Pakistani Rape Victim Receives Award in US

Pakistan gang rape victim to receive women's award in US - AP
A Pakistani woman whose gang rape triggered an international outcry has arrived in the United States to receive an award from a women's magazine, organisers of the event said. Mukhtaran Mai flew in over the weekend and will receive a Woman of the Year prize from Glamour magazine on November 2 at a ceremony in New York. Mai, 33, was gang-raped on the orders of a tribal council in 2002 as punishment for her brother's alleged love affair with a woman from another tribe.

Study Shows Upswing in Arrests of Women - AP
Women made up 7 percent of all inmates in state and federal prisons last year and accounted for nearly one in four arrests, the government reported Sunday. A co-author of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Paige Harrison, linked an upswing in the rate of arrest for women to their increased participation in drug crimes, violent crimes and fraud. The number of women incarcerated in state and federal prisons in 2004 was up 4 percent compared with 2003, more than double the 1.8 percent increase among men, the study said. In 1995, women made up 6.1 percent of all inmates in those facilities. "The number of incarcerated women has been growing ... due in large part to sentencing policies in the war in drugs," The Sentencing Project, a group promoting alternatives to prison, said in a statement.

Rape victim: 'Morning after' pill denied - Arizona Daily Star
Although it is safe, effective and legal, emergency contraception - the "morning after" pill - can be hard to find in Tucson. After a sexual assault one recent weekend, a young Tucson woman spent three frantic days trying to obtain the drug to prevent a pregnancy, knowing that each passing day lowered the chance the drug would work. While calling dozens of Tucson pharmacies trying to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, she found that most did not stock the drug. When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections.

Israeli-Palestinian women's group launches personal crusade for peace - AFP
Three women sharing a hunger, not for fast food, but peace, chatted away in a food court at Washington's ornate Union Station -- completely ignored in the rush of travellers grabbing a lunctime snack. But their gathering was poignant, and remarkable, because as each one admitted, it could never happen when they go home -- because two are Palestinian and one is an Israeli. Sherene Abdulhadi, a Palestinian Muslim, Roni Hammerman, an Israeli Jew, and Amira Hillal, a Christian Palestinian, are touring the United States to call for a renewed bid to forge peace between their communities. "How can any kind of normal life develop under these conditions?" asked Hammerman, who teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is an Israeli peace activist. The three women are the latest in a stream of Israeli and Palestinian women brought to the United States to argue for a new commitment to peace in their violence-torn homelands, by the US-based non profit group "Partners for Peace."

Iceland's women walk off the job to protest pay inequality - AFP
Women across Iceland walked off the job to protest wage differences between men and women, working a shorter day since they get paid less for the same work, officials said. At 2:08 pm (1408 GMT), tens of thousands of women left their jobs after working 64 percent of the day, in an action marking the 30th anniversary of the first such walk-out on the remote North Atlantic island which has one of the highest standards of living in the world. In 1975, a handful of women marked the first Women's Day in Iceland by working only 64 percent of the day, since they were on average only paid 64 percent of what men were paid for equal work. The idea spread, and on October 24 that year, thousands of women walked off the job at 2:08 pm, bringing some of the largest companies in the country to a standstill.