Africa Remains Hamstrung in Battle for Water and Sanitation

The statistics coming out of Africa are staggering: 40 percent of Africa’s 1 billion people live in urban areas and 60 percent live in slums, where water supplies and sanitation are "severely inadequate", according to the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

Concern Grows Over Prospects for Middle East Disarmament Meeting

Four months before 2012 - the year a conference is slated to be held on freeing the Middle East region of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) - no date, facilitator, or host country has been named.

U.S.: CIA-NYPD Alliance = Systematic Racial Profiling

While some Muslim Americans might have been hoping for a relaxation of the decade-long counterterrorism onslaught on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, a report published by the Associated Press - unearthing new and shocking realities on the extent of intelligence-gathering operations in New York City - suggests that the offensive on "terror" is only just beginning.

China, India Score With Untied Aid

Armed with a smile, Don Marut exposes the pitfalls of Western aid to developing countries. At a conference here, the Indonesian recalled the story of how 40 electric-train carriages were sent from Germany to his country for a journey to nowhere.

Refugees Tossed Between Iraq and Syria

At the height of Iraq’s sectarian war in 2006, 30-year-old Samer escaped his Baghdad neighbourhood to join a flood of refugees arriving in Syria. A young man of military age, he was at high risk of being targeted by armed forces that roamed the capital’s streets.

EGYPT: People-Funded TV Challenges Big Business

Egypt’s most organised political group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is tapping crowds as a new financing method for its nascent TV station and media outlets to be able to compete with well-oiled challengers in corporate and government- run media.

U.S.: Libya Intervention Unlikely to Be Repeated

As NATO-backed rebels continue efforts to secure Tripoli from forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi, analysts here are already debating whether the apparently successful uprising in Libya offers a precedent for future action elsewhere.

LIBYA: Dreaming of a Future After Gaddafi

"We grabbed all these weapons from Gaddafi's compound just before NATO shelled the whole place," says rebel fighter Massud Askar in downtown Nalut. The 50-year-old rebel displays an Italian light semi-automatic rifle in his right hand and a hand grenade in the other.

BOLIVIA: Morales Clashes with Native Protesters over Road through Tropical Park

The lack of regulations for consulting indigenous communities in Bolivia on initiatives that affect their territories is at the heart of a dispute over a road to facilitate traffic from Brazil, which would run through an enormous tropical national park self-governed by indigenous communities.

‘Profiteers of Misery’: The U.S. Private Prison Industrial Complex

By the end of 2010, the United States was home to 25 percent of the world’s inmates, with roughly 2.4 million people behind bars and over seven million under "correctional supervision".

Haiti’s Earthquake Victims: ‘Abandoned Like Stray Dogs’

Eighty thousand tiny houses dot the countryside near this coastal city, located just west of the epicentre of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake that killed some 200,000 and displaced over one million.

Lenape Take On Ford

"We have been living here for thousands of years. Unfortunately, we are the original people of this land, but we get no respect," says Vivian Milligan, in a tone filled with sarcastic laughter.

OP-ED: Governments Kill

We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence.

‘Sustainable Development Must Start with People’

When world leaders meet in Brazil next June for a U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the third since the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the question lingering in the minds of many is: what really is "sustainable development" in the context of a fast-changing world of growing poverty, hunger, pollution, political repression and social unrest?

INDIA: Hunger Shows its Power

If India’s powerful central government that rules over the destinies of 1.2 billion people quails before a slight 74-year-old man, it is because he is armed with a weapon that has rarely failed in this country – extreme renunciation through a fast-unto-death.

KENYA: Poor Struggle as Inflation Soars

As Kenya's inflation rate reached 15.53 percent, compared to 3.18 percent in October 2010, the country's poor have been struggling to afford the most basic of essentials. In some areas families can no longer rely on regular meals and have reduced them to one a day, others mostly eat potatoes to get by, and in one Rift Valley slum, poor families now buy toothpaste by the drop.

BRAZIL: Industrial-Port Complex Fuels Growth in Desolate Northeast

The port of Pecém in Brazil's impoverished Northeast region received a large order to unload and store cement factory equipment imported from China. The port authorities were unable to accept the original order, as the cargo would have occupied 40,000 square metres of storage space, nearly half the total available.

CONGO: Many Indigenous Women Still Give Birth in the Forest

Marguerite Kassa feared she would find herself alone in the small crowd of a dozen other pregnant women at the integrated health centre in Mossendjo, in the southwestern Republic of Congo. "I am six months pregnant already, but I hesitated to come here before now, because there is so much contempt for us," the thirty-year-old indigenous woman tells IPS. "Yet I was warmly welcomed."

Mexican Fisherwomen Organise Against Climate Change

Every night, Adlemi Marrufo goes out to catch bait crabs used to fish for octopus in this small seaside town and others along Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, as part of a women's cooperative that is working to adapt to and fight climate change.

PAKISTAN: Democracy Follows Drones

Along with the devastating drone strikes the United States-led ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan is bringing changes to punitive laws imposed by British colonialism on Pakistan’s Pashtun areas more than a century ago.

Libyans Find Historic Hope

"I’m 60 years old and I never thought I'd see this moment with my own eyes," Najib Taghuz tells IPS from the Tunisian-Libyan border. The engineer from the recently liberated town Gehryan is headed for Tunisia - his wife needs surgery on the left hand. But he hopes to return to a new Libya.