The Administrator of Gash-Barka region, Mr. Musa Rab'a, said that the role of women is of vital significance in the government's endeavors to ensure social justice.

When three women were named recently to share this year's Nobel Peace Prize, well-wishers said: Isn't it wonderful that women are being honored? And the news stories all led with their gender. I heard an NPR reporter say giddily that it marked a "celebration of women!"

Sit-ins, lobbying the government and further public awareness will be part of a new drive to eliminate gender-based discrimination, activists said Thursday.

A sit-in in front of Parliament will take place on Nov. 13, and another one is tentatively scheduled for Dec. 10, which marks U.N. Human Rights Day.

An Indonesian woman has won a United Nations Development Program-sponsored peace award for helping to build peace and prevent conflict in North Maluku.

Electronita Duan, from Halmahera, was awarded the N-PEACE award along with fellow peace advocates Filomena Barros dos Reis of East Timor, Purna Shova Chitrakar of Nepal and Shreen Abdul Saroor of Sri Lanka.

When Linda*, 16, entered into an agreement with her well respected 40-year-old teacher to exchange sex for good grades, she had no understanding of the inherently exploitive nature of the relationship.

As a result of the repeated sexual abuse, she became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl last year.

The UN Women's Fund for Gender Equality launches proposals for Women's Empowerment in Arab States. Perhaps everyone could take a page out of Muammar Gaddafi's book in Libya, where women have been given total conditions to foster their careers without regard to gender-based impediments.

Filmmaker, philanthropist and scholar Abigail Disney reached some surprising conclusions in her studies of war narratives. She shared them with a rapt audience at Stanford's Cemex Auditorium Wednesday evening.

The United Nations today screened The Whistleblower at its New York Headquarters, using the film's theme of a contract worker fired for investigating the alleged complicity of UN peacekeepers in sex trafficking to reaffirm its policy of zero tolerance for any such abuses.

These are the remarks, as prepared for delivery, of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a panel discussion in New York today after a screening of the film, The Whistleblower: What you have just seen is based on real events. It sheds light on an important issue — and a critical area of the UN's work. Regretfully, the film's protagonist, Kathryn Bolkovac, cannot join us this evening. I understand her son is getting married this weekend.

Kathryn Bolkovac was looking for adventure when she left Lincoln in 1999 to join the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. The Lincoln police officer got her adventure. But not as she planned. Working as a member of the International Police Task Force, she found young women from Eastern European countries being brought to Bosnia as sex slaves to service the internationals who flooded the country after its brutal ethnic civil war.