Asia

Afghanistan's security forces have been bolstered by thousands of women officers as they go on high alert ahead of nationwide parliamentary elections on September 18, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan reports.

The Slow Death of Domestic Violence

The government of Timor-Leste is struggling to implement a recently adopted law criminalizing domestic violence, amid scepticism that it is too much, too soon.

“We are a teenager of a country,” Maria Filomena Babo Martins, chief of training and education at the Secretariat of State for the Promotion of Equality (SEPI), which is coordinating the law's implementation, told IRIN.

The true toll of the Iraq war is one that won't be tallied for years. The effects of missing fathers and mothers, here and there, the cost of a society shattered into fragments only clumsily coming together, like badly healed bones.

Leila Fadhil of the Washington Post, one of the best people covering Iraq at the moment, has the story today of one of those edges. The fate of the children of Al Qaeda.

The National Conference for the Kurdish Woman is still ongoing in Dohuk with the participation of 21 Kurdish activists that represent Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran's Kurds, after its opening on Saturday, said the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Women's Union. The conference will last for six days until September 23.

Armenian and Azerbaijani women from both sides of the longstanding Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between the Caucusus nations will hold a press conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, on the International Day of Peace on Tuesday.

The event, taking place with the support of the United Nations Development Fund for Women and Belgian Senator Dominic Tillman, will be held Sept. 21 in Tbilisi's Betsy Hotel at 4pm, its organizers told Trend.

For the first time in its history the Nepali Congress will see a long queue of women participants in the 12th general convention. As many as 500 women representatives selected from village and regional level conventions and under reserved quotas are participating in the conclave.

In a rural Kabul suburb, hundreds of men jostle for the chance to ink their finger and vote, while next door, shielded by a curtain, only a few women wait for their own line to form.

Although 10 of Kabul's 33 parliamentary seats have been reserved for women, few were visible in the capital's outlying hamlet of Chawni after voting began in Afghanistan's second parliamentary election since 2001.

In mid-August in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the Taliban carried out a horrific sentence against two young Afghan lovers who had eloped against their families' wishes. The punishment was death by stoning. Deemed by Islamic extremists to be justified under sharia law, the process involves partially burying the accused, after which a male crowd hurls stones at the victims' exposed heads until they die.

Whatever else happens after this year's election, it is clear that one thing is certain not to change—namely, the extremely limited role of women in Burmese politics.

Leaders of the Democratic Party (Myanmar), Cho Cho Kyaw Nyein, left, Thu Wai, center, and Nay Yee Ba Swe at a press conference at the party's head office in Rangoon on Aug. 22.

For the second time in the past several months, a group of about 25 Israeli women successfully smuggled 23 Palestinian women and 7 children from the West Bank into Israel in defiance of Israeli law. The Israeli women met the Palestinian women at their homes in the West Bank, and drove them through the checkpoints into Israel, evading Israeli security.