An eight-year-old Pakistani girl was kidnapped by Islamist militants who forced her to wear a suicide vest to attack security forces, police said on Monday.

Police produced the girl, identified as Sohana Javaid, before a news conference broadcast on Pakistani television channels.

The girl recalled how she was kidnapped from her hometown of Peshawar and brought to the Lower Dir district in the northwest.

The OECD figures show that in 2010, official development assistance (ODA) from members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) was a mere 0.32% of their combined gross national income (GNI). This is less than half the 0.7% of their GNI, which they pledged as ODA 40 years ago.

Igniting a firestorm of global debate, the results of a Thomson Reuters Foundation poll identifying the five most dangerous countries for women are generating controversy in the blogosphere and on news organisations' websites around the world.

The European Union's ambassador to Lebanon Friday joined the rising chorus of voices denouncing the lack of female representation in the new Cabinet.

“The fact that I can only refer to him or his, is really disheartening,” Angelina Eichhorst, told The Daily Star Friday in an interview at EU headquarters in Beirut.

Efforts to free thousands of enslaved girls in Nepal and get them into school need more funding and less government bureaucracy, activists say.

Since the year 2000, more than 11,000 Kamlaris, girls committed to indentured servitude by their parents, have been rescued. But without financial support, those freed remain impoverished and some say they are forced to consider returning to work as Kamlaris.

Two strong messages came out of the meetings here of representatives of international women's and social justice organizations along with major international corporations and financial institutions: one, that despite individual agendas, these groups can and most probably will have economic inclusion on their primary list of goals; and two, if the G20 and other international financial entities don't do the same, dire results can be expected for

A coalition of women from the four major political parties in the country has been launched by President Ernest Bai Koroma in the southern regional capital, Bo.

Empowering women is just one facet of Just Like My Child's mission of improving the quality of life for the women and children in rural villages in Uganda. It gives me great pride and pleasure to share some astounding results I have received from our empowerment expert, Monica Nyiraguhabwa. She did some follow up from an empowerment workshop she did at the Namumira Primary School (Vicki Malinchak School) we just completed.

On Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned from a whirlwind tour through Zambia, Ethiopia and Tanzania, on which she sat down with national leaders and spoke on the benefits of fair crossborder trade and the importance of ending relations with Moammar Khadafy's Libya.