Up the Pacific Coast from California to Washington, through the heartland in Texas and Illinois, and over to the Atlantic Seaboard in New Jersey and New York, local trade unions and mainly immigrant workers centres are experimenting with new modes of cooperation.

New scientific research suggests that climate change is taking place faster than foreseen in studies considered so far, according to environmental experts at a forum on climate change called by the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE).

After decades at sea, organised labour has limped into port. Last fall, they helped to elect a sympathetic U.S. president and Congress. Now trade unions are gearing up to push for a major overhaul of labour law. They are also welding an alliance with immigrant and human rights groups to win comprehensive immigration reform.

It is too optimistic to say the United States is headed for a Japan-style recession, according to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman.

Just a few months after a right-wing government gained power in Israel, Iran's hardliner president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared the winner in Friday's election, although his main rival has not accepted defeat and reformist supporters were skirmishing with security forces in the capital Tehran Saturday.

'What are you doing here?' The motorist in the battered white Volvo stops to ask us alongside an overflowing rubbish cart. Residents of this poor Palestinian neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem have been burning garbage in a bid to clear the uncollected mounds.

Colombian journalist Hollman Morris phoned an international news agency and said in an agitated voice: 'I am being followed by the police.'

Although it is still in the process of being drafted, a 'code of responsible conduct' promoted by the Chilean government to regulate public and private investment in indigenous areas has already drawn resistance.

As the December deadline for reaching a global climate deal in Copenhagen approaches, China is claiming leadership - rallying emerging economies to defend their rights to development and strike bargaining positions with rich nations.

Representatives of the Rocinha slum and the Rio de Janeiro government have agreed to replace a high wall, intended to prevent this densely populated hillside neighbourhood from spilling into the forest, with ecological paths, parks and low walls.