• China
• Women's Issues
• Darfur
• Women's Health
• Social Issues

• Sheryl WuDunn's book "Half the Sky" investigates the oppression of women globally. Her stories shock. Only when w...
• http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sh...injustice.html

• As a journalist reporting on China, Sheryl WuDunn saw the everyday oppression of women around the world. She and Nick Kristof wrote "Half the Sky," c...
• http://www.ted.com/speakers/sheryl_wudunn.html

• Sheryl WuDunn's book "Half the Sky" investigates the oppression of women globally. Her stories shock. Only when women in developing countries have equal access to education and economic opportunity...
• http://blog.ted.com/2010/08/17/our-c...nn-on-ted-com/

• It's time for TED! Above, TED's curator, Chris Anderson, and European director, Bruno Giussani, welcome everyone in the theater, in simulcast, on the livestream and following on Twitter and the b...
• http://blog.ted.com/2010/07/13/report_from_ted/

• Our announcement last week of TEDWomen has touched off some really vibrant conversations online. Some have embraced the idea; others have reservations. At TED, we've been reading with interest and ...
• http://blog.ted.com/2010/07/23/tedwomen_join_t/

1. The Smather’s on-camera statement was made decades later, so there has to be some allowance here for a slight jumbling in recollection and “re-transmission”
2. (and more important) :very likely, Lyndon—when he talked to JFK about this-- dissembled (as he always seemed to do), beat around the bush, and very likely sent a confusing message to JFK, which, in the re-telling to Smathers, may have been jumbled (and/or misunderstood) ; and then we have (as noted in my point 1) the re-telling, by Smathers, to a camera, decades later.
   
   So this is a very interesting problem of separating “the signal from the noise” (as they say in information theory); and I think what is truly important is that Smathers remembers JFK complaining, on 11/18, and on a ride aboard AF-1 from Florida, that (a) he didn’t want to go to Texas and (b) among the many problems he had to deal with was this business of LBJ wanting Jackie to ride with him.
   
   This interview by Smathers provides really excellent “first hand” evidence of the extent to which JFK was being personally lobbied, by his own Vice President, on matters pertaining to the Texas trip—i.e., on getting him to go there (to Texas, AND to Dallas) in the first place; and then to the extent of the actual configuration of which car she would ride in, in the Dallas motorcade (!). If it weren’t for Smathers, all we’d have is the mealy-mouthed cop-out language of Sorensen, and others like him.
   
   3. Also, please do note the logical problem if LBJ really wanted to ride with JFK: IF that little snippet of a quote were to be taken seriously (and I do not take it seriously), then the actual configuration (i.e. Car-seating) would be that Lyndon Johnson would want to be in the same car as JFK, so if that were to be so—then how could it then be that LBJ “wanted Jackie to ride with him”? The phrase “ride with him” implies separate cars. Clearly.
   
   And, finally, for the same reason that the President and the vice President do NOT ever fly on the same aircraft, I am positive that—just on those grounds alone—it would be a complete violation of security for the President and the Vice Presient to appear in an open car together.
   
   So my appraisal of this “re-transmission” (by Smathers) of what he heard JFK saying, is that: (a) Lyndon was making a bunch of noise, complaining about this and that; and (b) buried in that “noise” was his real message; and that his real message was that he, as a “galaant” Texas, wanted the President’s wife to ride with him. I think that the rest of what Smathers heard—or thinks he heard, and then re-transmitted, in this interview—is simply false.
   
   And again, let me repeat my reasons for saying so. . .
   
   Because:
   
   (1) Common sense rules out that the Pres and the Vice Pres would ride in the same limo. (Ever).
   
   (2) IF LBJ really wanted “to ride with JFK,” then his request that he wanted Jackie “to ride with him” would make no logical sense.
   
   OK. . . Those are my beliefs about this remarkable little piece of information.
   
   First of all; I think its valid; and secondly, it shows what a sneaky bastard LBJ was—to try to actually lobby the President so that he would not have his wife within inches, and it would make him an easier target.
   
   Of course—had LBJ succeeded in this gambit, he would have to have had a lot of explaining to do afterwards, to credibly explain why Jackie was not seated next to her husband, in Dallas, as she obviously was in other cities.

• Kevin Ryan's blog

For your consideration: two stories, from opposite sides of the world, concerning the attitude of Power toward those who wo

They snatched Liao Meizhi on her birthday, dragging her off the street and into a dirty blue van as others held back her husband.

It was only two months later, when a stranger knocked on the door, that her family learned where she had been taken. The man said he had just been discharged from a nearby mental hospital – and that Liao was being held there against her will. Her husband insists she has no psychiatric problems ...

Researchers believe she is among a growing number of people wrongly detained in psychiatric institutions after clashing with local officials. One activist has compiled a database of more than 500 such cases.

Some victims have been held for a decade. Those freed describe being forcibly treated – with electro-convulsive therapy and powerful anti-psychotic drugs – for health problems they never had.

"In the last few years you have been seeing more and more cases involving petitioners and whistle blowers – 'the awkward squad' – [often when] the authorities have tried other punishments or sanctions to make them stop and nothing else has worked," said Robin Munro, author of China's Psychiatric Inquisition and a research associate at SOAS law school. "Finally they really try to scare them to hell by putting them in mental hospitals."