News headlines in May 2010, page 7

In a small office tucked behind the stairwell in Liberia’s Ministry of Education, the once-proud staff of the Girls’ Education Unit appear defeated.

In 2003, a number of Xu Cong Yang’s possessions — including jewelry and a rare stamp collection — went missing. The culprit, he believed, was a company owned by the local government in a central Chinese city that Xu had enlisted to insure the items.

The human rights body Amnesty International (AI) has yet to release its report on the outcome of its unprecedented visit last week to the disputed Indian- administered Kashmir state, but already there are doubts over its ability to come up with fair and accurate findings.

Nearly 15 years into a 20-year prison sentence served in Peru on charges of collaborating with left-wing terrorists, U.S. activist Lori Berenson is to be released on parole Thursday.

Amnesty International is calling on the G20 to lead the world out of a crisis in justice, after the band of major industrialised and emerging nations has led a fair bit of the world out of economic recession, to some extent.

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

In 2005, ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Irish rock star and philanthropist Bono dedicated a concert to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs for his services to global poverty alleviation.

'Our male coworkers have had to acknowledge it: we have worked side by side in this struggle,' says Emilia Peña, describing the role of women in driving forward the battle waged by thousands of workers to reopen a state power company in Mexico.

The Venezuelan government put a chokehold on the foreign exchange system by closing down the 'parallel' currency market, which in a country so heavily dependent on imports may stifle an economy already plagued by recession, inflation and shortages of certain products.

The Peruvian Congress has opened proceedings to demand that U.S. businessman William Kallop pay the Treasury 482.2 million dollars -- taxes on the 900-million-dollar sale of a petroleum company and other debts to the government.