The New York Times: In a Death Seen Around the World, a Symbol of Iranian Protests
TEHRAN — It was hot in the car, so the young woman and her singing instructor got out for a breath of fresh air on a quiet side street not far from the antigovernment protests they had ventured out to attend. A gunshot rang out, and the woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, fell to the ground. “It burned me,” she said before she died.

The London Times: Dreams of Freedom and the Brutal Reality: What happens now that the all too brief “Tehran spring” has been abruptly curtailed by the election result? Thirty years after Iran’s Islamic revolution, are the conservative male forces that control the country immune to the demands for reform?

Huffington Post: India's Child Bride TV Sensation NEW DELHI -- Defying all the conventional wisdom about Indian television viewers -- notorious for dogged allegiance to campy soap operas that pitted idealized brides against scheming mothers-in-law -- the hottest show on TV today is a progressive, heartwarming drama about a plucky little girl caught up in an illegal child marriage.

North Korea Sentences Two US Journalists to 12 Years Hard Labour North Korea said its top court convicted two U.S. journalists and sentenced them to 12 years in labour prison Monday, intensifying the reclusive nation's confrontation with the United States. The North's Central Court tried American TV reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee during proceedings running from last Thursday to Monday and found them guilty of a “grave crime” against the nation, and of illegally crossing into North Korea, the country's state-run Korean Central News Agency said.

It said the court “sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labour.” The KCNA report gave no other details. Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee — who were working for former U.S. vice-president Al Gore's California-based Current TV — cannot appeal because they were tried in North Korea's highest court, where decisions are final.


CBC NEWS: Author and Feminist Marilyn French dies at 79
Marilyn French, whose novel The Women's Room is a feminist classic, died Saturday in New York. She was 79. French's 1977 novel The Women's Room coincided with a wave of women's liberation that swept North America.
After French's 18-year-old daughter was raped, her experience trying to convince the district attorney to prosecute the rapist radicalized her opinions on the way society regards women.

New York Times: After Wars Mass Rape Persists
In modern times, we’ve seen mass rape as an element of warfare in Congo, Darfur, Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia — but the lesson here in Liberia in West Africa is that even when the fighting ends, the rape continues. And that brings us to Jackie, a lovely 7-year-old with tight braids and watchful eyes.

CBC - Afghan Women Pelted With Stones During Rape Law Protest:
Afghan women protesting against a new law that severely undermines women's rights were pelted with stones in the country's capital Wednesday, say reports.
About 300 mostly young women gathered in Kabul to show their opposition to a recently passed law that forbids women from refusing to have sex with their husbands and requires them to get a male relative's permission to leave the house.