Weekly News Roundup

Linda Grant DePauw's picture

Protests in Lebanon over Nursa Front Killing

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The killing by Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda-linked Sunni armed group, of a Lebanese security officer has prompted protests by his family members and supporters in eastern Lebanon.
 
 

Lebanon formally arrests detained wife of IS chief 

 
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BEIRUT (AP) — Lebanese judicial officials said Tuesday that authorities have issued a formal arrest warrant for a wife of the Islamic State group leader and referred the detained woman to military prosecutors.

 

Landmark Study Reveals US Not doing Enough For Women Veterans

 
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 "Today, one of every five new military recruits in the United States is a woman." More than 280,000 women served in the post-9/11 conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 2.5 million veterans are women.
 
 

US Military Has 1,000 Full-time and 22,000 Part-time Sexual Assualt Response Coordinators 

 
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Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently reported on the efforts his department has made against sexual assault within the ranks of the military. A year ago, President Obama directed Hagel to conduct a full review of progress being made, and while Hagel reported a decrease of twenty-five percent in the prevalence of sexual assault, he said "[t]here’s much more to be done."
 
 

Three American Teens, Recruited Online Are Caught Trying to Join the Islamic State

 
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CHICAGO — Mohammed Hamzah Khan, 19, rose before dawn on Oct. 4 to pray with his father and 16-year-old brother at their neighborhood mosque in a Chicago suburb. When they returned home just before 6 a.m., the father went back to bed and the Khan teens secretly launched a plan they had been hatching for months: to abandon their family and country and travel to Syria to join the Islamic State.
 
 

More Powerful Than ISIS

 
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The most uplifting stories I hear are often about things that never happened. This is what I keep reminding myself as I join others seeking to end rape as a weapon of war. This is what drives the work of the courageous women facing down ISIS every day.

This paradox is familiar to many women's rights activists out there. In this vital work to combat violations of women's human rights, the best news can be no news. A community that reported no women dying in childbirth in the past year. A girl who grows up into womanhood facing no barriers to her education and no violence.

These are the atrocities that grab headlines. But behind these headlines are the stories of things that did not happen, of women who escaped the threat of rape and found refuge beyond ISIS' grasp. Despite the odds, grassroots women's rights activists in Iraq and Syria are risking their safety and their lives to do what others have dismissed as impossible: to prevent rape as a weapon of war. These are the glimmers of hope that must light our way.

http://www.madre.org/page/press-room-125/news/more-powerful-than-isis-981.html