Below is a press release from sponsor Representative Betty McCollum about the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act of 2009.

McCollum Bill (Word doc., 45 KB)

Thanks to Bob Walker for the following summary of the bill: Authorizes the President to provide assistance, including through multilateral, nongovernmental, and faith-based organizations, to prevent child marriage in developing countries and to promote the educational, health, economic, social, and legal empowerment of girls and women. Sets forth priority assistance criteria. Directs the President, through the Secretary of State, to establish a multi-year strategy to prevent child marriage in developing countries and to promote the empowerment of girls at risk of child marriage. Sets forth strategy elements. Continue Reading »

The column below is by Global Media Award winner Bonnie Erbé about the International Violence Against Women Act of 2008 (H.R. 5927). You can send a supportive message to your Representative at the UNite Campaign to End Violence against Women’s website (http://www.saynotoviolence.org/join-say-no/tell-us-congress-pass-international-violence-against-women-act-ivawa --------------------------

For full article, visit:
http://www.scrippsnews.com/content/erbe-bill-would-help-women-worldwide

Solutions
For a Sustainable and Desirable Future

We are pleased to announce the debut of Solutions, an online and print publication devoted exclusively to showcasing bold and innovative ideas for solving the world’s environmental, ecological, and socio-economic problems.

Launching in January 2010, Solutions is a unique hybrid between a popular magazine and an authoritative peer-reviewed journal. The website, featuring our exclusive archive of peer-reviewed articles and online community of fellow problem solvers, can be found at: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com.
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Family planning services are available in over 90 percent of health facilities across Afghanistan but the number of women using them in rural areas is too low, according to the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH).

Hamida Ebadi, director of MoPH’s reproductive health unit, reckoned only 14-15 percent of women in rural and remote regions use family planning services.

“The number of women using these services in urban areas is higher than in rural areas but we don’t have formal statistics to show the disparity,” Ebadi told IRIN in Kabul.

For full article, visit:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?Reportid=84974

Congratulations to Malcolm Potts for this editorial in the Los Angeles Times.
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There are two wars going on in Afghanistan. One is to defeat the Taliban, and that war is not going well. The other is to liberate women, and that war has hardly begun. If the first war is won but the second is lost, Afghanistan will turn into a failed state — a caldron of violence and misery, home to extremism and totally outside the Western orbit of influence.

Last week’s election, however imperfect, is welcome, but it means little as long as women remain enslaved in this patriarchal, tradition-bound culture. In most of the country, a woman needs her husband’s permission to leave her home. Domestic violence is tragically common. Indeed, the government elected in 2004 passed, and President Hamid Karzai signed into law, legislation legalizing marital rape. Older men use their wealth and power to marry young women. In April, according to news reports, when a teenage Afghan girl called Gulsima eloped with a boy her own age instead of marrying an older man, she and the boyfriend were shot to death in front of the mosque in the southwest province of Nimrod.

For full article, visit:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/23/opinion/oe-potts23

We watched a teenage girl die last Friday.

Seventeen-year-old Shirin had been brought to the Herat Regional Hospital Burns Unit a few days before we met her. Ninety percent of her body was covered in third-degree burns.

Her mother-in-law said Shirin had burned herself by accident. The girl was preparing a meal in the kitchen but somehow confused cooking gasoline with petrol, she said.

For full article, visit:
http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/10/29/2112069.aspx

(written by Joe Bish, Population Outreach Manager for Population Media Center)
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Can you visualize 850 jumbo jets landing at your local airport today and each deplaning 250 people? If so, you will have a good grasp of daily, real-time global population growth.

Indeed, human numbers increase by over 200,000 every 24 hours. Every minute, 150 additional people need energy, water, food, and space to inhabit. By year’s end, that results in a 78 million person increase. It also creates demand for a significant amount of new resources the Earth must yield.
Illustration by Angel Boligan – Cagle Cartoons (click to purchase)

Arguably, on a planet already showing troublesome effects of a degraded, carelessly exploited environment, this extra passenger load is not good news. It was just in 1999 that we surpassed 6 billion humans, and in less than 2 years, we will pass 7 billion. In light of these trends, many respectable, hard-working environmental advocacy organizations argue that voluntary human population stabilization should be central to our efforts at sustainable development.
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Thirteen-year-old Sally al-Sabahi stood outside the courthouse earlier this month fiddling with her smudged, half-polished nails. She was hoping to get a divorce, but her husband did not show up.

When Sally was 11, her father married her to 23-year-old Nabil al-Mushahi, a cousin. Since the wedding, she has run away from her husband’s home three times.

“I was afraid of him since the first day,” she said in her parents’ tiny, windowless, stone home after the failed court date. “I don’t want to get married again until after I am dead.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009

Thanks to Tod Preston and Bob Walker for bringing my attention to this blog posting by Tod on the Woodrow Wilson Center’s “New Security Beat”. See http://newsecuritybeat.blogspot.com/2009/04/guest-contributor-tod-preston-on.html. Also, thanks to Jon Legg for the link to an October 31st BBC program, “Dying to Give Birth,” about giving birth in Pakistan, which you can hear at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004t2c1.
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Every day it seems the headlines bring new worries about the future of Pakistan. But among the many challenges confronting the nation—including a growing Taliban insurgency—one significant problem remains largely undiscussed: its rapidly expanding population.
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Thanks to Karen Newman of the Population and Sustainability Network in the UK for these links and the attached fact sheet on climate change and population. The Network was established to clarify and communicate the importance for sustainability of both population and consumption factors. It aims to bring together development, environment and reproductive health NGOs, government departments, academics and others, to increase leverage on population issues. See http://www.populationandsustainability.org/2/home/homepage.html.
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