• Poverty Leads to Massive Rise in Female Ahwazi Pavement Sellers. [British Ahwazi Friendship Society, UK] The number of female pavement sellers in the Arab majority cities of Khorramshahr (Mohamareh) and Abadan is soaring, according to a report published by Iran's Fars News Agency. According to the news agency's report, the female roadside hawkers are the sole income earnings due to non-payment of wages by state corporations and endemic unemployment and under-employment among Ahwazi Arab men. The age of female Ahwazi Arab hawkers, who sell food and handicrafts from the villages as well as smuggled goods such as cigarettes and chewing gum, is also falling. Unemployment among Ahwazi Arabs is running at 50%. Meanwhile, those employed by the state-owned ship-building and port companies are owed months of back-pay, leading to mass demonstrations and strikes. Women are now feeling the effects of the employment crisis, but most are illiterate and are only able to work in the informal sector. Yet, the Ahwazi Arab homeland is one of the most oil-rich in the world, with more oil reserves than Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates combined.

• Women Face Violence in Afghanistan, Iraq: UN. [Times of India] Women are facing increasing violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, especially when they speak out publicly to defend women's rights, a senior UN official told the UN Security Council. Noeleen Heyzer, executive director of the UN Development Fund for Women, called on for fresh efforts to ensure the safety of women in countries emerging from conflicts, to provide them with jobs, and ensure that they receive justice, including compensation for rape. "What UNIFEM is seeing on the ground — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia — is that public space for women in these situations is shrinking," Heyzer said Thursday. "Women are becoming assassination targets when they dare defend women's rights in public decision-making."

Afghanistan

• Slaying of Activist Sounds Alarm for Women. [USA Today]  Suspected Taliban assassins gunned Safia Ama Jan down as she went to work. The southern Kandahar government, where she ran the women's department, had denied her requests for a bodyguard. Ama Jan's death at age 65, like the proverbial canary in a coal mine, raises a larger, and very disturbing, question: Is she a symbol of where Afghanistan's fledgling democracy is heading? It's not just that she was a victim of a dangerously resurgent Taliban. She was also facing an uphill battle in her fight for women's rights in Afghan society more broadly.

• Amid Attacks, a Struggle to Teach Girls. [Boston Globe] Within two years of the 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, an extremist Islamic movement that banned girls' education and emphasized Islamic studies for boys, officials boasted that 5.1 million children of both sexes were enrolled in public schools. Now that positive tide has come to a halt in several provinces where Taliban insurgents are aggressively battling NATO and US troops, and has slowed dramatically in many other parts of the country. President Hamid Karzai told audiences in New York that about 200,000 Afghan children had been forced out of school this year by threats and physical attacks. According to UNICEF, 106 attacks or threats against schools occurred from January to August, with incidents in 31 Afghan provinces.

• Canada to Build Schools, Aid Women in Afghanistan. [Middle East Times, Egypt] Canada will give C$30 million ($26 million) to build schools and help women's micro credit projects in Afghanistan, international cooperation minister Josee Verner announced. Nearly half of the money is to help build schools and train 4,000 teachers for some 120,000 schoolchildren, 85% of them girls, in 11 provinces, she said in a statement released in Ottawa. Verner was in Afghanistan Sunday on a previously unannounced visit. A second part of the project, worth C$5 million will aid 1,500 women to grow and sell fruits and vegetables. "Canada is proud to help Afghan women realize the promise of the country's new constitution, which recognizes the rights of women," Verner said in the statement.

• Limited Access to Market, Tech Hinders Women Entrepreneurship. [The Daily Star, Bangladesh] Lack of confidence among the women entrepreneurs is the key limitation for the development of women entrepreneurship in Bangladesh.

• Dalit Women Activist Wins 'Alternate Nobel Prize. [Telugu Portal, India] Ruth Manorama, Indian activist for Dalit women's causes, has bagged the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, better known as Alternate Nobel Prize. "Ruth Manorama is the Indian subcontinent's most effective organizer of and advocate for Dalit women, belonging to the 'scheduled castes', sometimes also called 'untouchables'," Jakob von Uexkull, the founder of the awards, declared. "The jury honors Manorama, a Dalit herself, 'for her commitment over decades to achieving equality for Dalit women, building effective and committed women's organizations and working for their rights at national and international levels'. The 2006 Right Livelihood Awards honor pioneers for Justice, Truth and Peace building.

• UN, India Deploy Women Troops. [News24, South Africa] The United Nations and India have agreed on the deployment of 125 Indian policewomen as peacekeepers in Liberia, the first time the world body has used an all-female unit, say officials. Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) spokesperson Abhisekh Dayal said: "A memorandum of understanding between the UN and India has now been signed in New York and our unit will leave for Liberia later this month." The officers, aged between 25 and 30, were to be deployed for a possible six-month tour of duty in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, which was emerging from years of savage civil war. Poonam Gupta, a senior officer with the CRPF, said: "Our girls are now fully-trained in everything - language and communication skills, martial arts, weaponry, rescue and full-scale combat."

• Trafficking in Women, Children on the Rise in India. [Hindu, India] National Human Rights Commission chairman Justice A S Anand said that trafficking of women and children was on a rise in India. India was not only a transit point for trafficked women and children, but was also recipient and a supplier of such persons, Anand said delivering a lecture on 'Human Rights- Challenges of the 21st century'. The exploitation of women and children for sex, however, was not confined to India alone. With porous borders with Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, the problem has global dimensions, he said. Quoting statistics, he said it was a flourishing trade of eight billion dollars a year. It is almost surpassed the profits from drugs trafficking.

• Women's Reservation Bill Will Be Passed Soon: Speaker. [Hindustan Times] Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee on Sunday expressed hope that the Women's Reservation Bill would be passed in the Parliament during his tenure. "I am hoping that the bill will be passed during my tenure. My dream is that it will be part of our Constitution soon," he said interacting with a group of college students. Noting that the bill could not be passed hitherto since "ours is a fractured polity", he said "many do not want that the seats occupied by them should go to the women".

• Indian Brides Pay a High Price. [International Herald Tribune] Violent dowry harassment is an increasingly visible phenomenon in India. An average of one dowry death is reported every 77 minutes according to the National Crime Record Bureau and victim support groups say complaints of dowry harassment are rising, fueled by a rising climate of consumerism. Although the giving and taking of dowry is banned here under legislation that threatens a five-year jail term, activists describe the law as "ornamental" and point out that it is almost never imposed. Dowry negotiations remain an integral part of wedding arrangements, although, to avoid legal complications, the payments are often referred to as wedding gifts. Officials at the commission see about 40 abused women every day, and estimate that approximately 85% of these cases are related to dowry demands, a figure that they say has grown over the past five years.

• 3000-Year-Old Female Skeleton Discovered. [Payvand, Iran] Skeleton of a woman from the 1st millennium BC, statuette of a goat, a crook cane in the shape of a lizard, and several other objects were found in a grave in Gorgan which speak of the high social class of the woman buried in there. The woman was found buried in a squat position while the cane was under her left arm.

• Motor Racing: Iranian Female Barred from Defending Title. [Guardian Unlimited, UK] She was the speed queen of the racetrack who became a feminist icon after triumphing over an all-male field to become Iran's national car rally champion. But now Laleh Seddigh has been banned from participating at a race by the country's motor racing authorities. The federation's vice-president, Hossein Shahryari, said Seddigh had been barred because of a government circular restricting women to female-only events. That decree has now been lifted. But he added: "Women are speaking highly of themselves and that causes men who sacrifice their lives in this sport disappointment. Women are not champions in this sport, they are only participants. If they observed Islamic regulations more they would not have such problems."

• Gunmen Kill Three Women, Baby in Southern City. [Reuters AlertNet] Gunmen stormed a home in the southern Iraqi city of Samawa late on Wednesday, shooting dead three women and slitting the throat of a baby girl. Neighbors said the women were a mother and her daughter-in laws. The 18-month-old infant was the daughter of one of the in-laws. The women, all Shi'ites, the neighbors said, were killed in an overwhelmingly Shi'ite city. Violence there is almost non-existent, but revenge killings are fairly common in Iraq's south.

• Hidden Victims of a Brutal Conflict: Iraq's Women. [Guardian Unlimited] Abduction, rape and murder are the punishments for any woman who dares to hold a professional job. A month-long investigation by The Observer reveals the terrible reality of life after Saddam They came for Dr Khaula al-Tallal in a white Opel car after she took a taxi home to the middle class district of Qadissiya in Iraq's holy city of Najaf. She worked for the medical committee that examined patients to assess them for welfare benefit. Crucially, however, she was a woman in a country where being a female professional increasingly invites a death sentence.

• Women's Rights Champion Murdered. [Daily Telegraph, Australia] Gunmen broke into the house of an Iraqi women's rights campaigner and shot her dead in front of her three children. Human rights activists say the lives of women in Iraqi society have worsened dramatically since the US-led invasion of March 2003, amid a general break down in law and order and the rise of conservative Islamist militias. Captain Imad Khudhir of the Kirkuk police said 38-year-old Halima Ahmed Hussein al-Juburi was killed by 10 unidentified attackers who broke into her home. Ms Juburi was the head of the Human Rights organization of Maternity and Childhood in Hawijah, a lawless town in an area plagued by violent Sunni insurgent groups.

• Hezbollah’s Sole Female Top Official Has Harsh Words. [AKI, Italy] Rima Fakhry is an oddity given her status as the only female member of Hezbollah's top decision-making body. But when she speaks her words sound very similar to those of her male colleagues in the Lebanese Shiite group's leadership. "Our struggle will continue because the United States will not surrender easily," she said in a recent interview with Adnkronos International (AKI) at her makeshift office in Beirut.

• ‘National Assembly to Take Up Women’s Rights Bill on Oct 4’. [Pakistan Dawn] The 38th session is to discuss the Protection of Women Rights bill, according to federal minister for parliamentary affairs Dr Sher Afgan Khan Niazi. The government is expecting a fierce opposition reaction in the wake of the release of the president’s book. President Gen Pervez Musharraf’s remarks during his stay in the US have also irked opposition parties. According to the rules, the speaker will have to reconstitute the select committee at the start of the session after the bill is re-introduced. The government is facing tremendous pressure to pass the bill.

• Women Officials Face Death Threats in Southern Provinces. [PakTribune.com] Women officials in a number of southern and western provinces are facing death threats from anti-state elements. Chief of the women affairs department Karima Salik told Pajhwok Afghan News provincial chiefs of the department in Helmand, Nimroz, Farah, Zabul, Khost, Uruzgan, Paktia, Logar and Paktika provinces are facing death threats from unidentified armed men. She said Safia Ama Jan, who was gunned down in Kandahar province about a fortnight back, had received similar threats. Karima Salik said a woman chief of the department in the southeastern Khost province had received similar threats. She was now going to her office wearing veil (burqa).

• More Women Using Lifesaving Health Services in Pakistan's Quake. [People's Daily Online, China] Facing a range of threats to their health though, many mothers and children in Pakistan's quake- hit areas have better access to health care than before last October's earthquake, a UNFPA statement said Friday. On Oct. 8, 2005, a disastrous earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale hit northern Pakistan, leaving about 73,000 people dead and 3.5 million others homeless in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and Pakistani North West Frontier Province. Exposure, crowding, weak diets and bad sanitation constitute threats to quake survivors in those quake-hit areas, where an estimated number of 5,000 women give birth each month and maternal mortality is severe, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said in the statement.

• Pakistani Women Empowered by Learning to Sew. [Reuters AlertNet] Raheem is one of thousands of women receiving training from aid groups seeking to help Pakistani women become more self-reliant and empowered in their traditional society by teaching them skills to earn an income. Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in literacy rates in the world. Male literacy is around 60%, while only around 36% of females can read and write. Those rates drop in rural areas where only 22% of girls complete primary school, compared with 47% of boys. Many girls are taken out of school to work in the family home. Women in rural areas perform around 15 hours of menial labor a day, a third of that caring for livestock.

Turkey

• Women-Only Park Plan Causes Stir in Secular Turkey. [Khaleej Times, UAE] Strong reaction to a plan for a women-only park in Istanbul has focused attention on the divisions between Turkey’s secularists and supporters of the ruling AK Party, which has its roots in political Islam. Critics of the plan see it as the latest sign that the ruling party is trying to push through an Islamist agenda, but several female voters in the district said on Friday they loved the idea. News that the AK Party-run municipality of Bagcilar was planning to create a park exclusively for women, reported in the local press this week, prompted a fierce reaction among secular Turks who say the party is trying to give Islam a greater role in public life. The controversy reached parliament on Thursday, when opposition CHP lawmaker Bihlun Tamayligil asked the assembly: "Can you reconcile the principles of the Republic with applying the segregation of men and women?” according to local media.

• Saudi Women Choose Mostathmer. [AME Info, UAE] Saudi women have been flocking to training courses concerning an online investment tool called Mostathmer, created by the Tatweer International Software Development Company, which provides stock market investors with data to help them look after their capital. The Internet program provides up-the-minute price information, full-support basic analyses and related press news, in a bilingual portal. Tatweer is intending to hold training courses right across the kingdom.

• Female Arab Sportscasters Dominate the Field. [Asharq Alawsat] Two years ago, Saudi Arabia witnessed its first female news presenters with the launch of the new Saudi channel Al Ekhbariya. Anchorwomen have proved to be competition for their male counterparts as well as for prominent and distinguished female newsreaders around the Arab world even in the field of security which is considered internally to be dominated by men. More recently, Saudi women have entered a field from which they were completely absent, namely, sports-related news and programs.