Two Latino advocacy groups say they will challenge the constitutionality of Arizona's new immigration law, asserting it permits racial profiling. SB 1070 signed into law April 23 by Gov. Jan Brewer, permits police to question the immigration status of suspected illegal immigrants. Officials from the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and the National Coalition of Latino Christian Clergy (CONLAMIC) contend the law will let police single out minorities for immigration inspections. Under the law, it is designated a crime to be in the country illegally and immigrants unable to verify their legal status can be arrested and jailed for six months and fined $2,500.

After scoring points with global environmentalists with his World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) in Cochabamba this week, Bolivian President Evo Morales has got himself in hot water with gay activists across the planet. On April 21, he commented to reporters at the CMPCC on the dangers of factory-farm chicken—but in half-baked (pardon the pun) and homophobic terms. "The chicken we eat is full of feminine hormones," the populist president said. "And therefore when men eat these chickens, they experience deviances in being men."

The World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) at the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba closed on Earth Day, April 22, issuing several resolutions, including: that the UN adopt a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth; that an International Committee be organized to hold a global referendum on climate change on Earth Day 2011; that the industrialized nations provide annual financing equivalent to 6% of their GDP to confront climate change in the developing world; and that an International Tribunal on Environmental and Climate Justice be created, with its seat in Bolivia. The conference called for a new global organization to press for these demands, tentatively dubbed the World Movement for Mother Earth—or, by its Spanish acronym, MAMA-Tierra.

As the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) convened for a third day April 21 at Tiquipaya, outside the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, Aymara indigenous leaders and their supporters continued to meet just outside the official summit at the dissident "Table 18," on social conflicts related to climate change. Greivances centered on ecological impacts of mineral projects, including the Japanese-owned San Cristobal mine in southern Potosi department and the state-owned Corocoro mine in La Paz department.

As the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) convened for a second day April 20 at Tiquipaya, outside the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, Aymara indigenous leaders held their own dissident "Table 18" on social conflicts related to climate change. Barred by organizers from the official summit grounds on the campus of the University del Valle (Univalle), Aymara elders of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Cullasuyu (CONAMAQ) and their allies convened the dissident forum in a Brazilian restaurant just off the campus.

Former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon's special envoy for Haiti, said on April 17 that the international community needs to stay involved in Haiti if it wants to prevent violence from breaking out there. "We know one thing for sure: If you like the gunfight that's going on in northwest Mexico, you will love Haiti 10 years from now," he told reporters during a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. "If that's what thrills you--this horrible chaos from Monterrey to the border--you will just love Haiti if you walk away from it."

The Haitian government, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration (OIM) have been intensifying efforts to relocate Port-au-Prince area residents left homeless by a Jan. 12 earthquake and now living in as many as 900 improvised encampments in the capital and its suburbs. After having forcibly removed some 7,335 people from the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium the weekend of April 9, on April 12 the government said it was starting to relocate another 10,000 people.

On April 15 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued its 2009 report on human rights in the hemisphere. For the first time the IACHR included Honduras among the countries that it "believed warranted special attention." The inclusion of Honduras is based on a report, "Honduras: Human Rights and the Coup d'État," by an IACHR commission that visited Honduras in August 2009 to investigate the human rights situation following a June 28 military coup.