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UNITED NATIONS, Jun 8 2017 (IPS) – While stories of child marriage are commonly associated with the Global South, lesser known are the cases closer to home: in the United States.

Across the world, child marriage has persisted and the United States is no exception. Across all 50 states in the North American nation, marriage before the age of 18 has remained legal.

“These are old laws that were just never changed because people didn’t realize this was happening,” said Fraidy Reiss, the Executive Director of Unchained at Last, an organization fighting to end child marriage in the U.S.

Based on available data, Unchained at Last that over quarter of a million children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010. Data shows girls as young as 12 years old married in states like Alaska, Louisiana, and South Carolina.

The Tahirih Justice Center, which helps protect women and girls from gender-based violence, that Texas has the second highest rates …

Members of Zimbabwe’s Khoisan tribe perform a traditional dance during an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign conducted by Tsoro-O-Tso San, a development trust that aids the tribe. Credit: Jeffrey Moyo/IPS

TSHOLOTSHO, Zimbabwe, Aug 31 2017 (IPS) – Sixty-seven-year-old Hloniphani Sidingo gives a broad smile while popping out through the gate of a clinic in her village, as she heads home clutching containers of anti-retroviral pills.

The first Bantu people to dwell in present-day Zimbabwe, the Khoisan, also known as the Bushmen or Basagwa, populate remote areas of southern Africa, particularly Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Here, the Khoisan community is found in Matabeleland North’s Tsholotsho district, where many like Sidingo are domiciled. Other Khoisans live in Plumtree in this country’s Matabeleland South pr…

Close-up of a woman hands hold and broke a cigarette. Credit: Bigstock

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 21 2017 (IPS) – Back in November 2008, the 193-member General Assembly decided, by consensus, to ban smoking and tobacco sales at the UN headquarters in New York: a ruling observed by all affiliated agencies worldwide, including the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO) which has severed links with the tobacco industry.

But there still remains one holdout: the 187-member International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva whose Governing Body, which meets three times a year, has postponed once again its decision on whether or not to cut ILO’s ties with the tobacco industry.

The executive body’s deliberations remained deadlocked at a meeting in early November resulting in a second postponement of a decision to sever ties with an industry, whose products are …

Former “Blood Diamonds” now Provide Employment. Credit: Tommy Trenchard/ IPS

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 27 2018 (IPS) – How many people know where their gold and diamond jewelry comes from?

How many people consider the human cost of its production?

Not many consumers ask these questions, and, shockingly, neither do many of the world’s leading jewelry brands.

It’s a trend that Human Rights Watch (HRW) is trying to change with a new social media campaign, #BehindTheBling.

“We want people to think about where their jewelry comes from,” Jo Becker, Advocacy Director of the Children’s Rights Division at HRW, told IPS.

“Importantly, we want people to tell the brands that. We want them to write, to tweet, to call the big companies to put pressure on them to guarantee that their gold and diamonds are not coming from places that are c…

Danielle Nierenberg is Founder and President of . Emily Payne is a food and agriculture writer based in New York

Credit: Bigstock

NEW ORLEANS, United States, May 29 2018 (IPS) – Many factors contribute to the cost of a tomato. For example, what inputs were used (water, soil, fertilizer, pesticides, as well as machinery and/or labor) to grow it? What kind of energy and materials were used to process and package it? Or how much did transportation cost to get it to the shelf?

But that price doesn’t always reflect how the plant was grown—overuse and misuse of antibiotics, water pollution from pesticide runoff, or whether or not farm workers harvesting the tomatoes were paid a fair wage. It turns out cheap food often comes with an enormously expensive cost to human and planetary health.

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