Month: October 2018

United States (Conversation) – The midterm elections are widely expected to usher in this century’s “year of the woman” – an explosion of women entering government. Massachusetts will likely elect its first black woman to Congress, Arizona is poised to send its first woman to the U.S. Senate, and fully 50 percent of Democratic congressional nominees this year are women. But California – a policy trendsetter that in 1993 became the first state to be represented simultaneously by two women in the U.S. Senate – won’t be making history this…

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Australia (Conversation) – Australia has become a destination for a legion of far-right speakers from North America and the UK in recent months. Milo Yiannopoulos’ controversial visit last December resulted in violent clashes between protesters and a A$50,000 bill for Yiannopoulos for extra policing. (He never paid it.) Nonetheless, Yiannopoulos is planning a return in late November. In March, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson packed out auditoriums in three cities for speeches railing against feminism, political correctness and hate speech laws. This was followed by the visits of Canadians Lauren…

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United States (TexasTribune) – In the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers where she was held, Luz became known as la llorona — the one who cries. Luz, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her from an abusive husband in Honduras if she’s deported, said she was in emotional and physical pain for the five months she was in federal detention. First, she was separated from her 15-year-old son under the U.S. government’s short-lived “zero-tolerance” policy after fleeing what she described as 17 years of…

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Mexico (GV) – In Mexico, alarming security issues are nothing new — press reports, statistics and general public perception all point to a rise in criminal offenses. Faced with this situation, which has at times exceeded the scope of the public institutions meant to deal with it, regular citizens in Mexico City have turned to mapping technology in an effort to reduce the impact of crime in their communities. According to a report on criminal offenses in the capital, in the second quarter of 2018, Mexico City suffered from the second highest…

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United States (Conversation) – Republican women have faced a conundrum repeatedly in the last two years. In the cases of Donald Trump, Roy Moore and Brett Kavanaugh, the question facing them has been whether to support a male Republican leader accused of sexual assault – or to press for male accountability. That was evident most recently when Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine, spoke for 45 minutes on the Senate floor earlier this month. Collins explained why she voted to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court despite multiple allegations…

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United States (Conversation) – Roughly 5,000 people, mostly from Central America’s violent and unstable “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras are reportedly making their way through Mexico with the intention of claiming asylum at the U.S. border. The so-called “migrant caravan” is attracting intense social and political attention, with U.S. President Donald Trump declaring it a “national emergency.” He has also claimed, erroneously, that the migrants “have to” claim asylum in Mexico first. Migrants aren’t obligated to claim asylum in any country, but have a right to seek…

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World Wide (Conversation) – If you want gender equality, get rich. Research shows that men and women tend to be more equal in more developed countries. You might expect that the more equal opportunities in these countries might reduce other differences between the genders, such as what kind of jobs people are more likely to have, or personality traits such as kindness or a tendency for risk-taking. But a new study published in Science argues the opposite, that greater equality actually widens these kind of gender differences. Cleverly, the study…

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United States (Conversation) – African American civil rights activist Tarana Burke started the metoo campaign in 2006 as a way to support sexual abuse survivors, specifically black women and women of colour. But when it fired its way into the public consciousness to become a popular, global hashtag after the Harvey Weinstein story broke 12 months ago, the media responded. News outlets reported on Weinstein and the hundreds of others accused, and a number of television series and films worked #metoo into their storylines. These are all positive steps. But…

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