Following the Women’s March in Washington and its sister marches around the world, Chinese women were noticeably absent from the international media spotlights. This is because street protests and demonstrations that “promote falsehoods” are illegal in China, and the Chinese government has a history of cracking down and retaliating against public events and figures that bring light to gender inequality. While the Chinese government’s restriction of public protests and demonstrations is nothing new, over the past few years, China has been slowly increasing its censorship of feminist media and publications. For example, in 2015, the imprisonment by the government of the Feminist Five, a group of vocal Chinese women’s rights activists, made headlines and led to an international outcry, leading to their subsequent release. The members of the group had been detained for distributing pamphlets about sexual harassment on March 8, International Women’s Day. This event from last year also…

A woman who has lived in the UK for nearly 30 years with her British husband has been deported to Singapore. Irene Clennell, 53, says she was forced to board a plane without warning on Sunday, after being held for nearly a month in an immigration detention center in Scotland. She had been living near Durham with her husband, two British sons, as well as a granddaughter, in the UK. For a year before she was detained, Mrs. Clennell was the sole caregiver for her husband John, a former gas engineer, after he had an arterial bypass and suffered complications from a hernia. “My husband is so stressed. He’s not well enough to travel,” Mrs. Clennell told BuzzFeed News earlier last month. “He’s in constant pain and there’s no one to look after him properly. “I just want to be with my family. I don’t have anything in Singapore.…

Dozens of topless women, joined by hundreds of fully clothed protesters, have demonstrated in Buenos Aires to demand the right to sunbathe semi-nude after police asked bare-breasted women to leave a nearby beach. Smaller protests have occurred throughout the country in recent weeks in response to the January incident and it remains unclear if Argentine law allows women to go topless on public beaches. Police cited a national criminal code article prohibiting “obscene displays” to justify asking the women to leave the beach, although at least one judge ruled after the incident that going topless was not a crime. Arguing that women should have the same right as men to sunbathe topless, the women chanted, painted slogans on their bodies and held signs reading: “The only breasts that bother them are the ones that aren’t for sale.” The demonstration in downtown Buenos Aires followed the “Not One Less” protests late…

Mexico is warning its citizens in the US to “take precautions” following the deportation of a Mexican woman who had lived in the US for more than 20 years. In a statement, the foreign ministry said the case of Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos illustrated “the new reality”. The mother-of-two was detained on recently when she went for a routine check-in with immigration officials. President Donald Trump has promised to crack down on illegal immigrants with criminal records. Garcia de Rayos, 36, had pleaded guilty in 2009 to using forged documents to get a job and was issued with a deportation order in 2013. However, she was allowed to remain under President Barack Obama’s policy of leniency towards undocumented migrants who had entered the US as children. Garcia de Rayos’s children were born in the US and they remain there with her husband. “The case of Mrs Garcia de Rayos illustrates…

An Indonesian woman arrested on suspicion of the murder of North Korea dictator Kim Jong-Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in Malaysia was told she was taking part in a comedy TV show prank, Indonesia’s police chief has claimed. Tito Karnavian said Siti Aisyah, 25, was paid to take part in a series of pranks that involved convincing men to close their eyes and then spraying them with water. She was reportedly told this was part of filming for a comedy TV show called “Just for Laughs”. “Such an action was done three or four times and they were given a few dollars for it, and with the last target, Kim Jong Nam, allegedly there were dangerous materials in the sprayer,” Mr. Karnavian said. “She was not aware that it was an assassination attempt by alleged foreign agents.” North Korea demands Malaysia return Kim Jong-nam’s body immediately Mr. Kim was killed at…

By: Mary Carson Former first lady of Somalia Mrs. Edna Adan has warned international aid agencies about the need to speak directly to communities who practice Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or risk ‘winning battles but losing the war’ on the practice. Edna Adan says that despite a reduction in the numbers of young girls being cut in her homeland of Somaliland and in the wider Somali nation, things are ‘slipping back’. “Unless we get people sitting on the mat in the villages, taking time to speak to the grandparents and the parents and the religious leaders, we lose what ground we have made,” said the midwife and former foreign minister of Somaliland. “It’s not about the money; it’s about what we do with the money. And in some cases, sending people instead of money is better.” Adan, who underwent FGM as a child, is head of her own maternity hospital,…

By: Phillip Inman The gender pay gap is likely to persist for more than a generation in the UK after the government rejected proposals to encourage flexible working and help women back into the workforce, MPs have said. Without ministers putting their weight behind measures needed to end the “pay penalty” suffered by millions of women, the government will fail to meet its target of closing the gap within the next couple of decades, said the cross-party women and equalities committee. The group made 17 recommendations last March, but most of them were rejected in the government’s response in January. The MPs had called for measures including three months’ paid paternity leave and devising industrial strategies for low-paid jobs carried out by women in Industries such care, cleaning and retail. Theresa May highlighted the need to close the gender pay gap in her Conservative party conference speech last year and…