Despite having equality on paper, women continue to be shut out of most leadership positions in the United States, and some experts say that the persistence of language in which male is the default gender is an overlooked factor.

Hundreds of Peruvian communities were displaced as they fled the 1980-2000 civil war. Today the government is pushing for urgent passage of a law that would facilitate the relocation of entire villages or neighbourhoods in mineral or energy-rich areas.

Neoliberal economic ideas have grown increasingly dominant over the last 30 years. During that same time, the spread of HIV/AIDS has reached an epidemic crescendo.

Health experts have called on European governments to use a pioneering tax on fast foods to be introduced in Romania as a model for the entire continent as the battle with obesity spreads to the former communist bloc.

They come by the hundreds every day to sand dunes and rubble sites to sift for pebbles, stones and sand that can be used in making concrete blocks. They lean into trash bins across the Strip, and wade through piles of rubbish scavenging for plastics, metals, and any bits worth reselling.

When Chile elected Michelle Bachelet as its first woman president in 2005, thousands of women celebrated the historic victory as their own personal triumph, proudly marching in the streets wearing mock presidential sashes. Today, men and women both recognise the concrete and symbolic progress achieved in gender issues under her administration.

Arab governments have stepped up efforts to curtail tobacco use, but initiatives have met stiff resistance from the region's smokers.

A social programme in Bolivia that prevents the deaths of two mothers a day from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth is making headway despite administrative difficulties, and has the potential to cut the alarmingly high maternal mortality rate in this country by up to 80 percent in just five years.

As a former bureaucrat, Sakda Orphong cuts an unlikely figure as someone who is busy fomenting a grassroots protest movement to confront Thailand’s current government.

Local and foreign non-governmental organisations have had a liberal existence in Sri Lanka, but this may not last for much longer under the government’s plans to amend a 1980 law that would tighten control over them.