Just came across this NY Times article through furl, about a woman in Pakistan who was “sentenced to be raped.” The article is fairly short and talks about the plight of women in third world countries. The shit this is describing is just atrocious:

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran’s brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village’s tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy’s sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

As members of the high-status tribe danced in joy, four men stripped her naked and took turns raping her. Then they forced her to walk home naked in front of 300 villagers.

Normally, after this happens in their society the woman is expected to commit suicide, but this woman didn’t and opened up some schools and stuff, and got her attackers sentenced to death. Here’s a link to the whole article.

Oh, also, while I’m at it, there is this website I found called BugMeNot, where you can enter in a website and it will give you a login name and password. It’s handy for accessing things like the NY Times pages, which are behind passwords. The one they have listed for the nytimes.com site is “abbaabba” as both username and password. It worked for me.