Asia

More than one thousand women and 15 Arab and Jewish human rights groups will demonstrate on Monday against the Israeli authorities continued demolition of houses and villages in the Negev.

The demonstration organized by the Arab follow up committee in 1948 occupied land in cooperation with numerous women groups is to start in front of the Israeli interior ministry in Jerusalem.

Kaleme website reports that Rahnavard has called on the parliament to leave the evaluation of this bill of law to a "group of expert and progressive men and women."

Last week, Iranian media reported that the family protection bill of law, after three years of delay, will be put in the parliament's agenda.

Opponents of this legislation thus organized gatherings and issued articles to protest against it.

A record number of women are running in Afghanistan's critical parliamentary elections next month despite many being inundated with threatening phone calls, including death threats from insurgents.

Amid ever-rising violence, which some people fear could foster a repeat of last year's catastrophic presidential election, women are struggling to campaign at all outside a few areas, poll monitors say.

The monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed thousands and affected an estimated twenty million people across several provinces. According to development organizations working in the country, the humanitarian crisis is yet another blow for Pakistan's rural women. With increasing effects of climate change, the longer-term situation can only get worse.

Each night before she goes to sleep, Umm Shekar checks to make sure her pistol is loaded and tucks it beneath her mattress.

Increasingly worried about being robbed by criminal gangs or insurgents, the mother of six bought the weapon so she could defend herself and her family.

Her husband, a clothes importer-exporter, spends much of his time outside of Iraq, adding to her sense of vulnerability.

Agnes Monica, the famous Indonesian actress and singer, is a given to wearing sexy clothes, whether on stage, TV or advertising billboards. But not here, in the provincial capital of Aceh province. Just across from the 19th-century Baiturrahman Grand Mosque is a large billboard that features Agnes wearing a headscarf — even though she's a Christian.

In the well-publicized controversial -- and “plagiarized” -- ruling of the Supreme Court in the Vinuya vs. Romulo case, the justices en banc dismissed the petition of more than 70 “comfort women” belonging to the “Malaya Lolas Organization.”

The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

A group of women human rights defenders has appealed to President Benigno Aquino III to “heed the call for justice” and release a jailed nursing mother in the case of 43 health workers who were arrested in Morong, Rizal.

"The mother and child's detention speaks of the continued injustice against Oliveros and the rest of the Morong 43,” said Cristina Palabay, convenor of Tanggol Bai.

The Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Center (A.L.R.C.) has called Islamabad to invite the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances to conduct a country visit.