A Muslim woman in the southern Indian state of Kerala has received death threats after leading prayers for a mixed congregation in an act of defiance against established Islamic practice. Jamida Beevi is thought to be the first woman to lead Friday prayers in India for both male and female worshippers, doing so at Wandoor Cherukod village in Malappuram last week. She also delivered a sermon on gender justice.

“I believe in the Qur’an and the Qur’an teaches equality between the sexes. All this discrimination against women is manmade, imposed by the male clergy and I want to change it,” said Beevi, 34, speaking to the Guardian by phone on Tuesday. TradiBeevi said she believed the Qur’an contains no injunction that says only men can lead prayers. She belongs to a small sect called the Qur’an Sunnat Society; it believes only in the Qur’an, not in the hadith – the statements made by the prophet on a variety of subjects and written down by his followers after his death. Most orthodox Muslims believe in both the Qur’an and the hadith.tionally a male imam leads prayers, except when the congregation is all female.(theguardian)…[+]

The carmaker Volkswagen has suspended its head of external relations and sustainability after admitting that he had known about experiments in which monkeys were locked in small chambers and exposed to diesel exhaust. Thomas Steg, a former government spokesman who worked for German chancellor Angela Merkel and her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, is the first person to be relieved of his duties as VW said it was “drawing the consequences” of the scandal, which has rocked both the government and industry.

The company initially tried to distance itself from the institute that commissioned the tests, the European Research Group of Environment and Health in the Transport Sector (EUGT), a car lobby group funded by Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. But it is now known that VW managers were informed about the testing before and after it was carried out. Steg has been pinpointed as a senior manager who knew that the experiments were going on, with internal papers seen by German media suggesting he had known about them in 2013.(theguardian)…[+]

Amazon is diving into healthcare, teaming up with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the New York bank JP Morgan to create a company that helps their US employees find quality care “at a reasonable cost” and tackle the “hungry tapeworm on the American economy”.

The business giants offered few details on Tuesday and said the project is in the early planning stage. But the move from Amazon, which has long eyed the US’s enormous health market, sent shares in health insurance companies and pharmacy chains into a tailspin.“The ballooning costs of [healthcare] act as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” Buffett said in a statement. “Our group does not come to this problem with answers. But we also do not accept it as inevitable. Rather, we share the belief that putting our collective resources behind the country’s best talent can, in time, check the rise in health costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.”(theguardian)…[+]