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Contents contributed and discussions participated by jlessner

jlessner

Obama and Selma: The Meaning of 'Bloody Sunday' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the gravity of that place seized me, pushing out the breath and rousing the wonder.
  • to balance celebration and solemnity, to honor the heroes of the past but also to motivate the activists of the moment, to acknowledge how much work had been done but to remind the nation that that work was not complete.
jlessner

U.N. Finds 'Alarmingly High' Levels of Violence Against Women - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi sets off an unusual burst of national outrage in India. In South Sudan, women are assaulted by both sides in the civil war. In Iraq, jihadists enslave women for sex. And American colleges face mounting scrutiny about campus rape.
  • Despite the many gains women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls worldwide “persists at alarmingly high levels,” according to a United Nations analysis that the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to present to the General Assembly on Monday.
  • About 35 percent of women worldwide — more than one in three — said they had experienced physical violence in their lifetime,
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  • One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, it says.
  • 38 percent of women who are murdered are killed by their partners.Continue reading the main story
  • Where there are laws on the books, like ones that criminalize domestic violence, for instance, they are not reliably enforced.
jlessner

In U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student, Echoes on Campus of Old Biases - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For the next 40 minutes, after Ms. Beyda was dispatched from the room, the council tangled in a debate about whether her faith and affiliation with Jewish organizations, including her sorority and Hillel, a popular student group, meant she would be biased in dealing with sensitive governance questions that come before the board, which is the campus equivalent of the Supreme Court.
  • The discussion, recorded in written minutes and captured on video, seemed to echo the kind of questions, prejudices and tropes — particularly about divided loyalties — that have plagued Jews across the globe for centuries, students and Jewish leaders said.
  • The council, in a meeting that took place on Feb. 10, voted first to reject Ms. Beyda’s nomination, with four members against her. Then, at the prodding of a faculty adviser there who pointed out that belonging to Jewish organizations was not a conflict of interest, the students revisited the question and unanimously put her on the board.
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  • “We don’t like to wave the flag of anti-Semitism, but this is different,” Rabbi Aaron Lerner, the incoming executive director of the Hillel chapter at U.C.L.A., said of the vote against Ms. Beyda. “This is bigotry. This is discriminating against someone because of their identity.”
  • served to spotlight what appears to be a surge of hostile sentiment directed against Jews at many campuses in the country, often a byproduct of animosity toward the policies of Israel.
  • It has set off an anguished discussion of how Jews are treated, particularly in comparison with other groups that are more typically viewed as victims of discrimination, such as African-Americans and gays and lesbians.
  • “It’s egregious and startling,” Mr. Kosmin said. “If they had used this with any other group — sexual, racial, any kind of identity group — they would have realized it was illegal.”
  • “It’s very problematic to me that students would feel that it was appropriate to ask that kind of questions, especially given the long cultural history of Jews,” he said. “We’ve been questioned all of our history: Are Jews loyal citizens? Don’t they have divided loyalties? All of these anti-Semitic tropes.”
  • He called Ms. Beyda a “stand-out applicant,” with strong grades, interest and experience in the law. The students who voted against her also praised her credentials, but kept returning to questions about whether she could set aside her religious affiliation when ruling on issues before the council.
jlessner

In Ellen Pao's Suit vs. Kleiner Perkins, World of Venture Capital Is Under Microscope -... - 0 views

  • Ms. Pao contends she was discriminated against.
  • What is really under examination in this trial is the question of why there are so few women in leadership positions in Silicon Valley. At stake is any hope that the tech world can claim to be a progressive place, or even a fair one.
  • Were women simply not interested in becoming venture capitalists, “or did the venture capital world fight them off?”
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  • On the other hand, he said that Ms. Pao had “a female chip on her shoulder,” according to a report by an independent investigator hired by Kleiner.
  • Yet even allowing for the fact that all the witnesses so far were called by Ms. Pao’s team, documents and testimony in the trial show a firm whose attitudes derived from an earlier era. When Mr. Hirschfeld asked for a copy of Kleiner’s manual on discrimination, it could not be found.
  • Sheryl Sandberg, wrote a popular book telling women to “lean in,” by, for instance, seizing a seat at the table during meetings instead of hanging back at the edges.
  • “I feared somewhat for her safety,” Mr. Lane testified. Later, he underscored his alarm, adding: “This could have gone in a different direction. He could have pushed his way into the room.”
  • The men and women sitting in judgment of all this behavior look nothing like what Silicon Valley would consider a jury of its peers. Instead of being young, white and male, with a sprinkling of Asians — what critics say is the furthest limit in Silicon Valley in terms of diversity — the jury is half female and ethnically diverse. Testimony ended abruptly Thursday afternoon when one of the jurors had a family emergency.
jlessner

Making Egypt's Streets Safe for Women - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • making it far less likely that she will encounter the verbal abuse or physical and sexual assaults that women have come to expect on Cairo’s streets.
  • “I am a woman from Egypt, so I face harassment in the streets daily,” Ms. Helal, 29, said in a phone interview this week.
  • She has to be acutely aware of her surroundings every time she photographs in a crowd in public, constantly evaluate her safety and make sure there is a clear escape route in case she is attacked. While public harassment of women has been commonplace, it was not until an incident four years ago, while covering a peaceful protest on International Women’s Day, that she started documenting these encounters. It was a few months after the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt, and women went to Tahrir Square to hand out flowers in support of women’s rights.
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  • “A group of men came and told them they should not be there and should be home taking care of their families,” Ms. Helal said. “After that they attacked the women and harassed them.
  • “I decided to do this story because I don’t feel safe on the streets walking in front of a man,” she said. “There are no other photographers interested in working on these subjects here, and it is important to speak about these issues.”
  • She interviewed many women who said they had been attacked in Egypt, some of whom were reluctant to speak out, much less be photographed
jlessner

The Saudi king gave a prize to an Islamic scholar who says 9/11 was an 'inside job' - T... - 0 views

  • The preacher is not short of controversy. His orthodox, Wahhabist views — affiliated closely with the Saudi state — are polarizing in India, which is home to a diverse set of Muslim traditions and sects. His conservatism has led him to make statements endorsing the use of female sex slaves and allegedly expressing sympathy for terrorists.
  • In a 2008 video, he claimed President George W. Bush was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. "Even a fool will know that this was an inside job," Naik said. Years before, he appeared to offer tacit backing to terrorist masterminds such as Osama bin Laden.
  • "If [Bin Laden] is terrorizing America the terrorist, the biggest terrorist, I am with him," he said in one video. "Every Muslim should be a terrorist."
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  • In a video in 2007, he talked about how "Jews are controlling America."
  • In 2010, Britain's government barred his entry into the country on grounds of "unacceptable behavior."
  • "I am absolutely against Muslims who kill, but what is the U.S. doing?” Naik said, citing civilian casualties amid U.S. campaigns in the Muslim world. "Is the U.S. really bothered about human rights? No!"
  • The United States' close relationship with Saudi Arabia endures despite the kingdom's horrific human rights record and its conspicuous role in helping spread the views preached by Islamic supremacists such as Naik.
jlessner

Bus Driver in Delhi Gang Rape Blames Victim - 0 views

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    NEW DELHI - In the months after a young woman was brutalized and gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012, thousands of politicians, activists and ordinary citizens crowded onto India's airwaves and into its public spaces to say their piece about the crime.
jlessner

Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Fewer large companies are run by women than by men named John, a sure indicator that the glass ceiling remains firmly in place in corporate America.
  • Even as this ratio falls short of the score among chief executives, it remains astonishingly high. It also understates the impermeability of the glass ceiling. After all, most companies understand that an all-male board looks bad, and so most of them appoint at least one woman, although only a minority bother to appoint more than one. Far fewer of these large firms — currently one in 25 — are run by a woman serving as C.E.O.
jlessner

Campus Life and Guns - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The gun lobby is flirting with self-parody as it exploits the issue of sexual assaults on college campuses by proposing a solution of — what else? — having students carry guns. Experts who study the complicated issue of predatory behavior and advise colleges point out that rapes often begin in social situations. “It would be nearly impossible to run for a gun,” said John Foubert, the national president of One in Four, a rape-prevention organization.
  • Such common sense, however, has never deterred statehouse politicians when it comes to obeying the gun lobby.
  • Lawmakers in 10 states are busy adapting the issue of campus sexual assaults to the campaign to arm college students.
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  • Carrying concealed weapons on college campuses is now banned in 41 states by law or university policy.
  • In Colorado, North Dakota and Wyoming, legislators are working to allow adults to carry firearms in schools, starting in kindergarten.
  • As the debate goes forward, legislators would be wise to resort to some facts and consider a new study, based on federal data, by the Violence Policy Center. It strongly suggests that states with weak gun-safety laws and high rates of gun ownership lead the nation in gun deaths.
jlessner

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has No Interest in Retiring - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • RUTH BADER GINSBURG isn’t planning on going anywhere any time soon.
  • The second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, she’s part of the generation who came of age after World War II and led a revolution that transformed women’s legal rights, as well as their role in the public world. There’s a famous story about the dean at Harvard Law inviting Ginsburg and her tiny group of fellow female law students to dinner, then asking them how they’d justify having taken a place that could have gone to a man.
  • “The kind of raw excitement that surrounds her is palpable,” Carmon said. “There’s a counterintuitiveness. We have a particular vision of someone who’s a badass — a 350-pound rapper. And she’s this tiny Jewish grandmother. She doesn’t look like our vision of power, but she’s so formidable, so unapologetic, and a survivor in every sense of the word.”
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  • So Ginsburg is planning to be on the bench when the Supreme Court decides mammoth issues like the future of the Affordable Care Act and a national right for gay couples to marry. She says she doesn’t know how the health care case will turn out. But like practically every court observer in the country, she has a strong hunch about which way gay marriage will go: “I would be very surprised if the Supreme Court retreats from what it has said about same-sex unions.”
jlessner

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant on Women Doing 'Office Housework' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • This is the sad reality in workplaces around the world: Women help more but benefit less from it. In keeping with deeply held gender stereotypes, we expect men to be ambitious and results-oriented, and women to be nurturing and communal.
  • When a man offers to help, we shower him with praise and rewards. But when a woman helps, we feel less indebted. She’s communal, right? She wants to be a team player. The reverse is also true. When a woman declines to help a colleague, people like her less and her career suffers. But when a man says no, he faces no backlash. A man who doesn’t help is “busy”; a woman is “selfish.”
  • For staying late and helping, a man was rated 14 percent more favorably than a woman. When both declined, a woman was rated 12 percent lower than a man. Over and over, after giving identical help, a man was significantly more likely to be recommended for promotions, important projects, raises and bonuses. A woman had to help just to get the same rating as a man who didn’t help.
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  • Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, finds that professional women in business, law and science are still expected to bring cupcakes, answer phones and take notes. These activities don’t just use valuable time; they also cause women to miss opportunities. The person taking diligent notes in the meeting almost never makes the killer point.
  • When men do help, they are more likely to do so in public, while women help more behind the scenes. Studies demonstrate that men are more likely to contribute with visible behaviors — like showing up at optional meetings — while women engage more privately in time-consuming activities like assisting others and mentoring colleagues. As the Simmons College management professor Joyce K. Fletcher noted, women’s communal contributions tend simply to “disappear.”
  • With an even mix of men and women in the room, we expected the office housework to fall to a woman. But the one person who took notes the entire time was the founder of the Virgin Group, Richard Branson.
jlessner

Grand Theft Auto V and the Culture of Violence Against Women | Malika Saada Saar - 0 views

  • In GTA V, a gamer can purchase a woman (or is she a girl?) to perform a menu of different sexual acts that he experiences in first person. After purchasing the woman/girl, the gamer can choose to kill her -- and actually is incentivized to kill her to get his money back. At present, GTA V is one of the most popular and money making video games.
  • If Cambodia, India, or Nigeria produced such a video game, there would be global outrage. It would serve as unequivocal evidence of their misogynistic cultures in which women and girls are systemically raped and murdered with impunity. We would critique the ways in which their cultures and values are organized around the normalization of gendered violence.
  • Interestingly, there has been little to none such backlash against the American made and marketed GTA V in the U.S. The release of GTA V has been met with a very muted response. Any criticisms are reduced to being mere moral panics. Free speech advocates, GTA V fans, and other supporters insist that GTA V is simply a game, a victimless form of entertainment.
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  • GTA V is certainly not the only video game, or only iteration, of celebrated violence against women. Nor can GTA V be faulted for actually causing gendered violence. But GTA V's new standard for ramped-up, graphic violence against women comfortably exists in our rape culture, and reifies the distinct ways in which women and girls are propertied, humiliated, and abused.
jlessner

Some alums object when 'Princeton Mom' says some 'date rape' is just a bad hookup, a 'l... - 1 views

  • With 100 or so colleges under investigation by the federal government for the way they have handled allegations of sexual assault, with the president and member of Congress and countless advocacy groups weighing in, with some particularly horrifying cases making headlines and scores of other allegations simmering within campus communities, it’s a minefield.
  • Not everyone disagreed with Patton, who is president of the alumni class of 1977.
  • When List and several other alums, furious, reached out to others, they found that many were quick to sign on to their letter of opposition, more than 100 in a day or so.
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  • I think any form of rape is something that needs to be taken seriously. Rape is a crime that needs to be treated as a crime. The victims of a crime should not be blamed, should not be dismissed. Anything that trivializes any form of rape is very offensive to me.”
  • When people take the issue seriously, Daniels said, people can do something about it; work on education, work on prevention, work on supporting the victims.
  • Empowerment comes from control, and control comes from taking responsibility for yourself.”
  • With this, I strongly felt she was really, really undermining the young women who might have finally gotten the courage to come forward if they were raped by an acquaintance or on a date.”
  • Besides, she said, Princeton is a place that seeks, and welcomes, a plurality of opinions. “There’s no need to shut down any voice.”
  • And while we know that Princeton, like many other colleges and universities, has been struggling to find the right balance between the rights of the accused and protections for the victims,
jlessner

Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.
  • For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.
  • “I want the numbers to be higher, because the demand from districts is extremely high and we’re not going to meet it this year,” said Matt Kramer, a co-chief executive of Teach for America. But, he added, “it is not existentially concerning.”
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  • Last year, the highly selective program accepted about 15 percent of its applicants. Mr. Kramer said there were no plans to lower standards for the current year simply to yield a larger corps of teachers.
  • “We are sort of at 2.0 of education reform, and its future direction seems a little bit uncertain at this point,” said David M. Steiner, the dean of the Hunter College School of Education in New York.
jlessner

ISIS Said to Burn Captive Jordanian Pilot to Death in New Video - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A new video released by Islamic State militants on Tuesday purported to show the execution of a Jordanian air force pilot, who in a new show of brutality is burned to death, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors jihadist activity.
jlessner

Anti-Semitism is once again on the march in Europe - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • In the long and blood-soaked history of Europe’s Jews, the death of four more in a Parisian kosher market is, at best, a footnote. But they were not the accidental victims of the terrorists’ wrath, not just merely in the way or in the line of fire. They were singled out for who they were and not for what they had done — like publish provocative cartoons. They were killed for being Jews.
  • The Arab world weeps for the Palestinians — but only on cue and not too much
  • Here is where the Jew plays a role. He can be blamed.
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  • Anti-Semitism is the most durable and pliable of all conspiracy theories. It supposedly accounts for the death of Christ and the Jewish dominance of the liberal media. It carefully noted the disproportionate number of Jews in the communist movement and in the capitalist movement. Anti-Semitism can account for the wealth of the Jews and their scientific and artistic achievements. They are — we are — a most nimble people. We’ve had to be.
  • Blaming Israel for anti-Semitism misses the point. For at least 1,948 years, anti-Semitism both existed and thrived when Israel did neither. The pogroms of Europe — and the occasional ones of the Muslim Middle East — took place with no Israel in sight.
  • The Holocaust consumed 6 million Jews and not because Hitler was pro-Palestinian. Anti-Semitism infected ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the subtle mind of T.S. Eliot and the tinkering brain of Henry Ford way before any future Israeli had pushed around any future Palestinian. Anti-Semitism does not need a reason. It needs only an excuse.
  • The remedy — the cure — is education and assimilation. In the United States, high levels of anti-Semitism in the Hispanic population dissipate with assimilation.
jlessner

Republican Takeover of Senate Pushes Women Out of Powerful Committee Posts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “But I did think that was somewhat telling. We are not thinking about the women.”
  • The reason is largely because Congress is a culture where power is tied tightly with seniority, and committee chairmanships do not go to junior members. More than two-thirds of female lawmakers are Democrats, and Democratic women, who overall were elected earlier and in larger numbers than their Republican counterparts, have more longevity. When Democrats lost control, women lost top jobs.Continue reading the main story
  • Last year, when Democrats controlled the Senate, women led a record nine committees, including male bastions like the Appropriations Committee, which dispenses billions in federal dollars, and Intelligence, which oversees the government’s secret national security apparatus. Now there are only two female committee chairs: Ms. Murkowski and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine.
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  • The November elections brought a record number of female lawmakers to Washington. With 20 in the Senate and 84 in the House, women for the first time in history hold more than 100 seats in Congress. But the Republican takeover of the Senate has also cost women powerful committee leadership posts and presented new challenges to their wielding of power.
  • “You cannot deny that women were in a more powerful position in the United States Senate when the Democrats were in control,
  • It’s not to say that women can’t and won’t exert leadership, but we do know that titles matter, those formal positions of leadership matter.”
jlessner

Heroes and Bystanders - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Witold Pilecki, an officer in the Polish resistance to the Nazi regime, deliberately let himself be captured by the Germans in 1940 so that he could gather information about Hitler’s concentration camps. Inside Auschwitz, he set up resistance cells — even as he almost died of starvation, torture and disease.
  • Then Pilecki helped build a radio transmitter, and, in 1942, he broadcast to the outside world accounts of atrocities inside Auschwitz — as the Nazis frantically searched the camp looking for the transmitter. He worked to expose the Nazi gas chambers, brutal sexual experiments and savage camp punishments, in hopes that the world would act.
  • Finally, in April 1943, he escaped from Auschwitz, bullets flying after him, and wrote an eyewitness report laying out the horror of the extermination camps. He then campaigned unsuccessfully for an attack on Auschwitz.
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  • Eventually, he was brutally tortured and executed — not by the Nazis, but after the war, in 1947, by the Communists. They then suppressed the story of Pilecki’s heroism for decades (a book about his work, “The Auschwitz Volunteer,” was published in 2012).
jlessner

Smart Guns Save Lives. So Where Are They? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • bout 20 children and teenagers are shot daily in the United States, according to a study by the journal Pediatrics.
  • Indeed, more preschool-age children (about 80 a year) are killed by guns each year than police officers are killed by guns (about 50), according to the F.B.I. and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • This toll is utterly unnecessary, for the technology to make childproof guns goes back more than a century. Beginning in the 1880s, Smith & Wesson (whose gun was used in the Walmart killing) actually sold childproof handguns that required a lever to be depressed as the trigger was pulled.
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  • Doesn’t it seem odd that your cellphone can be set up to require a PIN or a fingerprint, but there’s no such option for a gun?
  • Kloepfer designed a smart handgun that fires only when a finger it recognizes is on the grip. More than 1,000 fingerprints can be authorized per gun, and Kloepfer says the sensor is 99.999 percent accurate.A child can’t fire the gun. Neither can a thief — important here in a country in which more than 150,000 guns are stolen annually.
jlessner

N.S.A. Tapped Into North Korean Networks Before Sony Attack, Officials Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The trail that led American officials to blame North Korea for the destructive cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November winds back to 2010, when the National Security Agency scrambled to break into the computer systems of a country considered one of the most impenetrable targets on earth.
  • A classified security agency program expanded into an ambitious effort, officials said, to place malware that could track the internal workings of many of the computers and networks used by the North’s hackers, a force that South Korea’s military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people.
  • Most are commanded by the country’s main intelligence service, called the Reconnaissance General Bureau, and Bureau 121, its secretive hacking unit, with a large outpost in China.
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  • Mr. Obama’s decision to accuse North Korea of ordering the largest destructive attack against an American target — and to promise retaliation, which has begun in the form of new economic sanctions — was highly unusual: The United States had never explicitly charged another government with mounting a cyberattack on American targets.
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