Female child welfare worker's in India, arms are severed

After receiving a tip that several young girls were about to be married. Shakuntala Verma, a government child welfare officer, travelled to Bhangarh village in the tribal-dominated Dhar district in Madhya Pradesh. Illegal mass weddings of under-age boys and girls are performed on Akshaya Tritiya, a lunar holy day regarded as particularly auspicious for weddings. Verma confronted a family there that was planning to marry off their young daughters in such a ceremony by demanding proof of the girls’ ages. She was forced to leave after family members threatened her.

Later there was a knock at her door when she answered the door, a sword was swung at her body severing an arm and almost her other arm. She was repeatedkly slashed at by the sword. Authorities are looking for the father whom they believe wielded the sword, which has Verma fighting for her life in a hospital.

Who says size does not matter?

"Sex satisfaction does not depend on penis size, but it involves love and mutual understanding," the ministry said.

Urologist in Thailand are seeing more cases of males who are injecting their penises with hot oils like Crisco or Olive Oil to increase their penis sizes. It was mainly men who were in their 30s and 40s, nor the age has dropped to where it is teenaged males doing this dangerous practice.

Co-ed soccer teams

Adolescent boys and girls at several highschools in Virginia, play on the same soccer teams. The move was mainly initiated from a need to have the sport remain a part of extracurriculum activities in those schools with small, limited athletic budgets.

Equal pay for French women

France has often been made the butt of jokes on the Fox News Channel but one thing that is curious, how could a country that is so backwards be willing to make a law for the enforcement of equal pay for women. Opponents of the law says, that it is just not far reaching enough for part-time workers.

Today women make up 57% of the French workforce, compared with 30% in the 1960s, but only 14% of company bosses and 35% of managers. However, more than 75% of part-time workers are women, as are nearly 90% of the 3.4 million workers in France earning less than £6,000* a year.

* £6,000 = $11,325.83 USD annually

* £6,000 = 8,791.03 EUR annually

8791.03 EUR = 11,335.32 USD annually

Say it is not so

Could it be possible that there is a link between narcissism and women's liberation? Why is it that everytime that a woman demands to have a respectful quality of life with fair treatment that allegations into the selfishness of women emerge?

Open up any woman's magazine, and you"ll see advertisements that unabashedly appeal to self-entitlement. Everything from hand soap to resort vacations is peddled with tag lines such as, "Take time for yourself," "You deserve it," and "It's all about you."

Doesn't beer commercials or men's magazines do the same thing? "You are a man, you deserve a king size beer," "If you drink the cool beer all the women will want you," and my favorite "Hey, I'd like to see my wife with the oversized tits that the new Playmate of the Year has."

Magazines and commercials encourage indulgence for consumerism by appealing to the fantasies of the targeted audience. Most women who are working with a family would like to be able to relax and have more time. There just never seems to be enough time between caring and assisting your husband provide for the family. Men want to be seen as masculine with the hot desirable wife while they drink their cool and hip beer.

Narcissism has no place under the umbrella of women's liberation.

And the struggle continues...

"She's one of the feminists who's been able to bridge worlds - between radicals and moderates, between young women and this whole generation of older women who will not go quietly into the night," says Tallen. "It's amazing she's still speaking out after so many years."
Steinem doesn't think so.
"There's still so much to do," she says, in a phone interview from her New York home. "Now is not the time for anyone, and especially not young women, to be complacent.
"It's important to look at the realities of where we are. To ask, `Is the campus as safe for women students as for male? Are tenured positions as likely to be occupied by women as men?'" she says.
"Students pay the same tuition, but when they graduate, women get a lot less money in the paid-labor force than men. They're getting 60 to 70 cents on the dollar for their investment."

Gloria Steinem, as with most activist, the struggle for women who are still trapped in the kitchen or a loveless marriage continues. Has the time for women's liberation come? Are women better off now than they were when they did not have the liberty to stay at home barefoot and pregnant? Has the extra money or the ability to have more things been as fulfilling as raising a family and a husband (in some cases)?

She raises very valid questions but as a product of women's liberation looking at it from a postmodern viewpoint, women's liberation was a failed experiment.

Iraqi women are living in fear

We have heard about the success of the war in Iraq and how the Iraqi people have a new foundation for democracy, which the elections are supposedly the evidence that the country is moving towards democracy. However, there is another story that fails to get media attention, the story of how Iraqi women are living in fear because they are afraid to go outside of their homes. These women are not in fear of Iraqi men or insurgents but are in fear of the U.S troops that are occupying the country. There are reports that allege women detainees have been raped in Abu Ghraib and children are being terrorized on the streets by U.S. troops.