Book review: Obama's Dreams from my Father
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As Obama fights for re-election this year, I thought it might be a good time to dig out my review of his book
Whatever else people expect from a politician, it’s not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty. Barack Obama has produced one, possibly because he wrote it when he was 33, long before realising any political ambitions. In essence, this is the search for his lost father who left when Obama was two, and whom he met only once, when he was 10. When Obama was 21 he received a phone call from Kenya telling him his father had died in a car crash. “I felt no pain,” Obama wrote after the call, “only the vague sense of an opportunity lost.”
Mayoral Election: How private grief helped Oona bounce back
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She was ditched as an MP in 2005 and told her IVF treatment had failed. But, as she bids to beat Ken Livingstone as Labour's London mayoral candidate, Oona King says that hardship has made her stronger than ever.
Oona King is often asked why she is returning to the political fray to run for mayor of London after the humiliation of being ousted from one of Labour's safest seats five years ago. It was a campaign she described as "one of the dirtiest" ever fought. Her fall from power came after a vicious battle with George Galloway and his anti-war party Respect, which targeted her because she voted in favour of the Iraq war. Given that 39.2% of voters in her Bethnal Green and Bow constituency in east London were Muslim, her pro-war stance was arguably political suicide.
Women for Refugee Women
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Immigration is a controversial subject, shrouded in myth. Let’s start with what we know is true:
- first that women, like men, are persecuted
- second, unlike men, their gender now carries the burden of conflict more than at any time in the past: a recent report states that in modern war zones, those most likely to die or be injured are no longer combatants; they are civilians and the modern weapon of choice is sexual violence. I’ve seen this for myself in the DRC -and what I have seen in places like the DRC shocks me to this day.
