by Vinita Bharadwaj, Gulf News, United Arab Emirates - It's a hot midday in Beirut and a few elderly Palestinians have gathered for gossip and lunch at the Active Ageing House in the Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. "Today is exceptionally hot," says one of them to the others, while passing around apples. As they bite into their fruit, there's a collective sigh and a distant gaze, when Ahmad Mohammad Al Khatib breaks the silence: "It tasted better in Palestine." The others nod knowingly and get ready to recount their stories of surviving the Nakba - yet again, to yet another writer, for yet another publication.

by Maria Eismont, Eurozine, Austria - Most regional newspapers in Russia focus on lighter, less risky content, preferring entertainment and consumer news to politics and investigations. Some publishers, however, have chosen another path, trying to address readers as citizens, not just consumers. What the readers themselves prefer is still up for debate. The most important question is whether Russia's privately owned press is sufficiently strong, influential and independent to represent a serious threat to an increasingly centralised government and to resist authoritarian pressure.

by Candace Piette, BBC News, Amazonas - "Deforestation is linked to economic factors," says Paulo Barreto, senior researcher at Imazon, a non-governmental organisation, in his offices in Belem, the capital of the Amazonian state of Para. With high food and commodity prices around the world, the hunger for cheap land in the Amazon - which costs a tenth of land in Brazil's south and south-east - seems set to increase.

by Katrin Bennhold and Caroline Brothers, International Herald Tribune, France - For the first time, the demands of France's illegal workers are backed by a growing number of their employers. Construction and cleaning companies say they cannot get enough legal workers to fill the available jobs. The employers' federation of the restaurant and hotel business has called for the legalization of 50,000 workers in that field alone. And Konex, a technology cabling firm, has rallied dozens of employers to form a lobby dedicated to the matter.

by Fran Yeoman, Times Online, UK - In places where real-life communities are divided and dangerous, the internet can be the safest place for young people to connect with each other and make their voices heard.

by Emma Graham-Harrison, Reuters, China - While Indonesia appears set to raise prices as soon as this week, the world's fastest-growing oil users show little inclination to tackle their subsidy schemes, as fighting food-fuelled inflation has become their top priority. That's bad news for oil consumers in the rest of the world, who face record crude costs partly as a result of demand growing unchecked in countries where pump prices have barely risen since the middle of 2006 -- when crude was in the $70s.

by Elisabeth Malkin, International Herald Tribune, France - Jesús León Santos is a Mixtec Indian farmer who will soon plant corn on a small plot next to his house in time for the summer rains. He plows with oxen and harvests by hand. Under conventional economic logic, León is uncompetitive. His yields are just a small fraction of what mechanized agriculture churns out from the vast expanses of the Great Plains in the United States. But to him, that is beside the point.

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 Jed Yoong, Asia Sentinel, China - Haris Ibrahim walked across Kuala Lumpur’s Merdeka Square on a clear night and stopped at a stage in front of the Moroccan-style Sultan Abdul Samad building. The 49-year-old lawyer, who also runs the blog The People’s Parliament, took out a candle and lit it in solidarity with the first Malaysian blogger to be charged for sedition, Raja Petra Kamarudin of the Web site Malaysia Today. That was a mistake. The district police chief walked up to him and asked, "What are you doing here?" He replied, "Holding a candle." When the police chief told him to leave, Haris demanded to know why. In the end, Haris was told that he was under arrest and escorted to the police station for questioning, later to be released. Haris is the latest to face a brush with the law as the Malaysian government, accustomed to a captive mainstream media owned by compliant allies and political parties, grows increasingly irritated with dissent.

by Sandra Steingraber, Orion Magazine, USA - Ten years ago, I published a book called Living Downstream that was about, among other things, hazardous materials. Ever since, I’ve received invitations to speak about the topic. Wherever I go, I do two things. One, I look up the Toxics Release Inventory for my host-community’s zip code. I study the location of the dumps, the routine chemical emissions, the accident reports, the off-site transfers, the permitted releases. And then, once I get there, I run. Both rituals are ways of paying attention.

by Anne Applebaum, Slate Magazine, USA - If we fail to persuade the junta to relent soon—despite what I hope are assurances that Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières, and the American military will bring only food, not regime change, much as we all might like to see it—then we have to start considering alternatives. According to some accounts, the U.S. military is already looking at a range of options, including helicopter food deliveries from offshore ships, or convoys from across the Thai border.

by Roula Khalaf, Financial Times, UK - Surely a more useful attempt at dialogue should involve Iran, Hizbollah’s chief backer. Both Saudi Arabia and Iran have an interest in containing a Sunni-Shia conflict of the vicious kind that has blighted Iraq – and that is what Lebanon’s violence is bound to develop into unless rapidly checked. Saudi Arabia can ill-afford to have its Sunni allies routed by a Shia group and could, eventually, be forced to intervene militarily. But Iran too has much to lose from a Lebanese civil war, not least Hizbollah’s aura of mighty resistance movement confronting Israel.

by Barbara Ferguson, Arab News, Saudi Arabia - Many analysts predict the most Bush’s trip can accomplish will be to hand over a working peace process to his successor. Arabs across the region are looking past Bush with a hopeful eye — particularly if his successor is a Democrat, said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Arab-Israeli peace negotiator who worked for the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration, though he added that “there may be less of a change from Bush policies” than many Arabs think.

by Stephanie Nieuwoudt, IPS, Italy - Is small the new big when it comes to agriculture in Southern Africa? As rising food prices place this sector firmly in the spotlight, there are compelling examples at hand to make the case for greater investment in small-scale farming.

by Katherine Zoepf, International Herald Tribune, France - The separation between the sexes in Saudi Arabia is so extreme that it is difficult to overstate. Saudi women may not drive, and they must wear floor-length black abayas and head coverings in public at all times. They are driven around in cars with tinted windows, attend girls-only schools and university departments and eat in "family" sections of cafés and restaurants, which are partitioned off from sections used by single male diners.

by Padma Rao and Erich Follath, Spiegel Online, Germany - Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan people, discusses the uprising in his native Tibet, why he doesn't support protests against the Olympic torch relay and his proposals for a compromise with Beijing.

by Rosemary Righter, Times Online, UK - Governments with the power to help must insist on doing so, with or without the junta's co-operation - with the approval of the UN Security Council if they can, and without it if they must. Governments had the approval neither of Saddam Hussein nor the Security Council in 1991, when they airlifted aid to fleeing Kurds in northern Iraq. The idea that states can do what they please within their borders has been modified since 1945 by a growing acceptance that states have responsibilities as well as rights, and that gross violations of those responsibilities are an international concern. Forcing aid on the regime would be a risky venture; but to cite sovereignty as the reason why nothing can be done without its assent would be to let this foul regime get away with mass murder.

by Antoaneta Bezlova, IPS, Italy - Rattled by rapidly rising global grain prices, China is looking at strategies to ensure long-term food security for its 1.3 billion people such as procuring farmland overseas and opposing the formation of any international grain price- fixing monopolies.

by Magdy Samaan, Daily News Egypt, Egypt - Parliament is yet to decide whether to pass the law or not and it is expected to stir a heated debate, especially given the 20 percent of Muslim Brotherhood MPs. Some of them had already rejected parts of this law, citing contradictions with Islam. The law is also criticized for criminalizing a number of practices that are quite common in Egyptian society.

by Charlotte McPherson, Today's Zaman, Turkey - Often, people ask me if America has changed a lot during the time I have been away. Every culture is in a process of change. For many of you, summer is a time of movement. Perhaps you have been living in a new culture the past year or more and soon you’ll be returning to your home culture. William Hazlitt, in his “Notes of a Journey through France and Italy,” writes, “The first thing an Englishman does on going abroad is to find fault with what is French, because it is not English.” Often when individuals visit another culture, they can be quite critical. It’s surprising, though, how many people on their return home can be critical of their own culture.