Here is the link to all OMNI newsletters:  http://www.omnicenter.org/newsletter-archive/   For a knowledge-based peace, justice, and ecology movement and an informed citizenry as the foundation for change.   .  Here is the link to the Index:  http://www.omnicenter.org/omni-newsletter-general-index/

See:  UN International Day of Women March 8 and Women’s Equal Pay Day April 17 Newsletters.

Webinar Women, Peace and Security: Practical Guidance on Using Law to Empower Women Tuesday, August 26, 2014 2:00 pm EDT International human rights principles and national laws provide powerful tools for advancing gender equality. The key is to know and understand these principles and use them strategically. A toolkit recently published by WAND’s Women, Peace, and Security Policy Director Julie Arostegui gives practical guidance on how to integrate international principles on gender equality and women’s rights into post-conflict legal systems, including case studies from the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Julie will discuss the toolkit and specific ways that all practitioners – both at the policy and grassroots levels – can use law to promote gender equality and empower women. We will also hear from women who have been successfully advocating for women’s rights in their communities at home and abroad: Nageeba  Hassan Tegulwa of the Ugandan Muslim Supreme Council will discuss innovative ways that she has been working with Muslim communities and inter-faith leaders in Uganda and the East African Community. Minnesota State Representative Carly Melin will discuss the recent passage of Minnesota’s Women’s Economic Security Act (WESA). In honor of Women’s Equality Day, please join us to discuss strategies for using these powerful tools to advance equality everywhere! Click here to register for this free webinar! NOW Dear James, Did you know today is Women's Equality Day? Today we commemorate the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. Suffragists put it all on the line for the right to vote. While protesting they faced abusive opposition, were arrested and many went on hunger strikes. In their honor, I've taken the pledge to vote in the upcoming election. NOW activists have been laying the foundation for victories in the midterm elections this fall. There's never a moment's rest, because there is just so much at stake this year. We're asking all women's right supporters to pledge to vote on November 4th. I've taken the pledge - will you? Just like the activists that came before, NOW activists are working with our friends in the U.S. Senate to block dreadful bills like the 20-week abortion ban and the Ryan Budget, which defunds social programs. But if the right wing takes over the Senate, those bills could become law -- and the good legislation we've worked on, like fair wages, paid leave, immigration reform and funding for Violence Against Women Act programs, will not see the light of day. Join me and take the pledge to vote. Together, we can Save the Senate and end the War on Women! A majority of the electorate supports abortion rights, raising the minimum wage, and labor unions. But those in elected office are doing everything they can to bust unions, regulate women's reproductive healthcare, and prevent even the slightest increase in the minimum wage. It's just too important - take the pledge to vote on November 4th! Sincerely, Bonnie Grabenhofer Action Vice President © National Organization for Women. All Rights Reserved.

1. Women's Equality Day - National Women's History Project

2. Women's Equality Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

3. Celebrating Women's Equality Day | The White House

4. INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 2014 Theme: Inspiring ...

• Images for Women's Equality DayReport images

5. Women's Equality Day - 26th Aug, 2014 | Days Of The Year

6. Celebrate Equality Day - About - National Women's History ...

7. Women's Equality Day - Encyclopaedia Britannica

8. Women's Equality Day - US Navy

9. Women's Equality Day - Holiday Insights

10. Women's Equality Day Celebration - the Women + Girls ...

1. Equal Rights Amendment - Law profs: Include abortion right‎

May 20, 2014 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The New Feminist Road Map [Special Request and Offer for TomDispatch Readers: This is a big day for TD.  We’re releasing a spectacular new Dispatch Book, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me.  Believe me, it should be an instant classic of gender relations.  In a rave prepublication review at the Canadian newspaper the National Post, Haley Mlotek hails Solnit’s writing as “one of the most vital tools we, as readers, can use to understand the world we inhabit. I am glad to live in a place where Rebecca Solnit will explain things to me.”  We’re urging TomDispatch readers to lend us a hand in ensuring the book’s success and that Dispatch Books -- for which we have big plans -- has a future by buying at least one copy (today!).  If you’re an Amazon customer, any book link in this piece will take you to that site, where, if you buy Men Explain Things to Me, you’re promoting our future (and also sending a few extra cents our way at no cost to you).  Otherwise tell your local bookstore to order copies.  That’s our fervent request.  Now for the offer: for a donation of $100 (or more), money we desperately need to fund the kind of journalism we do, Solnit will sign a personalized copy of the book for you.  Check out our donation page for more details, and please note that, because she will be on the road these next weeks, your signed copy will not be in the mail until early June. Tom]  Here are two figures, and given how anyone who has been sexually assaulted is likely to feel about the experience, they have to be low-end estimates: the latest Pentagon numbers indicate that about 26,000 men and women (but mainly women) in the U.S. military “were sexually assaulted in 2011, up from 19,000 in 2010”; and the figure regularly cited, even by President Obama and Vice President Biden, is that one in five college women either experience an attempted sexual assault or are raped in their years on campus.  While these numbers can be argued about, they are striking evidence that, so many decades after the modern feminist movement was launched, the gender wars (male version) continue at levels that should shock anyone.  Or thought of another way: for a surprising percentage of women in the twenty-first century, every career path seems to end in the same grim place.  a half-century later.  She suggests that, whatever has yet to be won, by changing our assumptions feminists have already insured that the biggest battle of all is in the past.  That women are equal to men and deserve equal rights as well, as Solnit points out, is no longer an earth-shattering idea, and that in itself is a great victory, even if getting institutions and individuals to abide by it is another matter.  Featuring a famed essay which originally appeared at TomDispatch and gives the book its title, it ranges from a highly original inquiry into marriage equality to a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women and a moving exploration of how novelist Virginia Woolf embraced the mystery of not knowing.  Simply put, Men Explain Things to Me is a must-read masterpiece. Tom Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force  Feminism Has Just Started (and It’s Not Stopping Now)  By Rebecca Solnit [This essay is from Rebecca Solnit’s new book, Men Explain Things to Me, and appears at TomDispatch.com with the permission of Haymarket Books and Dispatch Books.] The history of women’s rights and feminism is often told as though it were a person who should already have gotten to the last milestone or has failed to make enough progress toward it. Around the millennium lots of people seemed to be saying that feminism had failed or was over. On the other hand, there was a wonderful feminist exhibition in the 1970s entitled “Your 5,000 Years Are Up.” It was a parody of all those radical cries to dictators and abusive regimes that your [fill in the blank] years are up. It was also making an important point. Feminism is an endeavor to change something very old, widespread, and deeply rooted in many, perhaps most, cultures around the world, innumerable institutions, and most households on Earth -- and in our minds, where it all begins and ends. That so much change has been made in four or five decades is amazing; that everything is not permanently, definitively, irrevocably changed is not a sign of failure. A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has 999 miles to go and will never get anywhere. It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are trying to stop everyone who’s moving forward, and a few are marching backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes make a great leap, find what we didn’t know we were looking for, and yet continue to contain contradictions for generations. Click here to read more of this dispatch.

Visit our sister sites: