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Model Lizzie Miller And Her Tummy Rock The Fashion World |
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Wednesday, 02 September 2009 |
 The naked picture in Glamour magazine of a model with a tiny roll of fat around her middle is causing a commotion amongst women and the fashion media.
At 5 feet 11 inches (180 centimeters), and 12.5 stone (175 pounds/79 kilograms), 20-year-old Lizzie Miller, who wears sizes 12-14, agrees that it's astonishing that she's considered a "plus
size" model.
"It's sad," she says. "In the industry anything over size
six is considered a plus-size."
“When I was young I really struggled with my body and how it looked
because I didn’t understand why my friends were so effortlessly skinny.
As I got older I realized that everyone’s body is different and not
everyone is skinny naturally – me included! I learned to love my body for
how it is, every curve of it,” Miller says.
The overwhelming reaction to the
tiny photograph (by Walter Chin for Glamour), buried on page 194 of the September issue of the magazine "shows that the
world is hungry to see pictures of normal women," she adds.
"It's a photo that measures all of three by three inches," says Cindi
Leive, editor of US Glamour in a post on the magazine's blog, "but the
letters about it started to flood my inbox literally the day Glamour
hit newsstands."
Related links:
The Body Image Debate on Glamour.com
Too Fat To Be A Model (Guardian UK)
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Jobless, Homeless Blogger Gets Magazine Work |
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Tuesday, 01 September 2009 |
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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.
Read the full AP story here:
msnbc.com
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It Only Takes Eight Days To Change The World |
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Sunday, 30 August 2009 |
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 |
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Sunday, 23 August 2009 |
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As anniversaries go, it's a bleak one – and only Amanda Lindhout herself truly knows how bleak.
 It
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
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Women And Girls Aren’t The Problem; They’re The Solution. |
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Sunday, 23 August 2009 |
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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
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Support The International Violence Against Women Act |
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Wednesday, 19 August 2009 |
Susan notes: received August 18, 2009, from Amnesty International.
Dear Susan,
Right now, young girls are being sold into unwanted marriages to pay their fathers' debts. Their sisters are raped by rebel bands as a tool of war. And their mothers are beaten by husbands in retribution for daring to seek basic education such as the ability to read.
The United States could be doing more to combat rape in conflict, high rates of domestic violence around the world, human trafficking, and other forms of violence against women.
But the comprehensive legislation that would make fighting violence against women a priority for US foreign policy and give the State Department Office for Global Women's Issues the force of law is still missing.
Help us add 5,000 signatures to our petition urging President Obama and Vice President Biden to actively support the re-introduction and passage of I-VAWA this fall.
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Moves To Stop Young Egyptian Women Being Exploited By Sex Tourism |
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Monday, 17 August 2009 |
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”.
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Afghan Men May Lawfully Starve Wives Who Refuse To Have Sex With Them |
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Sunday, 16 August 2009 |
 An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.
The original version, which caused outrage earlier this year, obliged Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum, and it effectively condoned rape by removing the need for consent to sex within marriage.
Women's groups say the new wording still violates the principle of equality that is enshrined in their constitution.
It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.
Click here for the full story by:
By Sarah Rainsford
BBC Online
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Aung San Suu Kyi's Trial Ends In A Conviction |
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Tuesday, 11 August 2009 |
 A court in Myanmar sentenced the pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to 18 months of additional house arrest Tuesday, drawing widespread condemnation from around the world.
Playing up a moment of suspense, the court first sentenced Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, to
three years of hard labor for violating the terms of the house arrest
where she has spent 14 of the past 20 years.
Moments later, it reduced
the sentence and sent her home from the prison where she had been held since the trial began three months ago.
Click here for the full story by:
Seth Mydans
NYT online
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Homeless Holocaust Survivor Leaves Half Her Fortune To University |
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Tuesday, 11 August 2009 |
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A Jewish Holocaust survivor who later lived on the streets of New
York City has left half of her $300,000 estate to Hebrew University,
the school said Monday.
"It moved us very much," university
spokesman Yefet Ozery said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem,
where the school is based.
"Hebrew University has many, many
donors and benefactors and supporters and many people remember us in
their will, but I haven't come across such a person that lived actually
as a poor woman who would give half of her bequest to Hebrew
University," Ozery said.
The woman, who died two years ago in
her 90s, has not been identified publicly at the request of her
estate's executor, he said.
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