by Deborah Haynes, Times Online, UK - Young women are daring to wear jeans, soldiers listen to pop music on their mobile phones and bands are performing at wedding parties again. All across Iraq’s second city life is improving, a month after Iraqi troops began a surprise crackdown on the black-clad gangs who were allowed to flourish under the British military. The gunmen’s reign had enforced a strict set of religious codes.

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 Meg Bortin, International Herald Tribune, France - April in Paris. Nazis in uniform. Holiday tables under the trees. That something is wrong with the old refrain has not escaped the notice of the crowds flocking this April to a photo exhibition so controversial that the Paris mayor's top aide for cultural affairs publicly urged him to shut it down.

by Stephanie Holmes, BBC, UK - Sweden has decided not to ban sexist advertising, saying it would risk undermining the country's cherished right to freedom of speech. But the decision puts the country at odds with its Nordic neighbours. Norway and Denmark have strict limits on the use of such images for commercial gain.

by Audrey Schulman, Orion Magazine, USA - One afternoon last summer, I was on a commuter train when I heard someone yelling behind me. I didn’t pay attention because I was breaking up a fight between my kids. But the third time the person yelled, I turned around.

by Nikoleta Popkostadinova, Eurozine, Austria - It may look like a snapshot from the Third World, but this is the Roma Faculteta district of Bulgaria's capital, and the scenes here are replicated across the country and in neighbouring Romania, both members of the European Union since January 2007. A recent boom has seen unemployment in both countries practically wiped out by the rocketing demand for labour. But this benign trend has barely touched the Roma. Racism, under-education and lack of qualifications have kept them hermetically sealed from the economic changes enjoyed by their countrymen.

by Jennie S. Bev, Asia Sentinel, China - Love Verses is far from a story of innocent platonic love between pen friends. It is about romanticizing polygamy and re-packaging fundamentalism in a modern Hollywood way. Both the book and the film have been embraced by Indonesian Islamists, who may see it as a chance to embed Islamist ideology into the wider moderate majority.

by Nazila Fathi, International Herald Tribune, France - Islamic law, it seems, was powerless before the charms of the dolphins. They perform with Persian dance music, even though dance music was declared un-Islamic, and illegal, after the revolution in 1979. It is produced only by Iranian expatriates in Los Angeles, and Kish is the only place in Iran where it is heard.

by Kathryn Westcott, BBC, UK - The waters off the coast of Somalia have become some of the most treacherous in the world - swarming with well-armed pirates, searching for prey to hold to ransom. Attacks on fishing boats, cargo ships and yachts have surged, but these modern-day buccaneers may not continue to get their way.
The world's navies could be about to get tough.

by Karen Weisblatt, openDemocracy, UK - From anti-apartheid to the fall of communism, social movements have changed the world. A lesson for the new philanthropy?

by Jill Drew, Washington Post, USA - After weeks of expressing outrage at Western protests over Tibet and the Olympics, Chinese officials have begun tempering their rhetoric in recent days and telling Chinese people to be "rational" about their response.

by Amanda Akcakoca, Today's Zaman, Turkey - Sometimes it seems like the EU has been asking Turkey to amend Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code (TCK) forever. During every debate, conference, interview or conversation about Turkey there is always a reference to this controversial article.

by Kathleen Ridolfo, Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic - Al-Sadr claimed that despite his efforts to encourage peace through a cease-fire he declared for his militia in September, the government has been ungrateful and is now acting as "the third side" to target the Sadrists, after the Sunnis and the Americans. Reminding the government of its attempts to defeat the militia in May and August 2004, he asked, "Do you want a third uprising?" This is the strongest statement yet from the cleric, who remains in hiding in Iran.

by Marina Mahathir, The Star, Malasya - Separation by gender and age are these days outdated to say the least. It leads to ghettoizing of concerns, rather than mainstreaming them. Given the grumbling and rumbling among many women in the last general election about the number of female candidates, perhaps it is now time to think in ways more in keeping with the times.

by Elaine Lies, Reuters, Japan - Unlike the old days when girls would become geisha through personal connections, 23-year-old Komomo (Little Peach) took her first steps towards the vocation by e-mail.

by Jay Newton-Small/Scranton, TIME Magazine, USA - After one of the most negative weekends of campaigning so far this election, it's hard to know if either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will emerge from Tuesday's long-anticipated Pennsylvania primary looking much like a real winner. As the primary battle has become increasingly nasty, some Democrats worry that voters are digging in their heels and contemplating staying home (or even voting for John McCain) in November if their first choice doesn't get the nomination.

New York Times Video, USA - Heather Hurlburt of the National Security Network and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School debate whether politicians can convince Americans to go green.

by Amélie Gauthier, openDemocracy, UK - It may still be too early to evaluate the full impact of the turmoil, yet they are likely to be catastrophic: the effects of a global food shortage in a country already suffering from a profound structural crisis could seriously undermine all the achievements made to date by Minustah and the international community.

by Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall, International Herald Tribune, France - In the latest battle of the long-simmering war between cultural conservatives and liberals, the minister for information and culture last week ordered television networks to stop broadcasting five soap operas by Tuesday, saying they were not in keeping with "Afghan religion and culture."

by Wendy Kristianasen, Le Monde diplomatique, France - Iran’s government has shut down the magazine Zanan (Women) after 17 years and 151 issues, ending its advocacy of women’s rights and its fearless exposures of wrongs against women under the current regime. The closure clearly shows that women’s rights activists in Iran face growing repression.

by Chrystia Freeland, Financial Times, UK - The affluence of ordinary Americans has long been one of the most powerful advertisements for the American way of life. When Richard Nixon debated with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow in 1959, he conceded that the Soviet Union might have outstripped the US “in the development of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer space”, but he proudly pointed to colour televisions and kitchen appliances as examples of his own country’s prowess.

by Jeneen Interlandi, Newsweek, USA - Environmentalists have long warned about the crisis in nonrenewable resources, such as oil. Water, of course, is the ultimate renewable resource—it falls from the sky—and therefore has been of less concern. But where and when rain falls, and what happens to it after it hits the ground, are crucial in determining the health and prosperity of human societies, says Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and special adviser on environmental policy to an impressive number of foreign leaders including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, various governments, even rock stars (Bono is a friend). In his new book, "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet," Sachs describes the worldwide water shortage as "one of our most daunting challenges."

by Daniela Desantis, Reuters, Paraguay - A sandal-wearing former bishop's presidential election victory suggests Paraguay's democracy has matured, but after 61 years of one-party rule his political foes may dictate the pace of change. Fernando Lugo, a mild-mannered leftist who quit the cloth three years ago saying he felt powerless to help Paraguay's poor, ousted the ruling Colorado Party in Sunday's election with promises to tackle inequality and stamp out corruption.

by Caroline Brothers, International Herald Tribune, France - The United Nations refugee agency has advised European Union countries to stop sending asylum seekers to Greece until further notice, a step that amounts to a condemnation of Greece's treatment of people fleeing conflict and persecution. In a sharp response, Greece called the agency's criticism of its handling of refugees unfair and said other EU countries needed to share the burden of tackling irregular migration into the Union.

by Mary Ann Sieghart, TimesOnline, UK - Silvio Berlusconi made Spanish socialist politicians splutter the other day when he called the new Spanish Cabinet - more than half of them women - “too pink”. Doubtless the new women in Berlusconi's own government will be dubbed Le Belle de Berlusconi. For the Italians are even more chauvinist than the Brits, and our new female parliamentary intake in 1997 was instantly derided as Blair's Babes. That description was no more accurate than Hague's Hunks would have been of the largely male opposition benches.