(New York) ? The Indian government should appoint an independent commission to promptly and transparently investigate the killing of four protesters by Border Security Force (BSF) troops in Jammu and Kashmir state, Human Rights Watch said today. The government should act to end the BSF?s longstanding impunity for large numbers of killings over many years.
The unclear circumstances resulting in the deaths of four protesters, and the wounding of nearly a dozen more people, highlight the urgency of an independent inquiry. The BSF reported that on July 18, 2013, in Ramban district, its troops interrogated a local resident who it said ?made baseless and false allegations about being mistreated.? After protesters gathered and ?started stone pelting vigorously on the BSF post,? troops fired at the protesters in self-defense, the BSF said.
Local residents allege that BSF soldiers entered a mosque during a search operation and were rude and disrespectful to the mosque staff. When unarmed protesters gathered at the post, the BSF troops called for police support. The security forces then opened fire on the protesters, the local residents said.
?The loss of life at the Ramban mosque needs a prompt investigation by an independent commission,? said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director. ?Any finding of illegal use of force by BSF troops should result in prosecutions. Too often the BSF?s version of events is simply accepted, allowing killing after killing for which no one is held to account.?
Senior Indian officials have responded appropriately to the incident, but need to follow up with action, Human Rights Watch said. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said that it is ?highly unacceptable to shoot at unarmed protesters.? Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde has promised an investigation and said that ?any use of excessive force or irresponsible action will be dealt with strictly.? Previous investigations of BSF abuses have often been delayed and prosecutions stalled.
Human Rights Watch has previously documented misbehavior and serious human rights violations by BSF troops along the Bangladesh border. The border guards, who are deployed to prevent infiltration, trafficking, and smuggling, had engaged in numerous cases of unlawful use of force, arbitrary detention, and torture, and killed over a thousand Indian and Bangladeshi nationals. The BSF was ordered to exercise restraint and use rubber bullets instead of live ammunition, which led to a decrease in the number of people fatally injured, though unlawful killings continue.
The government has repeatedly failed to prosecute BSF personnel responsible for serious abuses. Inquiries by the National Human Rights Commission receive a standard response that fatalities occurred when troops had to fire in self-defense.
Human Rights Watch called on the Indian government to publicly order the security forces to follow the United Nations Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. The Basic Principles state that security forces shall ?apply non-violent means before resorting to the use of force and firearms,? and that ?whenever the lawful use of force and firearms is unavoidable, law enforcement officials shall: (a) Exercise restraint in such use and act in proportion to the seriousness of the offence and the legitimate objective to be achieved; (b) Minimize damage and injury, and respect and preserve human life.? Furthermore, ?intentional lethal use of firearms may only be made when strictly unavoidable in order to protect life.?
Since the shootings, violent protests have broken out in several parts of Jammu and Kashmir, and authorities have imposed curfews in some areas. Human Rights Watch called on organizers of protests to take steps to deter supporters from engaging in violence, including attacks on law enforcement officers.
?Security forces sometimes react with gunfire when outnumbered by an angry crowd, which is why they need to be properly trained in nonlethal crowd control methods,? Ganguly said. ?Incidents that end in shootings are not only terrible for all those involved, but set the stage for unnecessary bloodshed in the future.?
With the Pacific Ocean in the background, a rocket launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. on Jan. 21, 2011.
Pat Corkery/U.S. Air Force
Stars and Stripes
Published: July 18, 2013
The U.S. Air Force will consider leasing land on Vandenberg Air Force Base for private companies to extract offshore oil and gas from the central California coast, officials said Wednesday.
The proposal would allow oil companies to use onshore equipment with new extended reach ?slant drilling? technology to access deposits several miles offshore. Sunset Exploration and Exxon Mobil recently asked the Air Force to revisit their proposal to use the technology to build an oil and gas drilling project on the base near Lompoc, officials said.
Over the next several months, the military will study whether the new type of drilling is compatible with the base?s space and satellite-launching missions and determine if it is ?economically, environmentally and politically feasible,? the Air Force said in a statement.
?Initial information obtained by the Air Force indicates there may be potential for new technology slant drilling capable of targeting oil deposits off Vandenberg Air Force Base?s coastline from locations with minimal or mitigable mission/environmental impacts,? Master Sgt. Kevin Williams, a spokesman for Air Force Space Command, wrote in an email to The Times.
Environmental groups, which have long fought attempts to open the California coast to new drilling, say land-based drilling operations can pose many of same risks to marine life as offshore platforms.
"We have tremendous concerns about their proposal," Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center, told The Times. "This would be a new oil drilling project along a very biologically rich and sensitive area of the California coast. It would threaten migrating whales and other important species with oil spills and other impacts that result from offshore oil drilling."
[Updated at 6:11 p.m.: Sunset Exploration President Bob Nunn said the land-based drilling operation the company has proposed would fully avoid the marine environment, with its drill bit sitting one-half mile below the seafloor. "It's the antithesis of offshore drilling," he said.]
Sunset and Exxon for years have sought to drill for oil from the base, but Santa Barbara County deemed their application incomplete in 2006 because the Air Force did not sign off on it.
U.S. law allows the military to lease land for oil development, and Vandenberg currently has five active oil wells, Air Force officials said.
U.S. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Creek), California?s former lieutenant governor, and State Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson are among the politicians who have urged the Air Force to move forward with Sunset Exploration?s drilling project.
California regulators rejected a previous proposal to drill for oil near the base from an offshore rig over concerns it would harm the marine environment.
Last month, House Republicans launched a new effort to open federal waters off California to drilling, reviving an idea that has been controversial ever since a 1969 spill off Santa Barbara devastated the coast.
?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. housing starts and permits for future home construction unexpectedly fell in June, offering further evidence of a sharp slowdown in economic activity in the second quarter.
The Commerce Department said on Wednesday housing starts dropped 9.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 836,000 units. That was the lowest level since August last year.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected groundbreaking to rise to a 959,000-unit rate last month. June's drop unwound the prior month's gains, suggesting a smaller boost from residential construction to second-quarter gross domestic product growth.
Permits to build homes fell 7.5 percent last month to a 911,000-unit pace. Economists had expected them to rise to a 1-million unit pace.
Data including retail sales, trade and inventories indicate the economy lost considerable momentum in the last quarter, with growth estimates as low as 0.5 percent.
The economy, which grew at a 1.8 percent annual pace in the first quarter has been hit by tighter fiscal policy and slowing global demand. Housing has been providing some buffer against those headwinds.
Despite the unexpected drop in groundbreaking and permits last month, there was little in the report to suggest the housing recovery in unraveling as the volatile multi-family segment accounted for much of the decline.
Sentiment among single-family home builders hit a 7-1/2 year high in July, a report showed on Monday, amid optimism over current and future home sales. But many builders have been complaining about a shortage of labor and materials, which may have contributed to last month's surprise decline in activity.
"We should see growth in single-family construction into 2014. That's positive for housing, jobs and overall growth," said Gus Faucher, senior macroeconomist at PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh.
Last month, groundbreaking for single-family homes, the largest segment of the market, slipped 0.8 percent to a 591,000-unit pace, the lowest since November 2012. Starts for multi-family homes declined 26.2 percent to a 245,000-unit rate.
Permits for multi-family homes fell 21.4 percent to a 287,000-unit rate. But permits for single-family homes rose 0.6 percent to a 624,000-unit pace, the highest since May 2008.
Housing's recovery is being aided by still-low mortgage rates engineered by the Federal Reserve's accommodative monetary policy and steady employment gains.
While mortgage rates have spiked in recent weeks after the Fed expressed its desire to start cutting back on its bond purchases later this year, economists do not believe that this will derail the housing recovery. The monthly $85 billion in bond purchases have been holding down interest rates.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Wednesday the central bank still expected to start scaling back its massive asset purchase program later this year, but left open the option of changing that plan in either direction if the economic outlook shifted.
(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Additional reporting by Richard Leong in New York; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
AMMAN (Reuters) - About 30 Lebanese Hezbollah fighters and 20 Syrian soldiers and militiamen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have been killed in the fiercest fighting this year in the rebel stronghold of Qusair, Syrian activists said on Monday.
If confirmed, the Hezbollah toll from Sunday's battles in Qusair near the Lebanese border would highlight a deepening intervention in Syria by the guerrilla group set up by Iran in the 1980s to fight Israeli occupation troops in south Lebanon.
The reported Hezbollah losses also reflect the extent to which the Syrian conflict is turning into a proxy war between Shi'ite Iran and U.S.-aligned Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which back Assad's mostly Sunni foes.
Western countries and Russia, an ally of Damascus, back opposing sides in this regional free-for-all which is also sucking in Israel. Three times this year Israeli planes have bombed presumed Iranian arms stocks destined for Hezbollah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his country was "preparing for every scenario" in Syria and held out the prospect of more Israeli strikes inside Syria to stop Hezbollah and other opponents of Israel getting advanced weapons.
Israel has not confirmed or denied reports by Western and Israeli intelligence sources that its raids targeted Iranian missiles stored near Damascus that it believed were awaiting delivery to Hezbollah, which fought a war with Israel in 2006.
FOG OF WAR
Syrian opposition sources and state media gave widely differing accounts of Sunday's ferocious clashes in Qusair, long used by rebels as a supply route from the nearby Lebanese border to the provincial capital Homs. Hezbollah has not commented.
The air and tank assault on the strategic town of 30,000 people appeared to be part of a campaign by Assad's forces to consolidate their grip on Damascus and secure links between the capital and government strongholds in the Alawite coastal heartland via the contested central city of Homs.
The government campaign has coincided with efforts by the United States and Russia, despite their differences on Syria, to organize peace talks to end a conflict now in its third year in which more than 80,000 people have been killed.
A total of 100 combatants from both sides were killed in Sunday's offensive, according to opposition sources, including the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Troops have already retaken several villages around Qusair and have attacked increasingly isolated rebel units in Homs.
"If Qusair falls, God forbid, the opposition in Homs city will be in grave danger," said an activist who called himself Abu Jaafar al-Mugharbil.
State news agency SANA said the army had "restored security and stability to most Qusair neighborhoods" and was "chasing the remnants of the terrorists in the northern district".
However, opposition activists said rebels in Qusair, about 10 km (six miles) from the Lebanese border, had pushed back most of the attacking forces to their original positions in the east of the town and to the south on Sunday, destroying at least four Syrian army tanks and five light Hezbollah vehicles.
The Western-backed leadership of the Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group trying to oversee hundreds of disparate rebel brigades, said the Qusair fighters had thwarted Hezbollah with military operations it dubbed "Walls of Death".
Syrian government restrictions on access for independent media make it hard to verify such videos and accounts.
"NO DIALOGUE WITH TERRORISTS"
The fighting raged as Western nations seek to step up pressure on Assad - Britain and France want the European Union to allow arms deliveries to rebels - while preparing for the peace talks brokered by Russia and the United States next month.
Assad has scorned the idea that the conference expected to convene in Geneva could end a war that is fuelling instability and deepening Sunni-Shi'ite rifts across the Middle East.
"They think a political conference will halt terrorists in the country. That is unrealistic," he told the Argentine newspaper Clarin, in reference to Syria's mainly Sunni rebels.
Assad ruled out "dialogue with terrorists", but it was not clear from his remarks whether he would agree to send delegates to a conference that may falter before it starts due to disagreements between its two main sponsors and their allies.
The fractured Syrian opposition is to discuss the proposed peace conference at a meeting due to start in Istanbul on Thursday, during which it will also appoint a new leadership.
Attacks by troops and militias loyal to Assad, who inherited power in Syria from his father in 2000, have put rebels under pressure in several of their strongholds in recent weeks.
Assad, from Syria's minority Alawite sect, has been battling an uprising which began with peaceful protests in March 2011. His violent response eventually prompted rebels to take up arms.
Hezbollah has supported Assad throughout the crisis but for months denied reports it was fighting alongside Assad's troops.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the Hezbollah casualties on Sunday at 23 dead and more than 70 wounded, while 48 rebel fighters and four civilians were also killed.
Tareq Murei, an activist in Qusair, said six more people were killed on Monday as Syrian army artillery and Hezbollah rocket launchers bombarded rebel-held parts of the town.
Video footage purportedly showed a Syrian tank on fire at a street corner in the town. In another video a warplane was shown flying over the town amid the sound of explosions.
Lebanese security sources said at least 12 Hezbollah fighters were killed in Qusair on Sunday. Seven were to be buried in the Lebanese town of Baalbek and nearby villages on Monday.
(Writing by Dominic Evans,; Editing by Samia Nakhoul and Alistair Lyon)
Soft matter offers new ways to study how ordered materials arrange themselvesPublic release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: John Toon jtoon@gatech.edu 404-894-6986 Georgia Institute of Technology
A fried breakfast food popular in Spain provided the inspiration for the development of doughnut-shaped droplets that may provide scientists with a new approach for studying fundamental issues in physics, mathematics and materials.
The doughnut-shaped droplets, a shape known as toroidal, are formed from two dissimilar liquids using a simple rotating stage and an injection needle. About a millimeter in overall size, the droplets are produced individually, their shapes maintained by a surrounding springy material made of polymers. Droplets in this toroidal shape made of a liquid crystal the same type of material used in laptop displays may have properties very different from those of spherical droplets made from the same material.
While researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology don't have a specific application for the doughnut-shaped droplets yet, they believe the novel structures offer opportunities to study many interesting problems, from looking at the properties of ordered materials within these confined spaces to studying how geometry affects how cells behave.
"Our experiments provide a fresh approach to the way that people have been looking at these kinds of problems, which is mainly theoretical. We are doing experiments with toroids whose geometry can be precisely controlled in the lab," said Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. "This work opens up a new way to experimentally look at problems that nobody has been able to study before. The properties of toroidal surfaces are very different, from a general point of view, from those of spherical surfaces."
Development of these "stable nematic droplets with handles" was described May 20 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and also involves researchers at the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University in The Netherlands and at York University in the United Kingdom.
Droplets normally form spherical shapes to minimize the surface area required to contain a given volume of liquid. Though they appear to be simple, when an ordered material like a crystal or a liquid crystal lives on the surface of a sphere, it provides interesting challenges to mathematicians and theoretical physicists.
A physicist who focuses on soft condensed matter, Fernandez-Nieves had long been interested in the theoretical aspects of curved surfaces. Working with graduate research assistant Ekapop Pairam and postdoctoral fellow Jayalakshmi Vallamkondu, he wanted to extend the theoretical studies into the experimental world for a system of toroidal shapes.
But could doughnut-shaped droplets be made in the lab?
The partial answer came from churros Fernandez-Nieves ate as a child growing up in Spain. These "Spanish doughnuts" actually spirals are made by injecting dough into hot oil while the dough is spun and fried.
In the lab at a much smaller size scale, the researchers found they could use a similar process with two immiscible liquids such as glycerine or water and oil, a needle and a magnetically-controlled rotating stage. A droplet of glycerine is injected into the rotating stage containing the oil. In certain conditions, a jet forms at the needle, which closes up into a torus because of the imposed rotation.
"You can control the two relevant curvatures of the torus," explained Fernandez-Nieves. "You can control how large it is because you can move the needle with respect to the rotation axis. You can also infuse more volume to make the torus thicker."
If the stage is then turned off, however, the drop of glycerine quickly loses its doughnut shape as surface tension forces it to become a traditional spherical droplet. To maintain the toroidal shape, Fernandez-Nieves and his collaborators replace the surrounding oil with a springy polymeric material; the springy character of this material provides a force that can overcome surface tension forces.
"When you are making the toroid, the forces on the needle are large enough that the surrounding material behaves as a fluid," he explained. "Once you stop, the elasticity of the outside fluid overcomes surface tension and that freezes the structure in place."
The researchers have been using the doughnut shapes to study how liquid crystal materials, which are well known for their applications in laptop displays, organize inside the torus. These materials have degrees of order beyond those of simple liquids such as water. For these materials, the toroidal shape provides a new set of study opportunities from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.
"This changes how you think about a liquid inside a container," said Fernandez-Nieves. "The materials will still adopt the shape of the container, but its energy will be different depending on the shape. The materials feel distortions and will try to minimize them. In a given shape, the molecules in these materials will rearrange themselves to minimize these distortions."
Among the surprises is that the nematic droplets created with toroidal shapes become chiral, that is, they adopt a certain twisting direction and break their mirror symmetry.
"In our case, the materials we are using are not chiral under normal circumstances," he noted. "This was a surprise to us, and it has to do with how we are confining the molecules."
Beyond looking at the dynamics of creating the droplets and how ordered materials behave when the torus transforms into a sphere, Fernandez-Nieves and colleagues are also exploring potential biological applications, applying electrical fields to the droplets, and sharing the unique structures with scientists at other institutions.
"This is the first time that stable nematic droplets have been generated with handles, and we have exploited that to look at the nematic organization inside those spaces," said Fernandez-Nieves. "Our experiments open up a versatile new approach for generating handled droplets made of an ordered material that can self-assemble into interesting and unexpected structures when confined to these non-spherical spaces. Now that theoreticians realize we can generate and study these systems, there may be much more development in this area."
###
In addition to those already mentioned, the paper's authors included V. Koning, B.C. van Zuiden and V. Vitelli from Leiden University, M.A. Bates from the University of York in the United Kingdom, and P.W. Ellis from Georgia Tech.
The research described here has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation under CAREER award DMR-0847304. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.
CITATION: E. Pairam, et al., "Stable nematic droplets with handles," (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013)
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Soft matter offers new ways to study how ordered materials arrange themselvesPublic release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: John Toon jtoon@gatech.edu 404-894-6986 Georgia Institute of Technology
A fried breakfast food popular in Spain provided the inspiration for the development of doughnut-shaped droplets that may provide scientists with a new approach for studying fundamental issues in physics, mathematics and materials.
The doughnut-shaped droplets, a shape known as toroidal, are formed from two dissimilar liquids using a simple rotating stage and an injection needle. About a millimeter in overall size, the droplets are produced individually, their shapes maintained by a surrounding springy material made of polymers. Droplets in this toroidal shape made of a liquid crystal the same type of material used in laptop displays may have properties very different from those of spherical droplets made from the same material.
While researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology don't have a specific application for the doughnut-shaped droplets yet, they believe the novel structures offer opportunities to study many interesting problems, from looking at the properties of ordered materials within these confined spaces to studying how geometry affects how cells behave.
"Our experiments provide a fresh approach to the way that people have been looking at these kinds of problems, which is mainly theoretical. We are doing experiments with toroids whose geometry can be precisely controlled in the lab," said Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. "This work opens up a new way to experimentally look at problems that nobody has been able to study before. The properties of toroidal surfaces are very different, from a general point of view, from those of spherical surfaces."
Development of these "stable nematic droplets with handles" was described May 20 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and also involves researchers at the Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics at Leiden University in The Netherlands and at York University in the United Kingdom.
Droplets normally form spherical shapes to minimize the surface area required to contain a given volume of liquid. Though they appear to be simple, when an ordered material like a crystal or a liquid crystal lives on the surface of a sphere, it provides interesting challenges to mathematicians and theoretical physicists.
A physicist who focuses on soft condensed matter, Fernandez-Nieves had long been interested in the theoretical aspects of curved surfaces. Working with graduate research assistant Ekapop Pairam and postdoctoral fellow Jayalakshmi Vallamkondu, he wanted to extend the theoretical studies into the experimental world for a system of toroidal shapes.
But could doughnut-shaped droplets be made in the lab?
The partial answer came from churros Fernandez-Nieves ate as a child growing up in Spain. These "Spanish doughnuts" actually spirals are made by injecting dough into hot oil while the dough is spun and fried.
In the lab at a much smaller size scale, the researchers found they could use a similar process with two immiscible liquids such as glycerine or water and oil, a needle and a magnetically-controlled rotating stage. A droplet of glycerine is injected into the rotating stage containing the oil. In certain conditions, a jet forms at the needle, which closes up into a torus because of the imposed rotation.
"You can control the two relevant curvatures of the torus," explained Fernandez-Nieves. "You can control how large it is because you can move the needle with respect to the rotation axis. You can also infuse more volume to make the torus thicker."
If the stage is then turned off, however, the drop of glycerine quickly loses its doughnut shape as surface tension forces it to become a traditional spherical droplet. To maintain the toroidal shape, Fernandez-Nieves and his collaborators replace the surrounding oil with a springy polymeric material; the springy character of this material provides a force that can overcome surface tension forces.
"When you are making the toroid, the forces on the needle are large enough that the surrounding material behaves as a fluid," he explained. "Once you stop, the elasticity of the outside fluid overcomes surface tension and that freezes the structure in place."
The researchers have been using the doughnut shapes to study how liquid crystal materials, which are well known for their applications in laptop displays, organize inside the torus. These materials have degrees of order beyond those of simple liquids such as water. For these materials, the toroidal shape provides a new set of study opportunities from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.
"This changes how you think about a liquid inside a container," said Fernandez-Nieves. "The materials will still adopt the shape of the container, but its energy will be different depending on the shape. The materials feel distortions and will try to minimize them. In a given shape, the molecules in these materials will rearrange themselves to minimize these distortions."
Among the surprises is that the nematic droplets created with toroidal shapes become chiral, that is, they adopt a certain twisting direction and break their mirror symmetry.
"In our case, the materials we are using are not chiral under normal circumstances," he noted. "This was a surprise to us, and it has to do with how we are confining the molecules."
Beyond looking at the dynamics of creating the droplets and how ordered materials behave when the torus transforms into a sphere, Fernandez-Nieves and colleagues are also exploring potential biological applications, applying electrical fields to the droplets, and sharing the unique structures with scientists at other institutions.
"This is the first time that stable nematic droplets have been generated with handles, and we have exploited that to look at the nematic organization inside those spaces," said Fernandez-Nieves. "Our experiments open up a versatile new approach for generating handled droplets made of an ordered material that can self-assemble into interesting and unexpected structures when confined to these non-spherical spaces. Now that theoreticians realize we can generate and study these systems, there may be much more development in this area."
###
In addition to those already mentioned, the paper's authors included V. Koning, B.C. van Zuiden and V. Vitelli from Leiden University, M.A. Bates from the University of York in the United Kingdom, and P.W. Ellis from Georgia Tech.
The research described here has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation under CAREER award DMR-0847304. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.
CITATION: E. Pairam, et al., "Stable nematic droplets with handles," (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2013)
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- About 30 Saudi women teachers have demonstrated outside the kingdom's Education Ministry, demanding full time jobs.
An Associated Press reporter saw women holding posters Monday calling for full time contracts and benefits that include steady pay and retirement packages.
Some say they have been teaching part time in government schools for more than 10 years. The teachers have demonstrated in the past outside the ministry to press their demands.
Saudi Arabia is struggling to employ some of its best educated women. The Saudi statistics agency says women represent just 15 percent of the country's workforce.
The Labor Ministry says there are more than 200,000 unemployed women seeking jobs in the kingdom, and around 75 percent of them are college graduates.
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Public release date: 20-May-2013
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