by Caroline Gluck, Oxfam Conflict & Emergencies, UK - According to a UN report last year, an estimated 51 million people, or three quarters of the population in Congo, have no access to safe drinking water.

by Liz Fuller, Caucasus Report, Czech Republic - Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov and Chechen mufti Sultan-hadji Mirzayev have both harshly criticized the proposal by Chechen legal scholar Dagir Khasavov to establish Shari'a courts in Russia for the benefit of those Russian Muslims who do not want to “get bogged down in the Russian legal system,” which they do not trust.

by Afua Hirsch, The Guardian, UK - These days no self-respecting western reporter dares to describe anything potentially "primitive" in Africa without a sophisticated disclaimer.

by Laurel Zuckerman, Sorbonne Confidential, France - In Fall 2005, French youths rioted, destroying 200 million euros of schools, gymnasiums, cars and other property. Two people were killed; 2900 rioters were arrested; and martial law was imposed. When the smoke cleared, a French myth had died. France, land of égalité, had ghettos.

by Katie Matlack, Women's Media Center, USA - Women are the power users of social media and are the directors of healthcare for most families. And women–and especially mothers–frequently are the ones who have the insight, the blogs and the networks to bring stories about sensitive health issues to the world.

by Golnaz Esfandiari, Persian Letters, Czech Republic - Afghans were banned from a park in the Iranian city of Isfahan in order "to ensure citizens' welfare." But it was Iranians who quickly condemned the decision on Facebook and other social media.

by Claire Provost, Guardian, UK - Technology can increase access to water and sanitation; other solutions seem to hinge on policy. But are the two areas distinct?

by Cara Hoffman, Women Under Siege, USA - Rape and sexual assault are still treated as though they are individual, unrelated acts of violence against specific victims—unless they’re in places like Congo or Sudan, in which case the individuals are disappeared into a faceless number called “mass rape.” Either way, somehow, the perpetrators of the crimes and the culture they inhabit are left out of the discussion.

by Golnaz Esfandiari, Persian Letters, Czech Republic - In a test of where loyalties within Iran's conservative establishment lie, it appears tradition has won the day.

by Martha Rosenberg, Huffington Post, USA - It was not a great surprise that the FDA's new cephalosporin livestock rules have the Agribusiness Seal of Approval. It was Big Pharma and Agribusiness lobbying that killed its stronger cephalosporin rules issued four years after.

by Ingrid Cruz, United We Dream, USA - The wave of anti-immigrant laws is sweeping through the South, and Mississippi is now next on the list of states that are attempting to pass draconian bills

by Verena Vradulovic, In Image and In Word, USA - Decades of applied pesticides and fertilizers have delivered high yield, immaculate- looking fruit to many of the supermarkets in the U.S. and to the far corners of the globe, but not without a local cost. Heavy pesticide and fertilizer use in cultivating household staples such as oranges, peaches, nectarines, grapes, olives and walnuts has contaminated local community drinking water.

by Marjorie Cohn, Marjorie Cohn, USA - The Bush administration set rules of engagement that resulted in the willful killing and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians. In particular, U.S. troops in Iraq operated in "free-fire zones," with orders to shoot everything that moves. Attacks in civilian areas resulted in massive civilian casualties, which the Bush administration casually called "collateral damage."

by Claire Provost, The Guardian, UK - Four years ago, soaring food prices and reports of food riots from West Bengal to Mexico made headlines worldwide and fuelled a new demand for global hunger figures. How have people been affected by rising food prices? Has hunger increased? What is the "human cost" of global economic crisis?

by Marjorie Cohn, Marjorie Cohn, USA - The same voices who brought us the illegal, tragic, and ill-advised war with Iraq will continue to try to dominate the national conversation with battle cries against Iran.

by Eva Golinger, Postcards from the Revolution, Venezuela - Washington has made no secret of its disdain for Venezuela’s President Chavez and mass media have turned a democratic leader into a dictatorship. Does Venezuela really represent a threat to the United States or is the hype just an excuse for regime change?

by Golnaz Esfandiari, Persian Letters, Czech Republic - Tabarzadi's video message is an example of social media providing Iranian activists a platform on which they can express themselves more freely than through other, frequently heavily censored media.

by Sheila A. Smith, CFR, USA - 2011, of course, will be forever remembered as the year of the “triple disasters.” Only time will tell what this devastating experience will mean for the Japanese people and their society. For so many Americans, March 11 and its aftermath reminded us of why we so admire the accomplishments of Japan, and the civility and humanity of so many Japanese. From Kandahar to Canberra, from Seoul and Beijing, Japan’s friends around the globe responded—in part because of the tremendous scope of the tragedy, but also out of a sense of gratitude for Japan’s own effort to assist and befriend those beyond their own shores.

The impact of the disasters is too broad to discuss here. But as a long time Japan watcher, several aspects of the disaster and its aftermath stood out. The first, and most widely recognized, is the depth of gratitude expressed by the Japanese people for their military, the Self Defense Forces (SDF). As Japan’s “first responder,” the SDF performed search and rescue operations, opened and sustained supply routes, and filled in the manpower for the local governments that lost staff as well as infrastructure and communications. In June, when I visited Ishinomaki, the SDF were just beginning to hand back governance tasks to an inundated municipal staff.

Second, the disasters brought back into focus Japan’s Imperial family as the symbol of national unity. The Emperor spoke out in the early days as the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi unfolded to remind Japanese to remain calm and to have hope. He and the Empress also traveled back and forth to the devastated regions of Tohoku, visiting evacuation shelters and reassuring those who lost not only their homes but their family members as well. Read full blog on CFR

by Leela Jacinto, Newshounding the World, France - What can I say about a blonde, Afghan-American female journalist reporting – sometimes undercover – across the country, including the southern Pashtun badlands, trying to interview drug lords, mules, lackeys and hostile Pashtun patriarchs in one of the world’s most hostile regions?

by Elizabeth Flock, The Washington Post Blog, USA - As the Stop Online Piracy Act heads to a vote in the House Judiciary Committee tomorrow morning, its opponents are lining up to stop it. The bill’s newest foe? Journalists. If passed, SOPA would expand the ability of law enforcement and copyright holders to shut down any site that hosts pirated content. But as the American Censorship group voiced on the blog Boing Boing on Wednesday, many believe “SOPA would not only hurt free speech, it will choke off the Internet workforce and its readers by taking down entire Web sites.”

by Gwen Sharp, The Society Pages, USA - After reading the comic, I thought it would be fun to have a round-up of examples of masculinizing the feminine — that is, attempts to sell items to men through repackaging and renaming, drawing on ridiculous stereotypes of masculinity to assure men that they can use these products without becoming girly.

by Janine Mendes-Franco, Global Voices, The Netherlands - December 1, was World AIDS Day. This year's theme was “Getting to Zero”, which, in the words of one Caribbean blogger, meant striving “towards achieving 3 targets: Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths. In other words wrap it up, get tested, dismantle the AIDS related stigmas. Get the facts and act on them.”

by Gail Tverberg, Our Finite World, USA - World industrial production has self-organized in a way that assigns different roles to companies operating in the three country groups, as a way to minimize manufacturing costs. Over the long term, this particular version of self-organization cannot continue.

by Juhie Bhatia, Global Voices, The Netherlands - As governments gear up for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP17) in Durban, South Africa, which starts today, experts are warning that among climate change's greatest consequences in developing countries such as Bangladesh are risks to the agriculture sector, including an increased risk of hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity.

by Jennifer L. Pozner, WIMN, USA - "So, so often, entertainment media (which is advertising-driven) and advertising itself are invested in making women feel like we’re incomplete or wrong, sexually, so that they can sell us a fantasy of what it would be like for us to be right...our sexuality is both the defining characteristic of all women and the product being sold. It’s never about our own pleasure, needs or boundaries. It’s always about being a prop in someone else’s play. Journalism & social media all too often unthinkingly repeat and amplify these tropes, because it’s what we’re used to hearing as a culture, so it “makes sense” to most people. There’s very little incentive for any sectors of the media to question this dominant narrative, and often real negative consequences if they do."

by Helen Lewis-Hasteley, New Statesmen, UK - Female bloggers speak out about misogynist comments, rape threats and death threats.

by Paula J. Caplan, When Johnny and Jane Came Marching Home, USA - Two million veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq now live among us, some of a total of 23 million from all United States wars. The disconnection of most civilians from veterans’ pain disconnects us from profoundly important truths about the nature of humanity and connection.

by Sarah Anderson, Institute for Policy Studies, USA - Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have been the strongest supporters of taxing financial transactions for nearly two years. A few months ago, the European Commission also reversed its earlier opposition and released proposed legislation for such a tax in the European Union.

by Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation, USA - More than one in three Americans now lives on less than $44,700 annually for a family of four. That makes it pretty tough—sometimes impossible—to afford the basics like housing, healthcare, food and education.That’s why more and more people are turning to the safety net who never imagined they would need to.

by Suzanne Lehn, Global Voices, Netherlands - "The time has come for an official acknowledgement of this tragedy, the memory of which is as much French as Algerian. The forgotten victims of 17 October 1961 were working, residing, living their lives in France. We owe them this basic justice, that of remembering."

by Lisa Hymas, Huffington Post, USA - Population growth tends to get blamed on other people: Africans and Asians who have "more kids than they can feed," immigrants in our own country with their "large families," even single mothers in the "inner city." But actually the population problem is all about me: white, middle-class, American me.

by Kate Fried, Food & Water Watch, USA - If there is any money to be made in water privatization, it’s among wealthy corporations and their shareholders, who time and time again have proven that they are not responsible patrons of common resources such as water.

by Naomi Wolfe, Occupy Cyberspace, USA - Last night I was arrested in my home town, outside an event to which I had been invited, for standing lawfully on the sidewalk in an evening gown. Let me explain; my partner and I were attending an event for the Huffington Post, for which I often write: Game Changers 2011, in a venue space on Hudson Street.

by Zubeida Mustafa, Zubeida Mustafa, Pakistan - Today people don’t ‘retire’ in the conventional sense of withdrawing from active life to wait for the inevitable end. Most people remain as active in their later years as they have been in any of their other ‘ages’.

by Leela Jacinto, France 24, France - More than a decade after the US and Europe slapped economic sanctions on Burma following the military’s crackdown after the 1990 elections, the West had lost the game to China. That was evident.

by Ariela Blätter, Refugees International, USA - Consistently identified by Refugees International as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” the enduring Somalia conflict has displaced some two million people – nearly a quarter of the population. These staggeringly high numbers of refugees required Dadaab to expand from its original, temporary capacity of 90,000 people to a quasi-city of 500,000.

by Abigail Disney, BlogHer, USA - There are Leymahs and Ellens and Tawakkuls all over the world. And hopefully their newfound recognition will shed light on how transformational women are in peace and democracy. As Nobel Prize Committee Chairman Thorbjoen Jagland told reporters, “we cannot achieve lasting peace in the world unless women receive the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.”

by Sue Turton, Al Jazeera, Qatar - The impact of the drawn out conflict on ordinary people in Sirte was brought into sharp focus for us last night. We had swung by the field hospital on the way back from the fighting on the frontline to ask the surgeon about casualty figures.

by Daliah Merzaban, Huffington Post, USA - "Martial arts teach us awareness," said Imran. "The more we train, the more aware we become. The more aware we become, the less likely we would get involved in a situation of conflict. So ironically, the more we train, the less use we will have for our violent techniques. We attain peace."

by Amira Al Hussaini, Global Voices, Netherlands - Twitter is abuzz with excitement tonight as the names of Arab netizens are being circulated as possible candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize for the roles they have played in the Arab revolutions.

by Dr. Paula J. Caplan, Science Isn't Golden, USA - We must declare that the United States does not believe in playing God by deciding who lives and who dies.

by Nicole Lederer, Huffington Post, USA - Making transformations to something as big and as important as our energy system is not something any industry can do on its own -- much less an industry that's competing against one of the biggest, most influential (and most heavily subsidized) industries in the world: The fossil fuels industry.

by Nicola Hebden, France 24, France - At the foot of the Eiffel Tower, in distinctly autumnal weather for August, the one of the world’s largest international football events took place. Despite only having three 22 by 16 meter AstroTurf pitches, a total of just 12 event organisers and a budget of £3 million, the Homeless World Cup welcomed 64 teams from different countries, making a total of more than 600 participants - all of them without a home - to play football.

by Marianne Mollmann, Huffington Post, USA - As media reports celebrate advances toward new male contraceptive methods, the fact that women currently take the larger responsibility for birth control is held up as somewhat inevitable and sad. In effect, contraceptive use is now so firmly established as a woman's responsibility that data on birth control often are collected from women only.

by Juliana Rincón, Global Voices, Netherlands - Who else can step up to shoulder the responsibility of helping solve this violence problem? Do the media: mass and independent, have a part to play in this struggle?

by Anna Lappé, Civil Eats, USA - In order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed the future, we must invest in “sustainable intensification”—not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals.

by Fozia Mohamed, Global Voices, The Netherlands - How was the Libyan blogging scene before the February 17 revolution and how has it evolved over the last few months?

by Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian, UK - It's like a hangover after a big party. For over a decade microfinance has boomed as donors' have poured millions into the sector – now there is a sober reckoning. David Roodman picked up on it on Tuesday in his blog on the Centre for Global Development site, calling it the "new realism". He cited two recent reports, which argue for a rebalancing of the sector.

by Marcia G. Yerman, The Huffington Post, USA - Gloria Steinem has frequently spoken about the importance of sharing stories, using the imagery of communicating oral narratives around an ancient campfire. She has done that with her own personal history in the HBO documentary, Gloria: In Her Own Words.

by Scilla Alecci, Global Voices, The Netherlands - The effectiveness of the power saving measures is still a subject of hot debate in the country but many have taken this opportunity to change their power consuming life style.