The BBC’s Rahul Tandon reports on a woman in India who gave her daughters away because she was too poor to give them a decent life.

Media reports in India suggested that she sold the girls for 185 rupees ($3; £2).

When I ask her if that is true, her voice rises: “I could never sell my children. I could never do such a thing. I gave them to good families where they would be well looked after.”

Purnima is now in a shelter in Bijoygunge, about 60km (37 miles) from Calcutta, and her daughters Piya (10), Supriya (eight) and Roma (four) have been reunited with her.

Even taking into account the helplessness of her situation, I find it hard

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You know Cooper? The dog I live with now and then?

He went swimming in Vancouver with his real humans ten days ago and sliced open a paw, and had to get stitches and a bandage. I took him to the vet hospital for the second bandage change this afternoon and they told me there was a “buildup of oil” because of the confinement of the bandage, so he has to be on zero activity for two weeks and he has to wear the cone. I wanted to rip my own head off on getting that news.

So we came home, and I picked up the dreaded plastic cone where it was sitting waiting, and tried to put it … Read the rest

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Brian Grim of the Pew Research Center and Roger Finke of Pennsylvania State University have a new book, The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. Guess which religion plays the starring role.

Writing about Islam in today’s politically charged climate is difficult, Grim and Finke admit. Many commentators, they say, tend to be either overly critical or timidly uncritical.

The thinly-veiled xenophobes on one end and the overcompensaters on the other.

Among the researchers’ findings:

• Seventy-eight percent of Muslim-majority countries, compared with 10 percent of Christian-majority countries and 43 percent of other nations, had high levels of government restrictions on religion.

• Violent religious persecution is present in every country with

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The European Court of Human Rights is hearing the cases of four British Christians who claim they were fired because of discrimination against their religious beliefs. You remember them. The two Christian women who insisted on wearing necklaces with a cross attached when their jobs required no jewelry. (Here’s a thing, which I hadn’t noticed before. Two women. Necklaces. This doesn’t come up with men. So in fact…it really is a matter of jewelry, not religious belief. It’s a matter of Gender Custom that women can wear necklaces and men can’t, so somehow it becomes a “religious obligation” for women to wear a necklace with a cross attached, while that’s not a “religious obligation” for men. That doesn’t make … Read the rest

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Lots of people gather in a ballroom at a Washington DC hotel for the the Matrimonial Banquet, a fun evening of speed dating and socializing with semi-arranged marriage as the goal. It’s part of the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, and it is in no way to be confused with a livestock market.

…in recent years, the demand for such banquets has increased, and the society plans to hold them more frequently. More Muslims are embracing them as an acceptable alternative to arranged marriages and the vagaries of 21st-century, American-style dating. Online matchmaking is also popular, but some prefer to meet in person. Saturday night’s banquet was sold out, as was a second one scheduled

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The BBC looks at the joys of being a woman in Cairo.

Said Sadek, a sociologist from the American University in Cairo, says that the problem is deeply rooted in Egyptian society: a mixture of what he calls increasing Islamic conservatism, on the rise since the late 1960s, and old patriarchal attitudes.

“Religious fundamentalism arose, and they began to target women. They want women to go back to the home and not work.

“Male patriarchal culture does not accept that women are higher than men, because some women had education and got to work, and some men lagged behind and so one way to equalise status is to shock women and force a sexual situation on them anywhere.”

In … Read the rest

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