generalspeaking

Women's World

Afghanistan's parliament yesterday debated ways to protect female politicians from assassination following the murder of a provincial legislator. Sitara Achakzai, a high school teacher and women's right activist was shot dead outside her home in the volatile southern city of Kandahar on Sunday. She was targeted by four men on motorbikes. the Taliban later claimed responsibility. Ahmed Wali Karzai, chairman of Kandahar's provincial council and brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said the murder was a big blow to Afghan society. "No one will take a risk to send their daughters and their mothers and their wives to become a member of parliament", Mr. Karzai said.

A Jordanian man confessed to stabbing to death his pregnant sister and mutilating her body to protect the family honour. The 28-year old married woman was five months pregnant and had moved back in with her family after an argument with her husband. Her brother believed she was seeing other men. Attempts to introduce harsher sentences for honour killings have been blocked in Jordan's parliament. Some members of government have also urged judges to consider honour killings equal to other homicides and punishable by up to 15 years in prison, but many in the judiciary still hand down lenient punishments of half of that, or less.

Women in India are offering themselves as surrogate mothers to get through the recession and escape poverty. Fertility specialists say there has been a rise in the number of women volunteering for surrogacy, which coincides with a growing number of Western couples looking for mothers willing to have a child for them. Dr. Anoop Gupta, one of the country's leading gynaecologists, said there had been a sharp rise in recent months of childless couples searching for surrogates and women looking to earn up to $9,000 to deliver another family's baby. It is about $30,000 cheaper than surrogacy services in the United States.

An Azeri immigrant has been charged with hiring hit men to kill his daughter for wearing a miniskirt. His arrest follows the detention last week of two other citizens of Azerbaijan who confessed to murdering the 21-year-old university medical student. "They admitted to being paid 100,000 rubles ($3,650) by the girl's father. They said he wanted to punish his daughter for flouting national traditions and wearing a miniskirt", a police source said. The victim was abducted on the street, taken to the suburbs, then shot twice in the head. Russia has experienced a revival of conservative religious traditions since the fall of the Soviet Union in its Russian Orthodox and large Muslim communities.

Hindu nationalists in India have been accused of behaving like Afghanistan's hardline Taliban after women were attacked in a pub and couples warned about public displays of affection. Five men also briefly kidnapped a Hindu girl from a bus, incensed that she was travelling with a Muslim boy. All the incidents happened in the city of Mangalore in the southern state of Karnataka. India's minister for women and child development, Renuka Chowduri, has warned that Karnataka is in the grip of "Talibanisation" -- suggesting that women are being oppressed there as they were by the Islamist militia in Afghanistan. The violent pub attack, claimed by the radical Hindu group Sri Ram Sena (SRS), or Lord Ram's Army, has prompted fierce debate about the role of women in modern India and changing values in this conservative country.
For the SRS, the young women smoking, drinking and dancing in a trendy Mangalore bar at the end of January were indulging in "debauched" behaviour that had to be punished.

Taliban insurgents publicly executed a man and girl yesterday for eloping when she was engaged to marry someone else. Hashim Noorzai, head of Khash Rud district, Nimruz, said the two were killed by gun shots in front of a crowd of villagers. He had no details on how the Taliban had come to be involved in passing judgement, but said much of the mainly desert district was under their control. Nimruz is a sparsely populated area near the Iranian and Pakistani borders where foreign or government troops have little presence. Like much of southern Afghanistan, it has become a stronghold for Taliban fighters who were driven out of Kabul in 2001 but are making a comeback in the south and east.

Labels: Human Relations, Societal Failures, World News

posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, April 14, 2009