Word: parliament
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...Monday, Peter Robinson announced that he would step aside as First Minister for six weeks, saying he needed "time to deal with family matters" and vowing to clear his name. Iris Robinson, a prominent politician in her own right, gave up her seats in the British Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly and checked into a hospital for acute psychiatric treatment. Arlene Foster, 39, was selected to replace Peter Robinson at the helm of the DUP - she becomes the first woman since former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to lead a government in the U.K. (See pictures of new hope for Belfast...
...would guess, for example, that the states with the world's highest ratio of women to men in higher education are in the gulf. In Kuwait, women were elected to parliament for the first time this year. And women have been appointed to important ministerial posts in neighboring countries; Jordan has four women in its Cabinet, including Hala Latouf, the Minister for Social Development. There are women judges, too, in Palestine, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates - something that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago. And women are taking an increasingly prominent role in the economy...
...came to starting a political career as the Iron Curtain began to crumble. She knew how to navigate around blockages and when to keep a low profile. Her rise to prominence went all but unnoticed, except by the rivals she deftly derailed along the way. Elected to the first parliament of the reunited Germany, she was appointed a Cabinet minister by Chancellor Helmut Kohl just one year later. He called her das Mädchen, "the girl." She was used to sexism. "There was no real equality in the German Democratic Republic," she says. "There were no female industrialists...
...even trickier diplomatic and economic mire. Germany is a generous donor of humanitarian aid there - as it is elsewhere in the developing world. But at 4,300 troops, Germany also provides the third largest contingent of forces in the theater, after the U.S. and Britain. In December the German parliament voted to extend the deployment in Afghanistan for another year, and the European allies - as U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has acknowledged - have reduced the number of so-called caveats that limit when troops may be deployed in combat. (Most German troops, for example, have been based in the north...
...revelation followed a series of other disclosures about the Robinsons' private lives over the past couple of weeks. On Dec. 28, Iris Robinson, who serves in both the British Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly, announced that she would be ending her 20-year political career, saying she had been suffering from "serious bouts of depression." Then, on Jan. 6, a handful of television journalists were invited to meet Peter Robinson at his home outside Belfast. Robinson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Northern Ireland's largest political party, is known for his clinical, dispassionate public image. As the cameras...