Today, like every other Friday since February, Iraqi citizens will gather in Tahrir Square – in Baghdad, not Cairo – to protest corruption, poor government, lack of basic services, high unemployment rates and constraints on freedom of expression.

The Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent Wednesday in Port-au-Prince three senior UN officials as part of the corrective measures proposed after the scandal gang rape by four Uruguayan peacekeepers on a young Haitian 18, in the town of Port-Salut (south).

The United Nations human rights office is appealing to Member States to give generously to an important fund that has for the past 20 years given grants to grassroots initiatives that help victims of slavery transform their lives.
The UN Voluntary Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery has seen a marked decrease in donations received in recent years, according to the office (OHCHR).

The relationship between gender equality and economic advancement is continuing to strengthen, and can greatly affect the productivity of companies and countries alike. The issue was raised yesterday at the World Bank's press conference in anticipation of the release of its World Development Report on Gender and Equality and Development.

Madeleine Rees, a former U.N. human rights official and the inspiration for one of the heroines in the film The Whistleblower, was wrongfully dismissed from her job with the Geneva-based U.N. Office of the High Commission for Human Rights in March 2010, according to a ruling by the U.N.'s administrative disputes tribunal.

As rebels stormed Col. Moammar Gadhafi's lavish Tripoli compound in August, one foreign correspondent, Alex Crawford of Sky News, was there to cover the action. At one point, she even interviewed an ecstatic rebel fighter wearing one of Gadhafi's military caps stolen from the dictator's master bedroom. Crawford has been called the journalistic face of the Libyan conflict.

Michelle Bachelet first met Hillary Clinton at a photo opportunity, when the Chilean was on the cusp of becoming her country's first female presidential candidate. The two women wound up talking for almost an hour, on women, politics and health policy.

The UN Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) and the Karnataka government on Wednesday signed a project cooperation agreement to empower elected women representatives and promote gender responsive good governance. The agreement was signed between the department of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (RDPR), government of Karnataka and the UN Women.

Amina*, 27, left her home town of Kismayo in south-central Somalia at the end of May for northern Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp. The journey took her and her four children 14 days and nearly broke them, but between the famine and the conflict, she was afraid that staying in Somalia could mean death.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has sent a senior team to Haiti to enforce the United Nations' zero-tolerance policy on misconduct by its personnel following the alleged sexual assault of an 18-year-old Haitian man by Uruguayan members of the UN peacekeeping mission in the Caribbean nation.