Asia

As Cho Cho Kyaw Nyein travels around Burma trying to garner support for the Democratic Party (DP), she is met with admiration and respect. The 62-year-old admits that she owes much of this adulation to her father and former deputy prime minister, the late Kyaw Nyein.

A profound distrust in political parties is hampering female participation in Yemen's struggling democracy, a study released on Tuesday suggests.

The evidence against Burma's junta has been piling up for many years. Thousands upon thousands of girls and women raped as a tactic of war by the Burmese army; children press-ganged to serve as porters; 3,500 villages burned to the ground in recent years; millions of people forced from their homes -- these are some of the crimes against humanity sponsored by the generals who rule their Southeast Asian nation of 50 million people.

It was a single word scrawled on a wall at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that unlocked something deep inside Inbar Michelzon, two years after she had completed compulsory military service in the Israeli Defence Force.

A Lebanese aid ship aiming to reach Gaza in defiance of Israel will "probably be delayed," organisers said Saturday, on the eve of its planned departure, after Cyprus denied use of its waters and ports.
The Mariam, a Bolivian-flagged cargo ship renamed for the all-women aid operation, was to have set off from the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli on Sunday night, headed for Cyprus on the first leg of a crossing to Gaza.

A non-profit center for women's rights defense opened in Kirkuk on Sunday under the name of “the Legal Free Center for Women in Kirkuk.”

They are hung from trees by metal chains attached to their arms and provided with plastic bags to collect their urine to drink when they are thirsty. They are gang raped, tortured with electricity and held prisoner in desert camps. When they escape they are shot, either by their Beduin captors or by Egyptian police.

When leading prominent Iraqi women leaders from all across the country gathered in Baghdad in June 28, 2010 they had only one question on their mind: Ela Mata? Until when? The question was directed at leading political parties engaged in negotiations over government formation after the recent elections.

Jerusalem is a city blessed but also cursed by its own holiness. No more so than here at 'Ground Zero', the religious epicentre within the walled Old City, beneath the most disputed holy site -- the Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary as known to Muslims, Har Habayit or the Temple Mount for Jews.

As reported last month by MediaGlobal, women activists are working in Iraq to increase women's participation in the government, economic, and legal sectors. Their work in the legal sector is particularly significant as it has the potential to strengthen laws regarding women's rights nationally, regionally, and on a global scale.