Afghan television broadcaster Tolo News on Wednesday aired an all-female panel in its studio with an audience of women to mark International Women’s Day, a rare broadcast since the Taliban took over and many female journalists left the profession or started working off-air.
A survey by Reporters Without Borders last year showed that more than 75 percent of female journalists had lost their jobs since the Taliban assumed power after foreign forces withdrew in August 2021.
With surgical masks covering their faces, the panel of three women and one female moderator on Wednesday evening discussed the place of women in Islamic society.
Photo: Reuters
“A woman has rights from an Islamic point of view ... it is her right to be able to work, to be educated,” journalist Asma Khogyani said during the discussion.
The Taliban last year restricted most girls from high school, women from university and stopped most Afghan females from working at non-profit agencies.
Another panelist, former university professor Zakira Nabil, said women would continue to find ways to learn and work.
“Whether you want it or not, women exist in this society,” she told the panel. “If it’s not possible to get an education at school, she will learn knowledge at home.”
Due to growing restrictions, along with the country’s severe economic crisis, the International Labour Organisation said female employment in Afghanistan had fallen 25 percent last year since 2021.
More women were turning to self employment, such as tailoring at home, it added.
The UN Mission to Afghanistan on Wednesday called on the Taliban to reverse restrictions on the rights of girls and women, calling them “distressing.”
The Taliban have said they respect women’s rights in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic law and Afghan culture, and that authorities have established a committee to examine perceived issues with the aim of reopening girls’ schools.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS