From the Huffington Post:Sonia Sotomayor won confirmation Thursday as the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, a history-making Senate vote that capped a summer-long debate heavy with ethnic politics and hints of high court fights to come.
The third woman in court history, she'll be sworn in Saturday as the 111th justice and the first nominated by a Democrat in 15 years.
The Senate vote was 68-31 to confirm Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, with Democrats unanimously behind her but most Republicans lining up in a show of opposition both for her and for the president's standards for a justice.
The 55-year-old daughter of Puerto Rican parents was raised in a South Bronx housing project and educated in the Ivy League before rising to the highest legal echelons, spending the past 17 years as a federal judge. She watched the vote on TV at a federal courthouse in New York City, among friends and colleagues.
A couple of noteworthy blogs that I have recently come across and thought you might enjoy:History of American WomenDedicated to the many women who contributed to the growing history of America.Wings & WaspDedicated to the many women aviators of World War II.
From Yahoo News:
Naomi Sims, a black model who opened the white-dominated fashion industry to African Americans in the 1960s, has died aged 61.
Sims - sometimes dubbed the first black supermodel - died of cancer on Saturday (local time) in Newark, New Jersey, the New York Times and thefashioninsider.com reported.
Born in racially segregated Mississippi in 1948, Sims made history in August 1967 as the first black model on the cover of Fashion Of The Times - a supplement to The New York Times.
She scored another first when she made the cover of Ladies Home Journal and went on to feature on the covers of Life Magazine and Cosmopolitan.
"Thanks to her proven personal initiatives as a true pioneer, she succeeded in creating a real place for black women in the modelling industry," said Marcellous Jones, chief editor at thefashioninsider.com.
From
JM Bown @ Mercury News:
At 65, longtime Alameda resident JoAnn Smith Ainsworth was sort of forced to pursue her dream of becoming a novelist.
The database administrator found herself unemployed and scared when the law firm where she had worked for 20 years abruptly went out of business. To stave off her sorrow, the divorcee turned her focus to books — not reading them as much as writing them.
Last week, Ainsworth, now 70, celebrated the paperback release of her second novel, "Matilda's Song." The medieval romance set in Britain after the Norman Conquest of the British Isles of the 11th century already has been published online.
Visit
JoAnn's website
From Nick Illiev @ The Sofia Echo:The tomb of a Bulgarian princess was discovered in the northern Bulgarian town of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria's medieval capital, the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) said.
Archaeologists Nikolai Ovcharov and Hitko Vachev have excavated on August 2 what has been described as the grave of a Bulgarian princess, buried in the courtyard of the St St Peter and Pavel church in Veliko Tarnovo.
According to the two archaeologists, they have concluded that the grave dates back to the 14th century or earlier, sometime after the reign of tsar Ivan Assen II. The princess was found wearing "luxurious clothes trimmed with golden ribbon; excellently crafted jewelry; a golden ring, earrings, silver and golden pins were also found around the buried body", the BNR said.
Archaeologists have discovered over 100 artifacts since excavation work commenced two months ago at the St St Peter and Pavel as well as St Ivan Rilski churches in Veliko Turnovo. Most of discovered finds consist of golden jewelry. Once the items are restored, they will exhibited at the town's history museum in autumn 2009.
From UN News Centre:A newspaper produced entirely by women in rural India is among the four winners of this year’s Literacy Prizes awarded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in recognition of innovative programmes designed to teach women, adolescents and other marginalized populations how to read and write.
The fortnightly newspaper – distributed to more than 20,000 readers in Uttar Pradesh, northern India – is entirely created and marketed by newly literate “low caste” women who are training as journalists.
The award ceremony will be held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 8 September to coincide with International Literacy Day.
From John Esposito @ Middle East Online:Like the status of women in all the World's religions, in Islam and Muslim societies patriarchy played and in many cases continues to influence the status and roles of women. The place of women in the formative period of Islam reflected Qur'anic concerns for the status and rights of women as well as the patriarchal structure of the societies in which Islamic law was developed and elaborated. The status of women and the family in Islamic law was the product of Arab culture, Qur'anic reforms, and foreign ideas and values assimilated from conquered peoples. While the Qur'an introduced substantial reforms, providing new regulations and modifying local custom and practice, at the same time, much of the traditional pre-Islamic social structure with its extended family, the paramount position of males, the roles and responsibilities of its members, and family values was incorporated.
A new source of women's empowerment today has become active participation in the mosque and use of Islam's tradition to reclaim their rights in Islam. Reformers today emphasize that just as women during the time of the Prophet prayed in the mosque, so too today they actively exercise that right. In the centuries after the death of Muhammad, women played a small but significant role as transmitters of hadith (prophetic traditions) and in the development of Sufism (Islamic mysticism).
From Michael Sheridan @ the Times of India:The film’s title, ‘8,000 Girls Ascend the Heavenly Mountain’, suggests that Chinese audiences will see a tale of joy when it is aired on television this autumn.
It dramatises the lives of thousands of girls aged 13 to 19 who went to China’s remote far west in the 1950s to follow soldiers sent to colonise the turbulent Muslim region. In real life it was a trip to purgatory. As shooting for the film unfolds in Beijing under the watchful gaze of party censors, an astonishing story of mass deception, forced marriages and suicides has come to light.
Women have come forward to tell how they were lured to China’s new frontier by false promises of training and education — only to find themselves locked in barracks and coerced into marrying soldiers.
Chinese journalists have also discovered that Chairman Mao Tse-tung approved the dispatch of 900 prostitutes from the brothels of Shanghai to undergo “thought reform”. Thousands of war widows were also conscripted to go forth and multiply with new husbands from People’s Liberation Army.
From Khadijah Rentas @ CNN News:In many cases it's a woman that grips the blade -- maybe clean, maybe dirty -- that cuts a girl's path to womanhood.
The cutter, who works for a fee, can pursue any number of surgical options for the young girl's rite of passage. She can remove the girl's clitoris entirely, narrow her vagina with stitches, or make other excisions of the girl's genitalia.
A traditional symbol of a child's maturity to womanhood, the girl undergoes a circumcision. Often without an anesthetic, she feels every slice.
And sometimes girls that become women under the knife die under it, too.
In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni wants to outlaw female circumcision, and those that continue to perform the bloody practice would face the death penalty if a girl dies as a result of the procedure, Press Secretary Tamale Mirundi told CNN Wednesday.
