UN rights chief Navi Pillay called Monday for Muslim Gulf states to lift restrictions on women and to improve rights for millions of guest workers in the region.

"Women in the region are still unable to fully enjoy their human rights," Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said on the first stop of a six-nation tour of the Gulf.

"Discriminatory barriers continue to hamper women's right to shape their own lives and choices, and fully participate in public life and be part of public debates that influence the direction of a nation," she told a small gathering at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST) north of Jeddah.

On her first-ever visit to Saudi Arabia, she said other Muslim states in the world have improved women's rights via "dynamic interpretations of Islamic traditions."

In those countries, governments and Islamic legal experts "demonstrated that far from being innovations, such legislation was compatible with Islamic jurisprudence and, indeed, stemmed from it."

She specifically cited the practice of requiring women to have a male guardian to move around outside the home, to appear in court and often to engage in business.

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Maktoob.com
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Alyson Myatt said her own safety never crossed her mind.

After waking to a loud boom and realizing smoke detectors were going off in the Shelbyville home where she worked as a nanny early Tuesday morning, all she knew was she had to get to the 5-year-old boy she cared for.

And she did, after walking barefoot through a flaming hallway and carrying the boy to safety from the house on Goldenrod Court. “I didn't even think about me getting burned,” Myatt said. “I care for the kid a lot. I really do.”

She was new on the job -- she’d only been working there two months, reports CBS News Correspondent Whit Johnson.

Speaking from a bed in University Hospital's burn unit Wednesday evening, Myatt, 22, said she had been working as a live-in nanny for the family only two months.

Both her feet and her right hand were heavily bandaged after suffering severe burns, and she said it was too early to guess how long her hospital stay might be or what her recovery might entail.

Still, looking back, Myatt said she felt lucky. “I feel very blessed, it could have been a lot worse,” she said.

The boy’s father, J.B. Hawes, who was out of town, rushed back to Louisville.

“We went to the hospital from the airport, to see Ali,” he told CBS affiliate WLKY-TV, choking back tears. “When someone sacrifices, takes a chance with their life, for your son, it’s pretty amazing.

“He had about a minute to live. Most people wouldn’t have done what she did. I’ll owe her a debt for the rest of her life, because there’s no way to ever repay something like that.”



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CBS News
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IMAGINE you are one half of a young couple expecting your first child in a fast-growing, poor country. You are part of the new middle class; your income is rising; you want a small family. But traditional mores  hold sway around you, most important in the preference for sons over daughters. Perhaps hard physical labour is still needed for the family to make its living.

Perhaps only sons may inherit land. Perhaps a daughter is deemed to join another family on marriage and you want someone to care for you when you are old. Perhaps she needs a dowry.

Now imagine that you have had an ultrasound scan; it costs $12, but you can afford that. The scan says the unborn child is a girl. You yourself would prefer a boy; the rest of your family clamours for one. You would never dream of killing a baby daughter, as they do out in the villages. But an abortion seems different. What do you do?

For millions of couples, the answer is: abort the daughter, try for a son. In China and northern India more than 120 boys are being born for every 100 girls. Nature dictates that slightly more males are born than females to offset boys’ greater susceptibility to infant disease. But nothing on this scale.

For those who oppose abortion, this is mass murder. For those such as this newspaper, who think abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” (to use Bill Clinton’s phrase), a lot depends on the circumstances, but the cumulative consequence for societies of such individual actions is catastrophic.

China alone stands to have as many unmarried young men—“bare branches”, as they are known—as the entire population of young men in America. In any country rootless young males spell trouble; in Asian societies, where marriage and children are the recognised routes into society, single men are almost like outlaws. Crime rates, bride trafficking, sexual violence, even female suicide rates are all rising and will rise further as the lopsided generations reach their maturity (see article).

It is no exaggeration to call this gendercide. Women are missing in their millions—aborted, killed, neglected to death. In 1990 an Indian economist, Amartya Sen, put the number at 100m; the toll is higher now. The crumb of comfort is that countries can mitigate the hurt, and that one, South Korea, has shown the worst can be avoided. Others need to learn from it if they are to stop the carnage.

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The Economist

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Where women really stand in Afghan society didn’t hit home to me until I walked down a busy market street in Kandahar without seeing a single woman.

The birthplace of the Taliban, Kandahar is conservative even by Afghan standards.  It is also the focus of NATO’s next big military offensive in Afghanistan,  and I spent a couple of days last week embedded with a U.S. military police unit there to report on plans for the offensive and the mood on the ground. 

Under a blistering afternoon sun, a group of U.S. and Canadian soldiers and military police led me down a road packed with shops on either side — a bustling market street where you could buy anything from glass plates to spare bicycle parts.

At first, I was taken in by the colourful sights and smells, some of which reminded me of my childhood in India – giant bags of something resembling green and beige pasta shells, sweet shops stacked with glass containers of cookies and pastries, fruits and vegetables laid out on the ground, men sitting on a mat and drinking chai.

It was only after a while that I realized that the curious local faces staring at us were all male,  that each and every shopkeeper, assistant and hanger-on (and there were a lot of them) we had seen so far was a man.  Could it really be possible that we had walked about 200 metres along a busy market in the city center without seeing a single woman?

A Canadian soldier next to me chuckled when I mentioned it. “That’s what my wife asks me as well when I send her pictures.  Where are the women? You rarely see them here, and when you do they’re completely covered up,” he said.  The general lack of women also probably explained why the Kandaharis were staring at me like I had just showed up from outer space.

At every shop we stopped at to ask questions, a small crowd of boys and young men would gather around to find out what the fuss was about and after a few minutes of giggling and staring, some would take out cellphones to take pictures

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By Deepa Babington for Reuters
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For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number of women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980.

The findings, published in the medical journal The Lancet, challenge the prevailing view of maternal mortality as an intractable problem that has defied every effort to solve it.

“The overall message, for the first time in a generation, is one of persistent and welcome progress,” the journal’s editor, Dr. Richard Horton, wrote in a comment accompanying the article, published online on Monday.

The study cited a number of reasons for the improvement: lower pregnancy rates in some countries; higher income, which improves nutrition and access to health care; more education for women; and the increasing availability of “skilled attendants” — people with some medical training — to help women give birth. Improvements in large countries like India and China helped to drive down the overall death rates.

But some advocates for women’s health tried to pressure The Lancet into delaying publication of the new findings, fearing that good news would detract from the urgency of their cause, Dr. Horton said in a telephone interview.

“I think this is one of those instances when science and advocacy can conflict,” he said.

Dr. Horton said the advocates, whom he declined to name, wanted the new information held and released only after certain meetings about maternal and child health had already taken place.

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By Denise Grady
New York Times

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