Soon after she had her second child, Rathna fell into a frenzied state and had to be brought to a hospital here in the southern Indian village of Dharmapuri. After a month-long series of tests, doctors issued their diagnosis: Rathna, they said, was suffering from a psychiatric aberration that seems to occur often among adolescent mothers.

In the last two weeks, Mexico's Supreme Court has taken two fundamental steps in recognising the rights of gays and lesbians. On Monday, it voted to uphold a Mexico City law that allows same-sex couples to adopt.

"The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has proved that music can break down barriers previously considered insurmountable," its Argentine-Israeli conductor, Daniel Barenboim, told IPS on a visit to Ecuador.

For Muhammad el-Baradiyeh, 38, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is always a blessing.

Opportunistic food traders have been blamed for soaring food prices across the Middle East that have added a financial burden on families observing the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

"I used to work on the south coast, cutting sugar cane, and I would go all the way to Belize to pick oranges during the harvest. I went through a lot so we could get by," Héctor Pan, a Q'eqchi Indian in Guatemala who has now abandoned farming to become a river rafting guide, told IPS.

Public safety is the top concern of Mexico's civil society organisations, but shortage of money is hampering their work, according to a study released this week in the capital.

By finally announcing the date of the country's first general election in 20 years, Burma's military regime has lived up to a promise it made in its seven-step "roadmap", a blueprint in its desperate quest for political legitimacy.

When Timothy was forced into the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) at age 11, the first thing they did was beat him. Then they took him to a military base where his tasks were to carry other soldiers' bags, wash their clothes, collect firewood for them, and cook their food.

The families of 32 Mapuche prisoners on a hunger strike for a month in different prisons in southern Chile have come to the capital to denounce irregularities in their trials and push for dialogue with the authorities.

Tanya Athikom's search for a permanent job in the information technology sector has so far resulted in a string of disappointments. The Bangkok resident has thus been forced to accept short-term contracts in local and multinational companies here in the Thai capital.

The families of 40 villagers murdered in Peru on Christmas Day in 1984 are camping out next to the eight graves in which their loved ones were buried, to keep watch over the slow, painful process of exhuming the bodies, a task that is being carried out by the public prosecutor's office.

"One day more, one day less," says María Lourdes Afiuni when she says hello or goodbye to her thousands of followers on Twitter. The Venezuelan judge has spent the last eight months in prison, because she decided that a defendant should be released on bail pending trial.

By the time Thandi Khumalo* brought her seven-month-old daughter to the Red Cross Children's Hospital in Cape Town, help came too late. The infant had developed acute diarrhoea and kwashiorkor, a condition caused by severe protein and calorie deficiency, and died a few days after being admitted.

One year after the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama announced that it intended to overhaul the country's heavily criticised immigration detention practices and create a "truly civil detention system", a new academic paper bolsters claims by human rights groups that real reform is still a long way off.

The United Nations celebrated the International Day of the World's Indigenous People this week by showcasing award- winning short films produced by indigenous filmmakers and reaffirming indigenous rights and cultural treasures.

The magazine El Teje, which is published in the Argentine capital and presents itself as "the first transvestite publication in Latin America," has been fighting the stigmatisation of the trans community for nearly three years.

Wahyudin dreams of becoming a full-fledged caregiver, if not a certified nurse, in Japan. But the Indonesian worker must first pass the required Japanese-language national certification examination, which is far from easy.

Tobacco multinational Philip Morris may have had good reason to send out victory smoke signals when Filipinos elected Benigno Aquino III to be president in May. After all, he is a regular smoker who has said he will not quit the habit.

When the Israeli government gave its blessings to a U.N. panel of inquiry probing the military attack on a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza last May, there was widespread speculation that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon may have struck a backdoor deal over its mandate.