Women and men alike came out en masse to vote for their choice candidates in the just concluded presidential elections in Iran. Voters have said that beyond the polls, the winner will influence not only Iran’s immediate future but also the looming battle to choose a new Supreme Leader Millions of Iranians have voted in a bitterly contested presidential election that has pitted hardliners against reformers and is expected to set the country’s direction for a generation. Supporters determined to hold on to those changes flocked to voting stations across more liberal areas of the capital, Tehran, where hundreds welcomed their reformist political heroes with a frenzy saved for film or rock stars in other countries. A sea of smartphones and chants of “We love you” greeted politicians and turbaned clerics throughout the morning, as they cast votes in a memorial hall favored by prominent reformers. The incumbent, President Hassan…

Orlando Herran, the Colombian lawyer for the accused Australian drug mule, has told Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes program that Sainsbury and her family was threatened before she boarded the plane. The 22-year-old is currently detained in a Colombian prison for allegedly smuggling 5.8 kilograms of cocaine in 18 boxes of headphones. Cassie Sainsbury has claimed a mystery man threatened to kill her family before she was caught with 5.8kg of cocaine in a Colombian airport. Orlando Herran stated that the 22-year-old was in financial trouble after problems with her fitness business when she answered a Craigslist ad offering a loan and trip to London. He said the itinerary was changed at the last minute before Sainsbury met a mystery man, who showed her pictures of her family and fiance and made threats in Colombia. “If you don’t get to fly we will be threatening or killing your family or…

By: Muneeza Naqvi Gurjeet is the child Kaur yearned for desperately, after 40 years of being that thing which a rural Indian woman dreads more than almost anything else — barren. She gave birth at 58 years old, with help from a controversial IVF clinic in a corner of north India that specializes in fertility treatments for women over 50. Such treatments have become more common across the world, and they strike a cultural chord in India, where a woman is often defined by her ability to be a wife and mother. While there are no reliable statistics for how many Indian women undergo fertility treatments each year at what age, tens of thousands of IVF clinics have sprouted up in the country over the last decade. Fertility specialists say pregnancies like Kaur’s are troubling because of the potential health risks and the concern that the parents may not live…

During an event with Ivanka Trump, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pledged $100million to the First Daughter’s proposed Women Entrepreneurs Fund – on the same weekend her father signed a record arms deal with the Saudis. The fund, which Ivanka first proposed during her trip to Berlin, Germany, will be run by the World Bank to help female entrepreneurs with the capital and networking resources necessary to kick start their businesses. Saudi Arabia is known as the world’s most gender-segregated nation and women, who are famously barred from driving, live under the supervision of a male guardian. During a roundtable on women’s economic empowerment, Ivanka praised Saudi Arabia’s progress but said ‘there’s still a lot of work to be done’ Ivanka, who is accompanying her father on his first international trip as president, said: ‘As a female leader within the Trump administration, my focus is to help empower…

Walmart says it will ask a customer to no longer shop at their stores after she was caught on video hurling racial abuse at other customers in Bentonville, Arkansas, Monday. The video posted to Facebook on Monday night showed a woman telling one customer to “go back to Mexico” and calling another customer a racial epithet. This video has been shared hundreds of thousands of times on the social network. Eva Hicks, a mother of three, said she politely asked the woman to step to one side as she reached for medicine. It was then the woman became aggressive, Hicks told CNN. “She moved back her cart and immediately started saying that people bother her on every aisle, and started saying more hateful things to me,” Hicks recounted and then took out her phone and began to record the encounter. The woman, who has not been identified, told Hicks to…

Hundreds of protesters recently took to the streets of Pretoria, angered by a rise in violence against women and children in South Africa, including killings and sex attacks. Answering the call by a group calling itself “Not In My Name” the protesters, most of them men, marched through the streets of the South African capital behind a woman symbolically dressed head to toe in white. “The time to take collective responsibility for our shameful action is now,” said Kholofelo Masha, one of the protest organisers, who described himself as “a loving dad, brother and uncle”. South African men have remained quiet on the issue for too long, he added: “You hear a lady screaming next door, you decide to sleep when you know there is a problem… No man should beat a woman or rape a woman while you’re watching”. Reports of the rape and murder of women and girls…

The Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, Yannick Glemarec, will participate at the fifth Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (24-26 May) in Cancun, Mexico, which will convene more than 5,000 delegates to discuss how to prevent disasters and reduce the loss of lives, as well as economic and infrastructure losses. Disasters affect women, girls, boys and men differently. Research shows that women and girls are most vulnerable to disasters and more likely to die than men in disasters—for instance, at the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, women and children made up 77 per cent of the victims in Indonesia. At the same time, women and girls have unique roles in resilience building, disaster response and recovery. They are often the first responders when disaster strikes, tending to the needs of their families and communities and coping with the adverse impact on their livelihood and possessions. During the event, UN Women…