After curving through miles of Quebec's countryside, the road to Montebello arrives at an enormous log cabin along the Ottawa River. Busloads of women pull up, from Rwanda, Colombia, the Congo, Mexico, Bosnia, Burma -- women who think they can change the world.

Civic society leaders in Mutare say holding elections this year would be a recipe for disaster.

A reporter at large about the recruitment and treatment of foreign workers employed as support staff on American military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Lauryn Oates started raising money to send women in Afghanistan to school, she wasn't sure they would ever emerge from the underground classrooms that kept them hidden from the threat of the Taliban.

Women are big winners in the cabinet appointed on Friday. The number of women ministers rose from 16 in the last cabinet to 22 in the new one.

Women now constitute 28% of the ministers. If the vacant post of Minister of State for East African Affairs is filled by a woman, the percentage will rise to 30%.

The forced return from Qatar to Libya of a woman who had made complaints about gang rapes in Tripoli and was later recognized as a refugee violates international law, the United Nations refugee agency said today.

The international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague has previously launched investigations into the alleged use of systematic rape as a weapon against the civilian population by leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda and militia groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.

A new report has rekindled debate on whether the Rwandan government "betrayed" women who were raped during the 1994 genocide by letting community-based gacaca courts process their cases.

A NATO official in Kosovo says a peacekeeper has been charged with raping several women working in a military camp in the west of the country.

Cpt. Hans Wichter said the 37-year-old Austrian peacekeeper "intimidated the women and used his position as their superior to rape them and coerce them into sexual acts."

In recent times, Bangladesh has been witnessing a sharp and steep decline in social and moral values -- values that dignify and distinguish a society. Everyday newspapers carry series of harrowing, gruesome tales that were unheard of a few decades ago. What has happened that the Bangladeshi society is sadly sliding into such a social and moral depravity?