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POPSFemale Fighters: We Won't Stand for Male Dominance Back in 1998, the fighters say, their now-jailed leader Abdullah Ocalan declared the group "a women's party." It was initially difficult to accept, says Karim, a 42-year-old male member of the PKK. Today, the PKK's ideology revolves around a belief that global crises and injustice are a result of millennia of male-dominated rule. Here, the women run their own assaults and have their own command structure. All tasks are shared, both on and off the battlefield. Discipline is paramount to survival, they say, and weapons are always clean and never out of reach.
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POPSSpike in Jobless Rate for Women Worst in 33 Years Kay Carey of Chicago is living that very scenario. An administrative assistant for a state social-services contractor, Carey was laid off in July when her department was phased out. She got the bad news after returning from vacation and only two weeks after moving into a new home. "I've never been laid off before. I go to work when I'm sick. I go to work when I'm tired, so it's kind of hard for me, but I haven't broken," she said. "I'm trying to learn not to get up every morning at 5:45." Her daughter recently had to drop her classes at Tennessee State University because she's $3,000 short on her tuition and Carey couldn't get a loan to make up the difference. "It's really hard when you have a child that wants to go to school, but can't," she said.
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POPSWomen With the horror of the recent "honor" killing in Georgia as the backdrop, I'm inspired to remind everyone that women die at the hands of male family members every day in the US. In fact, 4 times a day. I'm tired of the Right acting like they really care about women and gender equality. The only mention of women in the 2004 Republican platform is their insistence that if a woman gets pregnant, by law she'll stay that way until delivery. I went to a number of right wing websites and typed the words "violence against women" into their search engines. If any stories were listed at all, they were about honor killings in the Muslim world. The Right wrap their "concern" for women in the cloak of anti-Islamic rhetoric concerning honor killings and are dumb, deaf, and blind to all else. Enough. Islam is not the problem. Patriarchy is.
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POPSSilent Racism and White Privilege "Her book contends that “silent racism” fosters routine actions not recognized by an individual as racist, but upholds the status quo. Trepagnier says that some whites become detached from the race issue while others are so concerned with it that they become apprehensive about it, avoiding even the mention of the topic. In both cases, this passive stance silently provides the racist actions of others an endorsement, or worse, encouragement. Trepagnier claims that even individuals who feel enlightened in race relations often miss the point. In one of her studies, 25 white women who considered themselves progressive voiced their opinions to Trepagnier in eight group sessions from Santa Barbara, California. In the discussions, the women who were most race-aware said that they could identify racist actions they had performed as recently as a week ago. Among the least race-aware was a woman who responded, “Racism has nothing to do with me."
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POPSWhen Rape is OK: Female Contractors in Iraq
Women like -- as you may remember -- Jamie Leigh Jones, 23, a former employee of military contractor KBR who has been unable to get her charges of gang rape heard in court; women like Mary Beth Kineston, who was fired after complained about harassment and groping incidents. "I felt safer on the convoys with the Army than I ever did working for KBR," Kineston told the Times. "At least if you got in trouble on a convoy, you could radio the Army and they would come and help you out. But when I complained to KBR, they didn't do anything. I still have nightmares. They changed my life forever, and they got away with it." Jones testified in Congress in December -- and yesterday -- in order to draw attention to such cases and urge lawmakers to change regulations governing private arbitration. Emboldened by Jones, more women have begun to step forward, talking about mysteriously disappearing complaints and about being given, for their grievances, an 800 number and a pat on the head.
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