Robiul Afghanistan with her law degree sewn India Top Best Corvid Viking 2022 Uk Canda 2022

 When Fawzia Amini worked as a senior judge in Afghanistan's Supreme Court, she presided over cases of violent crimes against women, hearing harrowing and heart-breaking accounts of child marriage, sexual assault and femicide.

Last August, as the Taliban stormed Kabul and took control of Afghanistan, they shuttered the Elimination of Violence Against Women Court that Amini headed, fired all its judges and, she said, froze their bank accounts. At the same time, the group took control of key prisons and released thousands of inmates, including some of the men she had sentenced in her courtroom, she says.

Amini said she felt afraid and started to seek asylum for herself and her family to escape Kabul.

The crisis now facing female judges is emblematic of the Taliban's wholesale dismantling of women's rights won over the last two decades in Afghanistan.

Since 2001, when the group was last in power, the international community pushed for legal protections for Afghan women and trained a cadre of young female judges, prosecutors and lawyers to uphold them. In 2009, then-President Hamid Karzai decreed the Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law, making acts of abuse toward women criminal offenses, including rape, forced marriage, and prohibiting a woman or girl from going t

 

Specialized courts to try cases of the law's violation -- like the one where Amina and Samira worked -- were rolled out in 2018 and set up in at least 15 provinces across the country, according to Human Rights Watch. While full implementation was spotty and achievements fell short of what was hoped, the law became a driver for slow but genuine change for Afghan women's freedoms -- change that has swiftly been eroded.

Over the past year, the Taliban's leaders have banned girls from high school and blocked women from most workplaces. They've stopped women from taking long-distance road trips on their own, requiring that a male relative accompany them for any distance beyond 45 miles.

New guidelines to broadcasters prohibit all dramas, soap operas and entertainment shows from featuring women, and female news presenters have been ordered to wear headscarves on screen. And, in their latest decree, the Taliban ordered women to cover their faces in public, ideally by wearing a burqa.

And by banishing women from the judiciary, the Taliban have effectively denied them the right to legal recourse to remedy any of these infringements. It has left women and girls with nowhere to turn in a system that enshrines a hardline Islamic interpretation of patriarchal rule, Amini explained.

 

Judge Fawzia Amini is pictured on an overnight bus journey to Mazar-i-Sharif, from where she flew out of the country.

 

It was that terrifying reality, she says, which forced her to flee. Amini, her husband and daughters took a bus in September from Kabul to the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, driving 12 hours overnight with the headlights switched off to avoid detection.

"It was very hard for us," she said, tears filling her eyes. "During that time, we were very worried about everything."

From Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport, they boarded a plane chartered specifically for female judges, organized with help from Baroness Helena Kennedy, one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers.

 

 

Last August, Kennedy, a member of the House of Lords, said she was flooded with WhatsApp messages from dozens of desperate judges, women she had developed a connection with through her work setting up a bar association in Afghanistan.

"It started with receiving really tragic and, and passionate messages on my iPhone," she said. "Messages from people saying, 'Please, please help me. I'm hiding in my basement. Already, I've received messages of threat. Already, there is a target on my back.'"

Determined to help, Kennedy, along with the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, raised money for evacuations via a GoFundMe page and charitable donations from philanthropists. Over the course of several weeks, Kennedy says, the team chartered three separate planes that got 103 women, most of them judges, and their families out of Afghanistan.

The women are now scattered across several Western countries, many still stuck in legal limbo and seeking more permanent residency for themselves and their families.

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rock that stands alone in the western deserts of Central Australia—may seem an unlikely place from which to reflect on the scourge of violence against Black Americans that stains the U.S. body-politic today. But understanding the consequences of one event that happened far away in 1934 is a powerful reminder that the struggle to make Black lives matter and counter white supremacist violence transcends national boundaries.

In June 1931, Constable Bill McKinnon arrived in Alice Springs to take up his appointment as a police officer in central Australia. He was barely thirty—lean, brash, and tough—a no-nonsense raconteur with a sharp tongue and unyielding determination.

In 1934, after chasing down six Aboriginal men for the killing of an Aboriginal man that had taken place under tribal law, he cornered one man in a cave and shot and killed him at Uluru, a place that has long been sacred for the Anangu, its traditional owners, and is now spiritually significant for the entire nation.

 

In 1935, an Australian government Board of Inquiry, which exhumed the man’s body and eventually took his remains back to Adelaide, found that the killing was “ethically unwarranted” but “legally justified.” Remarkably, McKinnon claimed that he had fired his pistol into the cave in “self-defense.” Now, almost 100 years later—after the discovery of new evidence that proves he lied to the Inquiry—the murder of one defenseless Aboriginal man in the heart of Australia highlights the entrenched inequalities in societies rooted in violence and oppression.

There’s a reason that so many Aboriginal people identified with George Floyd. Australia’s First Nations people—twelve times more likely to be incarcerated than white Australians—continue to see themselves as victims of state-sanctioned violence, often involving police.

An undersea earthquake shook part of eastern Indonesia on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of serious damage or casualties.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the 5.7-magnitude quake struck about 158 kilometers (98 miles) off Laikit village in North Sulawesi province. It said the quake was centered about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) beneath the sea.

The Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysical Agency, which put the quake at 5.9-magnitude and 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) depth, said the quake was unlikely to trigger a tsunami.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 270 million people, is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the "Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines that arcs the Pacific.

In February, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed at least 25 people and injured more than 460 in West Sumatra province. In January 2021, the same magnitude earthquake also killed more than 100 people and injured nearly 6,500 in West Sulawesi province.

One person is dead and 17 others were injured when a vehicle struck a crowd of people in Berwick, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, authorities said.

"A vehicle drove through a community event," state Trooper Anthony Petroski said Saturday night.

 

After the crash, the suspect is thought to have fatally attacked a woman in neighboring Luzerne County, he said.

"The male suspect in both incidents is in custody," the trooper said. His identity was being withheld.

Police have not released the identities of the two people killed or any of the 17 injured, who were taken to several area hospitals.

Geisinger Medical Center, in nearby Danville, received 13 patients by mid-evening, spokesperson Natalie Buyny said by email. Conditions of the injured were not available.

"Staff is assessing and triaging patients for appropriate care," Buyny said.

NBC affiliate WBRE of Wilkes-Barre reported that a vehicle struck multiple people who were attending a benefit in the borough of Berwick.

The crowds had gathered to raise funds for the families of the three children and seven adults who died in an early morning house fire Aug. 5 in neighboring Nescopeck.

Shortly after the crash, state police were called about a man physically assaulting a woman in Nescopeck, where he was taken into custody by municipal police, Petroski said.

Police have not said whether there is a connection between the suspect and the woman who was killed, and are investigating whether he intentionally drove into the crowd.

Today, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 3.2 percent of Australia’s total population, yet they account for almost 30 percent of the country’s prison population. Their chances of dying in custody are almost six times greater than other Australians. Nationally, their suicide rates are more than double that of other Australians. Crucial social indicators such as life expectancy, health, housing, education, and employment—many of them impervious to the policies of successive governments to “close the gap”—continue to illustrate the alarming inequalities between Indigenous and other Australians. Despite the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Indigenous deaths in Custody (a large number of which are yet to be implemented), more than 500 Aboriginal people have died in custody since the Commission’s report was handed down.

Authorities say Muhammad Afzaal Hussain was shot at with two guns and police matched casings found at the scene of both homicides to a pistol and rifle found in Muhammad Syed's home and car.

Albuquerque police have said Muhammad Syed is also a "primary suspect" in the deaths of Naeem Hussain and Mohammad Zahir Ahmadi, 62, in November 2021, but he has not been charged in either case.

"Law enforcement officers also have recently discovered evidence that appears to tie the defendant, Shaheen Syed, to these killings," according to the motion to detain.

John Anderson, Shaheen Syed's attorney, declined to comment on Saturday. Shaheen Syed's family could not be reached for comment.