After being relegated to the shadows for decades by its more powerful neighbours, Laos is finally taking the lead role in a global campaign to ban the use of cluster bombs.

'The first film I make when I go back to my village will be about unequal wages women peasants get compared to their male counterparts,' says Haseena Mallah, an unlettered farmhand in her 40s.

Cecilia Gondwe waits in the shade of a tree at the Mwanza Border Post between Malawi and Mozambique. Somewhere inside, a clearing agent is completing elaborate paperwork on her behalf.

Ovidio Perez's brother was planning to return to Guatemala because of a new Arizona law that made it a state crime to be an undocumented immigrant. He returned, but in a coffin.

Precious Nabwire nearly died giving birth to her fourth child. If Kenyan gynaecologists have their way, a drug to control bleeding after childbirth will be licensed, offering greater protection to tens of thousands of women facing similar danger.

'We have to start thinking about a new social contract on a planetary scale, but also within each country,' says Argentine activist and scholar Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

There are growing fears that increasing numbers of women candidates and voters may not participate in the 2011 general elections because of an upsurge in election-related violence.

Musician Justin Dillon had been reading about human trafficking before he went on tour to Eastern Europe. In Russia, his young female translator told him about offers she was receiving to move west for jobs that seemed too good to be true - and with no paperwork to back them up.

'People want to get rid of the factory. It has to go. There's already been an accident,' a taxi driver said on the drive to the pesticide plant belonging to the Agricultura Nacional company in this southern Mexican city.

'The trust fund that we have just established is historic, not only for Ecuador but for the entire world,' said Rebeca Grynspan, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), after signing an agreement with the government of Rafael Correa to leave 846 million barrels of oil under the ground in a pristine Amazon jungle wildlife reserve.