A tiny, frail lady - her silver grey hair tucked under a white head scarf with a red floral trim - stands defiantly at a relief camp she set up for minority people displaced by Pakistan's recent deadly flooding.

Eighty-one-year-old German nun Ruth Pfau is surveying the needs of hundreds whose homes were washed away.

Two months since they sought shelter in Hyderabad, on disused land by the side of a busy road, she and her team have provided them with tents, food, water, medicine and a school.

"We need blankets," many of them shout at once. Then they complain the dry rations they received did not include sugar, milk, salt or chilli.

Masooma Hussaini's path to becoming one of the Aghan air force's first female military pilot candidates began with a TV advertisement encouraging young women to join.

She registered to take the exams for officer candidate school. Just a few months later, she was selected for a new pilot training program.

The idea of female military pilots -- some of the most coveted military positions -- would have been unthinkable in Afghanistan just a decade ago, when the Taliban had relegated women to the bottom of the social scale, with no access to education, let alone jobs.

But now Hussaini, 19, and four of her female colleagues, have broken yet another barrier: They are second lieutenants in the Afghan air force, on a path to becoming the first newly trained female pilots since the fall of the Taliban.

Banned from driving and denied the right to travel without permission, Saudi women are taking bold steps in business and trying to do away with the male guardian system that hobbles them.

"What we need today is the right to take decisions by ourselves without having to get the consent of the male guardian," said Rania al-Sulaimani, 33, who owns a beauty centre in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Like all women in the ultra-conservative kingdom, businesswomen need male permission for virtually everything, so even those who own companies are forced by law to appoint a male director, if just in name.

But two women managed to avoid the required appointment for their business, after knocking on the minister of commerce's door demanding an exemption, which they surprisingly got.

Two Virginia Tech scientists may have ­invented the future of cancer treatment—a way to eradicate tumors without the harmful side effects of chemotherapy, radiation or a surgeon’s scalpel.

They’ve built what chemist Karen Brewer calls a “molecular machine” that seeks out fast-replicating cancer cells and becomes lethal only when exposed to light.

Other photodynamic therapies rely on drugs that grab oxygen molecules from nearby tissue, so they are powerless against dense, fast-growing cancers—such as breast, brain, lung and prostate—with hypoxic, or oxygen-free, cores.

“I really wanted to come up with something completely different, a light-activated drug that would not require oxygen,” says Brewer, an expert at building light-­triggered on/off switches for chemical compounds.

Muslim sisters around the world are invited to help support breast cancer awareness on October 27, 2010 by wearing pink hijab.