The Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan begin today. President Barack Obama announced his nomination of Kagan to the Supreme Court on May 10. If confirmed, Kagan would be the fourth woman Supreme Court Justice ever confirmed to the Court. She would be the third woman justice on the current Court and would fill the seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens, who announced his retirement in April.

Amnesty International welcomes the establishment of a new United Nations (UN) agency dedicated to strengthening its work on women's human rights, and in particular the opportunity it presents to address violence against women in the Pacific.

When men squabble, count on women to patch things up.

Saying women are better equipped than men in handling the more emotional aspects of peace negotiations, outgoing Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process Annabelle Abaya has urged the incoming administration to include more women on the government panels dealing with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

A certain hallowed ritual around the United Nations holds that to ensure a truly auspicious beginning, any new branch of the world body needs a really first-rate acronym.

So the new umbrella organization for women, which was unanimously approved by the General Assembly on Friday after years of haggling, seemed off to a rocky start, given that its acronym would be Unegeew.

In one of the more prominent of a series of recent rape scandals in Kurdish dominated southeastern Turkey, at least four girls aged between 12 and 14 were found to have been sexually exploited by state officials, including an assistant headmaster at a school and an employee of a local police department, over a period of two years in Siirt, a town located in a province plagued by fighting between the Kurdish insurgency and Turkish army.

In Mozambique NIMD supports a training project to encourage women to take an active role in politics. Mozambique is one of the 15 countries in the world with the highest representation of women in parliament, at 35 percent. It also has a female prime minister, Mrs Luisa Dias Diogo. Nevertheless there are two main stumbling blocks for women in their own parties.

Angola's experience of gender participation in politics and decision making organs was praised at the meeting of the Network of Women MPs of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) held on June 14 and 15 in Sao Tome and Principe.

The United Nations on Wednesday launched its first compilation of the best practices for its peacekeepers and other workers to prevent, deter and respond to the use of rape as a war tactic.

The booklet, titled: "Addressing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence - An Analytical Inventory of Peacekeeping Practice", was launched at the UN headquarters in New York, US.

The Women's Action for Development (WAD) has expressed disappointment in the reduction of women in the new National Assembly in Namibia from 33 percent to 22 percent.

Veronica de Klerk, the WAD Executive Director attributes the low number of women to sit in parliament to all political parties who listed women lowly on their candidate's lists.

The UN is to set up a single agency dedicated to promote the rights of women and girls around the world. The UN General Assembly voted in favour of the body after four years of negotiations. The new UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women will be referred to as UN Women, officials said. It will start work at the beginning of next year and unify four existing UN divisions dealing with women's issues.