Dedicated to the women who have graced the pages of history, from ancient to modern times.
Researchers have revealed the face that once belonged to the oldest human remains unearthed at an ancient burial ground in Thailand.The civil society has lauded the passage of the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill by the National Assembly, hoping that it will help protect women’s rights once it sails through the Senate.
Hilda Syed, a senior member of the Women Action Forum, told The News that it was a wonderful piece of news, adding, however, that the task now was to pass the bill from the Senate as well.
“The domestic violence bill stayed in the Senate for three months after which it lapsed but we are adamant to pass it through. Similarly, as soon as the amendments are made to this bill, it should come into force so that its efficacy is not compromised,” she said.
Zohra Yusuf of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that the unanimous acceptance of the bill by the NA was a positive sign for sure as it made certain “evil practices” illegal. But given the history of such laws being interpreted wrongly or not implemented at all, awareness of the law enforcement authorities is also needed.
She said that the bill was focusing on the punishment aspect at the moment, and it should also take into account the problems women faced while reporting inheritance issues.
“Recently, Bangladesh announced equal property rights for women on International Women Day which did not go down well with the clerics (there). But at least it is a step in the right direction. We need to focus on that as well.”
The recent victory of Yingluck Shinawatra, who will become Thailand’s first female prime minister, has inspired some Singaporeans to ask whether it’s also time for the prosperous city state to elect its first female president. Singapore is set to choose its new president, a largely ceremonial position, next month.
But electing a female president isn’t that easy as choosing a female member of parliament. After reviewing the minimum qualifications that a candidate must pass, it seems there will be some difficulty in finding eligible female nominees.
According to Grace Ke of the Association of Women for Action and Research, Singapore has had only one female minister in its history, and has never had a female chief justice, speaker, attorney general, Public Service Commission chairman or auditor general.
Archaeologists have found female skeletons buried with metal swords in Cambodian ruins, indicating there may have been a civilisation with female warriors, the mission head said on Thursday.
The team dug up 35 human skeletons at five locations in Phum Snay in northwestern Cambodia in research earlier this year, said Japanese researcher Yoshinori Yasuda, who led the team.
"Five of them were perfect skeletons and we have confirmed all of them were those of females," Yasuda told AFP. The skeletons were believed to date back to the first to fifth century AD.
The five were found buried together with steel or bronze swords, and helmet-shaped objects, said Yasuda, who is from the government-backed International Research Centre for Japanese Studies.
"It is very rare that swords are found with women. This suggests it was a realm where female warriors were playing an active role," he said.
"Women traditionally played the central role in the rice-farming and fishing societies," he said. "It's originally a European concept that women are weak and therefore should be protected."
"The five skeletons were well preserved because they had been buried in important spots at the tombs," he said.
It was the first time that large-scale research was conducted on the Phum Snay relics, which were found in 1999.
It is believed there was a civilisation inhabited with several thousand rice-farming people between the first and fifth century.
NEXT month marks the 40th anniversary of the first Asian woman joining the Metropolitan Police.
Karpal Kaur Sandhu served in Walthamstow and Leyton after joining the force on February 1 1971.
She paved the way for many Asian and women in the force, proving invaluable as an interpreter and was drafted in to deal with CID cases all over London where a female officer was needed.
She was born to a Sikh family in Zanzibar, east Africa, in 1943 and came to the UK in 1962, when she got a job as a nurse.
After joining the police, she served at Hornsey before moving to the Leyton division of the Met.
Kamala Harris, former San Francisco District Attorney became the first woman, first African American, and first Asian Indian to become the Attorney General in California. Hundreds attended the historic occasion. Several history makers were in the audience: former speaker of the House Willie Brown, an Assembly members, law enforcement officers and attorneys, business leaders, union leaders, ministers, elected officials, state leaders, national NAACP board members, Black newspaper publishers, and people who wanted to be a part of history. Excitement was high as a large crowd waited in the courtyard of the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts in Sacramento.
On Thursday, Indonesian women started using female-only railway carriages in Jakarta, part of a scheme to protect women from harassment on packed commuter trains.
State-owned railway company PT Kai currently provides 20 of these female carriages and plans to add more in the next three months.
The trains manufactured in Japan are the only fast public transport service between the four city suburbs connecting Jakarta, and women make up almost half of the 500,000 commuters a day.
First introduced in Japan in the year 2000, other countries such as India, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brazil also operate women-only carriages.
“We immigrant women made great sacrifices to come here,” Jahangir says. “But we did not come here to be idle and beg. We did not come here to be baby machines. We came here to work, and we want to be part of building a nation.”
The group held its first public meeting in the fall of 2007. In early 2008, it became a registered non-profit organization. In its first year, with $750 in seed money from COSTI immigrant services and a small grant from the Freedonia Foundation, the group ran 40 workshops on settlement services, each attended by about 50 women.
By 2009, the women had raised about $60,000 from the United Way and several other foundations and began renting office space on the main floor of Jahangir’s apartment building. In the winter and spring of that year, they knocked on 1,200 doors and interviewed 400 women about their experience in Canada. They found that 80 per cent of the women had university degrees, and most were angry about the lack of child care.
They rented buses to protest at provincial poverty-reduction forums and federal standing committee hearings. And they wrote letters, signed petitions and met with area politicians to demand action.
There have been angry protests in the South Korean capital Seoul after the Japanese prime minister's apology for his country's often brutal occupation of the Korean peninsula a century ago.
The apology has been met with mixed responses in Seoul, where South Korean politicians reportedly 'noted' the apology but said it failed to go far enough. Hundreds of South Korean women enslaved by the Japanese as so-called comfort women during the occupation have also held noisy protests outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul denouncing the apology.
A Sydney mother who forced 11 Thai women to work as prostitutes to help pay off her mortgage has been jailed for at least 13 months.
In March the 48-year-old pleaded guilty to bringing 11 women to Australia from Thailand for the purpose of sexual servitude between August 2005 and April 2008.
She also pleaded guilty to immigration offences.
The NSW District Court heard the women were forced to work off a debt they owed the woman for bringing them to Australia. She sent them to brothels in Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Adelaide and Perth.
It heard the woman paid an agency in Thailand $20,000 to supply the women who knew what sort of work they would be doing.
Coming out in protest for the first time, thousands of tribal women in Maoist-affected Jhargram in West Bengal's West Midnapore district on Friday held a demonstration against a rebel-led tribal group for forcing them to join their agitations. The women also formed a committee to resist thealleged torture of them by members of the Peoples' Committee Against Police Atrocities' (PCAPA).
Thousands of women from Radhanagar, Saktinagar, Gaighata villages of Jhargram held aloft sticks and brooms during their procession to oppose the PCAPA's diktat of joining their procession at gun point.
Sabitri Mahato, a housewife of Radhanagar village, said, "On Thursday night about 20 PCAPA members backed by the Maoists equipped with arms and bombs assembled at Radhanagar school playground and ordered us to join their procession to be held at Jhargram. When we opposed them, they started to beat us."
Elderly women, who were victims of sexual abuse by the Japanese invaders in World War II, on Monday asked President Benigno Aquino III to take up their cause and ask Japan to apologize and legally compensate the so-called “comfort women.”
The members of the Malaya Lolas, the remaining survivors of the Mapaniqui Siege of 1944, filed on a supplemental motion for reconsideration of a Supreme Court decision that dismissed their petition to compel the Philippine government to demand apology and compensation from Japan.
The group, through their lawyers Harry Roque and Rommel Bagares, also scored the high tribunal for plagiarizing the decision that dismissed their demand for an official apology and other forms of reparation against the Japanese government before the International Court of Justice and other international tribunals.
More than three decades after it began, China's one-child population control policy has some unintended consequences. Because of a traditional preference for boys, thousands of couples abort female fetuses, and the Chinese government says that last year, 119 boys were born for every 100 girls.
The shortage of young women is pushing some families turn to human traffickers to find wives for their sons. The traffickers often go to neighboring Burma, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos and North Korea to buy or kidnap women.
Members of Burma's Kachin Women's Association comfort three young women sold to Chinese families by human traffickers. The women, aged between 16 and 18, came to China with the promise of a better life. But they found themselves sold as brides to men in rural areas for as little as $700, and kept as virtual prisoners.
Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Annabelle Abaya urged the incoming Aquino administration to place more women on the government panel with the secessionist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) as she noted their critical role in balancing or cooling the usually tense atmosphere in talks. Abaya said government negotiating panels should include at least two women.
The Malaysian Association of Foreign Maid Agencies (Papa) brings in between 2,000 and 3,000 foreign maids from several countries every month to meet the needs of employers in this country since Indonesia froze the service to Malaysia a year ago.
He told Bernama that currently there were about 300,000 Indonesian maids working in Malaysia. He said most of the maids from Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines were non-Muslims because a majority of the demand for these maids came from the Chinese community.
Indonesia wants a minimum monthly wage of RM800 but Malaysia wants wages based on market demand and through discussions between the employer and the maid concerned.
"On average, the housemaids are now paid RM500 and above depending on the location of the workplace, whether it is in town or rural area. But if the maid gives quality service, the employer can consider a higher pay,” he said.
Something as impossible as a city for women is not a far-fetched dream anymore- It is under construction in Kuala Lumpur.
This extravagant exhibition and fair is being "developed" by the Star's monthly women's supplement, Clove, and it will be, as its tagline says, "Streets Ahead For Women".
FemmeCity, derived from the French 'la femme' meaning woman, will be held at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre from July 30 to Aug 1.
It is catering to women who are intelligent, bold, judicious and ready to spend in products and services that enable them to look and feel good and improve their lives, reports the Star Online. The highpoint of FemmeCity is its unique concept, which is to develop an actual city. There will be specific 'streets' covering beauty, fashion, health and fitness, women's consumer products, services and hobbies.
Household brand names such as Canon, Triumph, Tupperware, Watsons and Himalaya have confirmed participation at FemmeCity. It will also have a Library, Clinic, Community Centre and Coffeeshop.
Reforms undertaken by governments in the Middle East to protect domestic workers from abuse are insufficient to shield women working as house maids from abuse and violence, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.
Millions of mostly Asian women who work in countries like Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates remain at risk of human trafficking, forced labor, confinement and sexual violence, the New York-based group said.
Although several governments have made improvements for migrant domestic workers in the past five years, reform has been slow and incremental, Nisha Varia, the group's senior researcher of women's rights told The Associated Press.
Women working in private homes often work 20-hour days, face forced confinement and are sometimes physically and sexually abused, the report said.
Their passports are confiscated upon arrival, leaving employers in full control of their house maids' lives under what is known as a "sponsorship system."
The custom remains the biggest factor contributing to abuse, leaving women trapped in abusive situations since they are not allowed to legally change an employer, HRW said.
Young Arab women wait in an upmarket medical clinic for an operation that will not only change their lives, but quite possibly save it. Yet the operation is a matter of choice and not necessity. It costs about 2,000 euros (£1,700) and carries very little risk.
The clinic is not in Dubai or Cairo, but in Paris. And the surgery they are waiting for is to restore their virginity.
Whether in Asia or the Arab world, an unknown number of women face an agonising problem having broken a deep taboo. They've had sex outside marriage and if found out, risk being ostracised by their communities, or even murdered.
Now more and more of them are undergoing surgery to re-connect their hymens and hide the any sign of past sexual activity. They want to ensure that blood is spilled on their wedding night sheets.
The social pressure is so great that some women have even taken their own lives.
