Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Articles on Women in Politics


Fresh questions for PM over womens' role in government


Dame Helen Ghosh, former Home Office permanent secretary, says PM has network of friends from school and university

Dame Helen Ghosh, who said: 'It is actually quite difficult for a woman to get in as part of an Old Etonian clique.' Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

A senior Whitehall figure's reported comments about how difficult it was for women in politics to get into powerful networks and "Old Etonian cliques" prompted fresh questions Thursday over David Cameron's attempts to make the government more "women friendly". Dame Helen Ghosh, who recently retired as permanent secretary at the Home Office appeared to suggest the prime minister had surrounded himself with old friends from school and university, to the exclusion of women – though she denied this interpretation.

In a talk at Cambridge University, the London Evening Standard reported her as saying: "If you look at the current government – not necessarily back to the Bullingdon Club days – but Cameron, it is true, it is well known, has a clique, a network of friends – the friends he made at school, friends he made at university.

The paper also reported her as saying: "Women don't network. It is actually quite difficult for a woman to get in as part of an Old Etonian clique. They are far too busy doing other things, like bringing up their children, looking after their constituency."

In a statement later, Dame Helen said: "It is entirely false to say that I suggested that I think David Cameron surrounds himself by old Etonians – or that he has too few women in his team. A cursory look at the important roles around him reveals it is simply not the case."

Asked about the comments at a Downing Street press conference, the prime minister said: "I understand she is now saying she didn't say what she is reported to have said so I think you might want to bear that in mind."

The Evening Standard said that it stood by the quotations it reported.

Until her recent retirement Dame Helen was one of Britain's most senior civil servants as permanent secretary at the Home Office after a 33-year career in Whitehall.

In 2005, when Ghosh was appointed to her previous post – the top job at Defra – she was the only woman to head a leading department in government. She stepped down from the Home Office in September after 33 years in the civil service, to become director general of the National Trust.

Her departure prompted concerns that Whitehall was looking "maler and paler"

Last year Cameron was accused of patronising two female MPs when he told the Labour MP Angela Eagle to "calm down, dear" and referred to his own MP Nadine Dorries as "frustrated".

Such remarks have angered women already angry about policies that affect them disproportionately.

Articles on Syrian Massacre


The village of Taldou, near the town of Houla in Syria's Homs province was the scene of one of the worst massacres in the country's 14-month-long uprising on Friday.

United Nations observers on the ground have confirmed that at least 108 people were killed, including 49 children and 34 women. Some were killed by shell fire, but the majority appear to have been shot.

Diplomatic sources in Damascus have told the BBC that most of the deaths were caused by rooms being sprayed with bullets rather than point-blank executions to the head, as earlier reports suggested. The sources also say no throats were cut as opposition activists have asserted, although one victim's eye was gouged out.

But at whose hands they died remains a matter of contention. Activists, eyewitnesses and human rights groups - including the UN's high commissioner for human rights - point the finger at the Syrian army and the shabiha, a militia dominated by members of President Bashar al-Assad's heterodox Alawite sect.

The government however denies all responsibility, saying its soldiers were attacked and armed terrorists went on to shoot and knife civilians.

The United Nations has condemned the "indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force", but Maj Gen Robert Mood, the head of the UN Supervision Mission in Syria, said "the circumstances that led to these tragic killings are still unclear".

“I was in a room by myself when I heard the sound of a man. He was shouting and yelling at my family. I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot”

Quote Survivor of the Houla massacre

Protest attacked

The picture being pieced together by activists, survivors and the limited number of international journalists and human rights organisations in Syria is of an attack that began with the army shelling the town and ended with militiamen killing people house-by-house late into the night.

Rupert Colville, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said initial investigations suggest the majority of the victims were "summarily executed in two separate incidents" while fewer then 20 were killed by artillery or shell fire.

Eyewitnesses say that at about 13:00 local time (10:00 GMT) on Friday, just after midday prayers, soldiers fired on a protest in Taldou in the Houla area to disperse the crowds.

Some accounts report that opposition fighters then attacked the Syrian army position where the firing was coming from.

According to Syria's foreign ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi, "hundreds of gunmen" armed with machine guns, mortars and anti-tank missiles attacked soldiers, killing three.
 
Activists and eyewitnesses say the Syrian army shelled the town, reportedly at first with tank fire then with mortars, in a sustained bombardment that lasted at least two hours.
This tallies with UN accounts of tank and mortar shells in civilian areas. The UN Security Council issued a statement saying that "such outrageous use of force against civilian population constitutes a violation of applicable international law".
Mr Makdissi said that the army did not send tanks into the village and security forces remained in their defensive positions.
House-to-house attacks
Any civilian deaths, he said, were the result of "armed terrorist gangs" going house to house and killing men, women and children.
But according to activists and eyewitnesses interviewed by the BBC, other media and human rights groups, army shelling paved the way for a concerted ground attack by the shabiha.
Their reports suggest that men from the shabiha entered people's houses in army fatigues and either cut their throats or shot them in the head from approximately 16:00 to 01:00 on Saturday morning.
One opposition activist from the area, Hamza Omar, told the BBC: "The shabiha militias attacked the houses. They had no mercy. We took pictures of children, under 10 years [old] their hands tied, and shot at close range."
If that is the case, it is possible the killers were drawn from a string of largely Alawite villages to the south of Houla region. Fearing reprisals, some residents there have apparently been donating blood to help the approximately 300 injured.
Many of the dead come from the extended Abdul Razak family, which has a cluster of houses near to each other in the village.
In an interview with Human Rights Watch, an elderly woman from the family recounted: "I was in the house with my three grandsons, three granddaughters, sister-in-law, daughter, daughter in-law and cousin.
"At about 18:30 we heard gunshots. I was in a room by myself when I heard the sound of a man. He was shouting and yelling at my family. I hid behind the door... They were wearing military clothes.
"After three minutes, I heard all my family members screaming and yelling... As I approached the door, I heard several gunshots. I heard the soldiers leaving. I looked outside the room and saw all of my family members shot."
'Heroic Syrian army'
The UN observer mission in Syria is investigating the massacre
These eyewitness accounts are by video evidence and have also been confirmed by the Syrian government, although they blamed terrorists for the attacks.
"Women, children and old men were shot dead. This is not the hallmark of the heroic Syrian army," foreign ministry spokesperson Jihad Makdissi told reporters in Damascus.
At a news conference in Moscow with his British counterpart William Hague on Monday, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said it was clear the army had used tank shells but not who shot civilians at point blank range.
Alexei Pushkov, chair of the international affairs committee of the Russian parliament, the Duma, was more explicit on Monday: "We have very strong doubts that those people who were shot at point-blank [range] and were stabbed, that this was the action of forces loyal to President Assad," he told the BBC.
"The shelling was probably the responsibility of the troops of Mr Assad, but the stabbing and point-blank firing was definitely from the other side."
The UN's Maj Gen Mood told the BBC that monitors are continuing their investigations in Taldou to try and uncover the truth about what the Security Council has called an "appalling and brutal crime

Monday, 12 November 2012

Initial Reactions


After the first reading of the play, we had a discussion and shared our ideas about the play.

From my first reading of the play, I thought that the main theme or question and something that I think should be a running theme throughout our piece, is to what lengths are people going to have to go to become grateful for what we have got in our lives and to stop asking for more. One of the really interesting things that stuck out to me when reading “Blondie”, the character D does never deny what she did, “I did yes”, I thought that this gave the character more power over the others. However she did give a reason for what she did: “not once did they stop and look around and realise that they were in a free country,” this was a really thought provoking statement, as it made me as an audience member, think about how much I take for granted in my real life, and what horrors it might take for us to realise that. It also in some way justifies what she does and although what she did was horrible, in a way I understood that there was a need for something to make a change.

Also “Blondie” made me think about politicians and how manipulative they can be. It made me think about how it can become a popularity contest and that it was to do with how they look or what social activities they do; “Obama singing rhythm and blues”, but not actually about their policies or politics. This thought, rightly so, worried me because it makes me think about how much we as citizens know about the people who run our country, this makes me think that I don’t know who they people in charge are, and this could lead to us not knowing about what choices they are making.

 Also, when we were discussing in class the different characters, some people thought that A and C could be the same person, as A is overly angry and official, however C is very inappropriate and talks about how attractive B is. Someone said that C could be the subtext of A, and this idea, I thought was a really cleaver one, as it when A tries to avoid the question of who he voted for and C then says that he did, I thought that that would be a very cleaver way of showing the two sides of people and even the two sides of the way that people think and vote; although they are supposed to vote on politics and be professional about it, instead they just go for the looks and what attracts them the most.

Blondie by Hayley Squires

22-year-old Hayley Squires has penned an ironic comedy about the state of the nation. It centres on the perfect blonde, played by Emma King.
Taking a devoted country with her, she has become a kind of British Osama bin Laden creating terrorist atrocities but loved for her looks and attitudes.
Finally, Blondie makes some telling comments about the failings in our coalition-led country today.

- http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/theatre-uncut-traverse-cafe-7940