Articles in Category: Women In the News

Jobless, Homeless Blogger Gets Magazine Work

Six months ago, Brianna Karp found herself living in an old truck and camper she inherited after the suicide of a father she barely knew.

On Monday, her life became a 21st century fairytale when she turned her blog about homelessness into a plum internship for the fashion bible Elle magazine.

This is a story about love and Twitter, hope and the relative safety of a Walmart parking lot. Bri is our star, but there's also Matt, her trans-Atlantic boyfriend who found her on the streets of Orange County, Calif., as she wrote about her predicament at girlsguidetohomelessness.com.


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And there's E. Jean Carroll, a popular advice columnist for Elle who reached out with a $150-a-month job after Bri touched her in a letter, signing off Homeless, But Not Hopeless.

But to Bri and Matt, it's also a story about thousands of other smart, skilled, can-do people who recently had work and real addresses but don't any more.

"So inaccurate is the public perception of homelessness that the world cries foul when a homeless person is seen with a mobile phone or an iPod or heaven forbid, a laptop," Matt said. "Homeless people don't use the Internet, they don't write blogs, they're not webmasters and they don't use Twitter. They are alcoholics, they are substance abusers, they are illiterate. They don't work. They sure as hell don't have the right to fall in love. Do they?"

It Only Takes Eight Days To Change The World

Masarat Daud, a 26-year-old woman originally from Fatehpur Shekhawati in Rajasthan (India), and now residing in Dubai, UAE, left her high-flying job to create a eight-day learning academies to help Indian villagers learn computer, public speaking and communications skills.

Each skill takes eight days (three hours per day), for a total of 24 hours to educate communities!

No need for months and years; the road to empowerment just got shorter.





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Canadian Journalist Still Being Held Captive In Somalia

As anniversaries go, it's a bleak one – and only Amanda Lindhout herself truly knows how bleak.

amanda_lindhout.jpgIt was one year ago today that the Alberta-bred journalist and two colleagues were kidnapped at gunpoint in Somalia, plucked from a road near Mogadishu.

Since then, little has been seen or heard of the 28-year-old Sylvan Lake native, aside from a mute video of her and Australian reporter Nigel Brennan kneeling before their masked and armed captors aired on Al-Jazeera television weeks after they disappeared, and a few scattered, horrifying calls to media outlets by a distraught woman claiming to be Amanda Lindhout in recent months in which she essentially pleads with the Canadian government to save her life.

TheStar.com
Photo is a self portrait from Amanda Lindhout's Facebook page

Women And Girls Aren

In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks (Juliette: Acid Attack Survivor, Amazing Woman; Beauty Is More Thank Skin Deep; Afghan Girls, Scarred By Acid, Defy Terror, Embrace School;), bride burnings and mass rape (Tackling South Africa's rape epidemic; 29-Year-Old Jordanian Gets 7.5 Years For Killing Sister Who Had Been Raped).

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos.

There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

Read the full story by:
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
NYT Magazine

Moves To Stop Young Egyptian Women Being Exploited By Sex Tourism

A recent study by Menf Association for Development, an Egyptian non-governmental organisation, found that 40,000 underage and young girls have been “wed” in tourism marriages in Egypt since 2006, which has resulted in the birth of 150,000 children.

Mr Wael Karam, chairman of the Menf board, cited one case he found particularly shocking: “A father of a girl named Iman, 17, has made her marry 10 rich Arab men already. He didn’t mind her moving from one man to the other as long as he was being paid in advance for each of these ‘marriages’, which is done under the pretence of keeping with law and religion.”


Moushira Khattab, the new minister of family and population, said the “husbands” rarely recognise the children from these marriages and more often than not return to their home countries, never to see the girl or the child again.

“This is so disgraceful to Egyptian women and Egypt,” Magdi Afify, a member of the Shura Council, parliament’s upper house, said at a press conference held by Menf on Saturday to launch a parallel campaign against the “dangers of touristic marriage in Egypt”.