Holy crap that's a lot of people!

Using International Women's day as a catalyst, around 30,000 people kicked off the start of a worldwide march for global women's rights in Sao Paolo, Brazil last month. The relay-style march will go through 50 countries, calling for a global equal rights charter. Fittingly, it ends in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta - I did a country report on it in 7th grade) a west African country with few protections for women (as a general rule: the poorer the country, the worse things get for women relative to men). Also see the Boston Globe.

So in case you or your family members or people you know think women's rights are so passe and "so 70's" and that we need to get over ourselves, it's instructive to look beyond the borders of our privileged shiny frosted cake that is the U.S. on the global picnic table:

-70 percent of the 1.3 billion people living in poverty are women (International Confederation of Free Trade Unions)

-The incidents of mass rape in war zones like the Congo, where the military and rebel fighters have raped tens of thousands of women and girls during the conflict in the east of the country, have gone virtually unpunished (Human Rights Watch, Africa Division)

And that's all I can bring myself to share today.