India overlooks abuse of domestic workers in new sexual harassment bill…India’s first bill to protect women against sexual harassment has been slammed for excluding a provision for domestic workers who make up the bulk of women workers…Read it at Christian Science Monitor
India: garbage wars...In the small city of Katihar, nestled near the border of Bihar and West Bengal in northeastern India, there rages a war over trash.On the one side there is a group of cleaners, mainly women from lower castes, dressed all in green. They have begun offering a door-to-door service, collecting the garbage people used to throw in the street…read it at GlobalPost.Cancun climate change deal falls flat, Kyoto Protocol on life support…The climate change conference in Cancun appears to have sealed the fate of the Kyoto Protocol, the only binding treaty to combat climate change, and left countries squabbling over the substance and form of a new treaty for the future...read it at The Christian ScienceMonitor
U.N. Presence at Bashir’s inauguration spells trouble for ICC…The International Criminal Court was wounded by the defiance of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who rejected its authority after being indicted last year. To make matters worse, Bashir was re-elected and then, further rubbing salt in the ICC’s wounds, key United Nations officials attended his inauguration in Khartoum on Thursday…read it at Global Post
For peace and justice in Sudan…All her life, Sarah Rahman has seen her homeland bruised by savage violence. Even as North Sudan and South Sudan made peace after four decades of fighting, the conflict in Darfur persists. But the 24-year-old businesswoman sees “real peace” coming soon. “I believe this time all the killing will stop,” she said…read it at Frontline.
New Fronts for Justice in the Sikh Massacre…Mohinder Singh never saw what happened to his father. But his grandmother watched him hacked to pieces after his eyes were gouged out during the 1984 Sikh massacre in New Delhi…Read it at Global Post.
Haitian Girl With Massive Mouth Tumor Fights For Her Life…While shooting for a story in Haiti, we came across a 16 year-old girl called Ketura Malvoisin who is suffering from a tumor in her upper jaw. We had never seen anything like this before. Breaking her teeth, the cancerous tumor had come out through her mouth like a big blob of jello coated with saliva…Read it at Huffington Post
Le Nouvelliste Returns–Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, is reviving gradually. The publication was out of action for more than a month after a devastating earthquake struck the Caribbean nation on January 12.
The Haitian media—television, print, and radio—ceased operations for weeks following the earthquake that killed thousands, displaced a million people, and wrecked large parts of the capital city, Port-au Prince. 
The 111-year-old family newspaper, founded by Chauvet’s great-great-grandfather, is bruised but recuperating. The printing press is busted, but its building is still standing with cracks on its exterior. Most of the houses in the surrounding neighborhood have been destroyed, including the presidential palace and parts of the central prison…Watch it at Columbia Journalism Review
Sudan divided over ICC charges against Bashir–Outwardly, all seems normal at the Khartoum University campus. The sun streams through the hundred-year-old passageways. Noisy students mill around the campus with reckless abandon.
But a closer look reveals something strange. No one discusses politics openly. A rally opposing the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is quashed within minutes. Government “inspectors” are said to roam the halls, listening for anyone “inciting dissent”…Read it at GlobalPost
Keeping Armenia Alive in the Capital of Sudan–Armenian communal life continues after more than a century in the capital of Sudan, but sustaining it becomes increasingly difficult as its wealthier members depart…Read it at Time.com
Southern Exposure–When Opoka Christopher Amanjur, twenty-four, joined the Juba Post, a biweekly newspaper in South Sudan, as an editor, he went through each page of the newspaper, circling and underlining the text with a red pen…Read it at Columbia Journalism Review
Good COP, Bad COP–Political deadlock and convoluted information came with the territory for journalists covering the climate change summit in Copenhagen… Beyond that, however, journalists’ objectives and experiences there were often very different…read it at CJR.
Divine Dating — “Marriage is halal, dating is haram,” says Ali Selman. In other words, marriage is permissible, but dating is forbidden. These are the rules for the strapping, green-eyed Lebanese Shiite from Brooklyn…read it at The Daily Beast.
Threats to Environmental Journalists on the rise–Cherelle Jackson turned a deaf ear to the threatening calls she got after publishing the first two parts of a story about a government-sponsored development project that was proceeding despite the misgivings of an environmental impact assessment… Read it at CJR
Ireland’s Sunni-Shi’ite Divide–Iraqi immigrants are making new homes in Ireland, but sectarian animosities have traveled with them…read it at Time.com
From Darfur to Belfast--out of the line of fire into the melting pot…read it at The Irish Times
Indian Christians in Galway celebrate in a service that beats the language barrier–Many Christians among immigrants to Ireland have formed their own congregations outside of the mainstream churches…read it at The Irish Times
Hijab Hoop Dreams – ”Defense!” the players yelled to one another as the clock winds down and the opposition bears down on their basket in the dying minutes of the championship game. “Play defense!” The event could be any high school girl’s basketball tournament but for the fact that the players are all wearing loose-fitting sweatshirts and Islamic hijab scarves–and there are no men the crowd…read it at Time.com