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“The United Nations, the US, and countless other countries all know about what is happening to us. Everyone has acknowledged [the atrocities] publicly. We are peaceful people and we are being killed mercilessly,” Ameena Sawwan states.

A raging war in Syria has exposed countless women to mind-numbing violence. (© Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)

For Ameena Sawwan, the survivor of a chemical weapons attack in Syria, it was the Arab Spring that turned out to be the beginning of a nightmare in which she is trapped even today. What started off as peaceful protests against a repressive regime soon gave way to a series of retaliatory attacks by government forces. These days, a civil war rages in her country, a war  which has exposed countless citizens, particularly vulnerable women and children like Ameena and her little nieces and nephews, to mind-numbing violence.

Khobragade, second from left, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.

Devyani Khobragade, India’s deputy consul general in New York, was arrested recently outside of her daughter’s Manhattan school on charges that she lied on a visa application about how much she paid her housekeeper, an Indian national. Khobragade has claimed that she was treated like a common criminal and the news is creating waves in the Indian media, as are concerns about how the Indian government cares more about its more opulent citizens.

She had a face that launched a thousand ships, they said of Helen of Troy. The “face” triggered the Trojan wars when Helen left her husband the departed for Troy with her lover Paris. Since then, the story has lived on as a reminder to the dangers of illicit love affairs and infidelity. Now at least one top soldier is in trouble again because of an illlicit love affair with a beautiful woman. This time around the lady in question is not Helen, but Paula. Paula Broadwell to be precise.