Women's Views on News

Widow of London suicide bomber asks for funding decision to be reviewed

The widow of a suicide bomber has urged a court to overturn a decision to refuse her legal aid for representation at the upcoming inquest into the deaths of 52 people in the 7/7 attacks in London, reports the Press Association on News Yahoo.

Hasina Patel, whose husband was plot mastermind Mohammed Sidique Khan, is challenging the refusal to provide her with funding.

Her QC, Ian Wise, told Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Silber, sitting at the High Court in London, that the "important" question for them is whether the May decision was "rational and lawful".

He said: "If such funding were to be granted she would be in a position to make representations to the coroner as to why the inquest into the death of her husband should be resumed and whether it should be joined to the inquests into the deaths of the 52 victims of the bombings."

He emphasised that her judicial review application was not about the judges being asked to adjudicate on the "merits" of any application to resume the inquest into the death of her husband, or whether "any such inquest should be joined to the ongoing inquests due to begin on October 11 this year".

Welcome Baby Cameron - but what about Britain's other babies?

Following our coverage of the birth of Baby Cameron yesterday, Laurie Penny at the New Statesman (yes, I am her number one fan) asks if David Cameron will be moved to reconsider his party's budget in light of the devastating impact it will have on babies, children, families and communities across the country.

Laurie particularly highlights the impact of the coalition budget on the 700 babies born into poverty every day in Britain.

"The austerity cuts imposed by Cameron's coalition government will hit these newborns' families hard," writes Laurie Penney. "Their parents may not be able to afford to feed them a healthy, balanced diet... they will attend whichever local school can afford to take them, including some two hundred state schools whose promised funding for badly needed building restoration has just been withdrawn by the Coalition. After the signalled cuts to housing benefit come into force, many of them will grow up in cramped, unhealthy, sub-standard accommodation far from local amenities..."

She continues, "they will be less likely to achieve their potential at school, less likely to be able to afford to attend university or further education, and more likely to suffer from mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and panic disorder than those born to wealthy families. Before the 24th of August 2012, these poorer babies will already be significantly more likely to exhibit lower levels of attainment and wellbeing than children from better-off families; by 2016, less able children from families like the Camerons will have overtaken more able children from lower-income families...The children who were born today in inner Manchester are already likely to die six years earlier than babies born to families in the Camerons' London district of Notting Hill."

"Child poverty and inequality were not eradicated under Labour, but the austerity cuts imposed by David Cameron's government could spell disaster for the hundreds of children born today into less fortunate households - particularly those born to single parents, over whom the axe of economic judgement is casting a long shadow."

I would pay a substantial amount of money to trap David Cameron in a lift with Laurie Penny and a film crew, and firmly believe that this would be one of the best YouTube videos, ever.

Mark Steel: Is Sarah Palin 'militant jihadist'?

Writing in today's Independent, Mark Steel posits that the opposition to an Islamic Centre (it's not a mosque, though it does contain space for prayer) being built 2 blocks from Ground Zero is based on anti-Islamic fears and prejudices, and has nothing to do with protecting the memory of those who died in 9/11.

The centre will include a swimming pool, gym, performing arts centre and will host a range of interfaith and secular programmes. It will be open to everyone and is part-funded by the Cordoba Initiative, an organisation that aims to improve relations between Muslims and western cultures by creating programmes of active engagement between individuals and communities. Surely this is exactly the spirit that should be promoted in the years following 9/11?

The centre has been opposed most vociferously by Sarah Palin, who has called upon 'peaceful Muslims' to oppose the centre.

"So, as she's asking Muslims to oppose a centre open to everyone," writes Mark Steel, "That commemorates the victims of 9/11, it seems likely she's a militant Jihadist who thinks the building will be a betrayal of true radical Islam. She's certainly got experience of being filmed with rifles so she's probably sat by one while making a video up a mountain right now, leaning into the camera and booming 'The front crawl is the agenda of the infidel, my friends.'"

Critics have also stated that the centre would breach the 'sombre tranquility' of the Ground Zero and Mark makes an interesting point:

"So instead of this centre there should be more buildings such as The Pussycat Club," he asks, "Which is next door to where the towers were, and boasts of being the area's premier strip joint. But that must be in keeping with the sombreness, presumably because the girls start their slide down the pole in a fireman's uniform in honour of the heroic firefighters of that fateful day."

Budget will hit the poorest hardest says IFS

Chancellor George Osborne called it a progressive budget, the Fawcett Society for equal rights argues it is not lawful, and now the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) reports the proposals by the millionaire politician will hit the poor - and so women who are the lower paid - the hardest.

Reuters says the findings by the IFS are embarrassing for the Coalition Government and will make it harder to gain public support for the proposed cuts of between 25 and 40 per cent. The unions say the proposals will cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Low-income households of working age lose the most as a proportion of income from the tax and benefit changes. Those who lose the least are households of working age with no children in the top half of the income distribution, according to the IFS.

The Fawcett Society has told WVoN that the Government had a legal obligation to conduct an equality impact assessment of all proposed budgetary cuts - which it has yet to prove it has done - and that the budget as it stood was massively unfair to women (and see previous WVoN coverage).

A record number of women standing in Afghan elections

A record number of women are running in Afghanistan's critical parliamentary elections next month despite many being inundated with threatening phone calls, including death threats from insurgents.

Amid ever-rising violence, which some people fear could foster a repeat of last year's catastrophic presidential election, women are struggling to campaign at all outside a few areas, poll monitors say.

Even in Kabul, the capital, where the Guardian has interviewed a number of female candidates, women say they are facing daily obstruction from conservative hardliners, including death threats.

With voting billed for 18 September, Kabul's streets have been plastered in posters and billboards, many of which show the faces of would-be female MPs in the capital, the number of whom has more than doubled since 2005. However, many of the posters do not stay up long, or get defaced with slashes of bright red ink.

Afghanistan is a society in chaos. And is it any wonder with this level of patriarchal dominance. The trouble is that President Karzai is unlikely to do very much, if anything, to change a culture which thrives on violence, corruption, chauvinism and the suppression of the human rights of one half of the population. 

Unfortunately, the track record of the occupying coalition is not much better. My view is that nothing will ever change for the better in Afghanistan until women are accorded equal treatment.

Cutting state pension will strengthen family ties says think tank director

Warning - this could spark you off on an early morning rant - well it has me anyway.

Eamonn Butler writing in The Spectator is suggesting that the state pension and the National Health Service should be cut - to make family ties stronger.

It's for our own good, he argues, if we are forced to look after extended families and carry the financial burden because it will strengthen the family and so strengthen society. I can see Eamonn building his own granny complex onto his Englishman's castle as he pontificates. (He is from the free market think tank Adam Smith Institute which has the ear of politicians).

He writes: "The state pension system and the National Health Service make families less dependent on one another, and so weaken the bonds between them. In my youth, few people spent years in old age because they didn't live that long, but it was perfectly normal and routine for families to look after their elderly relatives, finding space for them in their own homes."

Who will shoulder the burden of the extra responsibility, eeking out a minimum wage to prepare an extra couple of meals each night, having the heating turned up on full, sleeping on the sofa in an overcrowded house. I think we know.

For I can't just see those hedge fund operators leaving work on time and sacrificing a million dollar deal to change Granny's bed clothes. They wouldn't. They would employ a woman to do it for them instead.

Bristol Palin now has her nose in the speakers' circuit trough

Bristol Palin is following in her mother's footsteps, at least as far as lucrative public speaking gigs go, says the Politics Daily website.

The 19-year-old daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin will earn (?) $14,000 when she speaks at a fundraiser in September to benefit Lifehouse, a home for single mothers. 

This won't be Bristol's first experience of public speaking. Earlier this summer, she signed with a speaker's bureau, which has made her available for conferences and fundraisers as well as women's, youth, abstinence and ''pro-life'' programmes.

Bristol has long way to go to catch up with her mother, though, in terms of speaking fees. Sarah Palin reportedly earns (?) $100,000 per speech, almost as much as her annual salary of $125,000 when she was Alaska's governor, a position she left abruptly last year with 18 months remaining in her term.

Apart from the politics of the Palin family, I have to take issue with the use of the term "earn" in this article, used twice to refer to the amount of money mother and daughter will "make" from their speaking engagements. Earning money refers to situations where people actually have to work for it - a concept with which the Palins may not be entirely familiar. 

Afghan president says he will not sacrifice women's rights in peace with Taliban

Msmagazine reports that Afghan president Hamid Karzai has said he will not sacrifice women's rights in any peace deal with the Taliban. 

In an interview aired on ABC news in which he discussed plans to negotiate peace, Karzai reportedly said that Afghan women will have "solid and meaningful" representation at the negotiations so that the political, economic and social gains that have been made for women in recent years will not just be protected, but explanded. 

Hmm, I have a number of issues with this. First of all, which political, economic and social gains was he talking about? I think it would be good to itemise them if women are to hang onto them. 

Secondly, will someone please remind Karzai about this when he forgets all about women in the scramble for power (oh, sorry, peace) with the Taliban. 

Wells MP claims she is being targeted in 'concerted campaign' over expenses

Newly elected Wells MP Tessa Munt has said she is being targeted by a "concerted campaign" over allegations she claimed a single occupier discount on her council tax, despite allowing friends to stay in her home whilst she was in receipt of the benefit. However Ms Munt claims they stayed for just 9 days in a total of 10 months.

BBC Somerset reports today that a website has apprently been set up demanding her removal as an MP and a petition has been drafted calling on Nick Clegg to force her to stand down.

Asserting that she has always been "completely upfront" about the people who stayed with her, including the broadcaster Andy Kershaw, she denies any sleaze and says it is quite right that Sedgemoor District Council investigate her, as they would anyone else. She is simply calling for the right to the same privacy as any other person would have.

Tessa Munt won the seat in the 2010 UK election as a Liberal Democrat. Following a hard-fought campaign she gained a majority of 800 over long-term Conservative incumbent David Heathcoat-Amory who himself admitted that his involvement in the parliamentary expenses scandal had probably cost him victory. She has always been in favour of the Lib Dem Coalition pact with the Conservatives.

Wife of 'Ground Zero mosque' imam speaks out on US 'hate of Muslims'

The controversy surrounding plans to build a 'mosque' close to the Ground Zero site in New York (which isn't a mosque and isn't that near to Ground Zero, if you read the Guardian) has been further fuelled by Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf who is behind the proposed centre.

The Daily Telegraph reports that she has used the phrase '"metastasized anti-Semitism " to describe what she believes to be the current  US attitude to Islam. She is quoted as saying "It's not even Islamophobia," she said "it's beyond Islamophobia - it's hate of Muslims. And we are deeply concerned."

Ms Khan has confirmed that the plans to build the mosque will go ahead despite the outcry. Her comments in relation to US attitudes to Muslims is in contrast to recent statements by her husband who has praised the religious freedoms he enjoys. 

In an interview for a Bahrain newspaper he says:

"The US Constitution protects our rights and what exists in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution is much better than what is found in many Islamic countries."

You can read more about this story on Forbes.com.