Bill Gates is pushing harder than ever for immigration reform that would allow the United States, the richest country on the planet, to skim off the cream of the few educated workers in developing nations.

The Alcan Prize for Sustainability is a US$1 million Prize that recognizes organizations demonstrating a comprehensive approach to addressing, achieving and further advancing economic, environmental and/or social sustainability. The closing date is 12 April 2007.

In an exciting development the Yogyakarta Principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity was due to be formally launched on 26th March. In addition, parallel events held during the Council were to enable discussion and analysis of the Principles and their application to issues of sexual orientation and gender identity around the world.

The United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has announced the launching of a global initiative to improve remittances services that allow foreign workers to send money back to their families in rural areas around the world.

Al-Jazeera reports that an Algerian court has sentenced several former banking executives to jail after finding them guilty of corruption following the collapse of the country's largest private bank.

According to Mohammed Ali Rashid, economics professor at the School of Arts and Social Sciences at the North South University in Bangladesh, even if trade openness boosts economic growth, such growth may not create jobs or alleviate poverty. Therefore the much-vaunted Aid for Trade concept should be redesigned so that "the major focus is shifted from simply creating more trade to the more important objectives of poverty reduction".

The new free trade agreements being signed up between rich and poor countries are proving far more damaging to the poor than anything envisaged within WTO talks, Oxfam said in a report issued on Tuesday 20 March.

Sexuality and Social Justice is an exhibition of 10 portraits with audio and text based interviews from the World Social Forum in January 2007. The exhibition pays tribute to activists who are doing brave work with sexuality and social justice in diverse ways.

The XO laptop is intended as an incredibly cheap and remarkably robust tool to aid children, particularly in developing countries, improve their education. Although the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is branded as "an education project, not a laptop project," the technical specifications of the XO laptop deserve some mention

Children with disabilities have the right to an inclusive education and United Nations Member States must increase efforts to ensure that all children, regardless of differences, learn together, the United Nations independent expert on the right to education has said.

The ICJ's international secretariat in Geneva is seeking to recruit a Legal Officer for its recently launched International Economic Relations Programme. Applications close on close on 6 April 2007. Applicants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are particularly encouraged.

On March 6, the U.S. Department of State released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2006. As in previous years, the State Department pointed the finger at human rights conditions in more than 190 countries and regions, including China, but avoided touching on the human rights situation in the United States.

South African Foreign Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma has dismissed claims that China's involvement in Africa is of a colonialist nature. She commented that China's trade with Africa has increased by 40% per annum since 2000 and this has had an encouraging effect on Africa.

The third Joint Economic and Trade Commission China-Angola is taking place from the 14th to the 16th of March in Beijing. This meeting signifies the augmentation in ties between these two nations in addition to the fact that Angola is already China's largest trade partner in Africa.

A family of seven Somali migrants who moved into a new house in North London five years ago has barely gone 48 hours without suffering some sort of racial abuse.

The UK and the other countries of Europe are signatories to children's rights conventions and yet they are systematically robbing a whole group of children of their basic, human rights by classifying them not as children but as foreigners and asylum seekers.

Ugandan health officials on Monday said they would seek alternative funding for anti-malaria projects after the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria declined a grant application of US$16 million because of concerns over financial mismanagement.

A number of regions of the world are reversing centuries of deforestation and are now showing an increase in forest area, according to FAO's State of the World’s Forests report, released on Tuesday 13 March.

Most development practitioners and development cooperation agencies agree that knowledge is at the core of sustainable development processes. This increased awareness has resulted in the upcoming trend of development oriented knowledge sharing programmes, according to Margaret van Doodewvaard.

An incisive new article by Akwe Amosu takes a critical look at Sino-African relations, in which she states that China’s march into Africa has reminded pundits of those two proverbial elephants fighting. Evoking the battle between East and West, they opine that it will be the grass that suffers - except in this instance, the people are the grass and one of the elephants is their own governments.