Seventeen years after losing her council job due to needing endometriosis surgery, Michelle Dewar’s campaign for paid menstrual leave gained 50,000 signatures in a week, reports ELIZABETH SHORT

HOW DO governments who want to wage war on another country win at least the acquiescence and at best active support of large sections of their own population for a process which is going to kill large numbers of people, injure and traumatise many more, and turn millions of people into refugees?
One way is to suggest that the “enemy” population is somehow not like us, and that therefore the kinds of horror they face during war is less deserving of sympathy than it would be otherwise.
Wars all too often become a source of racism as military domination leads to treating those on the other side as less than human.



