 |  | 
Week of
January 12, 2012 | | FIREBRAND The day Fawzia Koofi was born, she was left out in the sun to die. She was deemed useless—born the 19th child in an Afghan family that wanted a boy. In her homeland, she explains, girls are less valuable than goats: a goat will give you milk and meat, but a girl is just another mouth to feed and a dowry to finance. Koofi, the author of a new memoir, The Favored Daughter, went on to become the first female deputy speaker of the Afghan Parliament—and now plans to run for president. In so doing, she has become a target of the Taliban. She tells her searing life story on The Daily Beast. The Council of Women World Leaders mobilizes high-level women globally for collective action on issues of critical importance to women. KARMA Yoga loyalists are up in arms over a recent New York Times story. The controversial story details a host of injuries—and even brain damage—that can come from practicing yoga. New York City yoga instructors aren’t taking it lying down, reports Casey Schwartz on The Daily Beast. As instructor Adam Vitolo tells her, “To write a piece that goes into such depth with anatomy, it can only instill fear. That’s what’s unfortunate—students are going to start connecting their yoga practice to fear, and that’s not the mental state that’s conducive to yoga anyway. Nothing good comes from fear.” SCANDAL The conservative evangelicals in South Carolina are sure to be leery of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, but after this, they may not be the only ones. The Real Romney, a new biography written by a pair of Boston Globe reporters, reveals that as a Mormon bishop in the 1980s, the GOP frontrunner demanded a single mom give up her baby for adoption or face excommunication from the church. “This is not playing around,” the woman said. “This is not like, ‘You don’t get to take Communion.’ This is like ‘You will not be saved. You will never see the face of God.’” The authors say that people are not often excommunicated from the LDS Church over such matters, and the woman had positive things to say about Romney outside his role in church leadership. But the woman left the church, and Romney denies the threats took place. BRAVERY Fadwa Soliman, an actress in Syria, says she is wanted dead or alive. She recently became a poster woman for activists following her bold condemnations of Syria’s dictatorial government. But at the same time, she has been disowned by her own family—and has become a marked woman. The 39-year-old Soliman told The Daily Beast’s Alastair Beach—from an undisclosed location where she remains in hiding—that she refuses to leave the country, no matter the threats. “Whatever happens to other people will happen to me,” she says CRIME SPREE A pair of California women recently decided to escape their humdrum lives—in a highly unusual way. Paralegal Alexa Polar, 34, and parochial-school teacher Robin Pabello, 33, allegedly forged a six-figure check that they used to finance a few giddy days of a fantasy-fueled life, chartering a jet and putting a deposit on a mansion. Now they sit in a Southern California jail. The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly reports on their “wildly heedless escape from a paycheck-to-paycheck existence.” | | 
GET The Cheat Sheet A speedy, smart summary of news and must-reads from across the Web. You'll love the featured original stories on politics, entertainment, and more from The Daily Beast's diverse group of contributors.  GET The Yes List Weekly cultural recommendations from The Daily Beast. dex.php/solutions/entry/council-of-women-world-leaders
| |
No comments:
Post a Comment