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The highest-ranking woman at the United Nations said Wednesday she used everything in her toolbox during meetings with Taliban ministers to try to reverse their crackdown on Afghan women and girls, and she urged Muslim countries to help the Taliban move from the 13th century to the 21st. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, a former Nigerian Cabinet minister and a Muslim, said at a news conference that four Taliban ministers, including the foreign minister and a deputy prime minister, spoke off one script during meetings with her delegation last week. She said the officials sought to stress things that they say they have done and not gotten recognition for and what they called their effort to create an environment that protects women. Their definition of protection would be, I would say, ours of oppression, Mohammed said. Those meetings in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the Islamic group's birthplace in Kandahar were followed by a visit this week by U.N. humanitarian chief Mar
Protests in Iran raged on streets into Thursday with demonstrators remembering a bloody crackdown in the country's southeast, even as the nation's intelligence minister and army chief renewed threats against local dissent and the broader world. The protests in Iran, sparked by the September 16 death of a 22-year-old woman after her detention by the country's morality police, have grown into one of the largest sustained challenges to the nation's theocracy since the chaotic months after its 1979 Islamic Revolution. At least 328 people have been killed and 14,825 others arrested in the unrest, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that's been monitoring the protests over their 54 days. Iran's government for weeks has remained silent on casualty figures while state media counterfactually claims security forces have killed no one. As demonstrators now return to the streets to mark 40th-day remembrances for those slain earlier commemorations common in Iran and the wider .