by Amira Hass, Haaretz, Israel - What if Israel goes back to barring Israelis from Palestinian Authority territory? What if the trend of anti-Arab legislation continues and the state decides to strip their children, or them, of their citizenship?

by Mac McClelland, Mother Jones, USA - The ramifications of this ongoing battle have been huge: More than 500,000 internally displaced people living without villages, infrastructure, or any kind of security whatsoever. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled to neighboring countries or been resettled by the UN as far away as the United States. Countless civilians have been raped and murdered at the hands of the Burmese army.

by Mariana Baabar, Outlook, India - Pakistan in turmoil: discontent on the streets, political ferment, and ‘Memogate’.

by Katy Waldman, Slate, USA - After an hour and a half of trying to soften an increasingly furious—and personal— debate over Palestinian membership in the United Nations on Tuesday, moderator John Donvan gave up and wearily asked his panelists for closing statements. Aaron David Miller started off. “I realize in the last 90 minutes that perhaps one of the most astute things I’ve done, the best decisions I’ve made, was to leave the Arab-Israeli negotiating table,” he quipped.

by America Vera-Zavala, Aftonbladet, Sweden - Is this a racist movie? Ruben Östlund’s latest film — a story of poor black and middle class white children which deliberate plays on the audience’s prejudices — has sparked controversy in Sweden.

by Emily Dugan, The Independent, UK - More than 500,000 people are still living in tents, despite massive aid operation.

by Meera Dalal, Al Jazeera, Qatar - The tropical disease kills more people annually than cancer, but researchers think they can win the fight.

by Maureen Corrigan, NPR, USA - As he surely intended, Shalom Auslander opens up a whole big can of slimy moral and aesthetic dilemmas in his debut novel Hope: A Tragedy. Maybe plunking Anne Frank down in your novel — as, by the way, Philip Roth did in The Ghost Writer and, later, in Exit, Ghost — is excusable if there's a big enough point and if your writing is strong enough to carry it off. Maybe artistically appropriating Anne Frank — herself a brilliantly observant artist of her own tragic predicament — is not as creepy as dressing your child up to look like a little girl who, like Frank, was murdered. And maybe I have a headache because Auslander clearly wants to lampoon identity politics, as well as the acutely understandable Jewish sense of victimization, by sending up Anne Frank, aka, as she says here, "Miss Holocaust, 1945."

by Robyn Cohen, Girls On It, Brazil - One would think that if women are controlling 80% of consumer spending, it’s because brands are doing a good job of advertising to us. Sadly, that’s not the case at all. The percentage of women that work as advertising Creative Directors is…ready, 3%.

by Rafia Zakaria, Dawn, Pakistan - Working with an archive of material on marriage in Bengal over two centuries, Majumdar reveals how the concepts of arranged marriage and the joint family were instead innovations responding to pressure on family structures after colonisation by the British.

by Charlotte Boitiaux, France 24, France - Less than six months ahead of the presidential and legislative elections, France’s far-right National Front is on a mission to gain respectability among the Jewish electorate despite its traditionally anti-Jewish stance.

by DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post, USA - The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain.

by Zuki Zimel, Ear to the Ground, South Africa - No climate justice without gender justice.

by Claire Gatinois, Le Monde, France - In response to the crisis, shopkeepers in Salvaterra de Miño have decided to once again accept the former national currency. And the customers, attracted by prices at the same exchange rate that applied at the launch of the euro in 2002, are flocking to the Galician village.

by Alicia Hayashi, Canada - The "Baby Storm" case is not necessarily as unusual as it was exposed in the media to be.

by Alexis Erkert and Beverly Bell, Other Worlds, USA - As 2012 begins, a growing movement of displaced people and their allies in Haiti is actively claiming the right to housing, which is recognized by both the Haitian constitution and international treaties to which Haiti is signatory.

by Felicity Arbuthnot, Countercurrents, India - As the US occupiers leave Iraq the fate of former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq Tareq Aziz's fate hangs in the balance.