by Katharine Daniels
Executive Editor, The WIP
- USA -

Though the USA has typically been a leader in women's rights, the policies of the Bush Administration have taken us backwards in terms of women's issues, especially policies regarding the health and rights of women globally. Currently, the USA the only country in the world that does not financially contribute to UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund) for reasons that are political and not financial. With Barack Obama as President-elect, we have reason to be hopeful that U.S. funding to UNFPA will be restored. There are many challenges facing the USA, but we must ensure that restoring American leadership on women's issues is included and prioritized in the foreign policy of the new Administration.

On Monday, December 8th from 10am-12pm PST we were joined by Anika Rahman, the President of Americans for UNFPA, for a live online chat. As head of the official support organization for the United Nations women's health agency, Anika's role is to increase American engagement in the promotion of the health and rights of women globally. For more than twelve years Anika has monitored and analyzed United States and international policies that affect the reproductive health and rights of women.

by Handan T. Satiroglu
- Turkey -

Surfing YouTube.com, a favorite global pastime, is anything but a predictable experience within the confines of the Turkish Republic. Before browsing, one has to wonder, “Is it blocked?” “Unblocked?” or “Is the entire site blocked or just a few select videos?”

Turkey first denied access to Youtube in March of 2007 because Greek nationalists had posted derogatory videos of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the much-revered founder of modern day Turkey. After a brief lifting of the ban, in September 2007, a series of anti-nationalist videos incurred the wrath of Turkish authorities once again, and led to Youtube’s subsequent banning. Although the site was intermittently available soon after, once videos defaming Ataturk and the Republic in general resurfaced, the block was promptly reinstituted in January 2008. On this autumn-tinged October morning, the site remains inaccessible from my temporary home in Turkey.

by Kimberly N. Chase
- USA -

The issue of corn-based ethanol is getting more complicated by the day, with increasing concern about rising food prices and questions about environmental impact. But researchers are developing ways of producing cellulosic ethanol, which uses woody plant matter rather than starch or sugar to produce energy, and they say the fuel is almost ready for market.

Cellulose is much harder to break down than ethanol from food crops, and companies are using industrial enzymes followed by fermentation with microbes to arrive at a final product. None of the dozen or so companies in the running has reached commercial scale yet, but the race is certainly on.

by Jessica Mosby
- USA -

There will always be those who yearn for a simpler time, a time before the world was consumed by the internet and ever-advancing technologies. For the 54 million people living with disabilities in the United States, assistive technology can transform their lives, making it possible to fully participate in the able-bodied world – if they are able to afford it. The documentary Freedom Machines profiles people living with physical disabilities and the miraculous technologies that hold the key to their futures. The film, by Jamie Stobie and Janet Cole, will be broadcast on PBS September 9th as part of the Point of View series.

by Maria H. Lewytzkyj
- USA -

I keep a blog on MySpace devoted to coverage of the humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan. By giving life to this blog, my initial goal was to bring together a network of people from civil society who would become involved and stay informed. Early on, I posted an op-ed about China's role in Darfur and how the world was more interested in technological advances than the worsening human conditions in Darfur. A few of my friends on MySpace showed interest. One turned it into a podcast, and another started to correspond with me regularly. Soon we were adding people to our blogs who were genuinely interested in what was happening in Darfur, and though they felt completely helpless, they still wanted to stay informed. My experience in keeping this blog demonstrates the advantage bloggers have over the mainstream media - free press. Bloggers have the freedom to include perspectives and ideas that are often not included in mainstream coverage. This article is a jumping-off point for me to begin sharing my blog with readers of The WIP by cross-posting my Darfur coverage on The WIP's TALK blog.

by Genie Z. Laborde
- USA -

It's hot because most people don’t know about it yet and it's cool because it makes money. Crowdsourcing is a way for companies to enlist the help of their own Internet clients to produce their products. Utilizing the "wisdom of the crowd" to its advantage, crowdsourcing attracts customers, content and "clicks" or traffic to a website or online company. The amateur producers in the “crowd” wish to see their creations and this turns them into customers or producers of "clicks," both of which are valuable roles on the Internet.

by Megan Tady
- USA –

For Maureen Mullaney, helping her kids with their homework takes more than just proofreading their papers. Fed up with a painfully slow dial-up Internet connection at home, Mullaney often drives her children into town, where they sit outside the library to pick up a wireless Internet signal on their laptops in order to do research.

“How silly is it that in this day and age, you have to get in your car in the middle of winter, drive to the center of town, sit in your car with it running, while your child can research the traditional clothing of Chile?” asks Mullaney, who lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Mullaney says her children’s ability to do research for school reports is “ridiculously hampered” by their dial-up connection, particularly when they need to include images with their assignments. “You can’t see [the images] quickly,” Mullaney says. “You click on one and then you wait. And oh, that’s the wrong one.”

The process can be so frustrating, that sometimes Mullaney and her kids give up. “I just say, ‘Forget it, I’ll look it up for you when I get to work,’” she says. “So then I end up doing their research? What’s that all about?”

by Eva Sohlman
- Sweden -

Former CIA director Jim Woolsey eagerly leans across the table in the swanky restaurant of the Carlton-Ritz Hotel in Washington, D.C. The seriousness of the matter he’s discussing is reflected in his sharp, almost transparent blue eyes.

”The United States’ dependence on oil makes us very vulnerable from a security and environmental perspective. Why buy oil from Islamic theocracies, which sponsor terrorism against us? We are fighting a war against terror, but are paying for both sides. How smart is that?” asks the sprightly 66-year-old Woolsey.

by Katharine Daniels
Founder & Executive Editor, The WIP
- USA -

On March 8th, we will celebrate The WIP’s one year anniversary. In that time, The WIP has made its way into homes, offices, and Internet cafés in 146 countries. Whether you’re a reader in the USA, Indonesia, Nigeria, Argentina or South Korea – you’ve found us somehow. You’ve read our articles and joined our community. Through your commentary you’ve added your voices to the critical dialog that begins with a story. In just one short year The WIP has built a community of men and women from all over the globe.

On the pages of The WIP, readers and writers have built a meeting place where everyone is invited to listen to each others’ voices, histories, and insights. On these pages we’ve come to realize that issues such as the plight of vulnerable children, genocide, and rising food prices are not just the misfortune of somebody else. Looking past the headlines, we see clearly how national policies have international consequences. We’ve come to understand that we are all interconnected and through our stories we are educating ourselves. By responding to the women who write our stories, we let them know we are listening and together we are discovering fair, workable solutions to the problems we all face in our world today.

by Michelle Chen
- USA -

Angela Greene has a tough job: she and her workcrew scale the rooftops of Richmond, California to run wires, lay racks, and bend metal piping. Yet in the end, when she unfurls a gleaming solar panel over her community, it feels easy to save the planet.

After being laid off from her former job at a printing business, Greene went through a vocational training program and then joined Solar Richmond, an organization that is bringing sustainable energy along with new jobs to the heavily black and Latino port city.

by Katharine Daniels
Executive Editor, The WIP
USA

The issue of deforestation hasn’t been on my radar for some years. It is one of the problems on our planet that I’d assumed would be so obvious that surely “they” would have discovered something more sustainable than chopping down our last remaining virgin forests for profit!

Yet, earlier this month, while driving up the Oregon coast for the first time, to my horror, I saw that the situation appears to be even worse than the last time I checked. Fresh scars mar hillsides; small, random patches of trees are left standing with no apparent logic dictating what has been cut and what left behind. Virgin forest has been shamelessly clear-cut all the way from the edge of the highway, up and over what were once green, pristine mountainsides.

In this critical period of climate change, healthy forests play a crucial role. They abate global warming by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide. Thriving forests also regulate the water cycle and stabilize soils. What look more like Christmas tree farms have replaced some of the old forest land. These young trees will take decades of growth to absorb and store the same amount of carbon their old growth ancestors once did. When wilderness is destroyed, the carbon it stored is either burned or oxidized. The threat of deforestation is even greater today than it was twenty years ago. With all the discussion surrounding biofuels, one topic embarrassingly absent is “where will all the land needed to produce biofuels come from”?

by Victoria Stirling
Canada

• A boy winces at the smoke rising from the computer motherboards being melted over open fires in a recycling yard in New Delhi, India. Photograph courtesy of Greenpeace India/Hatvalne •

I first became aware that the Western world is shamelessly dumping its problems on those less fortunate when I read an article by Mari-Len De Guzman in a 2005 issue of Computer World Canada. It detailed the unconscionable disposal methods that some in the Western world employ today to get rid of electronic litter.

Katharine Daniels
Executive Editor, The WIP
USA

This past weekend I attended the third annual BlogHer conference in Chicago, Illinois. Participants networked, socialized, and attended presentations by successful female bloggers from all online spheres of life. This year’s event, called “A World of Difference,” is precisely what I found.

• Elisa Camahort, Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins, founders of Blogher at this year's conference. Photograph by Josh Hallet •

BlogHer was developed in 2005 “to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment.” The founders call it a “do-ocracy” that gives women online the opportunity “to help ourselves and work together to voice and achieve our individual goals.” It is no surprise that Blogher’s founders, Lisa Stone, Elisa Camahort, and Jory Des Jardins are three successful internet pioneers who had the chutzpah to follow an intuitive hunch, and they have developed something great and important.

by Aralena Malone-Leroy
France

With a record-breaking voter-participation of 86% registered on May 6th, the French citizen’s participation in politics appears to have taken a positive turn from resignation and apathy to genuine interest and action. The reasons for this about-face of public participation in the political sphere are manifold, and emerging media seem to be playing an increasingly larger role.

by Claire A. Williams and Lara Vogel
USA/Kenya

It all started with a note passed through the kitchen window. We were instructed to look at it, and then “repeat for me later.” Dutifully, we read: “I [greet] you. I love you. I pray for you. Please assist me with one ovocando. It is good to be nice.”

After sharing her note with us, a little orphan named Jane immediately scampered to hide behind a tree. Despite her subtle attempts at guilt, we did not provide the requested avocado, in large part because our apartment was, at the time, ovocando-less. But the note provided our apartment endless amusement and hung in a place of honor next to the list of students who planned to run with us for our marathon training each day.

by Glory Mushinge
Zambia

For more than seven years, the country has waited for the policy, while holding studies and consultative meetings amongst the private and public sector to ensure the final product would become something to write home about. The eventual launch of the policy on the 28th of March 2007 marked the beginning of much hard work for the sector, as there are many issues that need to be addressed.

There are issues of infrastructure, especially in rural and peri-urban areas where there is literally no proper communication infrastructure and skills to utilize ICT’s. In the words of the Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa, as carried out by his Vice President, Dr Rupiah Banda, when he officially launched the policy this week, "Government’s intention is to bridge the digital divide amongst Zambians."

by Anna Clark
USA

Green consciousness is finally hitting that bastion of carbon emissions with a war-inducing appetite for oil: the American automobile.

Between the nationwide Step It Up campaign of community activism and Al Gore’s Academy-Award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, the clamor for global warming action is forcing U.S. automakers to respond. And they are—if a bit begrudgingly.

Hybrid and fuel-efficient cars are hot; GM’s gone so far as to design a plug-in concept car that may never need gasoline. Tellingly, Detroit’s road-maintenance and salt trucks run on biodiesel. With the U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this month that gives the Environmental Protection Agency authority to regulate fuel efficiency—expressly because global warming is a “serious threat”—we might expect a green ethic to become more inherent to American cars.

It marks a significant change for an industry built on the premise of wastefulness. Giles Slade’s illuminating book, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, points to Detroit automakers for popularizing the corporate strategy that justifies the nation’s overproduction of goods by creating wants and needs in consumers.

by Suad Hamada
Bahrain

What could be more demeaning to women than allowing men to divorce their spouses by sending text messages from their mobile phones?

If such a move materializes, Muslim men could benefit more from modern technology than women as Muslim women would not be allowed this privilege and Islam prohibits them from calling off a marriage without the approval of Sharia judges. Many women who ask for divorce in court end up losing custody of their children and other marriage settlements.

by Susan Mwape
Zambia

Many Zambians active in the Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector have come to appreciate the use of open source software; this is software that can be used in Windows and can be acquired freely or at a very minimal cost.

by Katharine Daniels
Founder and Executive Editor, The WIP
- USA -

• The WIP's editors and women writers have a lot to celebrate as we look back on 2007. •

A colleague of mine in radio news congratulated us this week, saying that The WIP has over delivered on our promise to create quality international news reports from the unique perspectives of women. In our first two weeks, we’ve demonstrated that local stories from around the world are both thought provoking and relevant. We’ve published 34 stories from women across the globe. Each piece is a journey into the life of someone neither one of us knew before—writers like Viktorija Plavcak, who laments the national heritage and identity lost in Slovenia with the adoption of the Euro. Or Glory Mushinge, in Zambia, who denounces the substandard goods and services that have flooded the Zambian market through increased Chinese investment in her economy. In Mumbai, we met Lara Vogel and her discoveries in a society where doctors, out of circumstance, remain loving caregivers and are forced to practice medicine versus the over-reliance on science and machinery we’ve grown accustomed to in the west. In education, Janelle Weiner exposes what is lost in the culture of standardized testing—genuine and meaningful learning experience.

by Aralena Malone-Leroy
France

In June 2007, at the precise moment when thousands of tourists will be meandering down the Champs Elysées, contemplating the statues of philosophers lining the façade of the Hôtel de Ville, or strolling hand-in-hand along the curving paths of the Buttes de Chaumont, the mayor of Paris will offer tourists and citizens alike another reason to fall in love with the City of Lights: the deployment of 260 Wi-Fi hotspots dispersed across Paris, providing free internet access to all those equipped with a laptop. For those who prefer to surf the net in the great urban outdoors, approximately 138 plein air sites will be available; the remaining 128 hotspots will be deployed in municipal buildings throughout the capital (libraries, community centers, city halls), should the weather dictate otherwise.