by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - Election 2013 has proved to be an enigma. We are a people in a hurry and immediately after the polling took place on May 11 we had started jumping to conclusions. The facts had still not been ascertained fully, and without facts (and figures in the case of polling which is essentially a numbers game) how can one form informed opinions? What we have is a babble of judgements pronounced in line with the political leanings of various observers and on the basis of reports — not all of them authentic — circulating on the internet and in the media.

by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - As a new government enters the corridors of power in Sindh it will find itself empowered with an innovative and sensible document that lays down the gender guidelines for official policies in the province. It was a smart move on the part of the Sindh Women Development Department to launch its Provincial Policy for Women Empowerment two days before the elections. One significant objective of this document is to “mainstream the women’s perspective in all development work and governance.”

by Kaori Shoji, Japan Times, Japan - This bilingual thing … they say that it’s a both curse and a blessing. Watakushigotode kyōshukudesuga (私事で恐縮ですが, A thousand pardons for having the gall to talk about myself), but I think of it more like a stigma. It’s not the same for millenials — they were born and raised in a kinder and more lenient Japan, whereas us old-timer eigo-tsukai (英語使い, English-speakers) have had it tough since day one.

by Sonia Perez Diaz, The Independent, UK - Former dictator Efrain Rios Montt's conviction of genocide is a historic moment in a country still healing from a brutal, three-decade civil war and his trial offered Guatemala's oppressed indigenous communities their first chance to be heard, human rights activists said.

by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - At a time when secular-thinking liberal Pakistanis are under attack from the Taliban, reading Azadi’s Daughter by Seema Mustafa (no relative) proved to be a thought-provoking exercise for me.

Sub-titled Journey of a Liberal Muslim — that is how the author describes herself — the book resonated with me powerfully although India and Pakistan are believed to be worlds apart politically, socially and culturally.

But are they? Fahmida Riaz created quite an uproar in New Delhi when she categorically pronounced a few years ago, “Tum bilkul hum jaisey nikley/ Ab tak kahan chupay thay bhai”. (You turned out to be just like us/ Where were you all along, brother?)

by Lucy Siegle, The Guardian, UK - A week on, the Rana Plaza catastrophe in Bangladesh is now the deadliest catastrophe in the history of the garment industry, with the death toll exceeding 500. The gruesome accounts of rescuers cutting off limbs from trapped workers (sometimes without anaesthesia) surely leaves a stain on brands that no new collection, celebrity endorsement or micro-trend can wash away? Doesn't it?

by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - In the ongoing violence-stricken election campaign there is a lot of talk about the economy and how that needs to be fixed to improve people’s lives. The political parties in the fray have apparently come to realise that public discontent focuses on the rising level of unemployment, spiralling inflation and growing poverty.

Hence the candidates have responded to popular concerns by making promises that offer the people a heaven on earth. The party manifestos are full of populist rhetoric meant to appease the voters. Those who understand the flaws in the official system and know that structural changes are needed to rectify the wrongs can see through the hollow pledges being made and the inadequacy of the approach adopted. It is therefore not strange that all parties shy away from specifics, and strategies in various sectors are not even defined.

by Colleen Lee, South China Morning Post, China - Political veteran Elsie Tu laments the widening income disparity in Hong Kong and has taken a shot at tycoons who have no conscience.
The former lawmaker and urban councillor, who turns 100 on June 2, became emotional when expressing sympathy for striking dock workers and anger with a billionaire, whom she declined to name.

by Shazia Mirza, Dawn, Pakistan - Margaret Thatcher was an iconic woman. Today, where women become icons for having plastic breasts and marrying footballers, Thatcher was an icon for something substantial rather than ephemeral.

by Bina Shah, The Dawn, Pakistan - Twenty women in leadership roles from various industries — finance, the corporate sector, law, publishing — sat down and talked about how Pakistan can promote women role models who are at the forefront of the movement for independence, self-reliance, and empowerment.

by Mary Regan, Irish Examiner, Ireland - "WE want to see as many of them as possible” — this was the one-line response by a grinning Enda Kenny two years ago, when he was asked if female representation would increase under a Fine Gael government.

by Alyssa Wiseman and Samantha Levy, The Globe and Mail, Canada - It’s been a horrible few months, with the senseless deaths of teens Amanda Todd and, more recently, of Rehtaeh Parsons. The devastating deaths of these young women, both victims of cyberbullying, have propelled social media to national attention.

By Tina Rosenberg, The New York Times, USA - By the time a poor child is 1 year old, she has most likely already fallen behind middle-class children in her ability to talk, understand and learn. The gap between poor children and wealthier ones widens each year, and by high school it has become a chasm. American attempts to close this gap in schools have largely failed, and a consensus is starting to build that these attempts must start long before school — before preschool, perhaps even before birth.

by Maryam Hasan, Dawn, Pakistan - Samira* looks like just another girl next door, but on closer inspection, one sees grief in the eyes of the abaya and headscarf-wearing 17-year-old.

by Nayla Tueni, Al-Arabiya, UAE - Yesterday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad spoke of neighboring countries, including Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, which support terrorists who enter his country. He decreased the gravity of the accusation against the "brotherly" country, Lebanon, due to its domestic divisions. He did not speak of his people who revolted against an authority that ruled for forty years since the era of his father and that dominated all the country's resources along with a limited number of relatives and men. He did not speak of the reasons that pushed the Syrians towards revolting against the rule of the intelligence.

by Agnes Szabó, Der Freitag, Germany - He who swaps his homeland, swaps his soul, they say in Hungary. Still, in the last two and a half years, more than half a million Hungarians have left the country and spread throughout the world. That is twice as many as those who left after the Hungarian Uprising was put down in 1956 – a lot of people for a country with just 10m inhabitants.

by Doreen Lwanga, Pambazuka, South Africa - Rather than continuing to operate on an exclusive basis, the LGBT movement in Uganda should strive to nurture a multivariate movement for social justice, creating a multi-normative society for their safety and the peaceful coexistence of future generations

by Sabria S. Jawhar, Arab News, Saudi Arabia - Last week President Barack Obama visited Israel’s Hall of Remembrance while on his Middle East tour. During his visit he wore the Jewish kippa on his head as a sign of respect. It was an appropriate gesture that followed a long line of US presidents and foreign heads of state who also wore the kippa during ceremonies.

by Andrea Bohnstedt, The Star, Kenya - ‘Thought you’re tech city?’, a West African friend wrote. ‘Yeah, so did I!’, I shrugged my shoulders.
No brownie points for guessing that that this was in the post-election week as we watched the IEBC’s system wobble, wobble some more, and then fall over. That’s of course a bit unfair: after all, it was one institution that failed, not an entire sector – and the IEBC isn’t a tech firm to start with.

by Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, UK - Well, the organizers at CPAC learned sure their lesson from that debacle. They didn't feature women or women's issues at all.
Yes, women were there. Plenty of them spoke! And not all of them introducing men. But the schedule was barren of any panel focused on outreach to women, any nod to the particular problem of attracting women to the conservative cause.

by Linda McQuaig, Toronto Star, Canada - Had Hugo Chavez followed the pattern of many Third World leaders and concentrated on siphoning off his nation’s wealth for personal gain, he would have attracted little attention or animosity in the West. Instead, he did virtually the opposite — redirecting vast sums of national wealth to the swollen ranks of Venezuela’s poor, along with free health care and education. No wonder he alienated local elites, who are used to being first in line at the national trough.

by Shagufta Naaz, Dawn, Pakistan - It’s the boys who make their clothes dirty and then help their mom (or grandma) to clean them by ‘giving hands to the machine!’ It’s the boys who climb the jungle gym at the playground and ride a bicycle to school. It’s a boy who proudly promises his mother that he will win ‘first position.’
So what do the girls do?

by Beate Lakotta, Der Spiegel, Germany - Semiya Simsek's family was torn apart 13 years ago when her father was murdered in Nuremberg by a neo-Nazi terror cell. Even worse, German authorities for years suspected the family had been involved. Now, as one of the killing spree's perpetrators is set to go on trial, the Simseks are trying to find peace with Germany.

by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - What a world of contrasts we live in. We have heartwarming tidings entwined with horrible news. We have compassionate souls struggling to save lives alongside brutes who blow the life out of people. Then we have a government that is an intriguing compound of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Its conscience is not moved when it fails to provide security to the citizens while the police force guards the privileged of the land leaving ordinary folks vulnerable to acts of terror. But this very same government becomes the first to steer the Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act 2013 (Thota) through the Sindh Assembly unanimously — an act of great humanity.

by Liz Ford, The Guardian, UK - Female university students are mobilising to change a culture where academic success is often dependent on sexual favours. A 2011 survey conducted by ActionAid in three Liberian universities found that about 85% of female students had been sexually harassed or involved in transactional sex while they studied. Some women said they were forced to keep repeating classes if they refused to have sex with their male lecturers. If a woman reported her lecturer and he was sacked, the teacher would often simply move to another institution, the survey revealed.

by Isabel Hilton, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong - Delegates to China's National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference this week, can hardly avoid the realisation that they are at a pivotal moment in China's growing environmental crisis: either the government acts with a rigour and effectiveness it has not shown to date, or China's long period of growth could crash into environmental buffers.

by Fiona Ehlers, Julia Amalia Heyer, Mathieu von Rohr and Helene Zuber, Der Spiegel, Germany - For years, Europe's young have grown increasingly furious as the euro crisis has robbed them of a future. The emergence of Beppe Grillo's party in Italy is one of the results -- and is just the latest indication that disgust towards European politics is widespread.

by Jessica Mack, Guardian, UK - Violence against women is not all bloody lips and black eyes, though. It is emotional abuse and financial control, street harassment and reproductive coercion. At its root, such violence is about power, sex, how we view masculinity and the very fabric of our identities.

by Laura Bates, Guardian, UK - Facebook insists there's no place on its site for hate speech or content that is threatening or incites violence. So why do images that seem to glorify rape and domestic violence keep appearing?

by Sisonke Msimang, Mail & Guardian, South Africa - Anene Booysen's rape will happen again. She was raped and mutilated because she was a girl, and they wanted to destroy her.

by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - What secularists need to realise is that if they want to strengthen their hand they will have to muster popular support for their ideas by mobilising the masses. People have to be told what secularism is all about. We have lived under dictatorships for so long that we seem to forget that to gain currency any idea must have the support of the masses.

by Barbara Spinelli, La Repubblica, Italy - Because it lacks a common political government, the European Union is not leading the war but it is, nonetheless, now part of its daily routine. If we add the never-ending fight against terrorism to the fighting that spread throughout the Balkans at the end of the 20th Century, Europeans have been sporadically participating in armed conflicts for the past 14 years.

by Jill Filipovic, Guardian, UK - Values conservatives have got it wrong: marriage doesn't foster social stability and economic prosperity. It's the other way around.

by Liz Szabo, USA Today, USA - Cancer is not just a health issue, advocates say.

by Nora Boustany, Daily Star, Lebanon - There is a more valiant battle being fought and it is opening new frontiers of the mind in Syria. It is that of reporters, local and foreign, and all those helping them in excavating the truth from the ruins all around.

by Zubeida Mustafa, Dawn, Pakistan - It is now very clear that without a deweaponisation exercise there is absolutely no way of ending the violence in the metropolis.

by Karen McVeigh, Guardian, UK - Hundreds of women have been arrested, convicted, jailed, detained in mental institutions or forced to endure medical procedures as a result of the "criminalisation of pregnancy" over the last four decades, a new report has found.

by Rafia Zakaria, Dawn, Pakistan - The secret video camera, with its sinister ability to capture unwitting and perhaps unwilling subjects in acts of spying, represents a new tool for moral policing that far outdoes the human eye in surveillance.

by Beril Dedeoglu, Today's Zaman, Turkey - The Azerbaijani government is perfectly well aware that there are many people in the country unhappy with the way the country is governed, and they are getting ready to pour into the streets. Maybe their version of an Arab Spring really is approaching, who knows.

by Libby Brooks, The Guardian, UK - In trying to understand the horror in India, we would do well to define the beliefs that excuse or condone sexual violence.

by Katie Boucher, The National, UAE - It feels as though it ought to be the happiest time of your life. And yet, for many women who suffer from post-natal depression (PND) - up to a quarter of new mothers, according to statistics - having a baby can feel like the lowest.

by Rafia Zakaria, Dawn, Pakistan - They are the easiest of targets, little groups of women, clutching medical boxes and knocking on doors. From modest entryways to hovels to elaborate doors of mansions, from huts in lush villages to crumbling dwellings on craggy hills, all have borne the knocks of Pakistan’s Lady Health Workers (LHW). As this past December revealed, killing them takes almost nothing — a few bullets on defenceless unarmed bodies, is all it takes to kill the women that take healthcare to the most distant doorways of Pakistan.

by Lale Kemal, Today's Zaman, Turkey - Russia now faces the risk of losing not only it's business interests in this country but also its strategic weight in the Middle East region as a whole if it continues to support the regime of President Bashar al-Assad despite Moscow's own apparent belief that Assad's downfall appears to be nearing.

by Melanie Mühl, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany - In October 2012 Pieper saw a Greece where heavily pregnant women were rushing around, going from from hospital to hospital begging, but because they had neither health insurance nor enough money, nobody wanted to help them bring their child into the world. In a suburb of Athens, people who were until recently middle class, were gathering fruit and vegetable scraps from the street.

by Alexandra Kazakova, Asia Times, Hong Kong - Last year's violence in the town of Janaozen has created a significantly more oppressive environment in Kazakhstan, according to human rights defenders and analysts interviewed by IWPR.

by Nora Boustany, Daily Star, Lebanon - Just as the Palestinian Authority was gearing up for its minimal, yet meaningful, milestone last month at the United Nations General Assembly – that of gaining a non-member observer state status – London led diplomatic pressure for guarantees that Palestinians would forego their right to membership in a world court.

by Ellie Mae O'Hagan, Guardian, UK - Like every former detainee I met at Detention Action, Jay was at the wrong end of the single most controversial element of UK immigration law: the fact that the government imposes no time limit on the detention of migrants. We are the only country in Europe that does this.

by Sana Altaf, Dawn, Pakistan - Making things worse for the women are the social ramifications of infertility. Childless women are stigmatised and are looked down upon. Married women face the wrath of in-laws and husbands while unwedded girls fear marriage.

by Petula Dvorak, Washington Post, USA - What has happened to our culture that we even have this category — school shootings — by which to measure a horror that should otherwise be inconceivable, immeasurable and unfathomable?

by Orla O'Connor, Irish Times, Ireland - No discussion on women’s right to health in Ireland in 2012 can take place without emphasising the critical right of women to reproductive health and abortion.