam but letting power stay with his ruling Baath Party, mainly minority Sunni Arabs. The State Department wants stability above all. Meanwhile, the hard-line hawks at the Pentagon and in the vice president's office, with their professed devotion to sweeping transformation in Iraq, want the transition to democracry to be led by the Western-oriented exiles grouped since 1992 under the loose umbrella of the Iraqi National Congress, whose chairman, Ahmad Chalabi, is close to Makiya.
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PBS
FRONTLINE
serious tv journalism
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Washington Times
'Friend' briefs set record in Michigan case 3-3-03
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Not since the Supreme Court received its first "friend of the court" brief in 1821 have so many organizations filed so many words on one topic as they did Feb. 19 about the University of Michigan's affirmative-action case.
When the Feb. 19 deadline passed, 66 amicus curiae briefs by about 300 organizations had been filed in support of the university's admissions policy of giving preferences to blacks, Hispanics and American Indians. Four briefs took neutral stances, and 11 briefs argued that the practice is unconstitutional.
Washington Times
Polls show U.S. prefers silent stars 3-2-03
A Fox News poll released Friday found that 24 percent of Americans are interested in hearing what actors and musicians have to say about national affairs.
Sixty-eight percent wished the celebrated "would keep their opinions to themselves." The poll asked 900 registered voters and was taken Feb. 25.
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