November is hot in Congo. Every month is hot in Congo.

So it's likely their faces shone with sweat when the first residents of Duru, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, raced from mud hut to mud hut with a warning that sounded like, “El are ah!” That's “LRA,” in French or the Congolese dialect Lingala.

Two Iranian activists have been arrested as a group of political prisoners ended a hunger strike protesting the death of a women's rights activist, friends say.

The central African area's founding leader John Garang said the area's women were ‘the poorest of the poor and the most marginalised of the marginalised.'

But as South Sudan gets ready to become an official independent nation, on July 9, things are changing for women.

Since 2005, when North and South Sudan signed a peace deal that put a stop to decades of civil war, the tide has been turning.

A South Asian regional conference on “Promoting Gender Responsive Democratic Governance in South Asia” has started in Kathmandu from Tueday.

This is the first of two stories focusing on rape as a tool of war. The second story looks at the untold stories of rape in the Holocaust. Both stories contain graphic language; discretion is advised.

The envoy spearheading United Nations efforts to combat sexual violence during conflicts has strongly condemned the mass rape of more than 150 civilians in the far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) earlier this month.

There are many things for which Uganda has come to be known over the past quarter of a century. It was, for starters, the first country in post-colonial Africa where a sitting government collapsed due to pressure from a homegrown insurgency.

A report released by the Gender Monitoring Office, shows that women massively participated in the just concluded local elections.

54.5 percent of the registered voters were women, compared to 45.5 percent men. It also shows that 41 percent of the candidates who ran for elections for district advisory committees were women.

Al Qaeda and the Taliban appear to have ordered their cadres to increasingly use women to carry out suicide and armed attacks, Pakistan's security officials and western defense officials have told CBS News.