Billboard portraying soldier and Muslim woman coming to Bakersfield-Images and Video

A billboard depicting a US soldier with his arm around a Muslim woman wearing a niqab has been denied a place in New York City’s Times Square because of a fear the picture would be too polarizing.

The advertisement was developed for an anti-snoring mouth spray from a company called SnoreStop. Along with the picture in question, the billboard also features the Twitter hashtag #BeTogether and a tagline reading “SnoreStop: keeping you together.” 

The California-based pharmaceutical company has also used the tongue-in-cheek motto: “If we can keep this couple together, we can keep anyone together.”

Afghanistan's women still suffer threat of family murder

Family members are often the perpetrators of the murders of women they believe have 'shamed' the family

So-called 'honour killings' became culturally engrained in Afghanistan during the Taliban's hard-lined, punitive, conservative rule from 1996 to late 2001.

The entrenched belief is that girls and women bring shame upon their family if they do not marry a man chosen for them by their parents.

Often, girls are married off before they have reached

Afghan woman’s family ‘behead her and her lover and dump their bodies in graveyard in horrific honour killing’

A young couple in conservative southern Afghanistan have been found beheaded, apparently killed for having a love affair outside of marriage, officials said Wednesday.

Police investigating the case said they believed the family of the woman, aged around 20, was responsible for the murders in the southern province of Helmand, a lawless hotbed of the Taliban insurgency.

The elder brother of the male victim, who was in his 20s, told officers the woman had run away with him recently and was living in their family home. 

On Monday, 10 men broke into the house near the provincial capital Lashkar Gah and kidnapped the pair, police official Mohammad Ismail Hotak told AFP.