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| WOMEN TODAY |
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 Christian Science Monitor
Joe Sitcom 3-7-03
"This is a time when there are more male characters who are the butt of the jokes for being dumb or insensitive or childish or lazy than ever before," says Gary Edgerton, chair of communications at Old Dominion University. The "little household drudges," as Betty Friedan characterized women's roles in the '60s, have become "the male dolts of today."
NYTimes
Welfare-to-Work Policy Does Not Harm Children, Study Says 3-6-03
Poor children suffer no psychological damage when their mothers move from welfare to work, as millions of women have in recent years, a major new study says. And it says the mental health of adolescents in those families may actually have improved.
The research, financed by the National Institutes of Health and published today in the journal Science, provides the most extensive evidence yet to answer questions that have been swirling around one of the biggest experiments in social policy in the last half-century. The study suggests that the 1996 welfare law may not be as harmful to children as many people feared when it was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton.
NYTimes
Air Force Reports 54 Cases of Rape or Assault 3-6-03
The Air Force has identified 54 cases of rape or sexual assault in its investigation into impropriety at the Air Force Academy and there are likely many more cadets who will not come forward, Air Force Secretary James Roche said Thursday.
``The part that is the saddest thing ... whatever we see, whatever the number is, 25, 50, there are probably a hundred more that we do not see,'' Roche said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. It wasn't immediately clear when the assaults occured.
Arizona Republic
Newsletter helps women navigate midlife jobs, relationships 3-6-03
They were the generation of women who burned their bras, took the pill and broke down the barriers to traditionally male professions.
They were told they could have it all and, in some cases, they did. Now these 40 million female baby boomers are hitting middle age and many are facing confusion about everything from their relationships to their careers.
"This definitely is not our mothers' midlife," says Amy Lynch, 48, editor and publisher of the recently launched Ourselves: The Newsletter for Women at the Center of Life.
NYTimes
Picketing Hootie at a Hooters? 3-6-03
O.K., madhouses are off limits. But with everyone from Martha Burk to the Ku Klux Klan requesting an application to picket against — and for — Hootie's Male-Only Haven for American C.E.O.'s next month, there is some serious competition for the primo protest sites.
It's about location, location, location. Picket placement is vital. So, as a service to every demonstrator ready to hunker down between the dogwoods and Tiger Woods, a trusty scout has been enlisted to scour the area in an attempt to tailor protest needs to site selection.
A bill to spend as much as $400 million to process thousands of these kits, which are supplied to emergency health facilities in sealed containers to collect evidence during a victim's medical exam, will be introduced this month in the Senate.
Unprocessed rape kits are sitting in evidence rooms throughout the nation because of a lack of state and local funds to process them, bill supporters say. The processing cost can range from a couple hundred dollars a kit to $2,000, depending on the circumstances of the attack.
Washington Post
Clinton Develops Into a Force in the Senate 3-5-03
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, after lying low for most of her first two years, is emerging as one of the Senate's most prominent and influential Democrats, moving aggreessively on fundraising and policy matters and fueling speculation that she plans to run for president in 2008.
New York's junior senator also is commanding greater influence over the party's base of trial lawters, environmentalists, union workers and abortion rights activists through her new leadership assignment: chairman of the Democratic Steering Committee, a Senate organization that helps promote the party's agenda. Leading senators tapped Clinton for the job of revving up party activists and enlisting their help in attacking President Bush and congressional Republicans. She brought civil rights leaders to Washington last week to discuss a broader campaign against Bush judicial nominee Miguel Estrada.
Girl Scouts? What's an organization known for squeaky-clean values and selling cookies doing bringing girls into a state prison? Changing with the times, that's what, and helping the Scouts get to know their mothers, some of whom have been incarcerated for years.
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WOMEN
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Christian Science Monitor
A woman on trial for Rwanda's massacre 3-7-03
"Pauline" is Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, the first woman ever to be charged with genocide and using rape as a crime against humanity.
In 1994, in the hills of Rwanda, over the course of one hundred days, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers were brutally murdered by Hutu extremists. Nine years later, here at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Ms. Nyiramasuhuko is one of many high-ranking Rwandan officials finally facing justice.
Canada isn't doing enough to ensure women's equality on many fronts, including parental leave, childcare and pay equity, argues a highly critical United Nations report on how this country is living up to its international commitments.
Women's groups say the new report from the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women backs up what they've been arguing for years — that cuts to social programs are hurting women.
Women in many parts of Afghanistan continue to face discrimination and intimidation more than a year after the fall of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime, according to a U.N. report issued on Thursday.
. . . many "Taliban-like" restrictions on women remained in parts of the country and a lot more still needed to be done to ensure their full and equal participation in society, the United Nations said in the report, issued ahead of International Women's Day on March 8.
Independent Online
Domestic violence is shadowing Russian women 3-6-03
Almost 14 000 Russian women are killed in acts of domestic violence every year, according to Amnesty International.
This sombre death toll comes close to the major losses Russia sustained in its war against Afghanistan and its ongoing war in Chechnya, officials said on Wednesday.
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The Age (Australia)
How the PM is hurting women 3-7-03
By Anne Summers
The Howard Government began virtually from day one to systematically dismantle the apparatus designed to achieve and nurture equality of opportunity between the sexes. What we have today is a Government whose policy - implicitly and explicitly - is to remove women from the full-time workforce.
The implications of this are profound.
Women who are not in full-time employment have no possibility of economic independence. They cannot earn a decent income. Nor can they accumulate savings for retirement. They cannot develop and maintain job skills, keep abreast of professional developments or industry standards. It is difficult, if not impossible, to retain the social skills and confidence that the workplace provides.
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| WOMEN'S HEALTH |
Washington Post
Caesareans, Bladder Control Linked 3-6-03
Women who deliver babies through Caesarean section are less likely than those who give birth vaginally to develop bladder control problems later in life, according to a large new study.
Twenty-one percent of women who gave birth vaginally developed incontinence, compared with 16 percent of women who had Caesareans and 10 percent among women who never had children, the study found.
Aspirin Cuts Risk of Colorectal Cancer for Some, 2 Studies Say 3-6-03
A daily aspirin dose can sharply reduce the risk of colorectal cancer in people who are at high risk of developing the disease, according to two new studies released today.
The results appear straightforward, but Imperiale cautioned that side effects cloud the issue. He calculated that 471 people would have to take aspirin for at least five years to prevent one case of colorectal cancer, and 1,250 people would have to take it for at least 10 years to prevent one death.
And for every person who is spared from colorectal cancer, there would be one person who suffered from major bleeding as a result of the aspirin therapy. Furthermore, he said, more people would suffer strokes caused by the aspirin than would be spared death from cancer.
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DESIGN STUDIO |
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A NEWLYWED couple, Ryan and Michele Stulak, built their house on top of a 25-story industrial slag heap here, and did so knowingly. Residing with them on 50 years' worth of steel byproducts is a growing community of settlers, the first wave at the development known as Summerset at Frick Park. Most are Pittsburgh natives who, as they used to drive by the black slag mountains, could not have imagined making them their home. "I never in a million years thought I would," Mr. Stulak said.
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STYLE.COM
Vogue and W online
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NYTimes
Summoning a 60's Ghost, It's Groovy, Baby 3-6-03
DECORATING is just like politics: you can't stay neutral forever.
And so it was that last week, Cristina Greeven Cuomo broke with her old decorating habits — a French-country look in white and ivory — and splashed a vivid red geometric fabric across the white walls of the foyer in the Upper West Side apartment she shares with her husband, Christopher Cuomo, son of Mario M. Cuomo, the former governor of New York. In the living room, she put down a carpet with graphic squares in blues, light blues and browns and set down two club chairs upholstered in sky blue. A sofa in a vivid ziggurat pattern of dark brown and white is on its way.
NYTimes
Four Women Swagger in Milan 3-5-03
Four women closed the Italian fall 2003 season today, their clothes changing the tempo and temperament of fashion. After years of male domination, have the women finally taken over macho Milan?
This is a city that adores the pinup girl clothes seem incapable of containing. Indeed, many television commentators who focus on fashion arrive at the runway presentations in thigh-revealing frocks and with enough cleavage and hair volume to win a Cosmo cover.
Milan put more stock in the name-brand sexy models of the 1980s and early '90s than any other fashion center. Even when most designers in Paris and New York focused on mannequins that were wan or androgynous, Italian designers maintained their affection for the va-va-voom women whose figures could make a mourning dress and veil look like one big come-on.
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Washington Post
President Bush to Hold News Conference Tonight 3-6-02
The White House announced President Bush will hold a news conference at 8 tonight, but officials said he still has made no decision about war.
"This is not a scheduled announcement of anything," Whie House press secretary Ari Fleischer said this morning. "The opening statement will be about the successes in the war against terror as well as the importance of disarming Saddam Hussein."
With the U.N. Seciroty Council bitterlydivided, Britain has proposed allowing Iraq more time to comply with U.N. demands following adoption of a resolution authorizing war, diplomats reported.
The new proposals would set an interval of perhaps a week or less between adoption of the resolution and any military action and demand President Saddam Hussein come clean on any present or past weapons of mass destruction programs.
Economist
The great uniter? 3-6-03
“I'M A uniter, not a divider.” That was George Bush's boast in the 2000 presidential election. He promised to “change the tone in Washington” by bringing back civility to domestic policy. He also said his “humble but strong” foreign policy would improve America's relations with the rest of the world.
These ambitions lasted about five minutes. Mr Bush's first tax cuts passed the House of Representatives with a mere ten Democratic supporters. Things improved a little after September 11th, when the need to show a patriotic united front prevailed, but partisan warfare has since returned with a vengeance. The president is pushing for a second round of tax cuts, the appointment of anti-abortion conservatives to judgeships and the rolling back of affirmative action—all things that make Democrats seethe and weep. As for endearing his administration to foreigners through humility, well, let's just say that it did not go entirely to plan.
The United Nations has done extensive contingency planning for administering a postwar Iraq, but has no secret plan for running the country, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday.
U.N. officials were stung and embarrassed by the leak of a 60-page blueprint for a U.N. civil authority to be installed in Baghdad just months after a likely U.S.-led military operation to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Christian Science Monitor
Bush's bold agenda, soaring stakes 3-5-03
To some, President Bush has taken on an appropriately ambitious agenda - from a war that aims to remake the map of the Middle East to a domestic plan that includes big new tax cuts and a $400 billion prescription-drug plan for senior citizens. Routing Saddam Hussein, a popular goal with Americans, would add a fresh infusion of optimism to the US economy.
To others, Bush is more than proactive: He is taking policy risks that go well beyond what events dictate. The result, skeptics warn, could be a disastrous entanglement in a part of the world most inhospitable to Americans - and a ballooning deficit that could hobble the economy for years to come.
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Even though jobs are following Americans out of the cities and into the suburbs, it seems the exoduses still don't line up. Indeed, jobs and workers often end up far apart. That's a major factor behind the three-minute increase in the nation's average commute during the 1990s. And it explains why a growing share of Americans are crossing county lines to reach their jobs.
Washington Times
DeLay threatens to curb courts' jurisdiction 3-6-03
"Congress for so long has been lax in standing up for the Constitution," the Texas Republican told reporters during a briefing yesterday. "There are ways to express ourselves — for instance, we could limit the jurisdiction of the judicial branch.
"Article III, Section 2 [of the Constitution] allows us to do that. I think that would be a very good idea to send a message to the judiciary they ought to keep their hands off the Pledge of Allegiance," he said.
Christian Science Monitor
High court OKs 'three strikes' law 3-6-03
The court said such sentences are not so grossly disproportionate to the criminal history of a career offender as to violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. "State legislatures enacting three strikes laws made a deliberate policy choice that individuals who have repeatedly engaged in serious or violent criminal behavior, and whose conduct has not been deterred by more conventional punishment approaches, must be isolated from society to protect the public safety," writes Justice Sandra Day O'Connor for the majority.
BBC News
US court to rule on net porn 3-6-03
On Wednesday the court met to hear arguments in a case brought by the American Libraries Association, which is arguing that a new Federal law insisting that every library install filters against obscene material on its computers used to access the internet violates the First Amendment, which protects free speech.
Under the Children's Internet Protection Act, libraries that receive federal subsidies must use software that screens out obscenity, child pornography, and sexually explicit material deemed harmful to minors.
LATimes
Senator, His Son Get Boosts From Makers of Ephedra 3-5-03
For more than a decade, the dietary supplements industry has counted on Sen. Orrin G. Hatch to fend off tighter regulation of products such as ephedra, the controversial stimulant linked to more than 80 deaths — most recently a young Baltimore Orioles baseball player.
For its part, the supplements industry has not only showered the senator with campaign money but also paid almost $2 million in lobbying fees to firms that employed his son Scott.
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Christian Science Monitor
Al Qaeda-Pakistani ties deepen 3-6-03
This week's arrest of Al Qaeda's third-in-command was at once a tremendous coup for Pakistan's oft-maligned government and also a stunning embarrassment.
Officials here are quick to brag that local security forces nabbed Khalid Sheik Mohammed, along with another senior Al Qaeda leader, on their own. What they aren't crowing about is that Mr. Mohammed's arrest exposes a link between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's largest Islamic political party, Jamaat-e Islami.
Washington Post
Franks Briefs Bush on war Plans, Says Military Is Ready 3-6-03
Pakistan In a sign of heightened war preparations, defense officials disclosed yesterday that the number of air patrols over southern Iraq flown by U.S. and British aircraft has more than doubled this week.
The increase was prompted, in part, by the influx of hundreds of warplanes into the region, the officials said. But it also is intended to keep Iraqi forces guessing about when and how a war might begin.
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