LAHORE, Pakistan — A Pakistani court sentenced four men to death on Wednesday for the murder of Farzana Parveen, a pregnant woman who was bludgeoned to death in May for marrying the man of her choice.
Her father, a brother and two cousins were found guilty of the killing by the court, said Abdul Samad, a senior state prosecutor, after Wednesday’s hearing. Another cousin was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of abetting the crime.

Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves have helped make it one of the wealthiest countries in the Gulf region. At the same time, the Muslim nation is socially conservative, with rigid cultural attitudes and restrictions on women that include preventing them from driving.
Saudi Arabia is home to 20 million Saudi citizens, as well as several million foreigners. As of last year, roughly 680,0000 Saudi women were employed, less than 11 percent of adult women, in contrast to about four million Saudi men at work, or 60 percent, according to government figures.
The effort to find jobs for women could have big implications for Saudi society, which is why it is bound to stir controversy among the more traditional elements of the kingdom. If more women join the work force, overall attitudes about them could begin to change, much the same as happened in America decades ago when women went to work in huge numbers, said Patricia Cortes, associate professor of markets, public policy and law at Boston University.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A network of private schools on Monday unleashed a scathing public attack on Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Nobel laureate, in the most concerted assault yet on her reputation in her home country.
The All Pakistan Private Schools Federation, which claims to represent 150,000 schools across Pakistan, declared that Monday would be “I am not Malala” day and urged the government to ban her memoir, “I Am Malala,” because it offended Islam and the “ideology of Pakistan.”

Mormon leaders have acknowledged for the first time that the church’s founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, portrayed in church materials as a loyal partner to his loving spouse Emma, took as many as 40 wives, some already married and one only 14 years old.
The church’s disclosures, in a series of essays online, are part of an effort to be transparent about its history at a time when church members are increasingly encountering disturbing claims about the faith on the Internet.
Smith probably did not have sexual relations with all of his wives, because some were “sealed” to him only for the next life, according to the essays posted by the church. But for his first wife, Emma, polygamy was “an excruciating ordeal.”

Considering that it took the Mormon Church more than a century to acknowledge what scholars have long known to be true, it may take another hundred years for the elders in Salt Lake City to proclaim that the prophet, seer, revelator and founder of their religion was the kind of guy who would have to register with the police today before moving into a neighborhood.

And here’s what it all means: the winds of change have reached our largest weathervanes. The highest powers in the country have begun calling on men to take responsibility not only for their own conduct, but for that of the men around them, to be agents of change.

NEW HAVEN — A sexual harassment case that has been unfolding without public notice for nearly five years within the Yale School of Medicine has roiled the institution and led to new allegations that the university is insensitive to instances of harassment against women.

Men generally expect that their careers will take precedence over their spouses’ careers and that their spouses will handle more of the child care, the study found — and for the most part, men’s expectations are exceeded. Women, meanwhile, expect that their careers will be as important as their spouses’ and that they will share child care equally — but, in general, neither happens. This pattern appears to be nearly as strong among Harvardgraduates still in their 20s as it is for earlier generations.

Hyperbole aside, and now that the dust has somewhat cleared, whether you agree that it is ridiculous to pay attention to an ill-advised shirt when scientific enlightenment is in question, or you view the garment as a symptom of the problem of female underrepresentation in the sciences — and both positions have merit — I think the real moral of this particular story exists beyond personal politics and is fairly straightforward and universal: What you wear in public matters. Whomever you are, and whatever you do.

BERLIN — Germany’s coalition government pledged Wednesday to introduce a bill mandating quotas for women on the supervisory boards of the country’s top companies, after a feud erupted this week when a leading conservative lawmaker told the minister of family affairs, a woman, to “stop whining” about the proposal.