KARACHI, Pakistan — The latest Academy Award for a filmmaker from Pakistan is focusing attention on so-called honor killings of women in the country, with the prime minister and other senior officials vowing to strengthen laws against the practice.

Dressed as Rosie the Riveter, the icon of American women’s empowerment during World War II, Li Tingting’s raised fist in a photograph posted on Facebook on Monday signaled defiance — one year after the authorities detained her and four other Chinese feminists on the eve of International Women’s Day, causing an international uproar.

WASHINGTON — The White House will nominate Gen. Lori J. Robinson of the Air Force to lead all military forces in North America, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Friday. If confirmed by the Senate, General Robinson will become the first woman to head one of the United States combatant commands.

The dean of the law school of theUniversity of California, Berkeley, sexually harassed his executive assistant over a period of several months, and then was allowed to stay on the job out of concern for his career after an internal investigation found her sexual harassment complaints to be justified, according to a lawsuit announced Wednesday.

The school now finds itself embroiled in three sexual harassment cases involving faculty members in the highest echelons of the university. Law school Dean Sujit Choudhry, famed astronomer Geoff Marcy and vice-chancellor of research Graham Fleming have resigned under pressure in the last year amid widespread controversy over the handling of their cases.

Ms. Karvonides is Harvard’s first Title IX officer, leading a new bureaucracy that oversees how the institution responds to complaints of sexual violence under Title IX, the federal law that governs gender equity in education. She is one of a rapidly growing number of Title IX employees on campuses nationwide, as colleges spend millions to hire lawyers, investigators, case workers, survivor advocates, peer counselors, workshop leaders and other officials to deal with increasing numbers of these complaints.

In a lawsuit against the university filed on Tuesday in Federal District Court, Ms. Ravina said she complained repeatedly to Columbia officials about the situation, but that they only dismissed and belittled her. The suit claims Ms. Ravina was subjected to gender discrimination and sexual harassment, and asks for more than $20 million in damages. She also wants more time to apply for tenure.

SEOUL, South Korea — The Constitutional Court in South Korea on Thursday rejected a challenge to the country’s ban on the sex trade, handing a defeat to prostitutes who have campaigned for years to decriminalize their work.

The case, submitted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces civil rights laws against workplace discrimination — is the latest front in the spreading debate over equal treatment of female athletes. A tennis official was forced to resign recently after saying that female players “ride on the coattails of the men,” and the N.C.A.A. has drawn scrutiny for the financial contrasts between the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments.

Throughout my childhood, well-meaning adults told me that my race and my heritage weren’t supposed to matter. Yet claims of “colorblindness” and melting-pot platitudes did not stop people from complimenting my English or asking where my parents had gotten me, nor did they prevent my classmates from pulling back their eyes and teaching me slurs I was usually too humiliated to report to anyone. In those years there was no one I could turn to in my confusion, no one who could answer my questions: Where, exactly, did I fit in? Did my adoption mean I was supposed to try to aspire to a whiteness beyond my reach? When other people looked at me, what did they see — an Asian girl, or an American?