In pictures: Yemen's displaced women and girls

Yemen's war between forces loyal to the internationally-recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi and those allied to the Houthi rebel movement has devastated tens of thousands of lives through death, injury and displacement.

Women and girls constitute half of the 2.18 million people who have been internally displaced. Here are stories of some of them now living in the Dharwan settlement, outside the capital, Sanaa.

Grandmother Aliah complains about the scarcity of food, water and health care. She relies on her son-in-law's earnings of $4 (£3) per day to support three generations of the family who have all fled from Hudaydah province. An estimated 14 million people are considered food insecure and seven million severely food insecure, with malnutrition widespread.

Muna and Sakina from the northern rebel stronghold of Saada fled with their mother and three siblings to the Dharwan settlement last year after losing their father. The conflict has taken a harsh toll on civilians and an average of 75 people are either killed or injured every day.

For Safiah, life has changed irrevocably since the start of the conflict. She fled with her husband and five children from their home in Saada for the safety of a camp for displaced people in nearby Hajjah. The camp was subsequently attacked and she lost her son in the incident.

Source : http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-38305875

Veiled and Undercover: Exposing Harassment of Muslim Women in the U.K.

Hate-crime expert Irene Zempi wore Islamic clothing in public to research harassment against visibly Muslim women in the U.K. The disdain and abuse she experienced was so bad, she says, she didn’t want to leave the house.

Originally from Greece, Irene Zempi is a foreigner in the U.K., but it’s not obvious until she speaks. She didn’t give much thought to her ability to blend in until 2009, when she began working at the charity Victim Support in Leicester. That was where she met Muslim women who were being abused in public because of the way they dressed. Propelled by the injustice and shocked at the lack of information on the topic, she went on to earn a PhD in criminology with a focus on the purposeful victimization of visibly Muslim women.

While Zempi was conducting her doctoral research, she interviewed Muslim women who urged her to wear the Islamic hijab (headscarf), niqab (face veil) and jilbab (long dress) so she could better understand their collective experience. A practicing Orthodox Christian, she agreed that dressing the part would be the best way for her to examine the issue of female-focused Islamophobia. So, in 2012, she went undercover for a month in Leicester. The level of harassment she faced was astonishing, she says.

Nearly four years have passed, but the data from Zempi’s research is now more timely than ever. In 2015 alone, there was a 326 percent increase in hate crimes against Muslims in the U.K., with Muslim women more likely to be attacked than Muslim men. And police figuresshow that hate crimes soared in the country following the Brexit vote earlier this year.

Women & Girls spoke with Zempi, who teaches criminology at Nottingham Trent University, about her month as a Muslim, the results of which will be published fully for the first time in an upcoming report with co-author Imran Awan of Birmingham City University .

Women & Girls: Why are Muslim women more likely to experience Islamophobia than Muslim men?

Zempi: We see that Muslim women who are visibly Muslim in terms of their dress are easy targets. It’s obvious that they’re practicing Muslims and, to some extent, wearing a veil is a symbol of Islam in the West. A hate crime is a message crime. Therefore, for hate crime perpetrators, attacking the symbol of Islam – the veil – sends the message to the wider community that all Muslims are vulnerable. The perpetrators think they can get away with it if they attack Muslim women because they don’t think the women will fight back or report it to the police because they view Muslim women as oppressed and forced to wear the veil.

So, there isn’t just one reason why Muslim women in veils are more likely to experience abuse. It’s a combination of reasons. Muslim men also suffer from Islamophobia. Women experience it more in the public space – like when they walk on the street or take public transport – while men are more likely to experience it in the labor market.

How Facebook plans to take over the world ...

It’s late afternoon on a blustery spring day on the waterfront at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base that’s now hired out for corporate functions. Vast warehouses, once used to store army supplies, are awash with sleek signs, shimmering lights and endless snacks. Behind them is an Instagram-ready view of Alcatraz island. In front, a fleet of Uber and Lyft cars lines up in the car park, while inside one of the warehouses Scottish synthpop band Chvrches take the stage.
For the first few songs there’s only a small group of hardcore vocal fans at the front of the stage, flanked by a subdued mix of backpack-wearing dad types politely bobbing their heads, drinking cocktails out of plastic cups.

 The shindig has been put on by Facebook for the benefit of delegates attending its F8 conference. The event, which has run most years since 2007, began as a means to win over the developer community and has now become a comprehensive and highly engineered launchpad for the company’s annual plans. Many of the 2,600 attendees have paid $595 to find out how they can integrate their own digital products with Facebook to carve out some kind of presence among its enormous audience – and there’s booze and entertainment thrown in.
The band is performing on the same stage from where Mark Zuckerberg has delivered the conference’s opening keynote speech. The lead singer makes a joke comparing the 31-year-old CEO to Star Wars villain Kylo Ren, and it seems to break the ice. From that point on the cheers and claps get louder and it starts to change into a more recognisable gig – but there is nothing as rapturous as when, hours earlier, “Zuck” had pledged a free virtual reality headset and Samsung smartphone to every attendee.

For this audience, it’s clear who the real rockstar is .

 When Zuckerberg addresses the F8 audience it is with the composure and conviction of a president addressing his citizens. “We’ve gone from a world of isolated communities to one global community, and we are all better off for it,” he says as he hammers home his “mission” to connect the world.

 He warns of “people and nations turning inwards – against this idea of a connected world and community”, a position that fits both with his ideology and that of Facebook. This is not a speech about technical tweaks, but a state of the union address .

 It takes courage to choose hope over fear,” he adds. Behind the rhetoric and the casual clothes, the message is clear: Facebook is one of the big boys now, taking on huge global challenges and planning for prosperity.

 The scale of Facebook’s audience is unprecedented. More than 1.6 billion people use Facebook at least once a month, or half of all internet users. That’s before you count users on other Facebook-owned sites including WhatsApp, which has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and photo-sharing site Instagram, which has 400 million .

 Facebook has also introduced its free basics service to 37 countries, offering a free but limited package of apps to mobile phone users, but which some critics say allows Facebook to tightly control the online experience of potentially the next billion people to come online.

 “You hear all the platitudes about Facebook connecting the planet, but to say they are doing it for benevolent reasons is absolute nonsense. It’s about connecting commerce, not people,” says venture capitalist and former journalist Om Malik, who reminds us of the hidden agenda of social networking firms: if you’re not paying, you’re the product.

 Facebook – which made $5.8bn of revenue in the last three months of 2015 – is able to make money from its users not just because of that unprecedented audience, but the amount of time they spend on the service. In the US the average 18- to 34-year-old spends 30 hours per month on social networking services, and 26 of those are on Facebook, according to analysts at ComScore.


 Every click, every like, every comment and every connection is used to build up a rich profile of each user. Brands can then pay Facebook to target users based on their age, location, relationship status and interests. This is how Facebook makes its money – profiles of us that advertisers adore.