From Viet Nam News:According to statistics by the General Statistics Office, between 2005 and 2008, 32,000 Vietnamese women married foreigners, mostly Chinese, Taiwanese and South Korean.
Meanwhile, statistics by the South Korean's Statistics Office show that, the number of Korean men marrying Vietnamese women increased from 134 in 2001 to 5,822 in 2005.
According to Ho Xuan Huy from the Viet Nam International Organisation for Migration (IOM), most foreign marriages are arranged through marriage brokers.
"These agencies earn their fees by enticing Vietnamese women with false information about their future husbands," Huy said.
Many women are then forced to become servants for their husbands' families and made to work hard and sometimes even hit, according to a report by the IOM.
Lack of knowledge among Vietnamese women living in rural areas and a lack of adequate regulations on foreign marriages are problems that need to be addressed to tackle the issue, according to Quy.
Le Thi Hoang Thanh, from the Institute of Legal Science of the Ministry of Justice, said that Viet Nam did not have any systems in place to provide information to citizens who wish to marry foreigners. There are also no regulations for the protection of Vietnamese women who choose to settle in their foreign husbands' country, as no agreements have been reached for Vietnamese women's rights abroad.
From the Reading Eagle:Berks County singer and longtime nurse administrator Runette Gabrielle, 75, Spring Township, will portray black abolitionist and humanitarian Harriet Tubman, one of 10 famous historical women to be spotlighted this year at the Berks County Chapter of the Daughters of American Revolution Famous Ladies' Tea.
The fundraising scholarship event, scheduled for April 17, follows two months of national history highlights with Black History Month in February and Women's History Month in March.
From the Washington Free Press:Women are a revolutionary force. That fact shows in their holiday, International Women's Day (IWD), both its past and present.
The holiday's roots are in the struggles of working women and their socialist supporters. It's believed that a mass protest by women garment and textile workers in New York City in 1857 occurred on March 8, and that in March two years later the same women won a drive to unionize. They were fighting against brutal working conditions, low wages, and the 12-hour day.
On March 8, 1908, socialist women organized a demonstration of 15,000 in New York. Their demands were pay raises, shorter hours, the vote, and an end to child labor. After that, the Socialist Party of America decided to celebrate a women's day in the US, the first of which was held in 1909.
From the Telegraph:Meir Amit, the director-general of Mossad in the 1960s, laid down the rules for kidon women in a document that remains in force today. It contains the following passage: “A woman has skills a man simply does not have. She knows how to listen. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. The history of modern intelligence is filled with accounts of women who have used their sex for the good of their country... It is not just sleeping with someone if required. It is to lead a man to believe you will do so in return for what he has to tell you.”
'Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service’ by Gordon Thomas is available from Telegraph Books.
From Freep. com:She was watching television when the women came to her.
The news program showed thousands of people, mostly women, lined up in the rain to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King after her death in 2006.
Pearl Cleage wondered about those women, from all walks of life, united by that moment in history. So Cleage (pronounced cleg) did what she's done since childhood: She made up a story.
That story, about five fictional women whose lives intersect in the damp funeral line, became a play called "Song for Coretta," which is being presented at the Detroit Repertory Theatre through March 21.
From My Central Jersey:Bound Brook Memorial Library, 402 E. High St., will present a program entitled, “Women at the Turn of the Century 1880-1920” at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 4.
At the turn of the century, society’s perception of women was in transition, due to the changes going on in the country. Technology, urbanization and immigration were driving changes in the social and economic status of women.
This presentation will discuss women’s advancement into the professions, arts and business, in addition to how women took the initiative to drive social change and innovative approaches to serious social issues like health, public welfare and suffrage while improving their own position in society.
This program is free and open to the public. Call 732-356-0043 to register.
From the Baltimore Sun:When $1,000 or less prevents a woman in dire circumstances from taking a major step toward reversing the downward spiral of her life, the Response Network of the Women's Giving Circle of Howard County comes alive.
The network is an electronic call to action that sets a speedy fundraising mechanism in motion each month by e-mail, which is currently dispatched to 1,000 women and asks them to pledge whatever amount they can.
WGC, which is a fund of the Columbia Foundation, will join in celebrating that organization's 40th anniversary March 3 by presenting a program on philanthropy that is open to all women.
From Ghana Web:IN Ghana today, most women are discriminated against in jobs, pay, education and welfare. Most women are financially dependent on a man, and without assistance, carry the burden of looking after children and caring for the sick and old. Society's perception formers’- ranging from judges to journalists, cabinet ministers to advertising copywriters, take it for granted that women are inferior. In hindsight, they reduce all women, whatever their occupation, experience, Politics or interests to one dimension, sex, and judge them by whether they measure up to what men desire.
In our society, women don't have equality, they don't have freedom, and they don't even have respect in any meaningful sense. What can be done about it? Women have to be able to fight back, for themselves and for the future of all women. This doesn't mean an out-and-out conflict with all men all of the time. Separatism--the view that women can fight for liberation only on their own and against men--is a counsel of despair and a way of dividing women and men still further. Women have a right to organise with men to fight against the society that keeps us all down, to make men see that the world has to be changed. This doesn't mean that women can't organise their own meetings, demonstrations, pickets or whatever, when appropriate-- we have that right, too--but we should be trying to reunite women and men in the struggle for socialism.
From the Tehran Times:The second International conference on women is to be held in Tehran, from February 24 to 25, 2010.
Aimed at spreading Islamic thoughts about families, women; their rights and responsibilities, the conference is to be convened on the theme of “Contribution of the Islamic world to women’s issues and analysis of the consequences of feminism”.
Negative impacts of feminism, particularly in western societies, and its devastating effects on families’ foundation are among the issues to be discussed at the two-day event.
The conference is to be held by women’s cultural department of the Office for Supreme Leader Representative in Universities in cooperation with Iranian Foreign Ministry, the ministries of culture, health, and science as well as World Forum for the Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought, and the Ahl-ul-Bayt (A.S.) World Assembly.
About 300 essays in Persian and 100 in other languages from other countries have been so far submitted to the secretariat of the congress.
The First International Conference on women was held on the theme of “women, social-cultural issues, and globalization” in Tehran in April 2005.
