After the politics desk was finally freed from the yoke of nonstop U.S. election coverage, international editor Catesby Holmes was able to get back to her global network of scholars and start commissioning stories on subjects ranging from anti-vaxxers in 1904 Brazil to police protests in Nigeria, and to the current incidence of election violence worldwide.

This week, she brought readers an edifying – and horrifying – story about forced sterilization of Indigenous women in Peru, by scholar Ñusta Carranza Ko. The authoritarian Fujimori regime’s sterilization of almost 275,000 people – euphemistically called a “family planning” measure – took place between 1996 and 2001. Carranza Ko writes that “the crime of forced sterilization has been underplayed in Peru’s post-Fujimori reckoning with the past.” The main target of the government’s effort: Indigenous women of Quechua descent, whose high birth rate the government wanted to diminish.

Now, writes Carranza Ko, “in public hearings that began earlier this year, thousands of these women are demanding justice.”

We also had stories this week on the history of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, how the news industry’s push for engagement with the public can set their journalists up for abuse (especially if those journalists are women) and an examination by journalism scholar Joshua Braun of “whether it’s feasible – or wise – for cable companies to play moderator to the channels they carry.”