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to 2001 -- like running for parliament.
• In the last elections in 2010, 69 women won seats in Afghanistan's 249-seat parliament. The next parliamentary vote will be held in 2015, but first are the April 5 presidential and provincial council elections.
• Under Afghan law, 20 percent of council member seats are reserved for women, who are also figuring prominently in presidential campaigns. Three presidential hopefuls have taken the bold step of choosing a woman as a running mate, including one of the front-runners.
• Habiba Danish, a legislator from northern Takhar province, said she was the top vote getter in her province in the last parliamentary polls. Throughout the country, including in the south and the east where the hard-line Taliban are waging a stubborn insurgency, women have been elected to parliament.
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• BADROUSIEH, Syria (AP) -- When hundreds of residents of the postcard-pretty coastal Syrian village of Kassab fled this week, it bore historic weight: it was the third time since 1900 that ethnic Armenians there felt compelled to run for their lives.
• They left once at the hands of vengeful Turkish neighbors, and later because of Ottoman forces. This time it was Syrian rebels storming into town. It was a heavy blow for the minority community that sees the town as key to preserving the Armenians' identity in Syria.
• Kassab "is a symbol of Armenian history, language and continuity. It's very symbolic," said Ohannes Geukjian, a political science professor who writes on contemporary Armenian history and politics. "And so the fall of Kassab, I consider it the defeat of Armenian identity in that area."
• Rebels seized control of Kassab on Sunday after launching an attack two days earlier in the coastal Syrian province of Latakia. The fighters were from an array of conservative and Islamic groups, including the al-Qaida-affiliated Nusra Front.
• The province has an ancient Armenian presence, but is better known as a bastion of support for President Bashar Assad. It is his ancestral home and that of followers of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, that he belongs to.
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