WASHINGTON, May 20 (IPS) - With no major new initiatives on the agenda, President Felipe Calderón's state visit here this week appeared designed primarily to highlight increasingly close ties between the United States and Mexico despite growing frustrations on both sides of the border over immigration, economics and security cooperation.

NEW YORK, May 18 (IPS) - The controversy over Arizona's new immigration law heated up further Monday when a powerful coalition of civil rights and immigration advocates asked a U.S. federal court to find the new law unconstitutional and issue an injunction against its taking effect.

AMMAN, May 14 (IPS) - As the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq began, the country’s Christians started streaming across the border into neighbouring Jordan. Today most of them continue to live here in abject poverty with no hope of ever returning to the land of their ancestors.

Ma Xiangqian, a 19-year-old migrant from the eastern Chinese province of Henan, worked the 11-hour night shift, seven days a week, putting together electronic parts for Foxconn Technology, the world's biggest contract maker of information technology goods.

CIUDAD BOLIVAR, Colombia, May 13 (IPS) - More than 380 families -- some 2,000 people -- in this vast working-class district on the fringes of the Colombian capital that is home to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the armed conflict are to be relocated after landslides caused by leaking water pipes.

Immigrants in France send some eight billion euro (9.6 billion US dollars) a year back to their countries of origin, often paying exorbitant fees - though the French government has announced moves to lower tariffs.

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen is savouring another victory. His latest triumph: a string of verdicts against an outspoken female opposition lawmaker, Mu Sochua, who had accused him of making derogatory remarks about her.

PARIS, May 13 (IPS) - Members of the Haitian diaspora responded with "massive and spontaneous" aid immediately after the Jan. 12 earthquake, with thousands of professionals leaving jobs abroad to go and assist their compatriots, according to a government minister.

MANILA, May 11 (IPS) - Every day some 4,500 Filipinos leave their homeland in search of the proverbial green pastures. But some of them end up facing death instead.

In the wake of allegations that a male guard at a central Texas detention facility sexually assaulted female detainees on their way to being deported, immigrant advocacy groups say stronger oversight and accountability is urgently needed to prevent further abuse of female detainees.

WASHINGTON, May 10 (IPS) - The majority of youth in U.S. cities are no longer white, but there is also a growing disparity in the educational background and incomes of those cities' populations, says a new report from the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

HELSINKI, May 7 (IPS) - Juha Suoranta had until recently been a professor of sociology, pursuing a quiet academic career in the University of Tampere, unconcerned with issues surrounding asylum for foreigners in trouble.

MELBOURNE, Australia, May 6 (IPS) - After nearly 10 years of living in Australia, Sri Lanka-born Ramesh Fernandez is convinced nothing much has changed for refugees in the land of the ‘fair go’.

NEW YORK, May 4 (IPS) - Advocates for comprehensive immigration reform are working against time to transform a groundswell of popular support into concrete legislation that the U.S. Congress can pass this year.

When a super cyclone devastated the coastal districts of Orissa state in 1999, the government pledged to regenerate 3,000 hectares of mangrove. Or so forest official Chandra Sekhar Kar thought.

NEW DELHI, May 4 (IPS) - Despite the Indian government’s pledge to extend assistance, legal or otherwise, to the 17 Indian migrant workers currently on death row in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), human rights advocates have decried its alleged insensitivity to the prisoners’ plight.

President Barack Obama will be sending 1,200 National Guard troops to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border after pressure from both Republicans and Democrats to tighten border security and increase funding to combat the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S.

It's not the law yet, but for undocumented immigrants like Ismael Palafox and his family, SB 1070 is already a reality.

GUIYU, China, May 3 (IPS) - Like many who have profited from the electronic waste trade in this southern Chinese town, hospital administrator Lin Banghong does not live there. "I've worked here 10 years and haven't gotten sick," he said.

REYKJAVIK, May 1 (IPS) - It took the conviction of five Lithuanian men in March, on charges of bringing a 19-year-old girl into Iceland for sex work, before this country truly woke up to the reality of trafficking.