by Kristin Engh Førde, Kilden, Norway - The Norwegian ban on the purchase of sex was intended to reduce human trafficking and to convince people that prostitution is wrong. But has it worked? Both yes and no.

by Anne Winsnes Rødland, Kilden, Norway - Internally displaced women in Colombia are organizing themselves to secure their rights to housing, education and health care. But along with this come threats, violence and dissatisfied husbands. Is it worth it?

by Whitney Johnson, Harvard Business Review, USA - Unless women speak up — and I don't mean just talk, but get fluent in and remain fluent in a domain of expertise, whether finance, technology, science, fashion, construction, law — the whole idea that women can bring something extra to the table and be game changers won't happen.

by Claudia Costa, European Journalism Centre, Netherlands - The Italian media landscape is a good case study for such degenerating ethical behaviour. With the main newspapers and television channels deeply immersed in the country’s never ending political struggles, unquestioned reports breaching ethical and legal codes seem to be becoming increasingly frequent in the mainstream media.

by Kristin Engh Førde, Kilden, Norway - The disciplining and control of women and the feminine are intimately related to notions of cultural and racial purity. As a result, racist ideologies are almost always also misogynist and anti-feminist.

by Lara Dotson-Renta, Arab Media & Society, Egypt - It has been hip-hop that has become the most iconic and widespread soundtrack of the Arab Spring and, interestingly, it is having the double effect of helping to mobilize activists in the countries directly impacted by the pro-democracy movements while also solidifying links between Arab diasporic communities in the West with those still residing in the ‘homeland.’

by Siri Lindstad, Kilden, Norway - Gays and lesbians can now marry or register as partners in all the Nordic countries, with the exception of the Faroe Islands. Yet even within the gay movement there has been a long-standing resistance to marriage for same-sex couples.

by Abby Rapoport, Texas Observer, USA - Public education has always offered big contracts to for-profit companies in areas like construction and textbooks. But in the past two decades, an education-reform movement has swept the country, pushing for more standardized testing and accountability and for more alternatives to the traditional classroom—most of it supplied by private companies.

by Jasmina Babic, Global Voices, The Netherlands - What is happening in the centre of Athens has a name: proclamation of martial law by banning right of gathering and freedom.

by Sue Sturgis, Facing South, USA - A report released last year by Environment North Carolina found that the value of the tourism and fishing industries is three times larger than the value of any oil and gas production in the Eastern Gulf, four times larger in the Mid-Atlantic states and 20 times larger in the South Atlantic.

by Astrid Sverresdotter Dypvik, Kilden, Norway - A record number of women want to study technology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). More men are applying for pre-school teacher training. But most students still make traditional choices.

by Linn Stalsberg, Kilden, Norway - When a black lesbian is passed by at the workplace, is that a case of discrimination against women? Of gay people? Or because of her race? Or a stereotype that the three elements create in combination?

by Heidi Elisabeth Sandnes, Kilden, Norway - Women are, in fact, found in philosophical history, even though they have not been included in the canon.

by Siri Lindstad, Kilden, Norway - When traditional Norwegian farming is converted to nature-based agritourism, the gender roles on the farm change. Often the women become the general managers, while the men take over in the kitchen.

by Judith Matloff, Columbia Journalism Review, USA - Women have risen to the top of war and foreign reportage. They run bureaus in dodgy places and do jobs that are just as dangerous as those that men do. But there is one area where they differ from the boys - sexual harassment and rape.

by Sue Sturgis, Facing South, USA - The landmark $333 million court settlement that propelled legal researcher Erin Brockovich to environmental stardom involved the contamination of a California town's groundwater with hexavalent chromium, a toxic compound known to cause cancer.

by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Foreign Affairs, USA - Portraying the Muslim Brotherhood as eager and able to seize power and impose its version of sharia on an unwilling citizenry is a caricature that exaggerates certain features of the Brotherhood and underestimates the extent to which the group has changed over time.

by Laura Carlsen, Eurasia Review, UK - Ciudad Juarez in recent years has been described as a no-man’s Land, where legal institutions have lost control to the armed force of drug cartels. The femicides show us, though, that the causal chain is really the reverse.

by Yvonne Ridley, Foreign Policy Journal, UK - Armed with nothing more than a revolutionary heart and hopes of a better future Tunisians gathered and protested as government forces aimed their weapons and fired live rounds in to the crowds.

by Emma Sinclair-Webb, New Europe, Belgium - The European Commission’s latest annual report on Turkey’s progress toward EU membership made one thing very clear: Turkey is not doing enough to improve its human rights record.

by Kristin Engh Førde, Kilden, Norway - Is forced marriage an immigration problem or violence against women and children? The Norwegian authorities have not totally made up their minds.

by Laura Carlsen, Foreign Policy in Focus, USA - Two worlds will collide in Cancun, but they share a single planet. If the world that defends our current model of production and consumption prevails, the planet will edge ever closer to catastrophe.

by Anita Haslie, Kilden, Norway - Raising small children without stress, good health and a sense of fairness in the marriage – this is the experience of spouses in the 1970s who shared the responsibility of staying at home with the children while working part-time. Sociologist Margunn Bjørnholt has interviewed these couples 30 years later.

by Sue Sturgis, Facing South, USA - To understand where the hurricane protection system for New Orleans stands today, it's helpful to go back to 1965.

by Rebecca Trager, Nature News, United Kingdom - Worldwide, an estimated 33 million people are living with HIV, roughly half of them women, according to UNAIDS. In South Africa, one in three women aged 20–34 is estimated to be infected with HIV. Because 60% of all new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa are in women, there is a sense of urgency surrounding the development of HIV-prevention tools for this group.

by Habibe Ozdal, The Journal of Turkish Weekly, Turkey - Since gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine's relationship with Russia has been rocky, alternatively wishing to forge its own path and remain close to Russia. Ukraine's strategic location means the US, the EU, and Russia are all very concerned about its foreign policy choices,

by Nicolette Hahn Niman, Earth Island Institute, USA - The most environmentally sustainable food production mimics nature in all its complexity – and animals are an essential component.

by Kristin Engh Førde, Kilden, Norway - The war in Afghanistan is a war to liberate women, supporters claimed. Eight years later the voices that spoke on behalf of Afghan women have fallen silent.

by Mridu Khullar, The Caravan, India - In the race to modernise before the Commonwealth Games, Delhi’s trashpickers are being left behind.

by Kristin Engh Førde, Kilden, Norway - Studies suggest that sexual harassment can cause female athletes to leave the field of sport. “This means that harassment may lead to big losses for sport,” says Professor Kari Fasting, Norway’s foremost expert on the subject.

by Sue Sturgis, Facing South, USA - It was one year ago today that a 60-foot-tall dam broke at holding pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant in Roane County, Tenn., dumping more than a billion gallons of toxic coal ash onto a nearby community and into the Clinch and Emory rivers.

by Heidi Elisabeth Sandnes, Kilden, Norway - Scandinavian parents have no doubt that the state is responsible for providing day care centres for children from the age of one.

by Agnes Heller, Hungarian Quarterly, Hungary - The story of the last twenty years, of the period since the "change of regime" introducing a genuinely democratic system of government, is a novel one for Hungary. Yet, it is a very old story.

by Jayshree Bajoria, Council on Foreign Relations, USA - CFR International Affairs Fellow Kara C. McDonald says she is skeptical that this tactical shift in U.S. policy will help achieve its goal of a democratic Myanmar that respects human rights, releases all its political prisoners, and ends conflict with its ethnic minorities.

by Laura Wides-Munoz, Latinamerican Post, USA - Wise Latina. The catchphrase of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Senate confirmation hearings has taken on a life of its own, spawning T-shirts, note cards, dog jerseys and even thongs.

by Rasa Balockaite, Eurozine, Austria - "Go West", a 1970s song by the Village People, was popularized again in 1993 by the Pet Shop Boys, which bestowed the phrase with new connotations. Before the 1990s, in the United States at least, "Go West" would refer to the victorious conquest of the West in the nineteenth century or, even more likely, to the appeal of the youth movements in San Francisco and other West Coast cities in the 1960s.

by Danielle Chubb, On Line Opinion, Australia - People smuggling is not a security dilemma. It is a humanitarian challenge.

by Ruth Oniang'o, AJFAND, Kenya - The food systems in Africa are in dire need of serious attention. Facilities and personnel to monitor and maintain a safe food supply are in short supply.

Lygia Navarro, Virginia Quarterly Review, USA - August in Havana is a mounting wave of heat—so consuming, the sun so piercing, it can warp your sense of reason. Tempt you to surrender. Make you flirt with insanity. The pained faces around you are covered in grimy sweat, a haze of resignation in the eyes. Here or there a woman fans herself, perhaps with some ladylike, store-bought thing, but more often with a stray scrap of cardboard. Inside, heat radiates from every surface, the temperature rising as the torridity soaks deeper into the concrete walls. Outside is worse. Few dare venture into the scorching light.

by Chipo Sithole, IWPR, Zimbabwe - Shamiso Mushonga, eight months pregnant with her third child, feels like a prisoner in the two-room shack she shares with her other two children in densely populated Budiriro. She said she is so afraid of the cholera that since August has already killed hundreds in this Harare slum – including her husband in September – that she cannot allow her children to go out to play. She has not left her cramped quarters for the past four days, only going to the market with her children firmly in tow.

by Sabina Vaqifqızı, Institute for War & Peace Reporting, Azerbaijan - “Victims of human trafficking are subjected to two traumas. First is the humiliation they feel; second is their rejection by society. People close to victims should try and understand them, and must not blame them for what has happened.”

by Linda Burnham, Black Agenda Report, USA - The Obama candidacy has provoked a torrent of observations and speculations about race in America - some grounded in reality, some approaching the realm of sheer fantasy. In the latter category are the commentaries heralding the advent of a "post-racial America" and "the end of Black politics."

by Fatma Yilmaz, Journal of Turkish Weekly Opinion, Turkey - What Europe is experiencing today, is once more the legitimization of its anger against the social, political and economic transformation with the presence of the other.

by Hind al-Safar and Zaineb Naji, IWPR, Iraq - Firdaw al-Baghdadi has not seen her husband in three years. He was abducted in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, and although his family paid a ransom for his release, they never heard from the captors again. Baghdadi, 38, from Baghdad’s Shia suburb Sadr City, cannot find work and her own relatives are too poor to help out, so she lives with her husband's family in cramped conditions. “I don't know what to do,” she said. “Tradition prevents women from working, especially women like me.”

by Katy Glassborow and Taylor Toeka Kakala, IWPR, The Netherlands and DR Congo - International Criminal Court, ICC, prosecutors have dropped all sexual violence charges in relation to conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, because of an internal dispute over witness protection. Prosecutors removed counts of sexual slavery from the indictments against militia leaders Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo following disagreements with the court’s registry over how to protect two witnesses whose testimonies could have backed up the charges.

by Caroline Ayugi, IWPR, The Netherlands - "Wake up! Wake up! Rebels!” For more than a dozen years, hearing these words in the middle of the night would send us scrambling from our thatched huts into the bush. Exhausted by the constant fear of attacks by rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, children often had water splashed on their faces before being dragged from their beds to what we saw as “safety” – usually just an area of brush or deep grass not far from our village, east of Gulu, a town in northern Uganda.

by an IWPR reporter in Baghdad and Tiare Rath, IWPR, Iraq - In Iraq, suicide bombings by women are increasing. This week, two women blew themselves up in Diyala province, bringing to nine the number of such suicide bombings in the first four months of 2008. There were six attacks in 2007, the worst at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, in which 40 people were killed. Little is known about the lives or motivations of female suicide bombers in Iraq. But some analysts suggest that one reason for the rise is that women are using violence as a method of protest against perceived injustices and deteriorating living conditions.

by Katy Glassborow, Peter Eichstaedt and Emma Mutaizibwa, IWPR, The Netherlands - The feared Ugandan rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, is building up its military capacity at a time when it is supposed to be preparing to disarm under a peace agreement, IWPR can reveal.

by Mary Ndlovu, Pambazuka News, Zimbabwe - Anyone trying to predict the outcome of the Zimbabwean election must be either bold or foolhardy or both. No sooner has a prophesy gone to press than a new factor slips into the equation and everything has to be re-calculated. Commentators are reduced to scenarios – and the number of scenarios required to cover all eventualities and twists of fate multiplies by the day.

by Marianna Grigoryan, Armenia Now, Armenia - His teeth had fallen out into his palm, he tried to put them back somehow one by one, but they wouldn’t stay. They would fall out again.

“Mum, I saw a dream,” 28-year-old Gor Kloyan was telling his dream to his mother in the morning.

“I said, Gor, you saw a bad dream. Falling out teeth foretells a death of a loved one. Don’t go out today,” Gor’s mother Azatuhi says. “We have elderly grandmothers and grandfathers in our family, all are in bad health, I thought some bad thing would happen to one of them.”

The “bad thing” happened to Gor himself.