| Netanyahu Slammed for Belligerent Iran Stance |
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The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hysterical and increasingly belligerent outbursts against Iran’s nuclear programme and his threat to launch a preemptive strike at its nuclear facilities have met with global condemnation and have added to the international isolation of Israel. Significantly, Netanyahu’s bellicosity and his repeated invocation of the Holocaust in relation to the Iranian ‘threat’ have been exposed and repudiated by prominent Israeli politicians and former security chiefs, including the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, the former head of Israel’s security agency, Yuval Diskin, the former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, and the former military chief, Dan Halutz.
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Afghanistan: Woman Power
More than a decade after the Taliban were driven from power in Afghanistan, the plight of the country's women remains dire, with threats and attacks by insurgents on women leaders, schoolgirls, and girls' schools, and harassment of women for "moral crimes" such as running away from forced marriages or domestic violence.
Despite the best efforts of the international community and some of the more 'enlightened' elements of the current Afghan government, the kind of aggressive ultra-misogyny that marked the Taliban years (when religious police forced all women off the streets of Kabul, and ordered people to blacken their windows so that women would not be visible from the outside) is still evident in parts of the country.
But earlier this year the case of a 15-year-old girl named Sahar Gul was particularly shocking. There was international outrage when television pictures of her bruised and battered body being wheeled down a hospital corridor were shown around the world. She had just been rescued from weeks of imprisonment and torture at the hands of her husband's family. Continued
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