by Stacy Sullivan, Human Rights Watch, USA - Osama bin Laden's driver has been tried and convicted. But what's the verdict for the Bush administration's tactics in the war on terror?

by Sarah El Deeb, The Irrawaddy, Burma - As the Summer Games open in Beijing, actress activist Mia Farrow is Web-casting her own "Darfur Olympics" from a refugee camp on the barren Sudan-Chad border, aiming to shame China into using its influence with Khartoum to end the Darfur conflict.

by Ann Kobusinge, New Vision, Uganda - Family planning programmes target a woman whose influence over her sexuality and reproductive health is limited. Many women in rural areas conceal their use of contraceptives from their husbands who do not want them to use them.

by Maria Appakova, RIA Novosti, Russia - Mauritania has endured five coups and nine aborted attempts to change the political system since the early 1960s, and this event might have been nothing new but for one "if."

by Linda Melvern, Times Online, UK - How far was Mitterrand's Government involved in the slaughter of hundred of thousands of Rwandans?

by Dawn Paley, Upside Down World, Canada - July 23 marked the end of a two and a half year process carried out by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (TPP) in Bogotá, Colombia.

by Pilirani Semu-Banda, Inter Press Service, Italy - Gladys Mawera's face is contorted with pain -– both she and her newborn baby survived a complicated birth three days ago -- but she has not been able to take the painkillers and antibiotics prescribed to her by the medical personnel at the Chiradzulu District Hospital in southern Malawi. The hospital has been without water for five days.

by Alice Jones, Telegraph, UK - While the number of all-male teams banning women for "cultural and religious reasons" has decreased sharply, from 35 in Barcelona in 1992 to five in Athens in 2004, Muslim women from Arab countries are still under-represented at the Games.

by Gillian Gillers, Tico Times, Costa Rica - Two U.S. marshals were waiting in San José July 17 to escort Chere Lyn Tomayko to the United States, where she would face trial on kidnapping charges.

by Juliane von Mittelstaedt, Der Spiegel, Germany - One year after assuming total power over the Gaza Strip, Hamas is stronger then ever. Its weapons caches are overflowing and its control over daily life is secure. The Islamists can go about their business largely thanks to the supplies that get in via the tunnels connecting Gaza to Egypt.

by Heidi Kingstone, Independent Online, South Africa - The Congo is now the stage for what some have described as the largest humanitarian disaster in the world.

by Frida Berrigan, Press Connects, USA - Sixty-three years ago this week, the United States was the first (and so far, the only) nation to use nuclear weapons in war, detonating two warheads in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.

by Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune, USA - In the latest round of a bitter and extended exchange of charges, Rwanda's government Tuesday officially accused French political and military leaders of complicity in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which left up to 800,000 dead.

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sydney Morning Herald, Australia - To argue that children born and bred in superstitious cultures that value fanaticism are doomed to be governed by the law of the jungle is to ignore the lessons of the West's own past.

by Bronwen Maddox, Independent, Ireland - Iran has achieved, yet again, what it wants: paralysis of the international wrangling over its nuclear programme while avoiding outright confrontation with the US or Europe.

by Anne Applebaum, Slate, USA - Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today.

by Sekina Joseph, UPI Asia Online, Malaysia - Our world is choked with ethnocentric arrogance and economic blindness. What we need is more dialogue and openness toward other ways of life.

by Shaila Dewan, International Herald Tribune, France - Two months ago, as he left the trailer park he called home after Hurricane Katrina, Alton Love, 41, just knew he was on the brink of getting a working car, an apartment and a good job to support the 9-year-old daughter he is raising on his own.

by Violet Cho and Aye Lae, Irawaddy Magazine, Burma - A handful of prominent female activists have made a significant mark on Burmese dissident politics, but true equality of the sexes remains elusive.

by Barbara Gloudon, The Jamaica Observer, Jamaica - It's a century and a half since the disgrace of slavery was brought to a halt, beginning with the termination of the trade in enslaved Africans.

by Nicolien den Boer, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, Netherlands - A special Human Rights Watch (HRW) report says that both Hamas and Fatah security forces regularly torture Palestinian detainees.

by Dayo Olopade, The New Republic, USA - How a group of environmental activists in the Bronx is changing the color of green.

by Lila Abu-Lughod, Eurozine, Austria - Our lives are saturated with images, images that are strangely confined to a very limited set of tropes or themes. The oppressed Muslim woman. The veiled Muslim woman. The Muslim woman who does not have the same freedoms we have. The woman ruled by her religion. The woman ruled by her men.

by Shenali Waduge, Asian Tribune, Thailand - The Afghan Mujaheddin—and Osama bin Laden’s so-called al-Qaeda—were created by the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, and Britain’s MI6.

by Zofeen Ebrahim, Inter Press Service, Italy - While three million people are receiving treatment, every day 7,400 new HIV infections crop up -- 2.7 million new infections a year.

by Anna Johnson, Associated Press, USA - In this small Nile River farming village, Maha Mohammed has started to doubt whether she should circumcise her two daughters.

by Elisabeth Rosenthal, International Herald Tribune, France - While jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.