Dr Janet Lees

Seven years ago, on 2nd April 2019, I began my walk End to End at Land's End. It was an amazing experience. Spring was unfolding across the country and I was walking along within it. You can read about it in my book about activities for pilgrims in Britain ionabooks.com/product/come-w…

4.04.2025. 3yo Tymofiy 7yo Radyslav 7yo Arina 9yo Herman 15yo Danylo 15yo Mykyta 15yo Alina 16yo Kostiantyn 17yo Nikita. We owe them justice. Photo: Suspilne Dnipro.

In her final semester at Harvard, Amanda Nguyen was raped. She did everything survivors are told to do. Then she discovered that the physical evidence collected from her own body would be destroyed in 6 months — unless she filed paperwork to stop it. And then filed it again. Every 6 months. Forever. She was 22 years old. She decided to change federal law instead. 🌟 Amanda had interned at NASA. She had big plans. The kind of future that takes years of hard work to build was finally within reach. Then everything shattered. She went to the hospital. She reported the assault to police. She endured the forensic exam. She made the careful decision to file her rape kit anonymously — worried that an open case could affect security clearance applications for her dream careers. That's when the system revealed how broken it truly was. Because she was anonymous, Massachusetts law gave her only 6 months before her rape kit — physical evidence collected from her own body — would be permanently destroyed. Not the 15 years the state allowed for pressing charges. Six months. No official process to extend it. No clear instructions. No one to guide her. She had to figure it out herself, every 6 months, forcing herself to relive the worst experience of her life just to preserve her right to eventually seek justice. She started researching rape kit laws in all 50 states. What she found was staggering. Some states kept kits for years. Others destroyed them in as little as 30 days. Some states charged survivors for the cost of their own kit collection. Others never notified survivors what happened to their evidence. No consistency. No standard. *"Justice should not depend on geography,"* she said. But it did. In November 2014, Amanda founded Rise — a nonprofit dedicated to changing that reality. Everyone who worked with Rise was a volunteer. They fundraised through crowdfunding. Their goal was rewriting federal law. She met with lawmakers across Washington. Staffers told her it wasn't a priority. Some questioned her story. She kept going. She learned that the most powerful thing she could do was stop being abstract — to walk into a room, look a senator in the eyes, and say: *this happened to me. I am sitting in front of you.* Together with Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act — proposing that survivors should never be charged for their rape kit collection, should receive testing results, and must be notified at least 60 days before their evidence was scheduled for destruction. In February 2016, the bill was introduced. It passed the Senate unanimously. It passed the House unanimously. Not a single vote against. On October 7, 2016, President Obama signed the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act into federal law. Amanda Nguyen was 24 years old. Rise continued working state by state. To date, Rise has helped pass 33 laws across the United States, covering protections for over 84 million rape survivors. A movement started in spare time, with no budget and only volunteers, became one of the most effective civil rights campaigns of its generation. And Amanda never stopped reaching for the stars — literally. In 2024, Blue Origin announced she would be the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space. The young woman who had once feared that fighting for justice would cost her a future in space proved the two didn't have to be a choice. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Named a Time Woman of the Year. She wrote a memoir called *Saving Five.* But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Amanda Nguyen's story is not any single achievement. It is the fact that she turned the most painful moment of her life into something that made the world more just for millions of people who will never know her name. She was a college student who needed the system to work. When it didn't, she rebuilt it herself. **At 24 years old.

💛 Today we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Maya Angelou, who would have turned 98. A poet, author, activist, and global voice for justice — her words continue to inspire the world. “Still I rise.” ✨What is your favorite Dr. Maya Angelou quote? #MayaAngelou #Birthday

Apr 4: Feast of Tigernach (†c.549), abbot and bishop of Cluain Eois (Clones, Ireland). He studied at Ninian’s monastery of Candida Casa, ‘White House’, (Whithorn, Galloway), and was remembered at some churches in Scotland. St Tigernach’s tomb 📸HughPatrick23

A mother of four. A combat medic. They call her “Matushka.” She didn’t come to war as a soldier. She came because there were not enough medics — and her battalion was deploying to the outskirts of Kreminna. Her homeland. Luhansk region. In civilian life, Natalia was a lawyer, working in local administration. By 2022, she put that aside and joined Ukraine’s National Guard @ng_ukraine. She hadn’t practiced medicine for 26 years. She relearned everything — fast. Because there was no time. Her call sign — “Matushka” — came from the soldiers. At the time, they didn’t even know she had four children. But they understood something else: she would take care of them like her own. “The hardest path in this war is the infantry,” she says. “Where the infantry stands — that is our land.” Today, many of her fighters are under 30. Volunteers. Educated. Deliberate. She calls them “my boys.” A combat medic’s job isn’t just about wounds. It’s everything — chronic illness, exhaustion, survival. But the core is simple: keep them alive. Carrying the wounded isn’t the hardest part. Running under fire isn’t the hardest part. Waiting is. Waiting while drones hang overhead. Waiting when you know someone needs you — and you cannot reach them. Once, a soldier was critically wounded. Internal injuries. No access. She and another fighter saved him over the radio — her knowledge, his hands. When he reached the stabilisation point, a doctor asked: “What did you give him to keep him alive?” She didn’t. They did. Together. She always tries to be the first face they see when they return. “When the armour opens and you see her — you know everything will be okay,” they say. “My motivation is my boys. The way they look at you. The way they believe.” “They are my shield — and I am their rear.” Her family worries. She doesn’t tell them everything. “I’m fine,” she says. Because this is not just about today. It’s about going home. Liberating Luhansk. Letting children return to where they were born. “Hold the line. No step back. No matter how hard it gets.” Because for her — and for them — this is still their land. #Ukraine #WarInUkraine #Frontline #Medics #HumanStories 🎥👇

On 13 April 1990 - Good Friday - the USSR for the first time officially admitted responsibility for the Katyń massacre of Polish officers. During a visit to Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev handed Wojciech Jaruzelski copies of NKVD documents confirming Soviet responsibility for the crime. Among them was Beria’s 5 March 1940 “Katyń decision”, signed by Stalin and other Soviet leaders, ordering the execution of Polish prisoners of war and detainees without trial.

This Easter, we remember: Israel obliterated the mausoleum of Simon Peter, the Apostle of Christ, in Shama, southern Lebanon. A sacred site that stood for over 2,000 years, now in ruins. This is a war crime. This is a crime against history.

‘Stars were seen as if falling from heaven’ #OTD in 1095, according to Symeon of Durham. ‘Not by ones or twos,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but so thickly that nobody could reckon it.’ 📸Jason Hullinger

@MFA_Ukraine @pictureladyjan 💔🇺🇦🙏

Five people were killed and at least 19 others injured after Russian strikes hit a market in Nikopol, Dnipro region, on April 4, in broad daylight. Among the wounded is a 14-year-old girl. She was hospitalised in critical condition. The attack caused fires and severe damage. Earlier today, Russia also attacked Sumy (at least 7 civilians were injured), Kharkiv (3 people were injured), settlements across Dnipro region (3 civilians were injured, including a 5-month-old baby and a 6-year-old child), and Kyiv. This attacks followed yesterday’s Russian strikes that brought death and destruction. Ukraine proposed an Easter ceasefire, but Russia continued to respond with more strikes, rejecting diplomacy and peace efforts. Strong international pressure on the aggressor state must follow.

Day 1501 🇺🇦👊 #Ukraine

Highlights from today's walk in Longdendale. #walking #spring #nature #pollinators #trees #wildflowers

Woman of the Day Philippa Garrett Fawcett, born OTD in 1868 in Cambridge, daughter of the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and niece of Britain’s first female doctor Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who achieved a rare distinction in her own right. On 7 June 1890 at the age of 22, she took first place in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, the first time a woman had done so. It caused havoc. The Tripos was famously difficult: 12 papers and 192 progressively more difficult questions over eight days, and for those in contention for the title of Wrangler, a further three days of exams consisting of 63 still more testing problems. Preparation took months. To attain first prize as Senior Wrangler, Cambridge’s champion mathematician, was regarded as the greatest intellectual distinction of all. No fewer than nine Senior Wranglers including Sir Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. Philippa rose at 8am and studied for an intense six hours a day, often not retiring until 11pm, but she didn’t go as far as her competitors who worked through the night with wet towels wrapped around their heads. She knew she was being watched. The scandalised Pall Mall Gazette reported that she dared to wear “her thick brown hair down to her shoulders, and has even been known (so I have heard) to ride on top of a bus” but she was determined - according to a contemporary news report - to deny ammunition to those who tried “to make out that the women’s colleges are peopled by eccentrics.” Women then were considered incapable of mastering maths. Fragile, dependent creatures prone to nerves and possessed of a mind several degrees inferior to a man’s, studying during puberty was tantamount to dicing with death because most Victorian scholars believed that “the brain and ovary could not develop at the same time.” To take first place was unthinkable. Yet Philippa did. She knocked spots off the second place candidate with a score a full 13% higher than his. Did this accord her the much prized title of Senior Wrangler, First among Cambridge mathematics Firsts? What do you think? As her cousin Marion reported: “It was a most exciting scene in the Senate…The gallery was crowded with girls and a few men, and the floor of the building was thronged with undergraduates as tightly packed as they could be. The lists were read out from the gallery and we heard splendidly. All the men’s names were read first, the Senior Wrangler [G.T. Bennett of St John’s College] was much cheered. At last the man who had been reading shouted “Women.” A fearfully agitating moment for Philippa it must have been. He signalled with his hand for the men to keep quiet, but had to wait some time. At last he read Philippa’s name, and announced that she was “Above the Senior Wrangler.” That’s right. Only a man could be named Senior Wrangler, so the bloke in the No. 2 spot got the title. Philippa was simply listed as “Above the Senior Wrangler” instead. Despite this grudging nod from the university, Philippa’s achievement attracted media attention internationally, and the Daily Telegraph made this its lead story stating, “Once again has woman demonstrated her superiority in the face of an incredulous and somewhat unsympathetic world... And now the last trench has been carried by Amazonian assault, and the whole citadel of learning lies open and defenceless before the victorious students of Newnham and Girton. There is no longer any field of learning in which the lady student does not excel.” You’d think that Cambridge would be proud to award a degree to someone of such exceptional ability, wouldn’t you? Nah. Women could attend lectures and take the same exams, but they were denied degrees on the basis of their sex. Instead, they were handed a Certificate of Proficiency, which makes it sound as though they’d mastered making sausage rolls in a Bake-off contest. Philippa promptly became a “Steamboat Lady”. Until I read about Phillippa, I’d never heard of “steamboat ladies” but it was the nickname given to women students from Oxbridge who travelled to Trinity College Dublin between 1904 and 1906 to be awarded an ad eundem degree - an academic degree awarded on the grounds of mutual recognition or equivalence. Trinity had long held the view that there was no reason to restrict women students from graduating on the same terms as men if they achieved the same grades, and its Board agreed to recognise eligible female Oxbridge students by awarding a Trinity degree. The Board anticipated that only small numbers of women would take up the offer to graduate: Irishwomen who had studied at Oxbridge. In fact by 1907, Trinity granted degrees to some 720 "steamboat ladies”, all of whom would have been awarded degrees if they had been men. How much talent and potential was lost? Philippa became a mathematics lecturer at Newnham College for ten years before going to South Africa to set up teacher training colleges. She died on in June 1948, two months after her 80th birthday, and one month after Cambridge finally conceded that yes, women could be awarded a degree.

Kherson. Absolute horror. russian fascists are dropping aerial bombs on residential neighborhoods. And the world is still watching. Every moment of silence gives Moscovia a vote of confidence.

Kherson, human safari 08:30 A Russian drone attacked a public bus 7 civilians injured, hospitalized Women, 19, 68, 50, 43 men 71, 63, 51

A French journalist in Iran confirms Trump and Israel bombed: • 8 pharmaceutical factories — including a cancer medication facility • 60 pharmacies • Hospitals • One of the oldest medical research institutions in the region These aren’t military targets They’re lifelines

On Good Friday, the evening sun has gone down in Longdendale. God grant a quiet night and peace for all people. #GoodFriday #HolyWeek #peace #prayer

Why doesn't the media talk about the peacekeepers killed by Israel in Lebanon? Israel deliberately killed three UN Indonesian peacekeeper and wounded others in Lebanon. Israel cannot continue to be treated as a full member of the UN. Attacking UN peacekeepers is an abomination which was in the past perpetrated by terrorists, but never by members of the UN. Some of you pretended to care what the UN had to say in 1948. Do you care that the UN of today has had more UN personnel killed in the last 2 years than in its history. This is the moment we can salvage what remains of the UN and international law. I call on everyone to unite for the sake of our humanity and to end impunity for violating international law.

Three peacekeepers injured, two seriously near El Adeisse, in the Marjayoun area of south Lebanon where there are constant exchanges of fire between Israeli troops and Hezbollah

15 million books in Ukraine are at risk of destruction. This is the number held in the collections of the Book Chamber of Ukraine, the only archive of this scale in the country. It preserves copies of books, newspapers, and magazines printed over more than a century. As a result of Russian shelling, the building and its engineering systems have been damaged, creating additional risks to the preservation of these collections. #WarCrimes

@victoriaslog 💔🇺🇦🙏

16 yo Maksym is being treated in Kyiv after a brutal Russian strike on Sumy. He has multiple injuries and shrapnel wounds to his face. He has already undergone surgery. This isn’t the first time Russians have tried to kill him. A year ago, they struck a civilian bus in Sumy, and he had to pull his injured mother out with his own hands.