There have been continuous calls to overturn the Kingdom’s ban on women driving. While women’s rights activists in the country have been openly campaigning for the right to drive, many high ranking officials maintain it is a societal issue and will be resolved only when Saudis feel the time is right.
Earlier, a group of more than 100 Saudi women signed and sent a petition to Second Deputy Premier and Minister of Interior Prince Naif, asking that the ban be overturned.
However, this controversy does not seem to affect people living in remote desert villages. They are of the view that women driving is a necessity when taking into account their living conditions.
Dedicated to the women who have graced the pages of history, from ancient to modern times.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saudi Arabia: Women Defy Tradition ... and Drive!
Malaysia: Women Authors
Award winning author Chiew-Siah Tei ".... won for her critically-acclaimed debut novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes, which had also been longlisted for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript form in 2007."
Peggy Tan Pek Tao, author of Life: The Malaysian Style!, was also a winner at The Star Readers’ Choice Awards.
Language lecturer Tan has written newspaper articles and an English grammar book for university students. She decided to start writing something “more exciting”, and published a well-received book of short stories, Tales of the Heart, in 1997.Both the top winners in this year’s awards are notably experienced, with years of writing under their belts.
Tei has been writing articles, literary prose and columns for Chinese newspapers such as Sin Chew Jit Poh and Nanyang Siang Pao since the 1980s. She has published several books in Chinese, including It’s Snowing (1998), about her life in Scotland, and a collection of arts and film reviews, Secrets and Lies (2000).
UN: Literacy Empowers
Top United Nations officials called today for more funding and advocacy to improve literacy rates among the world's women, who comprise two out of every three adults who cannot read or write.
In a message marking International Literacy Day, which is observed today, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed the transformative effect on both a family and the wider community when a woman is literate.
Literate women are more likely to send their children, especially their girls, to school,” he said. “By acquiring literacy, women become more economically self-reliant and more actively engaged in their country's social, political and cultural life. All evidence shows that investment in literacy for women yields high development dividends.”
Mr. Ban urged governments, donors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups to do more to make literacy accessible to women everywhere, particularly those living in vulnerable or isolated communities.
Every literate woman marks a victory over poverty,” he noted, calling for increasing funding and sustained advocacy for quality literacy programmes that empower women and ensure that girls and boys at primary and secondary level do not become a new generation of young illiterates.”
New Zealand: Women Losing Grip On Power
McGregor said interim results of the Census of Women's Participation showed that for the first time since the biennial survey began in 2004, the number of women in positions of power was going backwards.
Until recently New Zealand had a female prime minister, governor- general, attorney- general and a woman at the helm of Telecom, our largest publicly listed company.
McGregor said every other year there had been incremental improvements. "It means we have hit a plateau and are probably going to slide back," she said.
"New Zealand has always had a wonderful reputation - first of all with suffrage, but also with gender equality in a number of different areas, so that's why I'm worried about the signs of regression. We are at a critical stage for women's rights and gender equality. There's been a bit of complacency born out of the fact that there was a blip when we had a number of high-fliers."
McGregor believed it was time for the baby boomer generation to step aside, and accepted that view would cause controversy. "I do think there needs to be new and radical thinking. Younger women are there and I think we need to make space for them and for their voices and their forms of activism which are different from ours."
China: Gender Equility Through Education
Visiting Senior Chinese legislator Chen Zhili on Saturday called for the promotion of gender equality through education.
Since the Fourth World Conference on Women, society has become more aware that the empowerment of women and the improvement of their status is critical to economic, political and social development, Chen said during a keynote speech at the UNESCO forum on gender equality in Athens.
Chen, vice chairwoman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), said China has witnessed great improvement in the status of women in recent years.
With the implementation of the Women Protection Law as well as other national policies on gender equality, the rights of Chinese women in the area of education, work and politics are guaranteed, Chen said.
Nazar Ahari - Fighting For Women's Rights In Iran
The charges against Nazar Ahari are among the most serious that can be levelled in Iran: muharebeh (enmity against God), a crime, in theory punishable by death, originally intended to be used against armed gangs and pirates, not dissidents.
Nazar Ahari is also charged with assembly and collusion aiming to commit a crime, propagating against the regime and disrupting public order. But perhaps most dangerous among the allegations – strongly denied both by her family and her organisation, the Committee for Human Rights Reporters – is of "relations" with the banned Mojahedin e-Khalq group, which is accused by the Iranian regime of terrorist activities. Her family says that she deplores the organisation.
Arrested twice since the disputed Iranian elections in June 2009 and held in the notorious Evin prison, in north-west Tehran, Nazar Ahari has been kept largely incommunicado since December, when she was arrested with several other women activists on her way to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the city of Qom. Also detained was Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, another prominent women's rights activist and film-maker, who has since left Iran and was sentenced in absentia to two-and-a-half-years in jail and 30 lashes for her part in a 2007 protest.
Made In Dagenham
They set out to fight for a fair deal for themselves; they ended up changing the world of work for generations of women. Now the 187 women machinists from Ford's flagship factory in Essex are to be celebrated in Made in Dagenham – starring Miranda Richardson and Bob Hoskins – which opens in cinemas across the UK this month. This weekend the man who worked behind the scenes as history was being made spoke, in a rare interview, to the IoS about the part he played in it.
When women machinists at Ford's Dagenham factory downed tools in 1968 in protest at the fact that they were classed as unskilled workers, while male colleagues doing the same job were thought to be skilled and paid much more for their efforts, they couldn't have imagined the ramifications.
The three-week strike brought production at the factory – which was the focus of the UK car industry at the time – to a standstill, and the dispute was resolved only when Barbara Castle was brought in to negotiate a settlement.
The Ford machinists went back to work after agreeing to be paid 92 per cent of male machinists' wages, and the strike speeded up the introduction of the Equal Pay Act of 1970, which made it illegal to have different pay scales for men and women.
India: Firsts For Muslim Women
From the Times of India: Muslim Women Offer Eid Prayers
Fighting back convention, 1,000 women congregated at Hyderpur in Malda to offer Eid namaz on Saturday just like their male counterparts. Succeeding in breaking free from the shackles of male domination, the women gathered under the banner of Muslim Mahila Janakalyan Samity and prayed, led not by a moulvi but a woman from among them.
"We have been doing this for the last nine years. It is the first all-women prayer to be held in West Bengal. We are proud that women are coming out from behind the purdah. There were initial objections from male family members, but they have now accepted it," said Shamima Begum, who led the prayer.
From the Times of India: Kendrapara Mosque Opens To Women
Hundreds of Muslim women offered prayers at an exclusive namaz for females at Kendrapara's Minar mosque on the occasion of Eid-ul-Fitr on Saturday. Mosque authorities said the annual event was aimed at women's empowerment.
"Each year, Eid brings joy to hundreds of women from the Alhadis sect in Kendrapara as they offer special prayers at the mosque at Badahat in Kendrapara," said Ainur Haque, cleric of Minar mosque. "The mosque managing committee's decision is a bold step towards giving women equal rights," he added.
Mona Lisa's Childhood Home Found
The woman behind one of the world's most famous paintings was born in a humble house in Florence, according to new documents. Rossella Lorenzi gets the story and you can view the video here at Discovery News.
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