By Joceline Tan, The Star, Malaysia - Grown men do cry and tears flowed among the Terengganu assemblymen when told that the Umno supreme council had decided to endorse the palace’s preference of Datuk Ahmad Said as Mentri Besar. The incumbent was out and Said, whom they had so strenuously objected to, was in. The outcome sets a disturbing precedent for Constitutional practices.

by Marcela Valente, IPS News Agency, Italy - Weaknesses of Argentine President Cristina Fernández' new government showed when in a surprisingly virulent dispute, farmers opposed to an increase in taxes on farm exports blocked highways around the country for two weeks, keeping trucks with food supplies from delivering their cargo.

by Marianna Grigoryan, Armenia Now, Armenia - Only a few people managed to read out books in a low voice, after which police began to take people to central Yerevan’s police station in cars. “What was going on yesterday was a disgrace. I cannot describe it otherwise. An absurd disgrace,” a spokeswoman for opposition People’s Party of Armenia (PPA) said.

by Carmela Cruz, Foreign Policy in Focus, USA - The Nobel Prize Winner in economics, his books on globalization have been widely acclaimed. His latest book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, discusses the cost of the U.S. war in Iraq not only to the United States but to the world and proposes an exit strategy for American troops there.

by Nava Thakuria, Asia Sentinel, China - Ignoring continued international pressure to boycott Burma’s ruling military junta, New Delhi on April 4 will sign an agreement to develop a port on the western Burmese coast for the benefit of India’s restive northeast, where a stubborn secessionist movement has continued its rebellion for decades.

By Nomi Prins, Mother Jones, USA - This week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson promised an upcoming blueprint for regulatory reform. The Federal Reserve's "heroism" last week included purchasing $30 billion of Bear's riskiest securities, turning the Fed not into a provider of last-resort liquidity but a speculative hedge fund.

by Lale Sariibrahimoglu, Eurasia Daily Monitor, USA - Turkey, located in the middle of the East-West energy corridor, and natural-gas-rich Turkmenistan have recently improved their relations after almost seven years without any high-level dialogue. This development has raised hopes for the revitalization of the long stalled, U.S.-backed Trans-Caspian pipeline (TCP) project aimed at carrying Turkmen gas to Europe via Turkey – and bypassing Russia.

by Catherine Jiang, Asia Sentinel, China - I am a daughter of the one-child experiment. I was born in 1978, a year before the policy came into effect, to a former Red Guard mother who wrote propaganda for the government and a mechanical engineer father who retired young from a state-owned company, and too late to have a sibling. Because they were members of the Communist Party, breaking the rules by having a second child was unthinkable. My mother had been a Red Guard in high school; her fervent devotion even earned a trip to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong, an amazing honor for her generation. She ultimately rose to be in charge of the one-child policy in Dandong, our home town. Anyone who wanted a child had to report to my mother, who took records and monitored them.

by Amy Goodman, Truthdig, USA - We just passed the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. military members killed in Iraq since the invasion five years ago. Still, the death toll climbs.

by Anna Husarska, The Guardian, UK - "This is her, the rape victim." I raise my eyes and look at a Congolese woman in her 40s who is breastfeeding. Marie-Honorine, my colleague from the International Rescue Committee, a specialist in working with survivors of sexual violence, points to the Bambi-eyed 14-month-old girl at the woman’s breast and says: "No, that is the victim."

by Penny Coleman, AlterNet, USA - "I was a great soldier once upon a time," Goldsmith says. He graduated at the top of his class in basic training and was on the commandant's list in the Warrior Leadership Course with a 94.6 percent average. He aced every test, mental and physical, received commendations and medals and promotions, but by the end of his first deployment he knew he was in serious trouble. His CSM (command sergeant major) Altman, however, had told his battalion, "If any of you go try to say you're depressed and thinking about killing yourself, you're going to get deployed anyway, and when we get there, you'll get to be my personal I.E.D. (improvised explosive device) kicker!" So he self-medicated; he drank. A lot. "All I wanted to do was black out."

by Jacqueline Klopp, Daily Nation, Kenya - Displaced people are a symptom of a collapsing State that no longer can, or wishes to, provide security to its citizens. How the Kenya Government deals with the pressing problems of the displaced will be a key litmus test of its commitment to reconstructing the State and entrenching better governance.

by Alia McMullen, Financial Post, Canada - Consumers in the United States have not felt as negatively about their country's economic prospects since December, 1973, when the country was deep in recession, in the midst of the Arab oil embargo, coping with the Vietnam war, and about to impeach President Richard Nixon.

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 Marina Mahathir, The Star, Malaysia - As with anything else, there may soon come a day when seeing politicians and other public figures “cross over” racial lines becomes something very normal and no longer anything to remark on. Perhaps the day when vertical thinking along racial lines is nearer than we dreamt.

by Nina Berglund, Aftenposten, Norway - Culture Minister Trond Giske worries that the ever-expanding use of English in Norway is threatening the very existence of the Norwegian language. He's preparing an official government declaration aimed at nothing less than ensuring its survival.

by Anne Applebaum, Slate Magazine, USA - "We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations and we hope that all people attending the games recognize the importance of this." Thus spake Samsung Electronics, one of 12 major corporate sponsors of the Olympics, when asked last week whether recent events in Tibet were causing them any concern.

by Donette Read Kruger, The Zimbabwe Guardian, Zimbabwe - Although I was born in Gweru, Zimbabwe, (which in 1942 was then Gwelo, Rhodesia), my Balham-born father was an RAF pilot during that period, but despite this affiliation with the RAF, I refrain from contributing to the poppy brigade and wonder why other Blacks proudly flaunt this emblem, regardless.

by Oula Farawati, Al-Ahram Weekly, Egypt - After decades of heavy subsidies on basic commodities, starting with fuel and ending with bread and milk, Jordan decided to leave consumers to fare for themselves by lifting all subsidies and opening the market to competition, leaving Jordanians who have yet to understand market mechanisms struggling to strike a balance between their limited incomes and increased prices.

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.

by Razeshta Sethna, The News International, Pakistan - The headscarf remains the most charged issue in Turkey today, which has taken the form of a politicised ongoing battle between the country's politicians and its secular elite that have long ruled the state. The argument is that even though wearing the headscarf may be a political symbol, it cannot be banned as there is no legal justification. Erdogan is said to have stated that "in a world were freedoms are debated, where everyone dresses up the way they want to everywhere they go," the ban being lifted makes perfect sense.

by Lydia Polgreen, International Herald Tribune, France - As Darfur smolders in the aftermath of a new government offensive, a long-sought peacekeeping force, expected to be the world's largest, is in danger of failing even before it begins its mission because of bureaucratic delays, stonewalling by the Sudanese government and reluctance from troop-contributing countries to send peacekeeping forces into an active conflict.

by Rasna Warah, The Daily Nation, Kenya - Many Kenyans, including myself, are shocked to learn that their country is now considered a role model by many Zimbabweans who have been seriously contemplating “doing a Kenya” if the results of the elections this weekend are not to their liking.