It's been a horrible weekend for the world - spending the weekend in bed, being ill, I had to stop watching tv after at a certain point  - don't know anymore what is more frightening, the tsunami and the nuclear emergency in japan or  the situation in Libya or cote d'ivoire?

Instead of watching ty I read last weeks observer and the observer magazine ( the international woman's day issue ).
It's a very good issue - highly frustrating though!

I strongly recommend reading mariella frostrups aricle " With one voice"

Here some extracts and facts  that make me more than furious:

"Johnson-Sirleaf has also this year won the coveted African Gender Award for helping poor women send children to school and for developing a female enterprise fund. In neighbouring Rwanda, women now outnumber men in parliament (by 52% to 48% men). Conversely, in the UK there are more blokes called Dave and Nick in government than there are women MPs. Women continue to hover at a steady 19% in the chamber, put off perhaps by a testosterone-fuelled climate where the last two prime ministers' wives have given up high- flying careers to support their husbands or simply to satisfy the perceived demands of middle England."

"Two-thirds of children denied school are girls, 64% of the world's illiterate adults are women, 41m girls are still denied a primary education, 75% of civilians killed in war are women and children, causing Major-General Patrick Cammaert, the former UN peacekeeping commander in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to declare in 2008: "It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict."

"Recent research from the International Food Policy Research Unit finds that equalising women's status would lower child malnutrition by 13% – that's 13.4 million children – in South Asia and by 3% (1.7 million children) in sub-Saharan Africa. That's a lot of lives to save by just doing what's right."

"Gender-based violence causes more deaths and disabilities among women aged 15 to 44 than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war. Basically it's safer to spend Friday nights chain smoking on the M1 with a bag of Congolese mosquitoes, in fog, than to be a woman in large swathes of the world."

"60 million girls are sexually assaulted at or en route to school. One in five women will become a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime – many of these on a number of occasions."

That's why Mariella frostrup together with others set up Great – the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust.

www.thegreatinitiative.com/

I couldn't help thinking that if we get these problems solved we probably solve plenty more along the way.

Read: Women's Rights a Strong Point in Tunisia by Kathrin Bennhold in the NY Times.

James Bond  Daniel Craig in drag for International Women’s Day
Written by Jane Goldman Directed by Sam Tayor-Wood.

http://www.weareequals.org/