Will the USA sign the Women's rights pact?

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was adopted by the UN 30 years ago. It was adopted by 184 countries out of 192. The USA was one of the countries that refused to ratify it along countries like Iran, Soudan and Somalia. The US senate failed to reach 67 votes needed.

As bizarre as this may sound, one of the major issues holding the vote is "abortion", since this convention contains language that would remove some of the restrictions on abortion that are still in place in the US.

Other source of disagreement is that the US military does not use women in combat units and CEDAW would force them to do so if a women wants to integrate one of these units.

But the most ironic issue, is that CEDAW would force US businesses to pay women for maternity leave!! Even though most corporate do provide this benefit, it is still not mandatory and a lot of small businesses in the US won't pay a dime for a women on a maternity leave.

It is going to be interesting to see if the democrats now in charge can get a closure on the issue and get the pact signed, because it is really a shame for the USA.

More informations here

Muslim in America..

I came across this article here about an experience initiated by Akbar Ahmed, the Islamic studies chairman at American University in Washington.

They also have a blog here, that I invite you to read, specially the comments.
Despite some negative comments nurtured by 8 years of Bush's War on Terror post 9/11, it shows that perception is changing here in the US. Anyway, thought it could be a good reading for whoever is interested, specially that religion and Islam are the main topic of Tunsiphere now :))))))

Are you rumsfelding me? :))

Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of Defense under G.W Bush was known for confusing reporters and dodging their questions to a point where it became ridiculous. We used to joke at work when someone is trying to dodge a question by telling him "Are you rumsfelding us?" I am sure it worked well with G.W Bush :))

To understand how good (or bad) he is, this is an excerpt of a speech (here) he did at Nato in Brussels, where he was trying to convince them that the US needed to proceed with a pre-emptive strike without waiting until they find a proof of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)


"Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no "knowns." There are thing we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."

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