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Week of
February 23, 2012 | | WOMEN IN THE WORLD Next month, inspiring women leaders and activists from around the globe—including Nobel winner Leymah Gbowee, Angelina Jolie, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Meryl Streep, Madeleine Albright, IMF chief Christine Lagarde, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, The New York Times’s Jill Abramson, president of Kosovo Atifete Jahjaga, Nancy Pelosi, and many more—will convene in New York City for Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s third annual Women in the World Summit. Housed at Lincoln Center, the three-day event will spotlight the urgent challenges facing women today. The event will also feature performances by the star of Broadway’s Evita revival and a closing presentation by Oscar nominee Streep. Buy tickets and see our complete lineup of events. REMEMBERED U.S. journalist Marie Colvin—at work for British paper The Sunday Times—was killed in Syria on Wednesday, following nearly three decades of work on the front lines of the world’s most atrocious wars. Colvin died telling the story she had told for much of her career: about the plight of people under siege. She had entered Syria illegally and had recorded a dispatch for CNN the night before her death, saying the shelling in Homs had reached terrible levels. In a Facebook post Colvin wrote that the situation in Homs was “sickening” and that she was “trying to understand how the world can stand by” but that she “should be hardened by now.” Colvin, 57, had twice won the Foreign Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards, in 2001 and 2010. To get involved with women in the media, go to the International Women’s Media Foundation, a global network dedicated to strengthening the role of women in the news media worldwide, to further freedom of the press. OUTRAGE Saudi Arabia has never fielded a woman on its Olympic team, and effectively imposes a ban on females playing sports in the kingdom. The International Olympic Committee has recently announced that it won’t force Saudi Arabia to send women to the Games. In the face of such a blatant violation, two-time Canadian Olympic swimmer Nikki Dryden, who’s now a human-rights and immigration attorney in New York, says that it’s about time the IOC enforces its charter banning “discrimination of any kind.” “The Olympic ideals of human dignity and gender equity are my ideals, too, and it is time for the Olympic movement to find its voice and demand access for Saudi Arabia’s women to the 2012 Olympics.” LOVE AND MARRIAGE Do these really sound like words men would say: “We all marry our second or third or fourth best choice. It’s just life.” But recent studies show that men are actually more likely to “settle” than their female counterparts—despite the long-held stereotypes that suggested otherwise. The Daily Beast’s Jessica Bennett examines why a whopping 31 percent of men said they would commit to a woman they are not in love with, compared with 21 percent of women. For example, one (male) Colorado computer instructor tells Bennett that he wants “a friend I get along with, have good sex with, and is willing to compromise, and I’ll build the love over time.” But while some might say feminism has caused women’s reluctance to settle, others say men have always been more likely to marry Mrs. Good Enough—and that isn’t a bad thing, especially considering the alternative of a life alone.quot; CONTROVERSY After collaborating on two new songs—Rihanna’s “Birthday Cake” and Chris Brown’s “Turn Up the Music”—Hollywood’s most infamous exes are sending the wrong signal to their fans, Allison Samuels writes. The couple, which had a nasty breakup in 2009 after Brown was slapped with five years of probation for beating Rihanna after a pre-Grammy party, has kept incommunicado via Twitter and other realms over the last three years. But the song collaborations are the first outright evidence that the two might doing more than just messaging one another and, Samuels writes, they risk going down the same road as Bobby Brown and the late Whitney Houston. | | 
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