General Women, Peace and Security

When Tanya Rosenblit boarded the No. 451 bus to Jerusalem last month, she knew that the predominantly ultra-Orthodox passengers would keep their distance from her because of their adherence to strict rules of gender segregation.

But when one of them demanded she move to the rear, Ms. Rosenblit held her ground.

President-elect Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general, and the 49-year-old Baldetti, both of the rightwing Patriotic Party, will be sworn in Jan. 14.

I'm not a gender essentialist. I don't believe that women are from Venus and men are from Mars. I suspect strongly, in fact, that women and men are the same species and might even be able to reproduce.

Fatuma Elmi, a resettled refugee from Somalia, recently attended an international conference on the world's forcibly displaced and stateless organized the UN refugee agency.The meeting took place last month at the organization's headquarters in Geneva.

(UN Photo)

Davao City has given birth to another groundbreaking initiative – The Women's Peace Table.

Of course, it is but natural that the city known for its empowered women and a Galing Pook-winning gender mainstreaming program should be the one to come up with this bright idea.

Shortly before Christmas, President Obama issued an order creating a National Action Plan On Women, Peace and Security (NAP) which reads in part:

(a) The United States recognizes that promoting women's participation in conflict prevention, management, and resolution, as well as in post conflict relief and recovery, advances peace, national security, economic and social development, and international cooperation.

"A dead rat is worth more than the body of a woman." Those were the words of one distraught young woman whom I met in Walikale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2010.

When President Obama introduced new legislation to combat domestic violence in October 2011, the U.S. administration promised a $25 million a year budget for programs that hope to bring domestic violence prevention organizations to the table along with recent $150 million dollar funded federal extension programs for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Grants.

It's perhaps the only market in the world where all the vendors are women. Ima Keithal in Manipur's capital of Imphal (in the north eastern region of India on the border of Myanmar/Burma) is a tourists' paradise where women, sell everything from vegetables to beautiful hand spun shawls. But there's a bitter behind-the-scenes story here.