A baby girl born today will still face inequality and discrimination, no matter where her mother lives. We have a common obligation to ensure her right to live free from the violence that affects one in three women globally; to earn equal pay for equal work; to be free of the discrimination that prevents her from participating in the economy; to have an equal say in the decisions that affect her life; and to decide if and when she will have children, and how many she will have.

More: United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s Message for International Women’s Day

Africa now has three female heads of state, after Catherine Samba-Panza of the Central African Republic took office in January. Though women leaders remain the exception in African politics, activists say things are looking up.

Each of these women has taken office amid crisis and transition. Countries like Mali have seen their first female presidential candidates. Bad times are finally prying the doors open.

Discrimination remains, but the pool of qualified women is growing as more girls get to stay in school.

At least 16 African countries have passed parity laws. Countries like Rwanda reserve a percentage of parliamentary seats for women, while others like Senegal have set quotas for women on candidate lists.

More: Women on the Rise in African Politics

Earlier, the 70-year-old ex-president was brought to the court from a military hospital in Rawalpindi in a heavily-protected convoy. He sat in witness box and stood briefly when addressed by the judge. But Musharraf did not speak.

When Justice Arab asked him how he was feeling, he replied with a smile on his face that he was “good”. He remained in the court for 20 minutes and was taken back to the hospital, where he was admitted on January 3 after complaining of chest pain while traveling to the court for hearing.

The trial against Musharraf is related to his suspension, abrogation and subversion of the constitution after imposition of emergency rule in November 2007.

More: Musharraf Appears Before Court in Treason Case - the Times of India

I dont nec. agree - but, nuance is important:

First of all, the main issue - external policy matters. This is not war. War is when two or more countries engage one another in combat. When one country conducts armed operations on another’s territory unhindered, and the other responds with appeals to the international community, that is annexation.

It so happens that at one time I worked with the Kremlin as a political analyst, and I continue to follow its “points of reference”. That was during the time of “Putin the Moderate”, but the main approaches still apply. So it’s with some sense of responsibility that I agree with the argument that “Putin is not the monster you think he is. He’s a monster, of course, but of a quite different kind.”

In that sense, Putin is like a terrorist with a hand-grenade who demands that the plane change course, except that he is holding the world hostage

More @ The Institute for War and Peace Reporting

for some reason i cannot get the link to the source to work - so try this one:
pravda.com.ua

it is in russian - or google the english version at iwpr.net

Commentator Oliver North, a former Lieutenant Colonel who hosts a War Stories segment on Fox News, made the comments at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Referring to the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell two years ago,he said: “The members of our armed forces and their families deserve better than being treated like laboratory rats in some radical social experiment.”

“The people of Ukraine are this very minute paying the terrible price for America’s leadership deficit disorder.”

“Our leader should be admired and trusted by our allies, and if not feared, at least respected by our adversaries.”

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More: Fox Host: ‘Allowing Gays Makes the Military Like Lab Rats, Which Is Why Putin Invaded Ukraine’ - PinkNews.co.uk * PinkNews.co.uk

If you’ve had a chance to visit the September 11 memorials at Ground Zero in Manhattan, the Pentagon and western Pennsylvania — or perhaps have been to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. — then you have a sense of the powerful emotions that such places can stir up.

This week, the design was chosen for a memorial to the victims of the July 22, 2011, attacks in Norway that left 77 people dead and several hundred more wounded. Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg’s vision for what’s being called a “memory wound” seems likely to join the list of such memorials that evoke strong feelings.

Dahlberg’s concept cuts a channel through Utoya Island, where 69 of the victims — most of them young people attending a political camp — were shot and killed by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik.

More: ‘Memory Wound’ Will Cut Through Site of Norway’s Massacre : The Two-Way : NPR

Finally, there was the Donald—who was vastly less overwrought than LaPierre but also vastly less coherent. Trump started off babbling about all the celebs he’d just been hob-nobbing with down at his Miami hotel that morning. Next thing you know, he’s talking about how much Vladmir Putin respects him. How do we know this? Because Putin gave the Donald a present when they were hanging out in conjunction with The Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owns. You know who else really respects Trump? The Chinese. Trump has lots of rich Chinese pals, and they just love him. Plus, Business Week asked some question about the Top 10 things the Chinese want, and you know what they said? Trump stuff. Ties. Hotels. Apartments. Anything with his name on it. They’re crazy for the brand. The biggest bank in China is a tenant in one of Trump’s buildings, and they tell him, “We’ll never leave! We love you! We love the building!” Why? Because they respect Trump. Unlike that Obama schmuck, who they regard as a total loser. (How many hotels does Obama own? Zero! How many reality shows has he starred in? Zero.) And don’t even get Trump started on immigration or Afghanistan or how America should have seized Iraq’s oil after kicking Saddam’s ass.

More: CPAC: Come for the Crazy, Stay for the Party

YouTube

A pregnant South Carolina woman who drove a minivan carrying her three young children into the ocean surf off Florida was charged Friday with attempted first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse, though she has denied trying to harm anyone. (March 7)

more here

The pregnant 31-year-old woman from South Carolina, Ebony Wilkerson, was said to be acting out of sorts recently and talking of “demons.”

Since 1970, every World Cup football has been made by Adidas, an ideal opportunity to showcase their latest developments in ball design and technology. (Disclosure: I work at the Centre for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University, which has worked on some projects with Adidas. No one at the Centre for Sports Engineering Research has worked on Adidas’ World Cup ball.) In 2006, they took a radical departure from the norm with the Teamgeist. Traditionally, a football is constructed from 32 panels stitched together by hand. The Teamgeist had 14 panels that were glued together with heat (thermally bonded), resulting in a ball that was more “marble-like” than previous generations.

The change was not only aesthetic. Players using the ball complained of erratic behavior in flight. For the next World Cup (South Africa, 2010) Adidas considerably redesigned the ball, the Jabulani, which had only eight thermally bonded panels. Unfortunately, criticism of the ball was, if anything, louder than it had been four years earlier. Many coaches and players compared the Jabulani to a beach ball that swerves unpredictably.

Their radical design is different from a standard stitched football in two ways. First, fewer panels mean shorter seams. By my own measurements, a 32-panel football has a seam length of around 405 centimeters, compared to 345 cm on the Teamgeist and 203 cm on the Jabulani. Second, thermal bonding created a much lower seam profile. A laser scan of the surface of the Jabulani and a stitched football shows the stitched seam is more than twice as deep as the Jabulani’s. The floating, beach-ball-like behavior of these footballs isn’t because they are light, but because they are smooth.

More: 2014 World Cup, Brazuca: The Physics of Adidas’ New World Cup Ball.

Go entrepreneurs! Wow, this holds up and I promise you somehow I will find funding for a drone that can fly at least my GoPro’s and preferably my DSLR. *rubs hands in that slightly maniacal style*

I can make really good use of something like that. Aerial would add just what I need to step up and get those paid gigs for my little growing media company.

One of the judges of the National Transportation Safety Board (the NTSB) ruled yesterday that the FAA has no authority to regulate drones, striking down a six-year-old ban on commercial drones and saving a Swiss drone operator $10,000 that the FAA was trying to fine him.

The battle began in 2011 when drone pilot Raphael Pirker was issued a $10,000 fine for flying a styrofoam drone around the University of Virgina to capture footage for a commercial he was shooting for the university’s medical school.

As far as the FAA is concerned, commercial drone flight has been illegal since 2007; however, according to the court papers, they never actually created an enforceable rule. All they did was issue a policy statement.

More: Judge Strikes Down 6-Year-Old FAA Drone Ban, Makes Commercial Drones Legal