Asia

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the woman whose sentence of death by stoning triggered an international outcry has accused the Iranian authorities of lying about the charges against her to pave the way to execute her in secret.

A ship bearing aid for Gaza is preparing to leave Tripoli in Lebanon this weekend in the latest attempt to defy the Israeli blockade – with only women on board.

In a fraught coincidence, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be chairing a United Nations Security Council session on violence against women in conflict situations today, on the 63d birthday of Burma's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi. That devotee of nonviolence has been kept under house arrest for 13 of the last 19 years by a military junta that has committed the vilest crimes against women.
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Women in Iran have resisted attempts by the Islamic theocratic regime to render them second-class citizens following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Haleh Esfandiari said in her lecture, “Iran's Indomitable Woman.” Abigail McGowan, a history professor at the University of Vermont, followed with a discussion about the instability in Kashmir on W

It was one o'clock in the morning, and raining, when Frances's employer threw her out in the street, angry that she had asked for a day off. "She said that I should leave straight away," Frances says quietly. "She threw all my things into the road, but kept my passport, bank card and national insurance card."

Amnesty International has condemned the Pacific Islands Forum leaders for being all talk and no action on reducing violence against Pacific women.

After the forum, which concluded in Vanuatu yesterday, Pacific leaders commended themselves for their action and acknowledged a recommendation to set up a reference group on gender-based violence in the future.

The picture tears into you. Her eyes are haunting and courageous, her face brutally butchered. This is the face of an Afghan girl named Aisha who was attacked by her family that was supported by the local Taliban commander, according to the August 8th TIME magazine.

Her father died when she was two, one of her brothers was killed by a landmine, and her home was burnt down by soldiers, forcing her family to make a dangerous border crossing through the jungle. Yet the first thing you notice about 19-year-old Day Wah Htoo is her smile.

"We are out on the streets with a message -- kill us before you kill our young boys and girls," says Rehana Ashraf, a female teacher in Indian Kashmir.

It is a stance which makes the security forces deeply anxious as they battle to suppress a surge of violent protests against India's rule of the Muslim-majority region.

In military-ruled Burma's Karen state, tradition and a male-dominated social order have long guaranteed men the role of village chiefs. But this order is crumbling in the country's eastern region, giving rise to the new phenomenon of women village chiefs.