The World’s Most Powerful Women: June 30

Valentina Zarya (@valzarya) here, filling in for Claire this week.

Note: I sent out a duplicate version of the June 29th newsletter earlier this morning. Below is the news for June 30th. Apologies for any confusion!

U.S. Prime Minister Theresa May won a critical parliamentary vote on Thursday to approve her policy program by a narrow margin of 323 to 309. Defeat would have been a major blow to May’s new administration, as the vote was to approve last week’s Queen’s Speech, which laid out May’s plans for the next two years.

Pundits see the win—which was only possible thanks to a pact signed this week between her Conservative party and Northern Ireland’s small Democratic Unionist Party—as May overcoming the first of what is likely to be many challenges to her ability to govern, since she lost her overall majority in the snap election she called earlier this month.

Hours before the vote, Conservatives were forced into a major concession: England will now pay for women from Northern Ireland to travel to the country for abortions. Abortion is far more tightly restricted in Northern Ireland than in the rest of the U.K., meaning that hundreds of women a year travel to Britain to terminate pregnancies. Previously, they had to cover travel and medical costs themselves.

EUROPE/MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA

Making waves in Venice In 2010, 900 years after the profession emerged, Giorgia Boscolo became the first officially recognized female gondoliera—or gondola operator—in the city of Venice, Italy. After news of her job spread across Italy, a flurry of applications from other women was expected to follow. Except that didn’t happen. Boscolo remains the only woman with the coveted license to guide tourists through the city’s labyrinthine canals. Guardian

Widows take a stand

The widows of nine men (the so-called "Ogoni nine"), who were hanged by Nigeria’s military government in the 1990s, have launched a civil case against Shell, accusing it of complicity in their husbands’ executions. The men were hanged in a military court following a peaceful uprising by 300,000 Ogonis against Shell’s widespread pollution in Ogoniland. Amnesty International has sided with the widows.

Guardian

THE AMERICAS

Another bloody sexist remark

U.S. President Donald Trump ignited another Twitter firestorm Thursday after tweeting about television host Mika Brzezinski. He commented that she was "bleeding badly from a face-lift" during her stay with him at Mar-a-Lago. Here's a rundown from Fortune's Alana Abramson on other controversial comments the U.S. leader has made about female reporters:

Fortune

Google crawls towards parity

Google released its new diversity report Thursday, for the fourth year in a row. The updated global workforce data shows that women make up 31% of all employees at Google. Twenty percent of Google tech workers were women, up from 17% three years ago. And women hold one in four leadership roles at the company.

Fortune

Uber terrifying allegations

A U.S. woman who alleges that she was raped by her Uber driver is suing the company for ignoring his violent history. She says that Uber was previously alerted that the driver is dangerous by another woman, who was assaulted by him a few weeks prior. The driver in question—a convicted felon who served eight years in prison for attempted murder—currently has a warrant out for his arrest.

Fortune

ASIA-PACIFIC

She gets it from her daughter?

Ivanka Trump has been hailed as a "goddess" in China, but the answer to her popularity may rest with her five-year-old daughter, Arabella, who learned Mandarin from the crib thanks to a Chinese nanny. She was already a social media star in the country thanks to adorable renditions of traditional Chinese songs, but skyrocketed in popularity thanks to her performance for Chinese President Xi Jinping, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on China's leading Internet TV site, qq.com.

Time