Urban unemployment declined to 4 percent in China by the end of 2007 amid increased government efforts to improve people's livelihood, the labor ministry said Monday.

Filmmaker Arda Nederveen and anthropologist Marina de Regt have made a short documentary about Ethiopian and Somalian women who work as domestic workers in Yemen. Many families in economically developed countries make use of migrant women as domestic workers and cleaners. But even in a relatively poor country such as Yemen, migrants and refugee women do paid domestic work.

Questions about human migration from Asia to the Americas have perplexed anthropologists for decades, but as scenarios about the peopling of the New World come and go, the big questions have remained. Do the ancestors of Native Americans derive from only a small number of “founders” who trekked to the Americas via the Bering land bridge? How did their migration to the New World proceed? What, if anything, did the climate have to do with their migration? And what took them so long?

A new study by Kevin Pope of Geo Eco Arc Research and John Terrell of The Field Museum adds insight into the migration of anatomically modern humans out of Africa and into Asia less than 100,000 years before present (BP).

High rates of immigration are a good thing, most economists argue: the mixing of cultures fosters creativity and boosts economic productivity. But a survey in the US shows that greater ethnic diversity may hurt community spirit - in the short term, at least.

The African origin of early modern humans 200,000–150,000 years ago is now well documented, with archaeological data suggesting that a major migration from tropical east Africa to the Levant took place between 130,000 and 100,000 years ago via the presently hyper-arid Saharan-Arabian desert.

Desertification, exacerbated by climate change, represents “the greatest environmental challenge of our times” and governments must overhaul policy approaches to the issue or face mass migrations of people driven from degraded homelands within a single generation, warns a new analysis from the United Nations University.

The number of Venezuelans settling in the United States is growing. Experts say the reelection in December of leftist President Hugo Chavez has triggered a wave of migration from the oil-rich South American country. Many of those leaving are wealthy and fear the government's socialist policies. Steve Mort reports from the U.S. state of Florida, which has seen a large influx of Venezuelan residents.

Seasonal nomadism, migration, and resettlement have always been important for the people living in the northern Polar Regions as these movements are key for their survival. In the past, such movements were usually triggered by the local conditions which their continued existence is affected by activities such as aggregation in temporary winter villages near the sea ice for seal hunting and summer dispersal inland looking for wild reindeer.

About 100 Haitian migrants have come ashore near Hallendale Beach north of Miami in the southern U.S. state of Florida. At least one migrant died while trying to cross the treacherous Florida Straits. Some migrants swam to shore, while others jumped out onto the beach after their broken-down, 10-meter sailboat landed.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says it is extremely worried about new patterns of labor exploitation and human trafficking emerging in Iraq. It says some of the workers are taken against their knowledge to Iraq and others are falsely lured there by promises of good-paying jobs. Lisa Schlein reports for VOA from IOM headquarters in Geneva.