Financial pledges and policy commitments to scale up health and family planning services for women in 25 developing countries rolled out Wednesday, during the last lap of the three-day Millennium Development Goals review summit.

Donors' answer to the United Nations' request for a $169 billion women and children's health plan fell predictably short at $40 billion, with about half of that committed at previous events.

A woman took position alongside male soldiers at the graveside of a fallen colleague. She positioned her AK47 on her
shoulder, and on command fired into the grey sky with the others.

Mariatu Sesay became at that moment the first woman in the Sierra Leone army to take part in a 21-gun salute to honour a dead soldier.

When her husband was arrested for links to an insurgency raging in this southern region, Pattama Heemmima joined the ranks of Malay-Muslim women forced into the unfamiliar routine of visiting police stations, military camps and courts to secure the freedom of their imprisoned kin.

Zimbabwe's efforts to meet its Millennium Development Goals have been pinned back by the illegal Western sanctions on the country, President Mugabe has said.

In his address to the high-level plenary meeting on MDGs yesterday, the President said Zimbabwe - with the resources at its disposal and with constructive partnerships with the international community - would meet the targets.

The Turkish folk music artist Pınar Sağ is is tried for her saying, “Let the armed conflicts on our mountains end, peace should come and nobody should die” at the Düzgün Baba Festival in the Nazimiye district of Tunceli (eastern Anatolia) last year. The Nazimiye Public Prosecutor pressed charges of “praising crime and a criminal” against the artist.

A major focus of this year's convening of the Clinton Global Initiative is empowering girls and women, as I report in this dispatch from the CGI 2010 conference in New York.

Despite a call to action, the outcome document of the MDG summit makes bare mention of conflict and fragility, which need to be achieved before goals can be realised, claim g7+ members.

Standing up to Taliban death threats, a record number of women participated in Afghan parliamentary elections September 18.

“I am happy that Afghan women are becoming interested in politics day by day,” Fatana Gilani, head of the Afghan Women's Association, told Central Asia Online. “I am optimistic for the future of women in Afghanistan.”

Members of United Nations secretary- general Ban Ki Moon's Network of Men Leaders and members of the MenEngage Alliance and the Athena Network, have called on the AU, its regional bodies and member states to take urgent action in ensuring that this decade improves women's lives and brings an end to the endemic violence faced by women and girls across the continent, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The gender press briefing at the ANC national general council was scheduled for 11am on Wednesday.