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.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese