News stories by Sabine Clappaert

BRUSSELS, Apr 02 (IPS) - Twenty-two-year-old Dario (not his real name) came to Belgium from Brazil in 2005. Just a teenager at the time, he told IPS he "came to escape the economic, social and political conditions in Brazil and to learn another language".

BRUSSELS, Jan 20 (IPS) - Despite staggering advances in medical science and technology over the years, women around the world continue to suffer gravely as a result of inadequate access to basic reproductive health services.

DEAUVILLE, France, Oct 25 (IPS) - The international financial crash of the late 2000s created more than a global economic recession: it accentuated popular doubts about the paradigms on which our economies are built and prompted a closer look at two crucial drivers of economic growth: women and entrepreneurship.

The Traditional Courts Bill currently under discussion in South Africa’s parliament and due to be enacted by the end of 2012 could undermine the basic rights of some of the country’s most vulnerable inhabitants: the 12 million women living in remote rural communities across the country.

In a surprise address late Sunday night, U.S. President Barack Obama declared Osama bin Laden - leader of the terrorist organisation al Qaeda and the world’s most wanted fugitive - dead. According to Obama, bin Laden was captured and shot in Pakistan’s Abbottabad city, just north of Islamabad. Within minutes of the announcement, leaders across the globe began to issue statements expressing their views on bin Laden’s death.

While Belgium’s politicians, academics, business leaders and feminists grapple with the concept and reality of a law banning headscarves in public institutions and beyond, two entrepreneurial women have joined forces to rescue the headscarf from the country’s political debate. Inge Rombauts and Fatima Rafiy run the exclusive hijab boutique Noor D’Izar, which offers women, 'a fashionable solution regardless of their reasons for wanting to wear a headscarf,' Inge Rombauts tells IPS.