by Salome Asatiani, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - For Georgians and Georgia-watchers, it's a familiar scene that plays out every few years: Tbilisi unveils its latest proposal offering its breakaway region of Abkhazia a promise of political, economic, and cultural rights in exchange for reintegrating with Georgia. Abkhazia strenuously refuses. And the dialogue begins anew.

by Ulrike Putz, Spiegel Online, Germany - Rising global food prices have plunged Egyptians into a desparate daily struggle for survival. Many are unable to feed their families, and the hungry have taken to the streets. Is more violent unrest to come?

by Nicole Pope, Today's Zaman, Turkey - At a time when the court case against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) is putting additional strain on already difficult relations between Turkey and the European Union, it might seem frivolous or even irrelevant to discuss cultural cooperation between the EU and Turkey. But Michael Vögele, head of the civil society and institution building section at the Delegation of the European Commission to Turkey in Ankara, argues that it is precisely "when things are difficult" that collaboration in arts and culture matters most.

by Maya Schenwar, truthout, USA - Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's administration, moving into the third round of negotiations with the Bush administration over a "status of forces agreement" (SOFA) to establish a long-term US military and economic presence in Iraq, declared that the agreement must be approved by Parliament before it becomes law. Previously, Maliki had maintained that Parliamentary ratification was unnecessary. Submitting the document to Parliament may not only hold up the process of getting it signed and sealed - it could also change the terms that govern the US presence in Iraq for years to come.

by Hardev Kaur, New Straights Times Online, Malaysia - While the leaders had good meals while acknowledging that there is a growing food problem around the world, their words were cold comfort to the millions who go to bed hungry today. Action is needed. As Zoellick stressed: "We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths.

by Michela Wrong, New Statesman, UK - In much of Africa today, the sad reality is that land is still the only asset guaranteed to retain its value.

by Lydia Beyoud, Global Voices, Middle East - Tunisian blogger Stupeur!! Un nouveu depart!! (Stupor!! A New Beginning!!) responds to a Yemen Times article about an 8 year-old girl who is trying to file for divorce from a 30 year-old man she says her father forced her to marry.

by Kathleen Moore, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - In the last few years, biofuels have been viewed as a way to meet rising energy demands, as well as climate-change goals to reduce harmful emissions. But amid skyrocketing food prices and food riots in several poor countries, those benefits increasingly are being questioned.

by Shaila Dewan, International Herald Tribune, France - Wang, who had friends on both sides, tried to get the two groups to talk, participants said. She began traversing what she called "the middle ground," asking the groups' leaders to meet and making bargains. She said she agreed to write "Free Tibet, Save Tibet" on one student's back only if he would speak with pro-Chinese demonstrators. She pleaded and lectured. In one photo, she is walking toward a phalanx of Chinese flags and banners, her arms overhead in a "timeout" T.

by Miriam Mannak, allAfrica.com, South Africa - "Men and women must agree and acknowledge that women's inclusion and equal participation in parliamentary processes not only benefits societies...but is also necessary for legitimate democracy." Or, in the words of a female legislator from Ireland quoted in the study: "Our democracy is unfinished when women are absent from policy making."

by Simba Russeau, IPS, Italy - Adam, 32, left his wife and newborn daughter in northern Nigeria five years back to seek employment in Lebanon. He had a contract offering him 200 dollars a month to work in a cell phone shop in Hamra, Beirut. One in five people in Lebanon is now a temporary worker from outside, mostly Africa. That means close to a million, for a Lebanese population of four million. It's a struggle for these workers, but not everyone is complaining.

by Molly Moore and Corinne Gavard, Washington Post, USA - "It may mean that we won't be able to publish anything," said Isabelle Maury, editor of France's Elle magazine. "I wonder how this bill will be implemented and interpreted. If they decide to strictly implement it, it could mean that every fashion show and magazine will be banned or charged."

by Judy Dempsey, International Herald Tribune, France - If there is one European leader who could be setting the agenda on domestic and foreign policy, it is Chancellor Angela Merkel. Ever since she was elected in late 2005, German opinion polls have consistently given her high popularity ratings - unusual for a politician now more than halfway through her first term.

by Polly Toynbee, The Guardian, UK - So what's new? This is a year for reflection for my generation, especially women. What happened in 1968? What really changed? The year of riots saw feminism ignite too, a year hazed in an illusory miasma that nothing would be the same again - but of course it was. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot, 16,000 US soldiers died in Vietnam and Richard Nixon was elected. The world did not turn upside down. Feminist ideas more revolutionary than Che Guevara reached right into the heart of elemental things between women and men and families. Where is it now?

by Anna Husarska, The Wall Street Journal Asia, Hong Kong - In the war on terror, most of the media attention is paid to military operations in Afghanistan. But there's an equally important upheaval going on just over the border, in Pakistan's bulging refugee camps.

by Anne Applebaum, Slate Magazine, USA - How utterly predictable. Even without the recent riots in Tibet, anything as ludicrous as a 130-day, 85,000-mile torch relay was going to attract a healthy dose of negative attention. Why does the thing have to go to so many cities, after all? Why does it need to go through Tibet? Why is it surrounded by track-suited thugs? Why does it travel in a customized jumbo jet? Wasn't this supposed to be a relay? And what is the symbolic significance of a battery-operated chemical flame, anyway? What does it have to do with athletes or world peace? Any ceremony of such profound inauthenticity—the Chinese are calling it the "journey of harmony"—deserves to be disharmoniously disrupted as often as possible.

by Angela Balakrishnan, The Guardian, UK - Main points from the UN study of global agriculture.

by Rebecca Solnit, TomDispatch.com, USA - I still don't know why Sallie and I bothered to go to that party in the forest slope above Aspen. The people were all older than us and dull in a distinguished way, old enough that we, at forty-ish, passed as the occasion's young ladies.

by Mehru Jaffer, Boloji.com, India - It is not the first time that the female form has sparked off a public debate between politicians and artists. At the centre of controversy this time in Vienna is 'Turkish Delight', a bronze, unflattering, life-size form of a woman that was installed last November in a public park of the city, clad in nothing but a headscarf.

by Lydia Polgreen, New York Times, USA - The crisis continues to draw closer to outright confrontation between Chad and Sudan. Political analysts, diplomats and even the combatants acknowledge that both sides are supporting and arming rebellions on each other’s soil.

by Minette Marrin, Times Online, UK - A red mist of rage must have descended on millions of respectable citizens last week when the Court of Appeal decided that Abu Qatada, the Jordanian Islamist, will be allowed to stay in Britain. Supposedly the right-hand man of Osama Bin Laden in Europe and the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda in Europe, convicted in absentia of terrorist offences in his native Jordan, this undesirable alien had won his appeal against deportation.

by Mary Sanchez, Belleville News-Democrat, USA - Many Americans - those in the middle and on the lower end of the economic spectrum - are feeling vulnerable right now. And so candidates - at least, Democratic ones - seem to be banking on denunciations of NAFTA as a way to win voters, especially in the Rust Belt.