GENDER/LANGUAGE: Rejecting the Derogatory ‘Feminine’

What happens to language and the way women are addressed when they start to occupy positions of responsibility? Well, it depends on the language.

SOUTH SUDAN: A More Gender Representative Leadership

As the general elections scheduled for April 2010 draw nearer in Africa’s largest country ravaged by a long drawn war, the scramble for political positions is rife as women struggle to make their presence felt.

NEPAL: Witch Tag Only on Dalits, Minorities

Just 40 kms away from the capital Kathmandu, in Thasingtole, Lalitpur District, Kalli Kumari B.K., 46, a local Dalit woman, was mercilessly beaten up. She was accused of being a 'witch', imprisoned in a shed and forced to eat her own excreta

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Field of Dreams

Dominicans have an extraordinary passion for baseball. All young boys play the game, sometimes with uniforms and equipment on a town baseball diamond, sometimes using coconut shells and old planks as ball and bat on an empty street or sand lot.

POLITICS: China Revives Confucianism to Win the World Over

As western nations and the values of liberal capitalism received a battering in the financial storm, China's emergence as a pillar of economic stability and growth has fed a new craze in all things Chinese – from language to philosophy and culture.

RIGHTS-INDIA: Hi-Tech Beats Sex Selection Ban

When a magistrate in the western port city of Mumbai convicted two doctors in November for advertising sex selection services, it showed determination to enforce laws aimed at stopping gender determination tests linked to the mass abortion of female foetuses.

ZAMBIA: Let our Chiefs Govern

The Litunga of Barotseland, King of the Lozi, has no judicial or legislative authority. No supervisory control over government projects, and worst of all he cannot stand for elected office. Yet successive Zambian presidents have deferred to him.

COLOMBIA: Chicha, Fashionable Survivor

Chicha, a traditional homemade brew produced all the way from Mexico to Chile since the days of the Inca, has largely been a rural drink over the centuries. But it is enjoying a new popularity in bars and restaurants in Bogotá and other Colombian cities, as a hip alternative to mass-produced beer.

JAPAN: Careers On Hold For Most Women

Tomoko Ando and her husband divorced because she refused to quit her job as a lawyer and start a family. The shortage of daycare centres has created a dilemma for women like Ando who want to continue working, but also start a family.

SOUTH SUDAN: Women Perpetuate Culture of Submission

All day Rosalinda Duany sells vegetables from her stall at the local market, earning a living to feed her family while her husband spends his days idling with his friends. But when his days become too boring and he demands his conjugal rights, Duany wordlessly stops work just to oblige him.

DEVELOPMENT-THAILAND: Fish, Not Dams

Seventy-one-year old Kham, a woman from Napho Klang, left home early in the morning of Dec. 14 to join a ritual to revitalise the Mekong River, which passes through this part of north-eastern Thailand.

BURMA: A Celebration of Life through the Arts under the Junta

The Burmese military spares nothing with its iron grip on power – not even art.

CULTURE-TURKEY: Kurdish Directors Make ‘National’ Cinema

A ban on the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party in Turkey has not deterred Kurdish filmmakers from all over the globe gathering in this southeastern city to continue their struggle for recognition through cultural means.

SIERRA LEONE: Woman Breaking Traditional Walls in Chieftaincy Elections

A war is raging in the eastern part of the country, once the centre stage for battles during the 10-year civil war and the place where "blood diamonds" were once mined. But this time the war is not for diamonds, but about whether a woman has the right to stand for paramount chief in the local chieftaincy election.

MALAWI: Women Fight Harmful Cultural Practices

An experience which Belita Simpokolwe went through in December last year remains deeply etched in her memory. "Sometimes I fail to concentrate in class when these things come back to my mind," laments 13-year-old Simpokolwe, a grade six pupil at Kawale Primary School, in the northern Malawi district of Chitipa.

RIGHTS-INDIA: Women Rally Together to Fight Injustice

Rajbala, 40, learned in the cruelest way possible that poverty exacts an exorbitant price, especially if one is pursuing justice.

CULTURE: Foreign Cash Makes Afghan Films

After the fall of the Taliban, the most widely recognised and praised Afghan film has been 'Osama'. Directed by Sediq Barmak, the 2003 production is the heartrending story of a young girl who disguises herself as a boy named Osama so that she might survive the Taliban regime. Osama received awards at both Cannes and the Golden Globes.

GENDER: U.N. Women’s Treaty Weakened by Slew of Reservations

A landmark U.N. treaty on women’s rights, which will be 30 years old next week, is in danger of being politically undermined by a slew of reservations by 22 countries seeking exemptions from some of the convention’s legal obligations.

DEVELOPMENT: Afro-Uruguayan Women Find Their Own Way Home

Contrary to popular belief in Uruguay, the capital city’s black population is no longer concentrated in neighbourhoods like Barrio Sur, Palermo and Cordón, which were historically home to the majority of African descendents and remain heavily steeped in Afro-Uruguayan culture.

U.S.: “We All Breathe the Same Air and Drink the Same Water”

Some 8,000 kilometres from the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Native American environmental experts from 66 tribes came together at a summit here this week to address the most pressing needs in their communities - problems, all emphasised, that know no geographic boundaries.

MEDIA-ARGENTINA: Fighting Stereotypes of Slums ‘From the Inside’

A group of local residents from Villa 1-11-14, a slum on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, put out a magazine aimed at breaking down the stereotypes propagated by the mainstream media, which associate neighbourhoods like theirs only with drugs, crime and marginalisation.