A record number of women are running in Afghanistan's critical parliamentary elections next month despite many being inundated with threatening phone calls, including death threats from insurgents.

Amid ever-rising violence, which some people fear could foster a repeat of last year's catastrophic presidential election, women are struggling to campaign at all outside a few areas, poll monitors say.

The monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed thousands and affected an estimated twenty million people across several provinces. According to development organizations working in the country, the humanitarian crisis is yet another blow for Pakistan's rural women. With increasing effects of climate change, the longer-term situation can only get worse.

In many Middle Eastern and North African countries, the reliance on labour-based markets has long put women at a disadvantage for employment, an independent media organisation has said.

Each night before she goes to sleep, Umm Shekar checks to make sure her pistol is loaded and tucks it beneath her mattress.

Increasingly worried about being robbed by criminal gangs or insurgents, the mother of six bought the weapon so she could defend herself and her family.

Her husband, a clothes importer-exporter, spends much of his time outside of Iraq, adding to her sense of vulnerability.

Agnes Monica, the famous Indonesian actress and singer, is a given to wearing sexy clothes, whether on stage, TV or advertising billboards. But not here, in the provincial capital of Aceh province. Just across from the 19th-century Baiturrahman Grand Mosque is a large billboard that features Agnes wearing a headscarf — even though she's a Christian.

In the well-publicized controversial -- and “plagiarized” -- ruling of the Supreme Court in the Vinuya vs. Romulo case, the justices en banc dismissed the petition of more than 70 “comfort women” belonging to the “Malaya Lolas Organization.”

The numbers are in dispute, but the story they tell has remained the same for four decades: 200,000 women (or 300,000, or 400,000, depending on the source) raped during the 1971 war in which East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.

IOM Colombia is training public officials on gender-based violence against women; how to identify it, address it and provide assistance to victims.

"Weapons were silenced so women and people can speak" and "My body is my house, my house is my territory. Do not deliver the keys" are the slogans that indicate the direction of the discussions of the "International Meeting of Women and Peoples of the Americas Against Militarization," which begins next Monday (16th), in Colombia.

A consultative meeting between UNIFEM (part of UN Women) and the Human Development and Gender Commission of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was held in Abuja, Nigeria on 17 August, on a programme to end violence against women in the ECOWAS sub-region.

The programme was initiated by UNIFEM in 2009 and is funded by the Italian Cooperation.