Afghanistan's first female presidential candidate doctor Massouda Jalal sits in her comfortable apartment in Kabul's Microrayon district and tries to estimate the political support she will receive in the country's upcoming elections.
"I expect it will be from all over the country, from all the provinces, but I don't know what the percentage will be," she says.
In a country in which the presidential elections scheduled for June will be its first truly democratic polls, Jalal can be forgiven for not knowing the level of her support.
Particularly since the deeply conservative country has long repressed women, most spectacularly under the ousted hardline Islamic Taliban regime, when women were excluded from public life.
For Jalal, a 40-year-old pediatrician and mother of three young children, the significant point is that she is running for president at all.
"It's very important because in the 5,000 years of the history of Afghanistan, women have never participated in political power in the leadership of Afghanistan," she said.
While her chances of unseating the incumbent moderate President Hamid Karzai are not high, Jalal is confident that among her supporters will be those who have grown disillusioned with the conflicts that have plagued Afghanistan for more than two decades and left the country in ruins.
"Even very, very conservative, discriminating people ... are telling me `Yes, we think that a woman can bring national unity because women were never involved in the conflict.'
"They say you don't have a party, you don't have a political organization but we will do that in our villages."
Jalal has challenged Karzai once before. During an emergency loya jirga, or grand assembly, convened to prevent a power vacuum following the fall of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime in mid-2002, she also stood for president.
Ahead of the vote, Karzai approached her and offered her a position as his deputy if she withdrew but she refused, preferring to press on with her historic challenge despite some criticism that a woman head of state was "un-Islamic."
"I wanted to make a record and I wanted to challenge, whether I won or not," she says.
Karzai won the contest with 1,295 votes but Jalal came second with 171.
Since then she has participated in the historic loya jirga which earlier this month approved Afghanistan's new constitution and has been building her support base. Despite her growing reputation she still faces obstacles, with some publications banned from mentioning her name, using instead the phrase "a woman."
Jalal admits there are risks for anyone standing for election, particularly since voter registration in Afghanistan has been hampered by spiralling security concerns, but says she has faced worse.
Under the Taliban regime, Jalal who had previously been a pediatrician and lecturer in medicine at Kabul University, ran an all-women program within the UN World Food Program.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of