secede

from the north.

World News from the BBC

In the largest sex discrimination case ever brought before a court, the United States Supreme Court has ruled

in favour of

the retailing giant Wal-Mart. One and a half million women employees had brought a class action suit in which they accused Wal-Mart of paying women less and giving them fewer promotions. Here's Paul Adams.

The court's ruling was all about what constitutes a class action suit, and here all nine justices agreed that this was a flawed case. The court concluded that it was simply not possible to lump together up to 1.5 million employees at 3,400 stores. Evidence of a general policy of discrimination was, in the words of Justice Antonin Scalia, "entirely absent". But that doesn't mean the court found no evidence of discrimination. The four most liberal justices, three of them women, wrote that Wal-Mart's predominantly male managers were steeped in a corporate culture that perpetuates gender stereotypes.

The vice president of football's world governing body Fifa has resigned. Jack Warner was suspended last month over allegations of bribery, but Fifa said those had now been dropped. Mr Warner was being investigated over a cash-for-votes scandal. Another Fifa executive committee member, Mohamed Bin Hammam, was also

implicate

d. Fifa said Mr Warner had left of his own volition.

A new report on the state of the world's oceans warns marine life is likely to go extinct at a rate unprecedented in human history. The study by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean concludes that the world's waters are in a poorer shape than had been imagined. Coral reef specialist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg was one of the experts involved in the report.