In light of the ongoing controversy over Benghazi, the New York Times’ Room for Debate asked contributors to weigh in on Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state. Read more »

Among the many compelling stories of 2012 have been those of remarkable women fighting for rights and opportunities—for themselves, their communities, and their countries. In this post I highlight several such women and their courageous struggles. Read more »

Today is the United Nations’ first ever International Day of the Girl. The UN’s designation of this day reflects the growing awareness of the special challenges girls face around the world. It comes at a sober moment: just this week, the Taliban in Pakistan shot a 14 year-old schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, for her outspoken advocacy of girls’ education.  Although Malala survived the attack, she is in critical condition and the Taliban has vowed to finish the job if and when she leaves the hospital. Read more »

In his speech at the UN General Assembly this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to scale the blustery heights achieved in previous years–with predictable swipes at the European Union, Israel and the United States. Instead, he came across as a has-been bloviator, unable to escape his lame duck status and myriad problems at home, where he has his hands full with a deteriorating economy (hurt in no small part by tightened international sanctions), persistent internal political divisions, and continuing public disaffection, particularly among women. Read more »

The path to democracy hardly begins and ends with elections. There is necessarily a lot of heavy lifting along the way to ensure that a full set of human rights are protected. In the reconstituted Arab states of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, balancing conservative religious beliefs and social mores with minority rights, women’s rights, and freedom of speech is already proving to be a hard challenge indeed. Read more »

• The Resource Curse: With oil, gas, and minerals being found from Afghanistan to Mozambique to Papua New Guinea, the question of how to make natural resources a blessing instead of a curse remains crucial. CFR’s Terra Lawson-Remer takes it on in a new Policy Innovation Memo. To help countries counter corruption and boost transparency and accountability, she suggests extending the International Finance Corporation’s Sustainability Framework to bilateral as well as World Bank investments, boosting support for civil society in resource-rich countries, “internationaliz[ing] extractive-industry transparency requirements” across the world’s main stock markets, and strengthening monitoring of the Equator Principles for banks. CFR’s Stewart Patrick reviews the memo and the broader context on his blog. Read more »

On Wednesday, Libya’s interim government announced that it had finalized an election law to govern the choosing of a new 200-member National Assembly. The election, to be held prior to June 23, will be Libya’s first in more than four decades. In addition to managing the country’s affairs over the next year, the National Assembly will also be responsible for drafting the country’s new constitution. Read more »

In media markets around the world, liberals and conservatives are duking out their positions – often in increasingly vitriolic terms (the U.S. is a case in point.) Pakistan’s media is increasingly coming to look like the front line in their protracted battle between liberals and conservatives, too often with dangerous consequences. As the Committee to Protect Journalists reports, being a Pakistani journalist has become increasingly dangerous, especially for those reporting on the touchy subjects of politics and war. The number of Pakistani journalists killed for their reporting has quadrupled in recent years. In one high profile case last summer, Syed Saleem Shahzad was killed after investigating a story on links between the Pakistan military and Al Qaeda. Just this month, Mukarram Khan Atif, a freelance reporter who sometimes worked with the Pashto service of Voice of America was killed – this time by the Taliban. Read more »

In recent weeks, the Iranian regime has cracked down on journalists and activists in the lead-up to parliamentary elections in early March 2012. In another instance of the regime eating its own, Faezeh Hashemi, the prominent daughter of former president Ayatollah Akbar Rafsanjani, was one of the activists targeted. On January 3, she was sentenced to 6 months in prison for spreading propaganda about the Islamic Republic. The charge is related to comments she made in April 2011 to an opposition news source accusing the regime of being run by “thugs and hooligans.” Hashemi herself was harassed by security forces on several occasions. As part of her sentence, she has been banned from any political or organizational activity for 5 years. She can appeal, but clearly the regime wants to keep her – and by extension her father – quiet in the run-up to the March elections. She’s a de facto hostage. Read more »