Countries have been urged to provide key military assets and more women staff to serve at United Nations peacekeeping operations.

The call came from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as the Security Council held an open debate on peacekeeping operations.

The trauma and eventual death of a young student from Delhi following her brutal gang rape awakened many across the country to demand accountability from the government to establish stronger laws and more effective institutions to prevent violence against women. The need is to ensure greater security and justice for women and girls within a larger framework of a humane, just and equitable society.

Colombian Conservative and former Uribe defence minister, Marta Lucía Ramírez on Wednesday announced her intention to run in next year´s presidential elections.

Ramírez must first gain the support of the Conservative bigwigs before her candidature is confirmed, but she is by a clear margin the best hope the party has of securing a meaningful representation in the race for the Casa de Nariño.

Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

Haneen Zoabi is an Arab member of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament). In late December 2012, the Israeli Supreme Court overruled a Central Elections Commission decision and ruled that Zoabi can stand for re-election in 2013.

Zoabi is a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause. She was the first Arab woman to be elected to the Knesset, where she has served for almost four years.

Finland wants to make it easier for women to enter peacekeeping forces, but this could mean loosening physical fitness requirements.

Most Finnish peacekeepers carried out their military service as members of an elite crisis preparedness group. Last year 600 conscripts sought a spot on the team. Not a single woman made the cut. The test involves running 2,600 metres in 12 minutes.

For the past 10 months, a little-known conflict in a marginalized corner of northeast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has left a trail of killing, abduction, rape and forced displacement, with few signs of an imminent resolution. The epicentre of the conflict is a vast forest reserve covering some 13,700sqkm in Orientale Province.

In a historical protest against sexual violence against women hundreds of thousands of angry women and men spontaneously gathered in the streets in India, following the brutal 16 December gang rape and murder of a 23 year old student in Delhi.

Natan Sharansky, chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, was in New York for a quick two-day trip last week, meeting with a variety of American Jewish leaders on his newest assignment: seeking to resolve the conflict between women who want to hold prayer services at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and traditionalists who oppose them on religious grounds.

If sorted out from the floating theories on the culprits and their motivations, what the execution-style killings of three female Kurdish activists in Paris showed was that the conflicting parties, and third actors, of the long-standing conflict in Turkey over the Kurdish issue still maintain their deep-rooted, old habits.