As fighting in Syria goes on, a 30-country delegation opened peace talks yesterday with a "testy exchange." But a group of Syrian women have come together to demand an end to their country's civil war, and a place in negotiations to implement peace there.
A massive new UN survey has found that in some parts of Asia, more than half of the men admit to forcing a woman to have sex. Throughout the countries involved in the research, one in four men admitted to rape. Congratulations, UN Rape Survey. You found a thing to make even 9/11 seem worse.
Provoked by the four-year-long lawsuit
On the eve of "Swarmageddon," the name given to a cicada awakening 17 years in the making, the United Nations has released a report that highly recommends eating insects as a part of a healthy and balanced diet. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that many of the 1,900 species of insects that humans…
If you think the concept of International Women's Day is cheesy/problematic/[insert gripe here], you'll probably think "One Woman: A song for UN Women," described in a press release as "a musical celebration of women worldwide, featuring 25 artists from 20 countries across the globe" is corny, too.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Secretaries of State hearing UN pleas do it. Yesterday, a photographer caught Hillary Clinton aimlessly drawing on her speech notes during a UN Security Council meeting on the Middle East peace process. The situation is grim, shooting, suffering etc., but all of that starts to run together…
Somewhere there is a drug dealer who is really pissed that 30 pounds of his choice coke has gone missing. But if he wanted it so badly, he shouldn't have mailed it to the United Nations. The cocaine was sent inside fake diplomatic pouches, and ended up in the UN's mailroom last week. People there immediately recognized …
Sometime within the last day or so, it's estimated that the world's 7 billionth child was born. This child, like all children, was gestated in the body of a woman and like most children, is likely to be fed, bathed, and raised primarily by a woman. Whether the world that the child inhabits as he or she grows up is one…
The UN recently issued a report that declares that countries that restrict access to either abortion or contraception are violating a woman's human rights. The report also declares it Officially Messed Up when a woman is prosecuted for taking illegal drugs or drinking during her pregnancy, because it's her body and the …
The new UN agency for women has released a report on the progress of women worldwide. Despite the optimism implied by "progress," spoiler alert — it's all pretty terrible. But there are charts!
But the overall percentages of women in the police and judiciary are still pretty pathetic.…
It's not often that there's good news for women's access to health care, but here's some: maternal mortality is down by one third since 1990. What did the trick?
What does increased foreign presence in post-earthquake Haiti bring? Donated money, aid workers and increased U.N. presence, for sure. Also, Dominican prostitutes hoping to make a living off them.
[New York, July 6. Queen Elizabeth ll signs the visitors' book before departing the United Nations headquarters. Image via AP]
Last Friday, the United Nations general assembly unanimously voted to approve UN Women, an agency that will launch in January of 2011 and focus solely on issues surrounding the women of the world.
This week the UN gave Iran a four-year seat on its Commission on the Status of Women. But some activists criticize the decision, saying "Iran's discriminatory laws demonstrate that the Islamic Republic does not believe in gender equality." [FOX News]
[New York, March 5. Image via Getty]
[New York, February 22. Image via Getty]
[Leogane, Haiti; January 23. Image via Getty]
Last week, sitting alongside United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the Princess of Thailand, twenty-eight year-old Lebanese activist Ghida Anani delivered a fiery, unblinking address on fighting violence against women. Here's what we talked about afterward.
