March 8 Marks The International Women's Day - 2010

March 8 Marks The International Women's Day has been observed since in the early 1900's, a time of great expansion and turbulence in the industrialized world that saw booming population growth and the rise of radical ideologies.

1908
Great unrest and critical debate was occurring amongst women. Women's oppression and inequality was spurring women to become more vocal and active in campaigning for change. Then in 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

1909
In accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America, the first National Woman's Day (NWD) was observed across the United States on 28 February. Women continued to celebrate NWD on the last Sunday of February until 1913.

1910
n 1910 a second International Conference of Working Women was held in Copenhagen. A woman named a Clara Zetkin (Leader of the 'Women's Office' for the Social Democratic Party in Germany) tabled the idea of an International Women's Day. She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day - a Women's Day - to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women's clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin's suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women's Day was the result.

1911
Following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in 1911, International Women's Day (IWD) was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March. More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women's rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination. However less than a week later on 25 March, the tragic 'Triangle Fire' in New York City took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women's Day events. 1911 also saw women's 'Bread and Roses' campaign.

1913-1914
On the eve of World War I campaigning for peace, Russian women observed their first International Women's Day on the last Sunday in February 1913. In 1913 following discussions, International Women's Day was transferred to 8 March and this day has remained the global date for International Wommen's Day ever since. In 1914 further women across Europe held rallies to campaign against the war and to express women's solidarity.

1917
On the last Sunday of February, Russian women began a strike for "bread and peace" in response to the death over 2 million Russian soldiers in war. Opposed by political leaders the women continued to strike until four days later the Czar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. The date the women's strike commenced was Sunday 23 February on the Julian calendar then in use in Russia. This day on the Gregorian calendar in use elsewhere was 8 March.

1918 - 1999
Since its birth in the socialist movement, International Women's Day has grown to become a global day of recognition and celebration across developed and developing countries alike. For decades, IWD has grown from strength to strength annually. For many years the United Nations has held an annual IWD conference to coordinate international efforts for women's rights and participation in social, political and economic processes. 1975 was designated as 'International Women's Year' by the United Nations. Women's organisations and governments around the world have also observed IWD annually on 8 March by holding large-scale events that honour women's advancement and while diligently reminding of the continued vigilance and action required to ensure that women's equality is gained and maintained in all aspects of life.

2000 and beyond
IWD is now an official holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with flowers and small gifts. In some countries IWD has the equivalent status of Mother's Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

The new millennium has witnessed a significant change and attitudinal shift in both women's and society's thoughts about women's equality and emancipation. Many from a younger generation feel that 'all the battles have been won for women' while many feminists from the 1970's know only too well the longevity and ingrained complexity of patriarchy. With more women in the boardroom, greater equality in legislative rights, and an increased critical mass of women's visibility as impressive role models in every aspect of life, one could think that women have gained true equality. The unfortunate fact is that women are still not paid equally to that of their male counterparts, women still are not present in equal numbers in business or politics, and globally women's education, health and the violence against them is worse than that of men.

However, great improvements have been made. We do have female astronauts and prime ministers, school girls are welcomed into university, women can work and have a family, women have real choices. And so the tone and nature of IWD has, for the past few years, moved from being a reminder about the negatives to a celebration of the positives.

Annually on 8 March, thousands of events are held throughout the world to inspire women and celebrate achievements. A global web of rich and diverse local activity connects women from all around the world ranging from political rallies, business conferences, government activities and networking events through to local women's craft markets, theatric performances, fashion parades and more.

Many global corporations have also started to more actively support IWD by running their own internal events and through supporting external ones. For example, on 8 March search engine and media giant Google some years even changes its logo on its global search pages. Year on year IWD is certainly increasing in status. The United States even designates the whole month of March as 'Women's History Month'.

So make a difference, think globally and act locally!!! Make everyday International Women's Day. Do your bit to ensure that the future for women all over the world is bright, equal, safe and rewarding.

U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings

- By RON NIXON - April 14, 2011 - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Even as the United States poured billions of dollars into foreign military programs and anti-terrorism campaigns, a small core of American government-financed organizations were promoting democracy in authoritarian Arab states.

The money spent on these programs was minute compared with efforts led by the Pentagon. But as American officials and others look back at the uprisings of the Arab Spring, they are seeing that the United States’ democracy-building campaigns played a bigger role in fomenting protests than was previously known, with key leaders of the movements having been trained by the Americans in campaigning, organizing through new media tools and monitoring elections.

A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington, according to interviews in recent weeks and American diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.

The work of these groups often provoked tensions between the United States and many Middle Eastern leaders, who frequently complained that their leadership was being undermined, according to the cables.

The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department.

No one doubts that the Arab uprisings are home grown, rather than resulting from “foreign influence,” as alleged by some Middle Eastern leaders.

“We didn’t fund them to start protests, but we did help support their development of skills and networking,” said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, a Washington-based advocacy and research group. “That training did play a role in what ultimately happened, but it was their revolution. We didn’t start it.”

Some Egyptian youth leaders attended a 2008 technology meeting in New York, where they were taught to use social networking and mobile technologies to promote democracy. Among those sponsoring the meeting were Facebook, Google, MTV, Columbia Law School and the State Department.

“We learned how to organize and build coalitions,” said Bashem Fathy, a founder of the youth movement that ultimately drove the Egyptian uprisings. Mr. Fathy, who attended training with Freedom House, said, “This certainly helped during the revolution.”

Ms. Qadhi, the Yemeni youth activist, attended American training sessions in Yemen.

“It helped me very much because I used to think that change only takes place by force and by weapons,” she said.

But now, she said, it is clear that results can be achieved with peaceful protests and other nonviolent means.

But some members of the activist groups complained in interviews that the United States was hypocritical for helping them at the same time that it was supporting the governments they sought to change.

“While we appreciated the training we received through the NGOs sponsored by the U.S. government, and it did help us in our struggles, we are also aware that the same government also trained the state security investigative service, which was responsible for the harassment and jailing of many of us,” said Mr. Fathy, the Egyptian activist.

Interviews with officials of the nongovernmental groups and a review of diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks show that the democracy programs were constant sources of tension between the United States and many Arab governments.

The cables, in particular, show how leaders in the Middle East and North Africa viewed these groups with deep suspicion, and tried to weaken them. Today the work of these groups is among the reasons that governments in turmoil claim that Western meddling was behind the uprisings, with some officials noting that leaders like Ms. Qadhi were trained and financed by the United States.

Diplomatic cables report how American officials frequently assured skeptical governments that the training was aimed at reform, not promoting revolutions.

Last year, for example, a few months before national elections in Bahrain, officials there barred a representative of the National Democratic Institute from entering the country.

In Bahrain, officials worried that the group’s political training “disproportionately benefited the opposition,” according to a January 2010 cable.

In Yemen, where the United States has been spending millions on an anti-terrorism program, officials complained that American efforts to promote democracy amounted to “interference in internal Yemeni affairs.”

But nowhere was the opposition to the American groups stronger than in Egypt.

Egypt, whose government receives $1.5 billion annually in military and economic aid from the United States, viewed efforts to promote political change with deep suspicion, even outrage.

Hosni Mubarak, then Egypt’s president, was “deeply skeptical of the U.S. role in democracy promotion,” said a diplomatic cable from the United States Embassy in Cairo dated Oct. 9, 2007.

At one time the United States financed political reform groups by channeling money through the Egyptian government.

But in 2005, under a Bush administration initiative, local groups were given direct grants, much to the chagrin of Egyptian officials.

According to a September 2006 cable, Mahmoud Nayel, an official with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, complained to American Embassy officials about the United States government’s “arrogant tactics in promoting reform in Egypt.”

The main targets of the Egyptian complaints were the Republican and Democratic institutes. Diplomatic cables show that Egyptian officials complained that the United States was providing support for “illegal organizations.”

Gamal Mubarak, the former president’s son, is described in an Oct. 20, 2008, cable as “irritable about direct U.S. democracy and governance funding of Egyptian NGOs.”

The Egyptian government even appealed to groups like Freedom House to stop working with local political activists and human rights groups.

“They were constantly saying: ‘Why are you working with those groups, they are nothing. All they have are slogans,’ ” said Sherif Mansour, an Egyptian activist and a senior program officer for the Middle East and North Africa at Freedom House.

When their appeals to the United States government failed, the Egyptian authorities reacted by restricting the activities of the American nonprofit organizations.

Hotels that were to host training sessions were closed for renovations. Staff members of the groups were followed, and local activists were intimidated and jailed. State-owned newspapers accused activists of receiving money from American intelligence agencies.

Affiliating themselves with the American organizations may have tainted leaders within their own groups. According to one diplomatic cable, leaders of the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt told the American Embassy in 2009 that some members of the group had accused Ahmed Maher, a leader of the January uprising, and other leaders of “treason” in a mock trial related to their association with Freedom House, which more militant members of the movement described as a “Zionist organization.”

A prominent blogger, according to a cable, threatened to post the information about the movement leaders’ links to Freedom House on his blog.

There is no evidence that this ever happened, and a later cable shows that the group ousted the members who were complaining about Mr. Maher and other leaders.

In the face of government opposition, some groups moved their training sessions to friendlier countries like Jordan or Morocco. They also sent activists to the United States for training.

For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier

- By WILLIAM J. BROAD - March 8, 2010 - The New York Times

In the Iranian desert, at a sprawling industrial site ringed by barbed wire and antiaircraft guns, a shift in the enrichment of uranium is producing global jitters because it could shorten Iran’s path to the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

It is also illustrating one of the peculiarities of uranium enrichment, a version of the rich getting richer, really fast. The tricky process accelerates as it moves ahead. “The higher the concentration, the easier it gets,” said Houston G. Wood III, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia who specializes in nuclear enrichment. The process is, as scientists like to say, nonlinear.

Four years ago, Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale with centrifuges, machines that spin extraordinarily fast to separate uranium 235 from the more common form of the element, uranium 238. Uranium 235 is a natural rarity that splits easily in two, or fissions, in bursts of atomic energy, either in a reactor or a bomb. Reactor-grade fuel is usually defined as uranium 235 of about 4 or 5 percent, and bomb-grade as 90 percent or higher.

The desert complex, the Natanz nuclear facility, raised the level of uranium 235 to roughly 4 percent from its natural concentration of 0.7 percent. Over time, the facility produced two tons of concentrated material, enough, if further enriched, to make about two atom bombs.

Then, on Sunday, Feb. 7, Iran announced it would begin enriching its stockpiled uranium to 20 percent — ostensibly to make fuel for a research reactor in Tehran. Nuclear experts said that although this might sound like a leap, moving to 20 percent from 4 percent was actually a fairly easy step — not at all as demanding and time consuming as raising the level to 4 percent from 0.7 percent. And the ease of further enriching uranium once it is already enriched made the world take notice.

The new enrichment effort began Tuesday, Feb. 9. Three days later, France, Russia and the United States criticized Iran’s move as an “escalation.” In a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an arm of the United Nations in Vienna, the three United Nations ambassadors from those countries said the heightened effort raised “new concerns about Iran’s nuclear intentions.”

A senior Obama administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters on Feb. 18 that the enrichment step and related Iranian moves were clear provocations. “This program,” the official said, “is heading more and more in the direction of seeking a weapons capability.”

In scientific terms, rather than political ones, the issue is “nonlinearity,” a word almost as scary to nonscientists as highly enriched uranium is to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The definition is fairly simple, however. In a nonlinear process, a particular input produces an output that is disproportional in size, either big or small. The weather is conspicuously nonlinear, with small changes in one area producing deadly storms elsewhere. So are earthquakes and explosions. The word describes inequality in cause and effect.

A practical illustration of nonlinearity is that Iran — or any other nuclear hopeful — needs increasingly few centrifuges to make uranium 235 increasingly potent. For instance, one industry blueprint features 3,936 centrifuges for enriching up to 4 percent, 1,312 centrifuges to 20 percent, 546 centrifuges to 60 percent and just 128 centrifuges to 90 percent — the level needed for a bomb.

The reason is that “you’re moving a lot more material at lower levels of enrichment,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation and disclosed the blueprint. “It’s the reduction of the material” that makes the process gradually easier.

Centrifuges that whirl small amounts of gaseous uranium at high speeds are used to separate the element’s different forms, or isotopes, starting with material that consists of 99.3 percent of the heavier uranium 238. At each step, more of the heavy uranium is removed and the remaining material, now with a higher concentration of the lighter isotope, goes through the centrifuge process again.

Uranium ore has about 140 atoms of the heavy isotope for every light one, and separating the two takes a lot of spinning. By the time the enrichment process has reached 4 percent, it has successfully removed some 115 of the heavy atoms.

To get from there to 20 percent — the enrichment goal of the Iranians — the spinning centrifuges need remove only 20 more of the heavy atoms. And from there it is even easier to jump to 90 percent, bomb grade, by removing four or so additional heavy atoms. That is what worries many countries.

In the desert, at the Natanz complex, Iran presented atomic inspectors with evidence that it had succeeded in enriching some of its 4 percent uranium to 20 percent, the United Nations agency said in a Feb. 18 report. But American and European officials said the amounts were small so far.

Originally, Iran enriched its uranium to 4 percent with thousands of centrifuges in two cavernous underground halls roughly half the size of the Pentagon. The center of its new effort, according to the atomic agency, is a facility at Natanz known as the pilot plant, where Iran currently has 164 centrifuges spinning. Even with the aid of nonlinearity, that number is insufficient to enrich much uranium quickly.

In interviews and briefings, officials in Washington and diplomats in Europe said the pilot plant could make perhaps three kilograms, or about seven pounds, of 20 percent fuel per month. At that rate, they added, making enough to power the research reactor in Tehran would take five to seven years. But the reactor has only months to go before it could run out of fuel, they estimated.

The experts said the leisurely enrichment pace suggested that Iran’s declared goal was disingenuous and that its real motive was simply to escalate its defiant brinkmanship and up the ante in global negotiations over its nuclear program. Moreover, the enriched material must be turned into reactor fuel rods — a process that many experts doubted Tehran could master.

“We do not believe that Iran has either the technical knowledge or the intellectual property rights” to make the fuel rods, said Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy.

Iranian officials have all but admitted that the aim of the enrichment move — at least in part — is to strengthen its negotiating stance. Last week, when reporters asked Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, when the country expected to produce the fuel assemblies, he professed to have no idea.

He added, “We have opened a window of opportunity for the others to prove their political will to come and to have a deal on the nuclear fuel.” For months, Iran and the West have negotiated unsuccessfully to have Iran’s 4 percent uranium sent abroad for processing into reactor rods. The West wants the material out of Iran to preclude its transformation into bomb fuel.

Since 2006, the United Nations Security Council has repeatedly called on Iran to halt its uranium enrichment. Washington and its allies say that Tehran is seeking the ability to make nuclear weapons, a charge it strongly denies.

The Institute for Science and International Security, in a March 3 report, called Iran’s enrichment to 20 percent “particularly troubling.” As early as next year, it said, Iran could accumulate enough material to take the next step on the path of centrifuge concentration and make bomb-grade fuel. If Iran fed the 20 percent material back into thousands of spinning centrifuges at its main plant, the institute said, it could make sufficient fuel for a weapon “within a month.”

Iran’s sprawling enrichment plant at Natanz currently houses more than 8,000 centrifuges and is designed to hold 54,000 — the number is that large because of Iran’s ostensible goal of supplying reactors with tons of fuel.

Another worry for the West is whether Iran is developing a new clandestine site to further enrich its uranium. Last September, President Obama disclosed the existence of a half-built plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum. The plant is designed to hold 3,000 centrifuges, but experts said its unveiling had ruined its original purpose as a secret site.

Iran is now disconnecting hundreds of centrifuges at the main plant at Natanz, according to the atomic inspectors. Experts were unsure why. The move could signal technical troubles or new plans.

The institute, in its report, suggested that “Iran could be in the process of moving at least some of these centrifuges elsewhere,” perhaps to new clandestine sites. Iran last year announced plans to build 10 centrifuge plants underground to protect them from aerial attack. Experts agreed that it stood little chance of making 10 plants, but might succeed in building 1 or 2.

All told, there are 20 operating enrichment plants in the world, according to a recent study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Nuclear specialists said that the vast majority of those plants — unlike Iran’s — enrich their uranium to no more than 4 or 5 percent. Despite the technical ease of further enriching uranium into fuel for a bomb, said Mr. Albright, the Institute for Science and International Security’s president, “there are very few that go to weapon grade.”