Many have long maintained that a mass-based and sustained campaign of nonviolent Palestinian resistance -- a "White Intifada" -- if vigorously supported by a united Palestinian leadership and by Israeli, Arab, and international peace and solidarity movements, could end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

Currently, more women in Kurdistan are seeking primary, secondary and higher education, creating a more educated female workforce.

Pakistani lawmakers have adopted tougher penalties for acid attacks in a step towards eradicating a form of violence that can disfigure around 200 women a year, campaigners said Wednesday.

The Council of Europe says 13 countries have signed a convention aimed at combating violence against women.

Council spokesman Can Fisek says the convention was signed on Wednesday by Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey at a meeting of the foreign ministers of the 47-member council in Istanbul.

Policies aimed at expanding trade in Bhutan and promoting the Asian country's unique goal of maximizing “gross national happiness” should be linked to strategies for educating women and enhancing their positions in society and in the economy, a new United Nations report says.

After the war, one of the few jobs available is clearing explosives.

The women are taking back war-torn northern Sri Lanka, one square metre at a time.

"Security forces in civilian clothes have threatened me with the jambiyya, not just during demonstrations, but everywhere I go," the protest leader and journalist Tawakkol Karman told me, describing the traditional dagger that Yemeni men wear strapped to their waists.

The head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says Latin America and the Caribbean region remains the most socially unequal place in the world, highlighting the measures required to tackle the problem in a region which has made significant strides in reducing poverty.

This week a new chapter in the history of Colombia's long and bloodthirsty civil conflict is set to open. The "Victims' Law" and land restitution bill, which has been crawling through the national congress for the last six months, is about to be passed. And with it, says the Colombian government, an entirely new settlement between Colombia's three million victims of internal violence and the state.