Sanjay Suri- IPS/TerraViva

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS) - Male leaders fail to break the Mideast impasse. Enter women from Israel and the Palestinian territories working together. And… it would have been nice to say they succeeded where the men failed. They didn't. The women have been ahead of the times, in speaking of solutions others thought unmentionable once, but now increasingly accept. And yet, peace seems more difficult than ever.

"It's an ironic paradox," Molly Malekar, former director of Bat Shalom of Jerusalem Link, tells Terraviva. "Ideas taboo many years ago are more accepted now at the centre of the political spectrum. If you take the issue of the rights of Palestinians to a state of their own, more than 20 years ago this was never recognised. Now no one can ignore it." And yet, the women looking for peace have little hope.

Israeli and Palestinian women, together within the International Women's Commission for a Just and Sustainable Palestinian-Israeli Peace, have spoken of many solutions since the 1990s, when the very thought of these seemed taboo. Maha Abu-Dayeh Shamas, founder and executive director of the Women's Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling (WCLAC) based in Ramallah and Jerusalem, mentions several others: The women were saying in 1995 that Jerusalem must be shared between the two peoples "when it was sacrilegious to say that." Now leaders are considering this seriously.

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Thalif Deen - IPS/TerraViva

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS) - The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men, from higher death rates during natural disasters to heavier household and care burdens. In the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were reportedly women; in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women.

And following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women, who were the poorest population in some of the affected States in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, faced the greatest obstacles to survival, according to the New York-based Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO).

The 2007 Human Development Report, issued by the U.N. Development Programme, points out that women are particularly affected by climate change because they are the largest percentage - accounting for about 70 percent - of the poor population. Amy North, a researcher working on gender, education and global poverty reduction initiatives at the Institute of Education in the University of London, told IPS climate change is also exacerbating existing gender inequalities, with a devastating effect on the quality of life of poor women and girls. In many parts of the world, women and girls are responsible for collecting water and firewood.

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Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 9 (IPS) - "What do I get from them? Nothing but bullsh*t," says Nupur Acharya, reflecting about how she is treated by her husband and two grown sons on daily basis. The 50-year-old Indian national who is currently settled in New York says she not only cleans the entire house every day, but also works in the kitchen from morning to evening, which makes her feel more like an unpaid maid than a respected wife and mother.

While the household labour of millions of women like Acharya goes unnoticed by many economists, recent research by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) suggests that the fate of millions of women across the world who work in factories, farms, shops and offices is often little different, despite a treaty adopted in 1979 by the U.N. General Assembly intended to eliminate discrimination at home and in the workplace.

On the eve of the International Women's Day Monday, the Geneva-based U.N. agency that tracks labour rights violations worldwide released a report suggesting that it remains a distant possibility for a vast majority of women to find decent job in both the public and private sector, even when they are fully qualified. Despite signs of progress in gender equality over the past 15 years, there is still a significant gap between women and men in terms of job opportunities and quality of employment, according to the ILO report, entitled "Women in labour markets: Measuring progress and identifying challenges."

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Stephen Leahy - Tierramerica

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 9 (IPS) - Climate change science has come under full-scale attack in a last-ditch effort to delay or prevent action by the U.S. government against global warming, experts warn. U.S. Senator James Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma and climate change denier, in late February released a list of leading climate scientists he wants prosecuted as criminals for misleading the government. Those scientists are receiving hate mail and death threats.

"I have hundreds" of threatening emails, Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University in California, told Tierramérica. He believes scientists will be killed over this. "I'm not going to let it worry me... but you know it's going to happen," said Schneider, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world. "They shoot abortion doctors here."

This backlash against the evidence of climate change and the scientists themselves is not just a U.S. phenomenon. It is happening in Canada, Australia, Britain, and, to a lesser extent, in other European countries. On the surface, this campaign is about a few errors in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2,800-page report released in 2007 and some 10-year-old personal emails stolen from Britain's University of East Anglia.

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Mel Frykberg

SHEIKH JARRAH, Occupied East Jerusalem, Mar 9 (IPS) - Amid the wave of violence that swept through the occupied Palestinian West Bank, including East Jerusalem, over the last few days, there are signs that the Israeli left may be emerging from its collective coma. On Saturday night over 3,000 Palestinian, Israeli and foreign peace activists, waving Palestinian flags and shouting "Free Sheikh Jarrah", gathered in the East Jerusalem suburb in support of Palestinians threatened with home demolitions and evictions.

Progressive members of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, called for the removal of illegal Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and for the rights of Palestinian residents to be respected. The presence of hundreds of Israeli security forces kept the protestors separated from a counter-gathering of dozens of right-wing Israeli settlers who support Israel's Judaisation of East Jerusalem.

The Sheikh Jarrah protest was the largest gathering to date and represented a victory of sorts for the Palestinians and their Israeli and international supporters. Previous demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah have been marred by violence with the Israeli police arresting dozens of protestors, including respected Israeli leftists, and attempting to ban the gatherings completely. However, the protestors received support from the Israeli High Court of Justice last Thursday after petitioning for permission for the protests to continue.

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Gonzalo Ortiz

QUITO, Mar 9 (IPS) - Science fiction blockbuster Avatar was the big loser in the Oscar awards ceremony - not only a blow for director James Cameron but also seen as a symbolic reverse in the struggle to recover Amazon rainforest areas in Ecuador from the effects of oil pollution.

Several environmental organisations, like the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Amazon Defence Coalition, had asked Cameron to "let his legions of fans know that while Pandora is fictional, what is happening to (indigenous) communities in Ecuador is as real as it gets." In the film, Pandora, a moon orbiting the planet Polyphemus, comes under threat when human beings decide to extract a mineral essential for energy supply on Earth from its surface.

Rebecca Tarbotton, acting head of RAN, compared Avatar's story-line to the real-life drama of the struggle of Ecuadorean indigenous people who have brought a multi-billion dollar lawsuit for environmental damages against the oil giant Chevron. After an email campaign last month, backed up by weblog columns and press releases, Tarbotton called on Cameron Sunday morning to make good the promise he had made to use the movie to inspire mass environmental activism.

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