The failure highlights how tenuous women’s rights remain a dozen years after the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime, whose strict interpretation of Islam kept Afghan women virtual prisoners in their homes.

Khalil Ahmad Shaheedzada, a conservative lawmaker for Herat province, said the legislation was withdrawn shortly after being introduced in parliament because of fierce opposition from religious parties who said parts of the law are un-Islamic.

“Whatever is against Islamic law, we don’t even need to speak about it,” Shaheedzada said.

The Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women has actually been in effect since 2009 by presidential decree. It is being brought before parliament now because lawmaker Fawzia Kofi, a women’s rights activist, wants to cement it with a parliamentary vote to prevent its reversal by any future president who might be tempted to repeal it to satisfy hard-line religious parties.

Among the law’s provisions are criminalizing child marriage and banning “baad,” the traditional practice of selling and buying women to settle disputes. It also criminalizes domestic violence and specifies that rape victims should not face criminal charges for fornication or adultery.

“We want to change this decree as a law and get the vote of parliamentarian for this law,” said Kofi, who is herself running for president in next year’s elections. “Unfortunately, there were some conservative elements who are opposing this law. What I am disappointed at is because there were also women who were opposing this law.”

Afghanistan’s parliament has more than 60 female lawmakers, mostly due to constitutional provisions reserving certain seats for women.

The child marriage ban and the idea of protecting female rape victims from prosecution were particularly heated subjects in Saturday’s parliamentary debate, said Nasirullah Sadiqizada Neli, a conservative lawmaker from Daykundi province.

Neli suggested that removing the custom — common in Afghanistan — of prosecuting raped women for adultery would lead to social chaos, with women freely engaging in extramarital sex safe in the knowledge they could claim rape if caught.

Lawmaker Shaheedzada also claimed that the law might encourage promiscuity among girls and women, saying it reflected Western values not applicable in Afghanistan.

“Even now in Afghanistan, women are running from their husbands. Girls are running from home,” Shaheedzada said. “Such laws give them these ideas.”

Freedoms for women are one of the most visible — and symbolic — changes in Afghanistan since 2001 U.S.-led campaign that toppled the Taliban regime. Aside from their support for al-Qaida leaders, the Taliban are probably most notorious for their harsh treatment of women under their severe interpretation of Islamic law.

For five years, the regime banned women from working and going to school, or even leaving home without a male relative. In public, all women were forced wear a head-to-toe burqa veil, which covers even the face with a mesh panel. Violators were publicly flogged or executed. Freeing women from such draconian laws lent a moral air to the Afghan war.

Since then, women’s freedoms have improved vastly, but Afghanistan remains a deeply conservative culture, especially in rural areas.

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Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez contributed in Kabul.

The attacks follow three days of bombings and other violence across the country that killed 130 people. A market, a mosque and bus stops in both Shiite and Sunnis areas were targeted in scenes reminiscent of the retaliatory attacks between the two groups that pushed the country to the brink of civil war in 2006-2007.

The recent spike of violence has raised fears that the country might be heading to a new round of sectarian violence.

Saturday’s deadliest attack occurred when gunmen broke into the house of an anti-terrorism police officer in the southern suburbs of Baghdad, killing five people including him and his sleeping family. Police officials say the attackers stormed the house in the al-Rasheed district early Saturday and shot dead Cap. Adnan Ibrahim, his wife and two children, aged eight and 10.

As they were leaving the area, the attackers killed another policeman who tried to stop them at a nearby checkpoint.

In the southern city of Basra, gunmen shot and killed a Sunni cleric, Assad Nassir, as he was leaving his house, said police.

Also, two Iraqi soldiers were killed and two others wounded when a roadside bomb struck a group of soldier who arrived to inspect the scene of a blast that took place earlier in the northern city of Mosul.

Health officials confirmed the death tolls. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the media.

The North fired two missiles Saturday morning and another in the afternoon, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said by phone. He said the North’s intent was unclear. His ministry said it is watching North Korea carefully in case it conducts a provocation against South Korea.

In March, North Korea launched what appeared to be two KN-02 missiles off its east coast. Experts believe the country is trying to improve the range and accuracy of its arsenal.

North Korea recently withdrew two mid-range “Musudan” missiles believed to be capable of reaching Guam after moving them to its east coast earlier this year, U.S. officials said. The North is banned from testing ballistic missiles under U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Earlier this year, North Korea threatened nuclear strikes on Seoul and Washington because of annual U.S.-South Korean military drills and U.N. sanctions imposed over its third nuclear test in February. The drills ended late last month. This past month, the U.S. and South Korea ended another round of naval drills involving a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier off the east coast. North Korea calls such drills preparation to invade the North.

Analysts say the recent North Korean threats were partly an attempt to push Washington to agree to disarmament-for-aid talks.

This past week, Glyn Davies, the top U.S. envoy on North Korea, ended trips to South Korea, China and Japan. On Friday, an adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe returned from North Korea but didn’t immediately give details of his talks with officials there.

On Monday, North Korean state media showed that the country’s hard-line defense minister had been replaced by a little-known army general. Outside analysts said it was part of leader Kim Jong Un’s efforts to tighten his grip on the powerful military after his father Kim Jong Il died in December 2011.

The United States and Japan are participants in six-nation nuclear disarmament talks along with the Koreas, Russia and Japan. North Korea walked out of the talks in 2009 after the United Nations condemned it for a long-range rocket launch.

North Korea possesses an array of missiles. U.S. and South Korean officials do not believe the North’s claim that it has developed nuclear warheads small enough to place on a missile. Last week in Washington, South Korean President Park Geun-hye and President Barack Obama warned North Korea against further nuclear provocations.

Tension between the two Koreas remains high after both sides pulled out their workers from a jointly run factory complex earlier this year. The countries remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce instead of a peace treaty.

Rami Abdul-Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said Saturday that a coalition known as the Judicial Council had accused another rebel force, the Ghurabaa al-Sham, of robbing factories in Aleppo’s industrial neighborhood.

He said the two groups clashed on Tuesday and the Judicial Council is now holding Ghurabaa al-Sham members captive. The Ghurabaa al-Sham is also holding Judicial Council members.

Aleppo-based activist Mohammed Saeed said Ghurabaa al-Sham withdrew its fighters from several neighborhoods, including the industrial area.

Aleppo is Syria’s largest city and is split between rebel and government control.

His signature means the first gay marriages may be celebrated in France within about 10 days. Hollande’s office said he signed the bill Saturday morning, a day after the Constitutional Council struck down a challenge to the law.

Hollande, a Socialist, had made legalizing gay marriage one of his campaign pledges last year. While polls for years have shown majority support for gay marriage in France, adoption by same-sex couples is more controversial. The bill prompted months of widespread protests, largely by conservative and religious groups. Some were marred by clashes with police. It became a flashpoint for frustrations at the increasingly unpopular Hollande.

The case against Dimyana Abdel-Nour in southern Egypt’s ancient city of Luxor began when parents of three of her pupils claimed that their children, aged 10, complained their teacher showed disgust when she spoke of Islam in class. According to the parents, Abdel-Nour, 24, told the children that Pope Shenouda, who led the Egyptian Coptic Church until his death last year, was better than the Prophet Muhammad.

Blasphemy charges were not uncommon in Egypt under the now-ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak’s regime, but there has been a surge in such cases in recent months, according to rights activists. The trend is widely seen as a reflection of the growing power and confidence of Islamists, particularly the ultraconservative Salafis.

“Salafis are the engineers of these stories,” said Abdel-Hamid Hassan, a Muslim and the head of the parents’ council at the primary school where Abdel-Nour teaches. Hassan’s daughter was among several students who denied any wrongdoing by Abdel-Nour.

“If the pope himself came here from the Vatican and tried to spread Christianity among us, he would fail. We learn about our religion starting from the age of 5,” he said, alluding to the allegation against Abdel-Nour, since withdrawn, of “spreading Christianity.”

Criminalizing blasphemy was enshrined in the country’s Islamist-backed constitution that was adopted in December.

Writers, activists and even a famous television comedian have been accused of blasphemy since then. But Christians seem to be the favorite target of Islamist prosecutors. Their fragile cases — the main basis of the case against Abdel-Nour’s case the testimony of children — are greeted with sympathy from courtroom judges with their own religious bias or who fear the wrath of Islamists, according to activists.

The result is a growing number of Egyptians, including many Christians, who have been convicted and sent to prison for blasphemy.

In at least one celebrated case, the offense was clearly provocative: Seven Coptic Christians living in the United States received death sentences in absentia for producing an anti-Islam film that sparked waves of protests by ultraconservative Islamists in front of U.S. embassies across the Arab world on Sept. 11, 2012.

But rights groups say the vast majority of blasphemy cases are merely attempts by Islamists to crack down on their opponents.

“Islamists are using the law to hunt down critics to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Christians are the weakest,” said Medhat Klada, a Switzerland-based Coptic Christian activist whose organization Copts United tracks such cases. “The numbers of Christians implicated is unprecedented,” he added.

Many believe that restrictions on freedoms are more severe under Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s first freely elected president, than during his predecessor’s 29-year reign.

Under Mubarak, “you might have had 50 cases, which means a case or two a year on average, but now you have like 10 cases in a year,” said Mamdouh Nakhla, who leads The Word Group for Human Rights and focuses on Christian-related persecution.

Freed Tuesday on nearly $3,000 bail after almost a week in detention, Abdel-Nour is due to stand trial on May 21. Her family refused several requests by The Associated Press to speak to her. Her father, Ebid Abdel-Nour, said: “She is innocent. God be with us. She can’t talk because she is in very bad condition.”

Emil Nazeer, a Christian activist who visited her, says she is suffering a “nervous breakdown.”

Rights advocates see cases like Abdel-Nour’s as politically motivated persecution. They say the verdicts tend to be harsher in southern Egypt, where Islamists are particularly powerful and Muslims are more conservative.

“Any move or word by a Christian is enough to get the rumor mill working,” said Amr Ezzat, a prominent researcher in Islamic groups at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). “Rumors quickly spread in villages or the towns where the radar of Islamist activists detect them and turn them into a rallying cry under the pretext that Islam’s supremacy is endangered.”

Salafis advocate an uncompromising and literal interpretation of the Quran, believing society must mirror the way the prophet and his immediate successors ruled in the 7th century. Some Salafi-based political groups are at odds with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group from which Morsi hails, while others are avid supporters of his government.

Part of the Salafis’ antagonism toward Christians is rooted in the belief that they were a protected group under Mubarak’s regime while they, the Salafis, were persecuted. Now empowered, they may be out to exact revenge on the Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 90 million people.

The Egyptian Federation for Human Rights, led by former judge Naguib Gibrael, detects a trend in the number of lawsuits and court rulings leveled against Christians and school teachers in particular over the past year.

Gibrael, a lawyer who is representing Abdul-Nour, says it’s his 18th case defending Christians — several of them teachers — detained over insulting Islam. He says his 17 other clients received three to six years in prison. They go to appeals courts, hoping for retrials or lighter sentences.

Another rights group, the EIPR, said it chronicled at least 36 blasphemy cases in 2011 and 2012, including more than 10 convictions, and that Christian school teachers were frequent targets.

“Teachers are an easy target,” said Gibrael. “Any two students can say anything about their teachers. Islamist teachers collect signatures, and quickly Islamists move a case, then terrorize the court by holding protests and besieging the court building until the judge issues a verdict. I have seen it all,” he said.

In Cairo, public figures who have lately faced blasphemy accusations or trials like movie star Adel Imam were all cleared, thanks to media attention, lobbying by rights groups and heavy police presence.

In rural areas, according to EIPR researcher Ishak Ibrahim, even those acquitted or otherwise cleared of blasphemy accusations face social or administrative punishment, with some forced by villagers to leave their homes, pay a fine or get demoted or suspended by their state employers.

Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood likes to project itself as a more moderate Islamist group when compared to the ultraconservative Salafis, but they still play a role in the blasphemy cases.

The top Brotherhood leader in Luxor, Abdel-Hamid el-Senoussi, is a lawmaker and the head of the legal team representing the families whose children testified against Abdel-Nour.

He acknowledged that two investigations by the school found no justification for the children’s claims, but said he does not trust those findings.

“They just want to avoid discord. But we prefer to get to the bottom of it,” he said. “Even if the court clears the teacher and rules that she is innocent, she must be fired from the school.”

“There are people who want to mess up with the ship of the nation and this teacher is one of them,” he said.

For him, the penalty for contempt of religion is not harsh enough. “I prefer 10 years imprisonment and, in case the judge clears the defendant, a fine that goes toward the upkeep of places of worship.”

“Anyone who insults religions must be punished to deter further assaults,” he said.

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AP writer Haggag Salama contributed to this story from Luxor, Egypt

Hundreds of activists have taken part in the activities organized by a sex education center headed by first daughter Mariela Castro.

“Join (us) to educate families about their great social responsibility to ensure that there is no discrimination of any kind,” Castro said.

The schedule included a gala bash at the capital’s cavernous Karl Marx theater, with drag performers on stage with the popular musical group Los Van Van. Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel attended.

Gays were persecuted for decades after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, sometimes sent to grueling rural work camps along with others considered socially suspect by the Communist government.

But there has been a gradual shift away from macho attitudes, and Fidel Castro himself has publicly regretted the mistreatment of people seen as different.

Six years ago, Cuba’s health care system began providing gender reassignment surgery free of charge, and a proposal to legalize same-sex civil unions is being studied.

But Mariela Castro, Fidel’s niece and the daughter of current president Raul Castro, says more must be done to raise awareness about lesbian, gay bisexual and transgender people.

Flashlights in his face, the driver steps out and places his hands on the roof while the soldiers frisk him for drugs and weapons.

He’s clean, and a hand gesture from the commanding officer sends him off into the maze of ramshackle homes that is Petare, one of the most dangerous parts of Venezuela’s notoriously crime-infested capital.

Since Monday, this scene is playing out day and night at dozens of military checkpoints set up here in the socialist government’s latest attempt to control the oil-rich country’s pandemic of violence.

Critics dismiss the “Secure Homeland” initiative as a political charade that risks degenerating into human rights abuses while having no lasting impact on crime. But to many residents, weary of being terrorized by armed gangs, seeing troops on the streets is a welcome projection of government power.

“You have to act forcefully so that people feel the force of the state,” said 47-year-old Irving Garcia, an unemployed former Army reservist, who like many Caracas residents has firsthand experience of violent crime. Garcia said he was shot in the chest when he unknowingly walked into a restaurant robbery. The bullet shattered his sternum, he said, inviting a reporter to feel a piece of protruding bone through his shirt.

With some 15,000 killings a year, Venezuela’s homicide rate is the fifth highest in the world, according to U.N. statistics. The murder rate doubled during the 14-year-rule of the late President Hugo Chavez as cheap access to guns and an ineffective justice system fed a culture of violence in slums like Petare, parts of which have become no-go zones for outsiders, including police.

Chavez banned gun sales, expanded a new national police force and stepped up policing and other programs in high-crime areas. Now, his hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, is adding military muscle by deploying 3,000 troops on the streets. The initiative started in the Caracas area on Monday and will be expanded to the states of Zulia, Lara and Carabobo next week.

Human rights activists worry that sending soldiers trained for warfare on policing missions will only make things worse for the residents they are meant to protect.

“It’s going to aggravate the situation, unfortunately, because the army isn’t prepared to deal with issues of public safety,” said Liliana Ortega, director of the COFAVIC human rights group. “We have various emblematic cases in which the use of the armed forces resulted in disproportional force.”

She said they include the 1989 street riots known as the “Caracazo,” when 300 people were killed, and a 1992 prison riot in Caracas in which 63 prisoners died.

The soldiers, who work together with the National Guard and national police force, have the power to make arrests but are supposed to hand over the detainees to civilian authorities. Any human rights abuses would be tried by civilian courts, according to the constitution.

In deeply divided Venezuela, there are also concerns over the initiative’s political undertones. Maduro narrowly won an April 14 presidential election that the opposition claims he stole through fraud, voter intimidation and abuse of government powers. Some of the first military units were deployed in areas under the political control of the opposition.

Petare, for example, lies in Miranda state, which is governed by Henrique Capriles, Maduro’s challenger in the presidential election. The mayor overseeing Petare also is from the opposition.

On Tuesday night, the military commander in charge of the troops in Petare, Gen. Antonio Benavides, led a motorcycle-borne unit roaring up deserted, winding streets, with a gaggle of journalists in tow. They stopped for a meeting with grass-roots Chavistas in the hilltop Bombilla neighborhood.

“How often does the mayor come here? How often does the governor come here?” Benavides asked the crowd of about 40 people. “Never,” they replied, unanimously.

A Capriles poster on a staircase above the outdoor gathering indicated not everyone here supports the government.

David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at the University of Georgia, said that for Maduro, the security initiative was both “an effort to fight crime and an effort to maintain or recover support in places where it has been declining because of crime and violence, among other issues.”

Though the idea of using military force against criminals resonates among Venezuelans, Smilde said, it would probably amount to little more than setting up road blocks and trying to project a presence on street corners. “But of course that just means that crime takes place a block away,” he said.

Some in Petare said the success of the initiative would depend not only on the soldiers’ ability to hunt down criminals and delinquents, but to win the trust of its law-abiding residents.

“What matters is how they are integrating with society, what they teach our young,” said Carmen Aponte, 47.

At one checkpoint, on a potholed street where stray dogs rummaged through foul-smelling litter from a daytime food market, irritated taxi drivers complained that the stop-and-search was bad for business.

“They make it hard for us,” said Jorge Torres, 50. “We can’t stop anywhere we want to and people don’t know where we can pick them up.”

He conceded the area was safer, for now, but predicted the military presence would be short lived. The government has said the soldiers will stay in the streets for a few months until regular law enforcement units can be boosted by new recruits.

“Once they leave, everything changes,” Torres said.

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Associated Press video: https://vimeo.com/66289079

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AP writer Jorge Rueda in Caracas contributed to this report.

The reported raid could touch off more clashes on the strategic island nation, home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet.

The group Al Wefaq says security forces entered the home of Shiek Isa Qassim early Friday in Diraz, about 10 kilometers (six miles) west of the capital, Manama. Qassim was not at home at the time, but his family members were present.

The statement said the teams searched the home and left, but police helicopters patrolled the area for hours after.

Bahrain has faced more than two years of unrest amid an uprising by majority Shiites seeking more political rights from Sunni rulers.

The fighting was in the Sambisa Forest Reserve, just south of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, which soldiers previously raided on the hunt for fighters belonging to the extremist network known as Boko Haram. Meanwhile, gunmen launched an assault on the hometown of one of Nigeria’s former military rulers hundreds of miles (kilometers) away, attacking a police station and banks.

Soldiers started the attack on Sambisa Forest Reserve on Thursday, having previously converged in the area in advance of President Goodluck Jonathan’s state of emergency decree affecting three states in the nation’s northeast, a security official said. The shelling killed at least 21 suspected Islamic extremists, the official said. There was no independent confirmation of the assault or casualties.

“We are not going to leave the forest until it’s over,” the official said, referring to the emergency rule.

The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing military operation. Brig. Gen. Chris Olukolade, a military spokesman based in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, could not be immediately reached for comment Friday.

In a related development, mobile phone service returned Friday morning to parts of northeast Nigeria after being cut Thursday. The security official told the AP that the service cut came on the orders of Nigeria’s government and security forces as soldiers moved into the northeast to begin operations. The official said service likely would be shut off again.

Mobile phones have become the only real communication device in Nigeria for both voice calls and the Internet, as the state-run telephone company collapsed years ago. By cutting off service at towers, the military could stop extremists from receiving warnings or intelligence ahead of their operations. Authorities said Thursday they had no information about the service cutoff or refused to comment.

Nigeria’s military and security forces have tracked fighters by their mobile phone signals in the past as well, prompting extremists from Boko Haram to attack mobile phone towers in the region.

Under the president’s directive, soldiers have ultimate control over security matters in Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states. Over the last few days, witnesses and AP journalists have seen convoys of soldiers in trucks and buses moving through the region, as well as trucks carrying armored personnel carriers. Jet fighters also have been seen flying low over Yola, the capital of Adamawa state.

This new military campaign comes on top of a previous massive deployment of soldiers and police to the region. That deployment failed to stop violence by Islamic extremists, who have killed more than 1,600 people since 2010, according to an AP count.

Jonathan’s emergency decree, declared on Tuesday, allows civilian governments to remain in place. Adamawa state Gov. Murtala Nyako, who belongs to Jonathan’s ruling People’s Democratic Party, criticized the president’s decision in a radio address Thursday night.

“I believe that the declaration has been a shock to the people of the state and others,” Nyako said. “True, this state has witnessed a few criminal activities by armed hoodlums in the last few years, but so (have) other states in the federation.”

That could be seen Thursday night in Daura, a rural town in Katsina state that’s the home of former military ruler and perennial presidential candidate Gen. Muhammadu Buhari. There, far from the states under emergency rule, gunmen attacked a police station and at least two banks, witnesses said. Police officials declined to immediately comment about the attack Friday.

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Associated Press writers also contributing to this report include Jon Gambrell in Lagos, Nigeria; Ibrahim Abdul in Yola, Nigeria; and Muawiya Garba Funtua in Katsina, Nigeria.