Sparks of Light 
"Sparks" - as we can all produce them - and yet they can start fires that change our word.
Her Resume, Awards and Qualifications
This site incorporates The Web Inquirer, founded in 1994 click here to access its original storehouse of information on politics, health and gender issues.
Gender and Religion - a challenging new book shows how sex and gender issues have posed problems for organised religion again and again.
ARMSGATE. How the Bush family came to the White House through a deal with Iranian Ayatollahs.... read the article that broke this in the major newspapers.
Gold Mining and Australian Aborigines - a Best Documentary Nomination winning film - in which every voice is Aboriginal .
The dirt on the diamond . See her film THE DIAMOND EMPIRE banned after being shown in peak time on TV across North America and on the BBC because of opposition from De Beers - and judge it for yourselves. Read also her recent book Glitter and Greed acclaimed in The Independent as "brilliant", "enthralling" and as the "product of hair-raising research".
Read here Diamond Mining and the Bushmen - a special done for the Ecologist with Survival International
and some site awards
There is a real irony about the West being so astonished that democracy in the Middle East would mean the rise to power of Hamas in Palestine and a pro-Iranian govenment in Iraq. They must have been blind not to see this coming from months if not years ago. When the Bush Administration intervened in the Palestinian Election to give a grant to one party and not the other, did they not realise this would create a reaction against the party they favoured? How would they react is some other country tried to so manipulate an American election?
There is also another disaster that has long been staring them in the face. It is the so-called Two State solution for the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. So far all the signs have been that it is creating an apartheid like solution. Palestinians have been offered in reality the freedom to run their own affairs in a supervised fashion inside the prison built behind the Walls with their funding a gift from Europe that can easily be withdrawn. That is not freedom, not to be allowed a real port, to have their airport still shut down by Israel, to be subject to targetted asassinations by rockets from helicopters.
Behind this reality lies a dangerously undemocratic calculation by the Israeli government. Yesterday 24th January 2006 the BBC reported that the Israeli acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had explained 'the main challenge ahead was to shape Israeli's borders to ensure a Jewish majority.'In order to ensure the existence of a Jewish national home, we will not be able to continue ruling over the territories in which the majority of the Palestinian population lives," he said.
Isn't that rather like shaping the borders of England to ensure a Tory or a Labour majorty? We would howl with outrage if such gerrymandering happened in oiur own country. Such policies have been rejected even in Northern Island. What is the Israeli fear?
The Israeli Consitution would be illegal in Europe and in the US under our bans on religious discrimination.
It seems what is ultimatedly feared is not terrorism but that Arab numbers will out vote Jewish numbers - and thus the Israeli policy that the Arabs must be confined as much as possible behind prison walls. I fear that the Palestinians have only accepted this so far because it is better than having nothing. Ultimately surely the only solution is for both parties to share the 'Holy Land|.' This is not idealism, but practicality.
Without the Two State non-solution, Israel/Palestine would be forced to become a secular state like the ones we have in the West, in which the religion of the citizen would become a private matter . But - isn't this the real democratic solution? Isn't this what we should all be working towards?
