by Megan Sullivan with Penelope Chester, Wordpress, France - Six hundred Liberian refugee women and children are currently detained in Ghana and face imminent deportation. Their crime? Free speech. The women had been holding a peaceful protest in the Buduburam refugee settlement, and, on Monday, March 17, in the early hours, a police force armed with AK-47s and tear gas came to arrest them while they were sleeping on the football field.

by Bronwen Maddox, The Times Online, UK - President Putin was the first winner from the Nato summit in Bucharest, and he wasn't even there. The Nato-Russia Council begins only today, but Putin, who has played the Western alliance with obsessive skill in his last months as President, ensured that relations with Russia dominated the earlier gathering.

by Ginger Strand, Orion Magazine, USA - “I can’t wait to see the reservoir,” the Queens woman announces. “I haven’t been here since I was a kid. We used to come and swim in it. The helicopters would chase us away.” It isn’t clear if she understands that the reservoir no longer holds much water. Built for Brooklyn in 1856, Ridgewood Reservoir occupies a large chunk of Highland Park. Since being closed and mostly drained in 1989, it has become a lively habitat for birds, frogs, salamanders, plants, and trees. It has also become the site of an unusual standoff: community residents versus parks.

by Karma Phuntsho, openDemocracy, UK - The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has kept its tryst with democracy - and its people have surprised even themselves. The Kingdom of Bhutan, high Himalayas between the two Asian giants of India and China, takes pride in doing things differently. Its foremost goal is "gross national happiness", and tourism is restricted to those who can afford a hefty package of some $200 per day. Almost 60% of the country is considered to be under forest cover, with 25% staunchly protected as nature reserve.

by Elena Jeffreys, Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - The stereotype of the Asian sex slave captures the Australian imagination. When Puangthong Simaplee died in immigration detention in 2001, a story emerged of a girl trafficked to Australia at the age of 12 and forced to have sex as a slave. Her story was given under duress, after the Department of Immigration had taken her into detention, during the first phases of the pneumonia that eventually killed her.

by Jagmohan Singh, World Sikh News, USA - My husband was brutally killed by the Punjab police. My brother-in-law was detained and then killed. I have been harassed and tortured. How do you want me to live my life? Should I cry my way to death or should I wait for the Indian system endlessly to become more humane and just?

by Anna Smolchenko, The Moscow Times, Russia - Despite complaints that George W. Bush has ignored Russia during his presidency, one fact cannot be disputed: Bush has held more one-on-one meetings with Putin than with any other world leader, with the exception of Britain's Tony Blair.

by Camilla Cavendish, The Times Online, UK - Fashionable though it is to rail against plastic bags, the climate change battle will not be won by the phoney war on bags, light bulbs and bottled water. Rather than trying to herd millions of individual consumers into taking tiny steps, the Government could change energy supply with one stroke of the pen.

by Chrystia Freeland, Business Day, South Africa - Like most middle-class kids living in America’s big cities, my six-year-old's indoctrination as an eco-warrior is progressing well. She has become a menace in the grocery store, where my failure to bring our own bags is pointed out for the environmental sin that it is

by Elizabeth Eames Roebling, IPS News Service, Italy - At 11 a.m., five hours after the start of the market day on the southern border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the driver of the bright red Haitian truck named "God of Justice" swung down the back gate and started unloading the full load of 60-kg burlap bags of coffee.

By Dina Ezzat, Al Ahram Weekly, Egypt - It has become almost impossible not to find Saudi Arabia in any story reported on the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is intervening in the Palestinian issue, Lebanese developments, the situation in Sudan and the crisis in Somalia. Saudi Arabia is also talking to Iran about its relations with the West and the rest of the Arab world.

By Stephanie Nieuwoudt, IPS News, South Africa - A 15-year-old boy was beaten by a fellow pupil at a high school in Florida, a relatively well-off suburb of the country's economic hub, Johannesburg. Shaun Erasmus was left with a gaping wound on his face, and also had his nose broken in two places; doctors had to operate to repair the damage.

By Kwamboka Oyaro, Boloji, India - I had just sat my final examinations for a diploma in journalism at the Auckland University of Technology when I fell ill. The next day I found I was pregnant. Disturbing images of the expectant mothers I saw in my village when I was growing up crossed my mind.

By Tahmima Anam, New Statesman, UK - Is my country about to be overrun by radical Islamists? Will everyone drown in the rising sea? I'm suddenly taking on the role of ambassador. When I won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book for the Europe and South Asia region, for my novel A Golden Age, it meant that the sari I wore was not another sad example of dress-code miscalculation, but rather a dignified outfit with which to accept an award.

By Fatma Aykut, Spiegel International, Germany - Hate-mongering mullahs calling Muslims to a holy war. Images of the mangled corpses of victims in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. These are the tools by which right-wing Dutch populist Geert Wilders tries to "shock" his audience. But it doesn't work. First, these images lost their impact long ago.

by Jayati Chakraborty, Merinews, India - Myanmar's path towards democracy is not a bed of roses. Any discussion on this issue clearly brings into the forefront the present political, social and economic situation of Myanmar. Myanmar, presently, is under military rule after a long phase of ethnic strives, conflicts and civil war.

by Mona Eltahawy, Middle East Online, UK - Is the Pope playing hardball with Osama Bin Laden? In a March 19 audio recording, Bin Laden accused Pope Benedict XVI of leading a “new crusade” against Islam. The accusation was outlandish and no doubt aimed at giving the al-Qaeda leader a leg up onto the bandwagon of current affairs upsetting some Muslims, including a Danish cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed and an anti-Islam film by a right-wing Dutch politician.

By Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe, USA - It was probably not wise for 64-year-old Brit Hume to describe the 71-year-old John McCain as having a ''senior moment.'' But when the traveling senator confused Shiites and Sunnis, when he conflated al-Qaeda with all extremists,

By Greer Fay Cashman, Jerusalem Post, Israel - President Shimon Peres declared that judges in the military courts were confronted with far more problematic dilemmas than those in the civil courts due to the many gray areas in the war against terror. Peres stressed that the military uniform "is not there to justify the unjust."

By Alice Poon, Asia Sentinel, China - China’s gender imbalance, the result of the 1979 one-child policy, is creating a social time bomb that may threaten the already feeble status of women, who are already losing ground. By the year 2020, there will be 30 million more men than women, according to a report by the State Population and Family Planning Commission.By 2020 may find a generation warped by a huge gender imbalance, raising questions about what one does with a society where one man in five cannot find a wife.