News stories by Adrianne Appel

BOSTON, Massachusetts, Nov 06 (IPS) - Local and state campaigns have become a moneyed battleground this year for corporations and special interest groups hoping to sway the results of elections for local and state offices on Nov. 6.

There was a time when big, yellow cats freely roamed the length of a wild Florida. Today, three medium-sized humans are trekking the length of this southeastern U.S. state - 1,000 miles of swamp, forest, ranchland and blistered feet - in hopes that panthers may one day be able to safely tread the same path.

Dozens of Immokalee Florida farm workers left tomato fields behind last week and set up camp on the lush, corporate grounds of Publix supermarket to fast and protest the company's refusal to pay a penny more per pound for tomatoes.

Times are tough for workers in the U.S. where a recession has a stranglehold on much of the economy, but life is perfectly rosy for those at the top.

A crisis of foreclosures is twisting through neighbourhood after neighbourhood here, separating thousands of U.S. families from their homes each day and further unraveling the social fabric of low-income communities.

Big banks will not be forced to downsize and the public will be the last to know when they fail, a controversial bill unveiled by U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Congressman Barney Frank proposes.

While world leaders banter about International Monetary Fund and World Bank business in Istanbul, NGOs critical of the way the Bretton Woods institutions operate are not letting up pressure.

Economics Nobel laureate Paul Krugman helped unveil a new, lifesaving invention at the 2009 Ig Nobel awards ceremony last week - a pink brassiere that doubles as a pair of filtering gas masks.

As all factions of the U.S. Congress continue a bruising debate about how to change the U.S. health system, one state, Massachusetts, seems to point the way clear, but activists say the Massachusetts plan is already troubled and doomed by skyrocketing costs.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. continue to lose their homes each month in an ongoing crisis that is wreaking chaos on communities, advocates say.