Kabul: Zakia Mohammadi, a woman in Afghanistan’s first national paragliding team, waited on a hilltop on the outskirts of Kabul for a wind to lift her craft into the sky, as dozens of watching teenagers clapped and cheered. She is one of a group of young Afghans taking to the skies in a country, where…
New York: Hind Abdul Aziz Alowais has become the first Emirati woman to be posted at the United Nations Headquarters in New York as a senior advisor since the UAE became a member of the United Nations in 1971. Alowais was selected for the post of Senior Advisor in the Office of the Deputy Executive…
The U.N.’s Human Rights Council (HRC) over the summer quietly appointed Saudi Arabia as head of a panel responsible for interviewing and short listing experts focusing on a range of human rights-related themes. Among the posts considered at meetings chaired by the Saudi ambassador to the HRC, Faisal bin Hassan Trad, since May, was one…
Izmir (Turkey): Hundreds of women have taken to the streets on bicycles in multiple events in western and southern Turkey to raise awareness of sustainable transportation methods, as Sept. 20 marked “The World Cities without Cars Day.” Around 500 women cycled the streets of the Aegean province of Ä°zmir after they gathered at Ä°zmir’s Konak…
Jordan’s Queen Rania received the Walther Rathenau Prize in recognition of her work as an outstanding advocate for peace and understanding between East and West. She was presented the award by German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The ceremony was held at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin. The Queen conveyed the pressing need for empathy and…
Qatar: In a historic breakthrough for women, Kuwait is recruiting female guards for the parliament in a bid to improve the security system. “Having women guards at the parliament has become an urgent necessity amid the security conditions and developments in the country,” Major General Khalid Al Waqeet, Assistant Secretary General for Parliament Security Guard…
For the first time in the history of Turkey, a Muslim but secular country, a woman who wears an Islamic headscarf has been named as a government minister. Aysen Gurcan, a 52-year-old academic, was appointed to be the minister in charge of family and social policies in the provisional government of Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu…
Tehran: Iran is all set to appoint its first woman ambassador since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, marking a breakthrough for women in government under the president, Hassan Rouhani. Marzieh Afkham, who is the country’s first foreign ministry spokeswoman, will head a mission in East Asia, the state news agency reported. Afkham will only be the…
London: British Muslim presenter, Mishal Husain, has been named the broadcaster of the year at the London Press Club Awards, setting a role model for Muslim women in UK. Nominated alongside BBC’s global health reporter Tulip Mazumdar and social affairs correspondent Alison Holt, Husain won the prestigious award that is primarily dedicated to print journalists.…
Niloofer Rahmani, First woman pilot of Afghan Air Force has been honored with the U.S Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award. Rahmani, 23, defied death threats from the terror group and even members of her own extended family to become the first female fixed-wing Air Force aviator in Afghanistan’s history and the first…
