A woman throws punches at a rubber boxing dummy, with the words "family violence" marked on its chest, at a catharsis club in Chongqing. The facility serves exclusively for women battling depression and family violence.

China’s police will be given more guidance on how to deal with cases of domestic violence, a rising trend in recent years.
According to the All-China Women’s Federation, domestic violence complaints have risen 70 percent in the past two years, wrote Chinadaily.com.
Nine ministries, including the All-China Women’s Federation and the Ministry of Public Security, will issue guidelines that provide a legal basis for police intervention, Zhang Yanhong, a director of the legal department of the federation, said.
The guidelines are expected to take effect at the end of this month, she said.
“They will strengthen an anti-domestic violence law due to go before the next National People Congress,“ Zhang said.
The guidelines take a practical and standard approach to dealing with family violence.
Police response must be immediate or they could face punishment, Zhang said.
China has laws and regulations concerning domestic violence, but they lack details for prevention and punishment.
“The police, up to now, do not have a legal right to intervene in family cases,“ Liao Saifang, a public security officer, said.
Police involvement will help stem domestic violence, and in some cases prevent deaths, Liao said.
In the past two years, the federation has received about 50,000 complaints of domestic violence, up 70 percent, the deputy chairman of the federation, Mo Wenxiu said.
Domestic violence is partly responsible for the 400,000 divorces every year in China, Mo said.
Guo Ruixiang, China Program Specialist of the United Nations Development Fund for Women said the increase was probably due to more violence and to an increase in victims seeking help.
“The figure reminds us of how serious the situation is in the country,“ she said.

Women have begun taking on many traditionally male responsibilities, because men are under increased risk of being killed when outside their homes.

Until 2003, Salwa Khatab Omar had been driven around by two drivers and accompanied by at least three guards who lived in a caravan next to her house in Baghdad. She lived in some style and without many responsibilities.
Since the 2003 US-led invasion, however, Salwa, the wife of a former senior army officer, has found herself responsible for virtually everything, IRIN reported.
“My husband can’t leave the house at all for fear of being targeted like other former regime officials,“ said Khatab, a 51-year-old mother of four.
“Unlike before, I have to accompany my sons and daughters to their schools and colleges in addition to dealing with other household stuff,“ said Khatab. She said they had to leave their home and rent a house where nobody knows her husband and his background.
Iraqi men are traditionally the breadwinners, while most women take care of other duties inside the house.
Iraq’s continuing violence, however, especially with threats against men, has forced some women to take on more family responsibilities--a phenomenon called “gender role swap“ by some specialists.
“Our society does not respect a man who sits at home while his wife works and feeds the family,“ said Kholoud Nasser Muhssin, a researcher on family and children’s affairs at the University of Baghdad.
“This phenomenon will definitely weaken the role of the father and reduce respect among children for their fathers in some families. It will adversely affect an already devastated society,“ Muhssin added.

In a paper called “I just want to get married--I don’t care to who! Marriage, Life Satisfaction and Educational Differences in Australian Couples“ doctoral candidate Shane Worner of Australian National University reports that married people are happier than unmarried people, and men who marry educated women are happier than men who marry uneducated women, reported Associatedcontent.com.
The paper was presented earlier this week at the annual conference of the Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia.
Worner surveyed 5,000 Australians, asking them to rank their level of happiness on a scale from one to ten, then inquired as to their marital status. In general, Worner found that married men are 135% more likely to report a high happiness score than single men. In contrast, married women are only 52% happier than their unmarried counterparts. The study also reports that single men have to make $136,000 per year more in income to attain the happiness that simply being married brings. For single women, this figure is $122,000. Regardless of the discrepancy between genders, the fact remained that married people do report higher levels of happiness.
Worner also observed a U-shaped curve of satisfaction levels exists around the time of marriage for both genders. Individuals are less happy the year or two before marriage, very happy around the time of the marriage, and then realize another decline in happiness after marriage.
The survey also included education level and revealed rather surprising results. A man’s happiness increases by 8% for each year of education his wife has. So, a woman that has a bachelor’s degree has the potential of making her husband 32% happier than she would otherwise. Interestingly, this correlation does not hold true for women.
Happiness also changes with differences in years of education between the spouses. Women tend to be a bit happier if their husbands are more educated than they are, but education differences do not matter as much to men.
Why these differences in happiness levels exists at this point is speculation. Worner states, “It may have something to do with personal preferences for certain characteristics in a partner.

The political participation of women is still very weak in Yemen, said a report issued this week. “Women’s participation is 0.3 percent in the parliament, and 0.08 percent in local councils, and their representation in the executive, judiciary and political parties is very low as well,“ said the report, which was released by the Arab Sisters’ Forum for Human Rights, a local NGO concerned with women affairs. The report, called the second shadow report about the implementation of the Convention of Elimination of Discrimination against Women, confirmed that illiteracy was still is very high among women in Yemen, wrote Yobserver.com.
“Educational policies do not encourage women to complete their education, they actually contribute to girls’ dropouts, and the abyss between males and females is tremendous in all levels and education fields. Curricula, despite change, are still enhancing stereotypes about women,“ said the report. The report called for new legislation that guarantees equality between men and women and nullifies all discriminative laws against women. “There are a lot of discrimination provisions in the Yemeni legislation which do not equalize between women and men, such as the Penal Code, Citizenship Law, Evidence Law, Personal Status Law, and Labor Law,“ said the report.
“Women’s participation in athletics is very weak, marginal, and has no social acceptance. There is only one women’s union for all sorts of sports in which women started to participate, in comparison with 26 unions for men.“ The report said that there are no positive discriminatory procedures for women such as the adoption of a quota, creation of a closed constituency, or others. It also said that violence against women is still a big problem that needs to be solved. “There is no law incriminating domestic violence, street violence, work violence, etc.
Besides, recently a number of pro-governmental newspapers are defaming civil society women activists, which negatively affects women’s encouragement to participate in public life,“ the report said. The health sector in general is still poor. The budget for medical care represents only 4 percent of the total budget. Women’s mortality and fertility rates are the highest in the world. They cannot make decisions related to their health without the consent of their husbands, which endangers their lives. They may not go under a cesarean operation or use birth control without permission from a man.

An Iranian woman works as a firefighter in Karaj, 35 km of Tehran.

She began walking when she felt contractions. she delivered on the roadside five kilometers from the hospital, said the 22-year-old Veronica Joseph.
It is a wonder that her newborn, only a few hours old, is fast asleep in his snug cloth cocoon. He has had a dramatic life up to now. “My mother helped. We put the placenta in a plastic bag and arrived at the hospital. But I feel fine,“ Joseph insists, speaking Tanzania’s national language Kiswahili through a translator, said Allafrica.com.
Looking unruffled, she sits on the edge of the bed she shares with two other women and their infants in the crammed one-room maternity ward of the Dodoma Regional Hospital in Tanzania’s capital city. Only a flimsy curtain separates dozens of resting new moms from the moans of those delivering in the adjoining labor room.
Joseph intended to give birth to her still-unnamed son surrounded by healthcare providers who are trained to handle emergencies on the spot. “It is safer here than at my home.“ The decision is not so clear-cut for many other expectant women in the East African nation.
Tanzania is ranked the fifth most dangerous place in sub-Saharan Africa for a woman to give birth, behind Sierra Leone, Niger, Malawi and Angola, according World Bank development indicators.
For every 100,000 babies born alive in 2000, Tanzania saw an average of 1,500 women die during pregnancy, child labor or shortly after delivery, World Bank statistics show. That year, almost 21,000 women died after problems arose while they were pregnant.
The situation had worsened from a decade earlier, when the maternal mortality rate was 770 per 100,000 live births and about 8,700 women had died due to complications during pregnancy.
A 2005 government survey, gleaned from a door-to-door campaign, put the maternal mortality rate at 578 deaths out of every 100,000 live births, up from 529 in 1996.
This discrepancy in numbers is said to be due to varying methods of collecting and measuring the information.
The figures do, however, show an unacceptably high prevalence of maternal deaths and concern is mounting that the country is moving further away from the United Nations Millennium Development Goal aimed at cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters between 1990 and 2015.
In many cases, rural dwellers follow their communities’ beliefs, seeking a traditional healer to deliver babies in a “natural“ way using herbs and age-old methods.
Qualified doctors or nurses took part in less than half of births (46 percent) in Tanzania between 2000 and 2004, according to World Bank statistics.
An acute shortage of trained health care professionals has seriously compromised the level of hospital care with only about one doctor for every 20,000 patients, according to government statistics.

A US study finds older women with memory loss are more likely to have problems falling asleep and staying asleep than those without cognitive decline, according Xinhua.
The study included almost 2,500 women, average age 69, with no signs of memory problems at the start of the study. They underwent cognitive tests over 15 years and were assessed for sleep problems at the end of the study in the journal Neurology.
The study found the nearly 25 percent of women who experienced cognitive decline were twice as likely as women without memory problems to experience sleep disturbances.
“Women who declined on one of the tests were also nearly twice as likely to nap more than two hours a day,“ Yaffe added.
There was no association between cognitive decline and total sleep time, said the study.

Black women diagnosed with breast cancer have more advanced and more aggressive disease than do white women, a new study found.
“It has been known for a long time that black women have a lower incidence of breast cancer than do white women, yet the mortality rate is higher in African-American women,“ said study leader Dr. Gloria Morris, assistant professor of medicine at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, in Philadelphia, reported Health.theledger.com.
Exactly why that is so has been under debate in medical circles, Morris said. “There have been many hypotheses,“ she said, including genetic components, dietary factors, less access to health care and screening, and other possibilities.
Morris and her colleagues compiled pathology data from two databases: the large National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) database, with almost 200,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer between 1990 and 2000, and the database from Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, which included 2,230 women diagnosed between 1995 and 2002.
The researchers compared demographic, clinical and molecular breast cancer data in the two databases. They found that in both databases, black women had more advanced disease at diagnosis and a poorer prognosis.