There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women, conclude two new research papers.

Insurance is the next big promise of financial services for the poor. But there aren't many takers.

central Ghor province is home to about a million people. Once at the heart of the mediaeval Ghorid empire stretching between present-day Iran and South Asia, Ghor is now poor and desolate even by Afghanistan's standard, with no proper roads, hospitals and schools.

As President Barack Obama pushes a controversial overhaul of the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system to cut costs, improve care and regulate insurers, Americans are divided over whether the 12 million mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants living stateside will get coverage.

Although forecasting the future is always dicey business, this paper presents several scenarios, all based on simulations of what poverty rates for various groups are likely to be over the next decade based on data showing how poverty has responded to changing unemployment rates in the past.

As African countries still struggle to control the deadly AIDS epidemic, they are also grappling with debates over what rights and duties to give those living with the disease -- a growing segment of the population that remains largely hidden.

While the European Union and Russia have developmental programs and institutions to prevent huge inequality between regions and preserve their cohesiveness as integrated entities, in Kazakhstan, a country the size of Western Europe, the regional development agenda remains inchoate.

India's extremes of hydrology, poverty and population present vast difficulties for water management which it has never mastered. And they are growing.

Race and discrimination are raw topics in Australia these days, after a series of violent assaults and robberies on Indian students over the past 18 months that have strained relations between Australia and India.

The number of children dying before their fifth birthdays each year has fallen below nine million for the first time on record, a significant milestone in the global effort to improve children's chances of survival, particularly in the developing world.

Some 30 years ago, the field of microfinance was born from a radical concept: poor people, when lent small amounts of money, will pay it back in a timely manner. ...Now another radical concept is starting to take hold: that the thing people really need, more than business loans, is a safe place to save their money. It's what development expert Robert Vogel calls the "forgotten half of rural finance."

Nationwide, funding to build low-cost apartments has dropped by more than half in two years to $4 billion. Hundreds of projects can't get off the ground because the federal tax credits that help offset development costs are currently worthless to traditional investors.

Is Africa an exception to the rule that countries reap a "demographic dividend" as they grow richer?

[New] research provides evidence of the sophistication with which poor people think about their finances. They are acutely aware of the importance of some psychological phenomena whose effects behavioural economists have only recently begun to explore.

Thousands of lone Afghan boys are making their way across Europe, a trend that has accelerated in the past two years. Although some are as young as 12, most are teenagers seeking an education and a future that is not possible in their own country, which is still struggling with poverty and violence eight years after the end of Taliban rule.

High-school students' performance last year on the SAT college-entrance exam fell slightly, and the score gap generally widened between lower-performing minority groups and white and Asian-American students, raising questions about the effectiveness of national education reform efforts.

Measured by average GDP, Guatemala is doing fine economically. But that fact hides dramatic income inequality: while wealthy citizens live luxuriously in sequestered Guatemala City neighborhoods, the poor are barely noticed, living like feudal peasants in the countryside.

A growing number of investors have taken the chance of investing in bottom-of-the-pyramid businesses, of which by far the most popular to date is microfinance... Yet as this idea has spread, it has become increasingly controversial.

Evelyn Santos began her quest for a green card nearly two decades ago, hoping someday she and her family could leave the Philippines and start a better life in the United States....The opportunity came in 2007, but with a painful caveat: Her two elder sons were now too old to qualify as dependents, so they would have to stay behind.

The paradox of rich resources and poor people hints at another layer of explanation about why Africa is poor. It is not just that there is war. The question should, perhaps be: "Why is there so much war?"

In less than a decade, Nepal, a poor and devout Hindu kingdom, had become what the Indian writer and gay activist C.K. Meena calls "a gaytopia." ...Nepal's transformation could only have happened in the first decade of the 21st century -- and similar changes are taking place elsewhere in Asia as sweeping economic and social forces erode long-held prejudices.

Experts within the research community say a small but stubborn streak of racial profiling has long persisted in the medical literature, borne out in studies that attribute health disparities between blacks and whites not to socioeconomics or access to health care alone but also to genetic differences between the races -- a concept that implies that a biological category of race exists.

Across East Africa, drought is again leaving millions of people in dusty countryside hungry, thirsty and dangerously dependent on food aid, the United Nations has warned. But as the weeks wear on, its effects -- less drastic but perhaps more politically potent -- are also creeping into urban capitals such as this one.

Reports of rising numbers of nutrition-related deaths and illnesses in Ethiopia are coming out amid tense times for humanitarian organizations, who face various obstacles in their attempts to deal with the effects of the drought.

To be sure, no group is doing well under our network of private insurers, which is more holes than net. But women fare particularly badly in terms of health, being more likely than men to leave a prescription unfilled; forgo seeing a needed specialist; and skip a medical test, treatment or follow-up.

Afghanistan has quietly passed a law permitting Shia men to deny their wives food and sustenance if they refuse to obey their husbands' sexual demands, despite international outrage over an earlier version of the legislation which President Hamid Karzai had promised to review.

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez.

...damning evidence, including testimony from released detainees and admissions from some officials, suggests that many endured appalling crowding in custody, ritual humiliation, starvation, sleep deprivation, vicious beatings and worse.

People like Victor Rozanski, who is trying get off the street with the help of a homeless shelter detox program, have gotten scant attention in the contentious national debate over whether and how to reform the nation's health care system. Among the nearly 50 million Americans who don't have health coverage are an unknown number of homeless adults, who would become eligible for Medicaid under proposals being considered in Congress.

A report released in June by the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement organization in New York, said that many Iraqi immigrants have been unable to find jobs, are exhausting government and other benefits and are spiraling toward poverty and homelessness.

Digging out of debt keeps getting harder for the unemployed as more companies use detailed credit checks to screen job prospects.

In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families -- from toddlers to old men -- are addicts.

As cash-starved states slash mental health programs in communities and schools, they are increasingly relying on the juvenile corrections system to handle a generation of young offenders with psychiatric disorders.

According to [a lawsuit underway], "large numbers of agricultural employers fail utterly to provide basic access to water and shade for their employees" and, as a result, hundreds suffer heat-related illnesses and hospitalizations -- or worse -- each year.”

For decades, American leaders and opinion makers have chosen to ignore the dark side of democratic India.

With economic troubles pushing more people onto the streets in the last few years, law enforcement officials and researchers are seeing a surge in unprovoked attacks against the homeless, and a number of states are considering legislation to treat such assaults as hate crimes.

Reformers of drug sentencing laws are closing in on a goal that was unthinkable even a few years ago: scrapping the federal sentencing structure established in 1986 that gives far harsher penalties for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, resulting in prisons packed with low-level, predominantly African American offenders.

Where better to ask the question than at a black beauty competition: Why is there a need for a Miss Black Whatever in 2009?

For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.

The blistered black walls of the Hameed family's bedroom tell of an unspeakable crime. Seven family members died here on Saturday, six of them burned to death by a mob that had broken into their house and shot the grandfather dead, just because they were Christian.

The nation blessed with Africa's largest oil reserves and some of its most fertile lands has a problem. It cannot feed its 140 million people, and relatively minor reductions in rainfall could set off a regional food catastrophe, experts say.

Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.

While Beijing has officially promoted gender equality ever since Chairman Mao proclaimed that women "hold up half the sky," implementation of this ideal has proved patchy.

The recession has delivered a disproportionate blow to blacks and Hispanics, yet minorities may be more optimistic about the economy than most Americans and many feel they have earned a place at the corporate table.

When a major swimwear factory in Bangkok found its sales plummeting in the downturn, it laid off some 1,900 workers, almost all of them women.

That didn't surprise labor activists who say women are the most vulnerable workers in recessions, especially in low wage industries in developing countries where gender equality lags.

The chief emerges from his tent to face the leaden morning light. It had been a rare, rough night in his homeless Brigadoon: a boozy brawl, the wielding of a knife taped to a stick. But the community handled it, he says with pride, his day's first cigar already aglow.

A study of Illinois traffic-stop data shows that police are more likely to ask to search cars driven by African-Americans -- but whites are more likely to have contraband.

The virtuous are often said to be as "pure as the driven snow" while villains are frequently described as having hearts of coal or blackened souls. And the metaphor is made flesh in many plays and films where the baddy wears black and the goody white. But how deep does the metaphor actually run, psychologically speaking?

Support groups claim an increasingly aggressive and macho political environment is contributing to the inaction of the police over attacks on lesbians and is part of a growing cultural lethargy towards the high levels of gender-based violence in South Africa.

The town where a white police officer and a black scholar ignited a national conversation on race and law enforcement has begun to open the dialogue that President Obama invited.

[In] July 2007, Wendell Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, saw an advert in a local paper for a tour of a free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia. [He] decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him.

America is being led, to a striking extent, by a new elite, a cohort of the best and the brightest whose advancement was formed, at least in part, by affirmative action policies. From Barack and Michelle Obama (Columbia, Princeton, Harvard) to Eric Holder (Columbia) to Sonia Sotomayor (Princeton, Yale) to Valerie Jarrett (Michigan, Stanford), the country is now seeing, in full flower, the fruition of this wooing of minorities to institutions that for much of the nation's history have groomed America's leaders.

And yet the consequences of that change remain unresolved, as became clear on Friday, when Mr. Obama grappled a second time with the arrest of the Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that up to 30 percent of animals and plants face an increased risk of extinction if global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius in coming decades. But anthropologists also fear a wave of cultural extinction for dozens of small indigenous groups -- the loss of their traditions, their arts, their languages.

Years of state and federal neglect have hobbled the nation's unemployment system just as a brutal recession has doubled the number of jobless Americans seeking aid.

When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?

The rich folk can worry about saving the elephants; the poor have more urgent problems at hand. When most Indians can afford clean transportation, are well fed and safely above poverty levels, come talk to them about reducing emissions.

In the 20 months since the current recession began it has taken a toll on people and places across the country, whether measured by job losses, unemployment, or increased demand for emergency and safety net services. However, the magnitude of these impacts has varied significantly across the nation's major metropolitan areas.

Images and accounts of the North Korean gulag become sharper, more harrowing and more accessible with each passing year.

New research has challenged the long-standing belief that HIV and AIDS in Africa primarily affect heterosexuals. A study published on the website of the British medical journal Lancet found that men who have sex with other men are up to 10 times more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to be infected with the virus -- which suggests that the fight against AIDS on the continent may be undermined by widespread homophobia.

Black students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released Tuesday by the Department of Education.

You line up [Michael Jackson's] album covers, from "Got to Be There" when he was 13 and brown with a big-tooth grin, to "Off the Wall," when he still had a beautiful nose and a big Afro, to "Thriller," when his skin was still beautiful brown, but his nose was smaller, to "Bad," when his nose was even thinner and his skin was white. You trace your finger over the transformation, looking for a clue as to why the lips changed, the nose became more upturned, the brown skin faded until it was bleached beyond recognition.

[The] before-and-after photos of Jackson tell a deeper story about color discrimination, also known as colorism -- an intra-racial discrimination among African Americans.

Many [families] in Urumqi find themselves at an unexpected crossroads in the aftermath of this week's violence, which has claimed at least 156 lives. Terrified of their Han neighbors, but accustomed to the comforts of the city they have made their home, they must weigh the benefits of staying in a place where they no longer feel welcome or returning to a countryside where their salaries will probably be reduced by half.

President Obama has enlisted the world's leading powers to contribute $15 billion to help millions of the world's poorest farmers grow enough food to feed themselves, American officials said Wednesday. ...With the ranks of the hungry expected to exceed a billion people this year, the undertaking has great urgency for the bulk of the world's poor who still live in rural areas.

It also signals a major change in the United States' own approach to hunger, which has relied far more on shipping American-grown food to the starving than on helping them grow their own.

The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind.

Government "safety net" programs like Social Security and food stamps have pulled growing numbers of Americans out of poverty since the mid-1990s. But even before the current recession, these programs were providing less help to the most desperately poor, mainly nonworking families with children.

Many economists view the recession as a correction that, while difficult in the short run, will improve the economy by redirecting workers and investments into more profitable industries. But for workers cramming into community colleges around the country to retrain themselves, the path forward is far from clear.

A new study of civil courts examined the 35 states with the highest immigrant populations and found that interpreter services are not always provided, or not provided well, and are not keeping up with growing demand.

Can 'inclusive capitalism' thrive in India?

Countries on the front line in the "war on terror" are using the battle against extremists as a smokescreen to crack down on minority groups, according to an international human rights group.

The treatment of [T-shirt maker] American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them -- and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.

In a landmark ruling Thursday that could usher in an era of greater freedom for gay men and lesbians in India, New Delhi's highest court decriminalized homosexuality.

With the U.S. economy in a ditch, money transfer agencies have been reporting a decline in the wages immigrants are sending back to their home countries. Now, it appears some immigrants are going a step further -- asking their relatives to wire them money back.

Crime in South Africa is commonly portrayed as an onslaught against the wealthy, but it is the poor who are most vulnerable: poor people conveniently accessible to poor criminals.

Diepsloot, an impoverished settlement on the northern edge of Johannesburg, has an estimated population of 150,000, and the closest police station is 10 miles away. To spend time in Diepsloot over three weeks is to observe the unrelenting fear so common among the urban poor.

Racial and ethnic profiling by the police is illegal in France, but the study of more than 500 stops at major Parisian transit stations showed that those who appeared to be of Arab origin were at least 7.5 times more likely than whites to be stopped, and that those perceived to be black -- of sub-Saharan African or Caribbean origin -- were six times more likely than whites to be stopped.

[A] wide variety of social services, such as elder care and mental health programs that many states typically farm out to private, mostly nonprofit agencies, are due for [budget] cuts. The severity of cuts is threatening the survival of some agencies and raising fears that children, the poor, the disabled, the elderly and others in desperate need of services will not get them.

The kinship between gay men and straight women is familiar to the point of cliche, but friendships between gay and straight men have barely registered on the pop culture radar, perhaps because they resist easy classification.

With the unemployment rate at 9.4%, some Americans are willing to go wherever they can to nab a job, even if it is temporary. To adapt, they find living quarters near the job in campers or cheap apartments, giving up normal family life for a paycheck, in a contemporary echo of the itinerants who roamed the country for work in the Great Depression.

Most victims of discrimination in the European Union are unaware of their rights and often don't know how or where to file a complaint, a watchdog said Wednesday.

Some see surging caseloads as evidence that the safety net is working...But others fret that the work of welfare reform is being gradually undone.

Despite having one of the highest rates of obesity in America, the poor are less likely to undergo weight loss surgery than obese people who are better off financially, new research shows.

When we talk about what the end of the U.S. auto industry will mean to thousands of autoworkers, we tend to have a specific image of that worker in mind: He's a conservative white Democrat who lives in suburban Detroit, hangs out in his local union hall, belongs to a bowling league and owns a hunting cabin in the Upper Peninsula. This is the iconic American autoworker. In fact, as much as a fifth of the industry's work force is African-American.

After bruising global downturns, the American economy has usually led the world back to growth, but developing countries could be the engine that powers the next recovery.

Millions of the world's poor are covered for natural disasters by cheap insurance, or microinsurance, as commercial firms recognize that insuring the poor is not just good public relations but also profitable.

Prisoners have no constitutional right to DNA testing that might prove their innocence, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

Africa is full of at least 50 million orphans, the legacy of AIDS and other diseases, war and high rates of death in pregnancy and childbirth. With the numbers increasing every day, Africans are struggling to care for them, often in ways that differ strikingly from the traditional concept of an orphanage in the developed world.

As the recession forces more hospitals and doctors to pare costs and services, the cutbacks are hitting one group of patients especially hard: children.

Tent cities have sprouted across the United States and advocates believe they could represent the leading edge of a wave of homelessness in the coming months as U.S. unemployment, nearing 10 percent, rises.

Rio de Janeiro's state government [is building walls as] "ecobarriers" to prevent Rio's favelas, or shantytowns, from steadily expanding across the city's scenic, heavily forested hillsides.

Opponents see a darker purpose: to imprison Rio's poorest residents. The walls have become a symbol of the inequality between the notoriously violent favelas and the people who live below on "the asphalt," as Rio's wealthy beachside neighborhoods like Copacabana are known.

The war in Iraq has uprooted millions of Iraqi men, women and children. Thousands who are still in exile have little or no prospect of a safe return home. But a flawed U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is resettling Iraqi refugees into poverty rather than helping rebuild their lives in the country that offered them sanctuary.

Inspired by Pennsylvania's example, New York City officials have developed an initiative to bring new neighborhood markets selling fresh food to areas of the city where they say the need is greatest.

Remittances sent home by Mexicans in the United States are the second-largest source of legal foreign revenue in the country, after gasoline exported by the national oil company. These electronic cash payments are vital not only to families that receive them but also to the regional and national economies. But the remesas, as the remittances are called, have been falling steadily since the end of 2007, when construction, manufacturing and service industries began to sputter.

Over the last year, buffeted by several high-profile crimes by illegal immigrants and revelations of mismanagement of the city's sanctuary policy, San Francisco has become less like its self-image and more like many other cities in the United States: deeply conflicted over how to cope with the fallout of illegal immigration.

Montgomery, a suburb of Washington, D.C., spends $47 million a year on technology [that collects students' grades and test scores in real time in order to to identify problems and speed up interventions]. It is at the vanguard of what is known as the "data-driven" movement in U.S. education -- an approach that builds on the heavy testing of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law.

The 139,000-student district, one of the nation's largest, says the strategy has helped it nearly close an achievement gap between white and minority students in the early grades. It also says the system has enabled it to identify minorities with academic gifts earlier, vaulting many more into demanding AP classes.

Homelessness often means life in soup lines and on city streets, but as a new study commissioned by the state shows, it isn't confined to cities. It also can be found across rural areas, so concealed that some people are surprised it exists at all, the study finds.

Brazil's woeful schools, more than perhaps anything else, are what hold it back. They are improving--but too slowly.

While recent media accounts portrayed Tent City's incarnations as creatures of the recession--reborn Hoovervilles for the laid off and the foreclosed--shantytowns have been a periodic but permanent feature of American urban life for at least the past two decades. They are what connects us to Sao Paulo, Lagos and Mumbai, physical manifestations of our growing inequality and societal neglect.

In a city where about 40 murders take place every weekend, it may not come as a big surprise that four prostitutes have been killed on the same stretch of road in Caracas in recent months. But when you find out that all four were transsexuals or transgender, it changes the picture somewhat.

The prospects for women who are scientists and engineers at major research universities have improved, although women continue to face inequalities in salary and access to some other resources, a panel of the National Research Council concludes in a new report.

For more than a decade, arriving asylum-seekers have faced the possibility that they will be detained while immigration authorities oppose their admission, under stricter laws passed in 1996. But a new study by the international advocacy group Human Rights First shows that it has become harder for them to win release while their cases are considered.

Abortion is illegal in Tanzania (except to save the mother's life or health), so women and girls turn to amateurs, who may dose them with herbs or other concoctions, pummel their bellies or insert objects vaginally. Infections, bleeding and punctures of the uterus or bowel can result, and can be fatal. Doctors treating women after these bungled attempts sometimes have no choice but to remove the uterus. . .

President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to serve on the Supreme Court, where she would be the first Hispanic and the third woman, has raised questions about how her background would affect her decision-making. But there is another question, too: How would she alter the larger dynamic among the justices?

Identity politics is back with a vengeance. A president who these days refers to his background obliquely when he does at all chose a Supreme Court candidate who openly embraces hers. Critics took issue with her past statements and called her a "reverse racist." And the capital once again has polarized along familiar lines.

Its serried ranks are more diverse than ever, its training and rules on the use of force more rigorous than in the past, yet the New York Police Department still struggles with the problem of fraternal shootings across the color line.

For years, textile jobs helped tens of millions of Indians clamber onto the bottom rungs of the nation's fast-expanding middle class. Textiles are India's second-largest source of employment, after agriculture, accounting for over 35 million jobs -- far more than the 2.2 million in India's high-profile information technology sector. Now, the global economic meltdown is pushing [many of them] back.

A few years ago, some people were worrying that a "digital divide" would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

In a country where at least 40% of the population lives in poverty, child labour is often regarded as a necessity. . .

The global economic crisis is exacerbating human rights abuses, Amnesty International has warned. The world's poorest people are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn, and millions of people are facing insecurity and indignity.

Like the Great Depression, this economic downturn is wrenching lives out of shape. But unlike 90 years ago, hunger isn't the main problem, and neither is the kind of homelessness that sent thousands of middle-class Americans into tent cities during the Depression. This time the toll is far less obvious: children are grappling with more stress at home, and low-income families, already highly mobile, are being forced to pull up stakes and move more often.

With unemployment rising to its highest level in more than a quarter century, more Americans are confronting the double crisis of losing both their jobs and their employer-sponsored insurance, which covers 177 million people.

For years, the Julia Ward Howe School in Chicago's Austin neighborhood was beset by discipline and academic problems. In 2008, Arne Duncan, then leader of Chicago Public Schools, was so fed up he approved what usually is seen as a nuclear option: To save the school, he fired the entire staff and put a nonprofit group in charge.

Encouraged by the early results he saw at Howe and other turnaround schools in Chicago, Duncan, the new head of the federal Department of Education, now wants additional cities and towns to take similar steps to fix their most troubled schools.

In restaurants, homes and offices across the country, Hispanics responded to Judge Sotomayor's selection with a puff of pride, some gratitude and considerable discussion. In interviews in Miami, Los Angeles and New York, many said this kind of recognition from Washington -- Democratic or Republican -- was long overdue given the growing size of the Hispanic voting bloc.

The people of this small Andalusian town have never been shy about their political convictions. Since they occupied the estate of a local aristocrat in the 1980s, they and their fiery mayor, Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo, have been synonymous in Spain with a dogged struggle for the rural poor.

Now that Spain's real estate bust is fueling rampant unemployment, this Communist enclave, surrounded by sloping olive groves, is thumbing its nose at its countrymen's capitalist folly.

The garbage collectors of Cairo live in neighborhoods spilling over with trash. The children play with the trash and in the trash, when they are not helping to sort or collect the trash. The women sit right in the trash, picking out rotten food with their hands and tossing it to their pigs, which live right there in the neighborhood with them.

[It] is their world, the world of the zabaleen, hundreds of thousands of people who have made lives and a community by collecting Cairo's trash and transforming it into a commodity. It is their very identity, and they are afraid the government is going to take it away.

Pregnancy and childbirth kill more than 536,000 women a year, more than half of them in Africa, according to the World Health Organization. Most of the deaths are preventable, with basic obstetrical care...

There is no single solution for a problem with so many facets, and hospital officials in Berega are trying many things at once. The 120-bed hospital here - a typical rural hospital in a largely rural nation - is a case study in the efforts being made around Africa to reduce deaths in childbirth.

Slaughterhouse jobs can be difficult and dangerous. Now, with U.S. unemployment at a 25-year high, they are also fiercely coveted. American workers -- who for years have largely avoided fruit-picking, office-cleaning and meat-processing shifts -- are increasingly vying for these jobs with immigrants, creating flashpoints in places like Shelbyville.

Natural disasters have a disproportionate affect on the world's billions of urban poor, according to a United Nations survey of the past 30 years

Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County - where about two-thirds of the population is white - almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change...

Is it possible that one day the New Orleans education system will offer every student the same opportunity to sit in a classroom in a top-performing school?

Rodney Ringler is an unemployed blue collar male without a college degree. He's hardly alone. Men like him have been the main victims of the current recession in the United States.

You have to be rich to be poor. That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand.

Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain. So we'll explain it here. Consider this a primer on the economics of poverty.

Late to arrive in the Northeast, the foreclosure crisis has swept through the New York region at an explosive pace in the past two years, destroying billions of dollars in housing wealth. ...The storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods - where the default rate is at least double the regional average - have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

"IF MY dad married a man, who would be my mom?" asks a golden-haired child in an ad from the National Organisation for Marriage, a group that campaigns to keep wedlock heterosexual. "I'm confused," adds another adorable moppet.

Ethan Mondor, however, is not confused. Now nine years old, he was plucked from foster care at the age of four and adopted by two gay men, Rodney Mondor and Ray Dumont. They are both his daddies, and families like Ray and Rodney's are becoming boringly normal.

Immigrants arriving by sea from Africa have become a painful thorn in the side of Silvio Berlusconi's government. It was elected after pledging to stem "clandestine immigration" - hardly an appropriate phrase in these cases, since the hope of desperate passengers aboard unsafe boats from Libya is precisely to be rescued. Once on Italian soil, the migrants may seek asylum. The two-thirds who do not win any protection are meant to be repatriated. But because most arrive without papers, the authorities have no idea where they are from. So they join the cohorts of immigrants living in Italy without permission. And since they cannot legally get a job, it is not surprising that they are charged with a disproportionate amount of crime - which the government was also elected to curb.

Minority car dealers are expected to be hit hard as General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC trim their retail networks, undoing years of work by the auto makers to bring more African-Americans, Hispanics and others into the car business.

In this recession, men are losing jobs at a faster rate than women. But women, now the primary breadwinners in many families, still earn 79 cents to every dollar that men earn. For minorities, the number is even lower. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, "Women, and especially women of color, are more likely to land the worst, lowest paying jobs, without health insurance, paid sick days or paid family care leave." Today on GRITtv Francoise Jacobson and others on the gender gap, women trade workers, and the recession.

In drafting questionnaires probing ethnicity, educational and governmental organizations are under increasing pressure to include a multiracial option rather than forcing individuals with complex racial heritages to choose just one category.

This prompted scholars Kevin Binning, Miguel Unzueta, Yuen Huo, and Ludwin Molina, to raise a provocative question: Does identifying themselves as multiracial help or hinder the psychological well-being of individuals of diverse ethnicity?

The boom-and-bust cycle in the U.S. housing market over the past decade and a half has generated greater gains and larger losses for minority groups than it has for whites, according to an analysis of housing, economic and demographic data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Although the nation has plunged into its deepest recession since the Great Depression, 72 percent of Americans in this nationwide survey said they believed it is possible to start out poor in the United States, work hard and become rich - a classic definition of the American dream.

...People are shifting their definition of the American dream. Four years ago, 19 percent of those [asked to define "the American dream"] supplied answers that related to financial security and a steady job, and 20 percent gave answers that related to freedom and opportunity. Now, fewer people are pegging their dream to material success and more are pegging it to abstract values. Those citing financial security dropped to 11 percent, and those citing freedom and opportunity expanded to 27 percent.

Unemployment is taking a very different human toll on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which helps explain why Europe and the U.S. can't agree on how to attack the global recession. The U.S. is spending hundreds of billions of dollars -- including increased assistance to the unemployed -- to prop up the economy, and wants Europe to follow suit. But most of Western Europe already has a strong, if costly, social safety net, so governments feel less pressure to spend their way out of trouble.

After resolving to leave her longtime but violent partner in March, Janai Parahams, 25 and jobless, wanted to make a fresh start. But she felt trapped: she was tending four small children with no family support or child care.

A social worker told Ms. Parahams about a nonprofit group, Safe Families for Children, that places the children of parents in crisis with volunteer families, on a temporary basis - from a day to a year or more. Ms. Parahams could approve the caretakers, see her children whenever she wanted and get them back with no courts involved. This unusual offer of extended respite to overwhelmed parents is part of a broader national trend in child welfare to keep many cases out of the courts and foster care systems.

Army specialist Mickiela Montoya was standing silently in the back of a Manhattan classroom while a group of male Iraq war veterans spoke to a small audience about their experiences as soldiers.

Montoya, who grew up in a Mexican family in East Los Angeles, served in Iraq for eleven months, from 2005 to 2006, with the 642nd Division Aviation Support Battalion. She was only 19 back then, but by the time she turned 21 she was as bitter as any old veteran, not only because of the lack of recognition she was receiving as a combat vet but because of the way she had been treated as a soldier--by her comrades, the army and by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Delivered on order for a few pennies a load by rickety horse-drawn carts speeding through the dirt streets of the Medina Gounass neighborhood of Guediawaye, [garbage] is as pervasive as the hot midday sun in which it bakes. The people use it to shore up their flood-prone houses and streets in this low-lying area near the Atlantic coast; they have no choice.

Since the country emerged as an industrial power in the 1960s and 1970s, it has been proud of its image as a nation of middle-class people. Many Japanese had little sympathy for the jobless and homeless, regarding their plight as stemming from laziness -- and an embarrassment to the country's profile as an industrial power.

With manufacturers such as Toyota Motor Corp. and Sony Corp. continuing to slash jobs, many Japanese for the first time are seeing poverty as a real possibility. Media images of homelessness and stories of unemployment also have struck a chord. Concerned about their own job security, many Japanese are seeing the homeless not as troubled individuals seeking handouts, but as victims of a failing economy and a government system that offered no safety nets.

In just over 100 days, Mr. Obama's presidency seems to have done much to alter the greater American public's perception of race relations. And perhaps, in some cases, even the reality.

Some girls walk as much as two hours each way, their plastic sandals slapping against dirt trails and fields lining the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Others take even longer when puddles impede their progress. Their common destination is one of the scattered houses enlisted to double as classrooms in Godah, an isolated village in Wardak province. The homes are part of a network of six schools for girls in Wardak and Nangarhar provinces that educate more than 2,800 students, the product of the efforts of a 28-year-old Afghan woman named Sadiqa Basiri Saleem. To bring education to rural areas like this one - where many girls may not know a single woman who can read - Saleem has battled widespread illiteracy and daunting cultural obstacles for the past seven years, setting up schools to change the educational landscape, one child at a time.

Each Friday, teachers in elementary schools in a corner of the richest country in the world quietly slip packs of peanut butter, fruit and granola bars into some pupils' bags - enough food to get them through the weekend before school dinners resume on Monday.

Not a word is said to the pupils or their parents because, even as the number of families in West Virginia dependent on food handouts continues to rise, many are ashamed to admit to their friends and neighbours that they need help.

Improving the equality of educational opportunity - a traditional American value - is one key to promoting economic mobility for disadvantaged students. The federal government has long been involved in promoting postsecondary education, especially since the enactment of the G.I. Bill near the end of World War II.

However, current expenditures on postsecondary education are not as effective as they could be, nor are they necessarily targeted at those students most in need of support. To promote equality of educational and economic mobility, this report offers recommendations to increase the college enrollment and graduation rates of poor and low-income students.

The Amnesty International Report 2009 documents the state of human rights during 2008, in 157 countries and territories around the world. It reveals the systemic discrimination and insecurity that prevent progress in law from becoming a reality on the ground. Crucially, this report reveals a world where, time-and again, states pick and choose the rights they are willing to uphold, and those they would rather suppress.