In a war where brutality seems to be in flood tide, Howard’s story is about a mother seeking an eddy in the inhumanity. Her daughter was taken in the Hamas attack. She knows the days since have put her at the center of a complicated crisis that has divided the world. But like so many caught in the middle, she just wants her child to be safe.

In Gaza, meanwhile, simply making bread has become a feat of ingenuity. Taking a shower is a dream. Children can now tell the difference between the sounds of artillery fire and rocket fire. They ask adults: What will happen to us? Will we stay alive? Says one mother: “I cannot answer.”

Supreme Court justices had no code of ethics, until now. The new document lays out no penalties, and most of the rules will be enforced ... by the justices themselves. Yet with public confidence in the court at an all-time low, doing anything is a positive step, experts say.

The grief and pain that Ukrainian soldiers can suffer on the front line is sometimes beyond the reach of doctors and therapists. Horses, though, can help.

In our weekly roundup of progress around the world, we have carbon accountability in California, a reawakened island in the Caribbean, and good news for the white rhino. Night schools in Japan are also expanding opportunity. 

Sometimes a simple idea is all it takes. In 2000, Mexico City added female-only train cars on its subway system. The concept soon spread – to Tokyo, Lahore, and Rio de Janeiro. Now that rethinking of how public transport can meet the needs of female passengers is at the heart of other shifts in urban design. What started as an attempt to shield girls and women from sexual abuse is shaping remedies to many social and economic problems.

Public transportation consciously designed around women, argues Kalpana Viswanath, an urban planner based in Haryana, India, is essential to building communities. In much of the world, women’s daily movements are based on tending to the needs of their families. “If you put the care economy center stage [in urban design], you also allow men to be better caregivers,” Dr. Viswanath told the authors of a newly published collection of interviews with international women who are rethinking urban environments. “It is the work of care that makes us human. We should foreground that in any infrastructure, service, amenity, or public space that we design and plan in our cities.”

The benefits of making public transportation female-friendly are measurable. The average rate of female literacy in the Middle East and North Africa is 88%, for example, yet women make up just 19% of the regional labor force. India faces similar discrepancies. Women there contribute to just 17% of the gross domestic product despite rising female enrollment in higher education. If women’s economic participation were equal to that of men, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates, it would add $28 trillion to the global economy.

Solving that discrepancy can sometimes be simple. In India, for example, the state of Karnataka recently made bus travel free for female passengers to boost employment and school attendance. A new World Bank study of gender-based transportation reforms in Cairo, Beirut, and Amman showed that such measures can have a “robust” impact on female economic participation.

But they also have a more complex social benefit. All-female subway cars, for instance, have helped women in Japan find freedom from the fear of sexual harassment during their daily commutes. In more restrictive, male-dominated societies, meanwhile, orienting public transportation toward women has become a focal point of equal rights.

“The cultural change in mobility ... is a moment of opportunity,” Janet Sanz, former deputy mayor of Barcelona, Spain, told the Local Governments for Sustainability blog last year. “What we do now is to prioritize people.”