KARACHI, Pakistan,Feb 24(IPS)-Dressed in women’s attire and a nose-pin errantlypositioned on one nostril, 38-year-old Shahzadi adjusts her‘dupatta’(scarf) over her head as she enters the office ofCantonment Board Clifton, a provincial government bureau thatrecently hired her.

LUXOR,Feb 24(IPS)-Hajj Khodari lifts a defiant fist at the demolitionmachinery now just meters away from his front door.

PARIS,Feb 22(IPS)-A new film about Alexandre Dumas, the author of‘The Three Musketeers’, has sparked a racial row here because awhite actor is playing the role of one of France’s most-readwriters who was of mixed race.

LONDON,Feb 19(IPS)-A new documentary‘Diary of a Disgraced Soldier’follows the dismissal from the British army of an Iraq warveteran and his battle with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)linked to his videographing the brutalising of Iraqi youth byfellow servicemen.

RIO DE JANEIRO,Feb 18(IPS)-Fátima Oliveira, one of Brazil's few blackwomen doctors, always goes to"the best carnival,"inSabará, a city of 130,000 people in the state of Minas Gerais,where"men dress up as women"at a celebration that is"very informal, very local, with few tourists."

VIENNA,Feb 17(IPS)-With hundreds of thousands of girls and womenbelieved to be at risk of female genital mutilation (FGM) inEurope, rights groups have mounted a campaign to get EU leadersto stop what they see as a barbaric and dangerous procedure.

ANKARA,Feb 16(IPS)-A political initiative to eliminate discriminationagainst the Alevi, Turkey’s main religious minority, risks beingstymied by the Diyanet, the country’s powerful religious bodythat does not recognise anything but Sunni Islam.

PARIS,Feb 16(IPS)-The United Nations’cultural agency, UNESCO, andthe government of Haiti have joined forces to try to safeguardand protect the Caribbean nation’s artistic heritage in the wakeof the Jan. 12 earthquake which destroyed not only countlesslives but also many national art treasures.

NEW YORK,Feb 15(IPS)-Islamophobia is rising in the West, and sectarianclashes have undermined unityin the Muslim world, but there ishope from"within", says a group of youngMuslim Leadersof Tomorrow (MLTs) working to address these problems.

SINGAPORE,Feb 13(IPS)-The impact of the global recession may still bearound, but Chinesecommunities all over Asia are bent onletting the Year of the Tiger come in witha festive, prosperousroar on Sunday.

BELGRADE,Feb 12(IPS)-The arrest of seven Wahhabis, following a policecrackdown on the remote Bosnian village of Gornja Maoca, hasraised concerns over the continued presence of Islamistfundamentalists who first arrived in the country during thebloody 1992-1995 Balkans war.

ROME,Feb 10(IPS)-The world's major religions might disagree ontheology and matters like the foods we ought to eat and the dayswe should rest on, but when it comes to fighting hunger, they seeeye to eye.

SANTIAGO,Feb 9(IPS)-Criminal law should not be used against freedom ofexpression, nor to silence community radio stations in Chile, sayactivists and journalists in response to closures of communityradio outlets in this South American country.

RIO DE JANEIRO,Feb 8(IPS)-Perfectly in tune, in spite of the off-key world ofTerra Encantada ("Enchanted Land"), a shanty town in thisBrazilian city, the guitars of Daniel Sant'Anna'sorchestra strike up the"Ode to Joy", played by childrenand teenagers who are looking for a way forward in their lives.

BUCHAREST,Feb 6(IPS)-A textbook on human rights activism, beingintroduced in Romanian schools this year, steers away frompreaching and uses interviews with global and local rightsactivists to suggest how young people may get involved.