News stories by IPS Correspondents*

The United Nations’ 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) opened Monday in New York, with the empowerment of rural women high on a list of priorities for this year.

Agriculture currently provides a livelihood for roughly 1.3 billion smallholder farmers and landless workers, of which nearly half — close to 560 million — are women.

On May 18, Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, the two men arrested in December after their traditional engagement party, were convicted of 'unnatural acts' and 'gross indecency' under colonial-era laws that remain in Malawi's penal code.

Critics of Arizona's new immigration law, which requires police to question people they suspect to be undocumented immigrants, say 'reasonable suspicion' boils down to having brown skin and looking Latino.

Diamonds haven't been among the first concerns at the World Social Forum these last 10 years. But through the recession and the still tottering recovery, a new sparkle in that business is pointing the way to a brighter world that is also better in a WSF sort of way.

Some signs are emerging of a new trend shown up by the recession: local governments (and the people) are going one way, national ones another.

The agreed, if dubious, solution to the financial crisis was to get people and governments - in the richer countries - to borrow more in order to spend more. What is not in doubt is the growing numbers of people who will be able to neither borrow nor spend.