For the first time, the French cabinet has an equal number of men and women, thanks to increased parity in higher education

Nicolas Sarkozy promised a parity government in 2007, but failed to deliver. Five years later, newly elected president François Hollande has just done it. For the first time, France boasts as many women as men in its 34-member cabinet. It may have looked gimmicky at first; it does however feel as if a hurdle has been finally passed, or a weight has been lifted off our shoulders. Gender equality can be done after all. See, easy.

And to live these moments in Cannes, on the first day of the 65th Cannes film festival where no women directors feature among the 22 film-makers whose films have been selected in competition somehow highlights Hollande’s achievement.

I have personally never belonged to the positive discrimination hordes. You should appoint people for their competence, not because you need them to reach quotas. The appointment of Rachida Dati as justice minister by Sarkozy in 2007 looked in that regard a rather calculating and cynical choice. History showed she didn’t measure up to the task; her appointment was a disservice to feminism.

However, I have been increasingly appalled by gender disparity in the workplace, and in politics in particular. When you look at Hollande and his prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault’s choices for the French government, few raise questions of competence and legitimacy. There seem to be few “gimmick” appointments and no Sarkozy-like beauty contest (the former president was famous for favouring slim and fit people, and if possible, good-looking). In fact, Hollande’s parity achievement feels normal. At long last.

For decades, there was a factual reason for gender disparity at the helm of the state. Few women reached higher education and when they did, in schools like Sciences-Po, Normale Supérieure and ENA, among France’s grandes écoles producing the Republic’s governing elite, they were simply outnumbered. Gender disparity in high spheres wasn’t a male conspiracy, only a mirror of higher education demographics.

Today, you could be forgiven for thinking that figures have now finally levelled and that Hollande’s achievement only reflects new demographics, but it is not quite the case yet. Looking at some of the figures, we’re getting to parity at Sciences-Po, but women still only represent a third of students in ENA’s early 2000s numbers. This is the reason Hollande’s decisions feel both normal and yet extraordinary as they both anticipate and give momentum to a soon-to-be-realised prophecy. When there is parity in higher education, there will be no reason or any excuse for gender inequality in government.

Although Motorola Xoom WiFi owners in the US have had Android 4.0.4 for quite some time now, Android 4.0.3 is only just now pushing out to folks in Canada. As noted in the Android Central Forums, the update went live earlier today for the masses. Checking with Motorola also shows that to be the case, as they’ve highlighted the update via their website.

• Updated Browser with faster rendering, zoom and pan Users can also now save pages for offline reading and request desktop versions of websites.
• Swipe to dismiss notifications, tasks, and browser tabs You can now dismiss individual notifications, apps from the Recent Apps list, and browser tabs with a simple swipe of a finger.
• Redesigned app launcher In All Apps launcher, you can now simply drag an app to get information about it, immediately uninstall it, or disable a pre-installed app.
• New System Font for Improved Readability An entirely new typeface (called Roboto) optimized for high resolution screens improves readability and brings a polished feel to the user interface.
• Updated “People” Application Replaces contacts and integrates seamlessly with Google+ and other social networks.
• Improved text input and spell-checking The keyboard now features improved accuracy to make text input faster. It also now includes an in-line spell checker to make corrections easier.
• Type with your voice Now you can simply touch the microphone on the keyboard and start talking to write emails, SMS, or any other text-more than 20 languages supported. Text appears in real time, so there’s no waiting for server processing.
• Richer and versatile imaging capabilities For capturing larger scenes, the camera introduces a single motion panorama mode. Also, you can now take still shots while shooting video just by tapping the screen as video continues to record. You can also launch camera directly from the Lockscreen. When you shoot videos, you can now choose from a number of silly faces and other fun effects which recognize individual facial features so you can give your friends big eyes, squeeze heads, make noses bigger, or change the scenery with background replacement.
• Redesigned Gallery app with photo editor To help pictures look their best, the Gallery now offers a powerful photo editor so you can crop and rotate pictures, set levels, remove red eyes, add effects, and much more.
• Richer, resizable widgets You can expand widgets to show more content, or shrink them to save space.

If you’re rooted, you may need to return back to stock in order to apply the update but no matter — you can root your Motorola Xoom once again after the update is applied. With the update having been tested aplenty on the US version already, you shouldn’t run into any issues with it. If so, head on into the Android Central Forums to get yourself some help.

Source: Motorola Canada, via: Android Central Forums

The busines, which was founded by 28-year old Mark Zuckerberg from his dorm room at Harvard University, raised more than $16bn in the process, marking the second biggest initial public offering there has even been. Only Visa’s was larger.

Lawyers prosecuting Bosnian Serb commander failed to provide documents to defence, causing judge to announce delay

The Hague war crimes tribunal, already under fire for its slow pace in dealing with Balkan war crimes cases, was thrown into confusion on Thursday by the revelation that lawyers prosecuting the Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic had failed to turn over hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence to the defence.

The Dutch judge, Alphons Orie, said the mistake would lead to a delay in the trial, which lawyers were already predicting would last four years or more.

“The chamber is still in the process of gathering information of the scope and full impact of this error,” Orie said.

He added that, after meeting defence and prosecution lawyers, he would announce a new start date for the prosecution’s presentation of evidence and witnesses “as soon as possible”. This phase had been due to start at the end of May.

The fiasco drew outrage from Bosnian survivors and bereaved families who had made the trip to The Hague to see Mladic face trial.

“We don’t agree with this. We ask to speed up the trial and to speed up the judgment, because it is important for the past, for Bosnia and the whole region, and it’s important for the future,” said Hatidza Mehmedovic, whose husband and two sons, one still a teenager, were among over 7,000 men and boys massacred by Mladic’s forces in Srebrenica.

“Nothing more can happen to me, but I don’t want any other mother anywhere to be in my shoes and go looking for the bones of their children, and be happy if they find only small bones,” Mehmedovic said. “With my elder son, they have only found two bones. With my younger they have almost a full skeleton. This has to be a fight for justice so that no mother has to look for their children in mass graves.”

Mladic claims he was in Belgrade holding meetings and attending a wedding when the Srebrenica massacre took place, but the prosecution demonstrated that he was in Srebrenica and the surrounding towns on the critical days from 11-14 July when the Muslim enclave fell to his forces and when men and teenage boys were rounded up and separated from women and children prior to their execution.

“This was not an army out of control or under the control of someone else. Only an army strictly under control from the top could have murdered over 7,000 people in four days,” Peter McCloskey, one of the trial prosecutors, said. “The VRS [the Republika Srpska army] carried out orders with incredible discipline, organisation and military efficiency … It was a truly amazing feat of utter brutality.”

For much of Thursday’s proceedings, Mladic listened impassively to the evidence presented against him. He became animated only once, clapping and giving a thumbs-up sign when a video was shown of him interrogating and shouting at the Dutch UN commander, Thom Karremans, whose troops were supposed to protect the enclave but were hopelessly outnumbered.

Mladic repeatedly asked Karremans if his soldiers had fired on Bosnian Serb troops who had overrun Srebrenica, and demanded to know if Karremans had called in Nato air strikes. Karremans insisted UN soldiers had been ordered to shoot only in self-defence and air strikes were decided by the UN headquarters.

In fact, as McCloskey pointed out, the air strikes were too little, too late.

The tribunal was shown footage of Mladic walking through Srebrenica town on 11 July 1995, just after it had fallen.

In it he says: “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift … Finally the time has come has take our revenge on the Turks [referring to Muslims] in this region.”

The prosecution also showed footage of Mladic on the scene while men and boys were separated from their families. Film was shown of the operation to round up men and boys who had tried to escape through the woods and of piles of corpses outside a nearby warehouse. Other evidence included Mladic’s written order to provide several tonnes of diesel fuel to a Bosnian Serb officer in Zvornik whose job it was to excavate mass graves and rebury the remains of the victims in smaller graves in an effort to avoid detection.

It was unclear how the debacle at The Hague had come about. The prosecution declared in November that it had handed the documentation over and only realised last Friday that it had failed to do so. The defence says a million pages were involved. Prosecutors admit that more than 37,000 documents could be missing.

Mladic’s lawyers are demanding a delay of six months. Tribunal sources suggested the delay would be significantly less than that, particularly in light of previous criticism of the court for its glacial pace. The trial of the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic lasted five years and only ended with his death from a heart attack in a cell in The Hague in March 2006.

After the morning session, Mehmedovic accused the international community of conniving in continuing “ethnic cleansing”. She pointed to a change in municipal law in Srebrenica this month, accepted by the international community, which meant that Muslim survivors of the massacre could not vote for the mayor. The municipality is now likely to come under Serb control in elections in October.

“What is even worse is that the whole world is seeing this and even now is not doing anything about it. The [ethnic cleansing] project is still alive. People are still suffering. Crimes are being rewarded,” Mehmedovic said. “Families of those who were killed cannot vote. With this law, they are legalising genocide. This is very dangerous for the region. This is what has to be stopped. “

It is perfectly possible to understand that many men are suffering at the moment without blaming it on feminism

Are men the new women? Are they having a harder time than silly moaning ladies? Has feminism gone too far? Has political correctness been put away for its own good? These are such familiar cultural tropes that we may dismiss the word trope altogether. Instead I would use another word: tripe.

Still, abundant tripe trickles down from on high, even academe. Every so often a new tome details how men, not women, are discriminated against (apart from rape, murder, equal pay, genital mutilation, the power imbalance in politics, business, education, law and arts they may have a point). Things are tough for some guys. Really, I know that. I just find it hard to accept feminism has gone too far, that a bit of underarm hair signals the end of western civilisation.

It is entirely possible to understand that many men are suffering at the moment without scapegoating feminism. That is the David Willetts manoeuvre: unemployment largely affecting working-class men is somehow the fault of middle-class women. Now we have Professor David Benatar from Cape Town addressing “the systemic discrimination against men” in a book called The Second Sexism. As always he has to set up some straw women: egalitarian feminists (good) against partisan feminists (bad). He also veers into quite bonkers territory. One of the ways men are more discriminated against is that there are more of them in prison than women. I may be missing something here, but I thought it was to do with them doing more crime?

Even the title annoyed me, though. Simone de Beauvoir must be twisting in her chignon, for she understood sexual politcs and its contradictions. There are many ways to understand power in theory. Read some Foucault. And there are many ways in practice. Have a relationship with another human being. The power dynamics between men and women mean that it is possible to argue for equal rights for women while acknowledging that life chances for many men are also on lockdown.

Right now, in terribly poor countries, girls are left to die in famines and the last food is given to baby boys, while in terribly rich ones, battles rage over who gets control of women’s bodies, women themselves or the state.

Still, Benatar lists the ways in which men are discriminated against, from corporal punishment, to conscription to circumcision to paternity leave and “bodily privacy”. All of this is done without class or context – he is a philosopher, all right? – and without seemingly much knowledge of actual feminism. While seeking to define them, he blurs the difference between disadvantage and discrimination and so ends up asking if we need affirmative action for men. We already have it. It’s called the status quo.

Strangely enough, in Volume 2 of The Second Sex, some 60 years ago, De Beauvoir spoke precisely of the prize of liberation: “to carry off this supreme victory, men and women must, among other things and beyond their natural differentiations, unequivocally affirm their brotherhood”.

Distinguishing sex from gender (“One is not born but rather becomes a woman”), she set off a train of thought about how we all construct ourselves. Freedom from the straitjacket of femininity for women brings with it a freedom for men too, for the price they pay for their dominance is well documented in terms of men’s mental and physical health.

It is no shock though that at a time when women’s rights are under attack (austerity hitting women hardest, abortion under threat), the politics of envy rears its head. For it is victim-envy, this me-too masculism. Or let’s just call it out: it is basic conservatism that says any challenge to the system, any rights won, have gone “too far”. These people cannot speak about the inequalities riven between classes, ethnicities and genders because it’s all about individuals who power through.

Thus, we have the mutant Tory feminists whose credo is: “I can have my cake and eat it. Get your own cake.” I mind that they don’t share the cake, but not whether they keep their faces honeymoon-fresh or not. I am simply bewildered by a feminism that would not want to advance women’s control of their own reproduction.

Still, we all get bamboozled with the choices women now have. Despite everyday stories of violence and abuse against women, we are now to refer to prostitution as “sex work”. I still await the dinner party where middle-class parents tell me: “Tom is doing his law conversion but even though Charlotte hasn’t done her Sats she already says she want to do sex work! We always knew she was entrepreneurial.”

It is clear that all kinds of people are in pain right now, male and female. Victimhood is not an Olympic sport. This was captured succinctly on International Women’s Day by the hashtag #whataboutthemenz. To be anti-sexist means to fight sexism, not to try to commandeer it. Or to reclaim it for men. Indeed, this move to consign sexual inequality to the past when it is a clear and present danger has to be countered. And it would be if feminism got itself in gear, never mind going too far.

Add into the mix the thousands of companies that make Facebook games, sell Facebook advertisements, help companies measure the impact of those Facebook advertisements, or, like the music-streaming service Spotify and The Guardian newspaper, rely heavily on Facebook to sell other wares, and that figure quickly catapults into the tens, if not hundreds, of billions.

Former Serb general gives truculent display at Hague court as prosecution outlines case including 1995 Srebrenica massacre

Ratko Mladic, the Serb military commander in the Bosnian war, has gone on trial for the worst crimes against humanity that Europe has witnessed since the second world war.

Facing 11 charges including two counts of genocide, the 70 year-old former general appeared unrepentant on Wednesday. When he entered the courtroom at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, he gave a sarcastic thumbs-up and a slow handclap to the public gallery. At one point, he looked directly at a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre and drew his finger across his throat.

“We visited him before the trial and tried to persuade him to be quiet, not to say anything at all,” Branko Lukic, his defence lawyer said. “He told me he made that sign at a woman in the gallery who provoked him by showing him the middle finger. He is like that. He does the same to me.”

After the break, Mladic complained about gestures from the public gallery. The judge told him to focus on the trial while warning the gallery he would put up a screen up around the court if there was any further “interaction”.

For more than four hours, the prosecution at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, outlined its case. Dermot Groome, one of the two senior prosecutors, said that the evidence would show that Mladic, as the head of the Bosnian Serb general staff, was directly responsible for the atrocities committed. More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, mostly Muslims and Croats, including tens of thousands of civilians.

“The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr Mladic in each of these crimes,” Groome said. In his statement, he drew on the defendant’s published directives to his troops during the war, as well his wartime notebooks seized by Serbian police in a Belgrade flat where he had been hiding during his 16 years on the run.

Groome’s also highlighted the individual tragedies that lie beneath the statistics, like the 14 year-old boy whose father and uncle were among 150 men from the same community murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in November 1992. He also told the story of a seven-year-old boy in Sarajevo killed by a Serb sniper while out with his mother gathering firewood. The bullet passed through her stomach and into his head. Lying wounded on the street, she thought her boy was simply following her instructions to take cover. It was only when UN soldiers lifted up his limp body that she realised he was dead.

Groome said that by the time Mladic’s forces stormed the supposedly UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys, “they were well rehearsed in the craft of murder.”

He added that Srebrenica was “different in scale, but no different in intent” from other atrocities carried out by Bosnian Serb forces. “It was no different in its utter inhumanity.”

One of the survivors in the gallery, Zumra Sehomerovic, said: “I am proud when I see Mladic finally behind that glass, in front of the court. It has come after 16 years but there is no statute of limitations on the crimes he committed”.

Her husband and three other family members were killed at Srebrenica and she said she saw the general up close when he appeared at the scene to “reassure” the terrified captives.

“When I look at him today, I see the man I saw then in 1995. I was standing a metre from him,” Sehomerovic said. ” There he was with his sleeves rolled up, and he was telling us everything would be OK. He was giving chocolate to the children and said he said he just needed to keep some of the men for a prisoner exchange but that everybody would be together again soon. And then he killed them all.”

Groome said the documentary evidence pointed to an “overarching” plan, set out in a list of six war aims drawn up by Mladic, aimed at ethnic cleansing hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats and carving out an ethnically pure Serb homeland in western and eastern Bosnia.

The prosecution statement also focused on the 44-month siege of Sarajevo. Groome quoted Mladic from wartime documents and interviews in which he appeared to boast about “putting a ring around the dragon’s head of Sarajevo”.

At one point the general is quoted as saying: “I have blocked Sarajevo from all four sides. There is no exit. It is in a mousetrap.”

Lukic said that he intended to cross-examine prosecution witnesses carefully, but would let the prosecution present its entire case before making his own opening statement.

“Our strategy is not to reveal our strategy and to keep our cards close to our chest,” Lukic said, but pledged to present “new evidence” when his turn came. He predicted that the trial could take more than four years to complete.

In court, Mladic cut a much diminished figure from the bluff, stocky and ruddy-faced military commander he was in the war. He survived for 16 years on the run, at first with the help of the Serbian army and the Serbian government in Belgrade, but since the election of a reformist president, Boris Tadic, in 2004, the layers of protection fell away. Mladic was cut off from funds and had been reduced to hiding in the garden shed of a relative in a Serbian village when he was caught last year.

The Bosnian Serbs’ wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, was caught in 2008, living under a false name and posing a new-age healer. He is already midway through his trial at The Hague. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president who orchestrated the Balkan wars from Belgrade, died of a heart attack in his cell in 2006 before a verdict could be delivered in his case.

At the start of Wednesday’s hearing the presiding judge, Alphons Orie of the Netherlands, said the court was considering postponing the presentation of evidence, due to start on 29 May, owing to material omitted by the prosecutors when it disclosed evidence to the defence. Groome said he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment”.

How Britney Spears came out on top, mobile phones on planes and why the recession is bad for your love life

Bested by Britney

US singer Demi Lovato (nope, we hadn’t either) must have been miffed to discover the other new American X Factor judge is world-famous pop star Britney Spears. Thunder promptly stolen.

Payback time

Sixty years ago the House of Commons agreed equal pay for women doing the same jobs as men. But, according to the Fawcett Society, women working full-time are still on average paid 14.9 % less.

I’m on the plane!

Virgin Atlantic has just ruined one of the greatest pleasures of air travel – not being contactable by phone or BlackBerry – with the announcement they’re allowing mobile use on their new new A330 Airbus plane.

Sex and misery

The recession seems to be responsible for everything. It was recently cited as the reason sales in erotic accessories have gone up (we’re all staying in). But Grazia are now claiming it’s why a quarter of 30-39 year olds are unhappy with their sex lives. Dwindling bank balances aren’t an aphrodisiac after all.

Adam who?

Continuing with its great revelations, the Leveson inquiry yesterday told us that Adam Boulton’s middle name is Babbington.

Get involved with the Olympic torch journey

The Guardian will be relaying stories about the people and places that it passes through, starting on Saturday. If your home is en route and you want to contribute, go to guardian.co.uk/torch-relay.

The ultimate wet look

The latest “must-have” from Chanel – a quilted leather watering can. There is even a pocket which we assume is for the storage of seeds. Stylish and practical.