AGRICULTURE: Three-Quarters of Hungry Are Rural Poor

Climate change, associated with a four-fold increase in natural disasters in the last decade, and the growth of world population, which is expected to reach nine billion by 2050, pose new challenges for aid initiatives like those of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

DEVELOPMENT: Japan’s Rude Awakening: Poverty Hurts

Japan may be one the world' biggest economies, but it is not immune to poverty.

PAKISTAN: War-Displaced Lament Poor Conditions

Wracked by intense violence in 2009, Pakistan has seen an unprecedented displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, which persists to this day.

DEVELOPMENT-FIJI: Amid Economic Slump, Children Face Bleak Future

Shonal Chand, 16, has ditched school to work full time to assist his financially struggling family. He sells pineapples, watermelons and other local seasonal fruits by the roadside six days a week.

ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Creeping Deserts and Crouching Hunger

It is just the beginning of the year, but M. Manju Laxmi already feels anxious. In four months or so, she will be back to her old routine: stuffing the wide chinks under her weathered closed doors and windows with her old saris.

POLITICS-NEPAL: Parties at Odds, Peace at Risk

Nepal’s walk to peace from a decade-long, Maoist-led bloody insurgency that ended four years ago could take longer than expected.

POLITICS: Backlash against Rogue Chinese Investors Alarms Beijing

As China moves up in the world and the need for investment in its own infrastructure declines, Chinese investors and financiers are eyeing lucrative contracts in less developed countries, winning bids to build dams, power plants and highways from Burma to Uzbekistan and Angola.

HEALTH-INDIA: Hunger Haunts Hospitals

As a nurse, Amita Dhaka sees much suffering, but what she finds hard to handle is inadequate nutrition and even hunger among poor in-patients.

MALAYSIA: Social Safety Nets Not Good Enough for Children

Malaysia may have been spared the worst effects of the economic slowdown due largely to its oil and gas reserves and other natural resources.

POLITICS: Indonesia Mourns the Passing of a Beloved Leader

The news about fourth Indonesian president and cleric Abdurrahman Wahid being admitted to the hospital last week merited only a passing mention in the national media. It was overshadowed by reports on the country’s tumultuous political situation, such as allegations that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was involved in a banking scandal and the controversies hounding the country’s corruption eradication agency.

SRI LANKA: A Nation Struggles to Forget a Tragedy

Waves hitting a train and carriages half submerged in water. Scores of men, women and children leaping above the water, hands outstretched, bodies strewn all over.

ENVIRONMENT-JAPAN: Solar Trend Catches Fire among Households

The global community may have been dismayed by the outcome of the recently concluded climate change talks in Copenhagen, but Mami Naito, 42, is not about to put off dealing with this global phenomenon in her own small way. "We very much like the idea of joining the efforts to prevent global warming," says the mother of two.

LEBANON: Hip-hop Kindles Hopes in Destroyed Refugee Camp

The hip-hop beats ringing through the muddy, unlit streets of this burnt-out Palestinian refugee camp seem incongruous. But the rhymes are camp-grown - and courageous.

Q&A: ‘Children Need to Adjust to the Economic Crisis’

During the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Yaowapa Donsay was laid off from the Thai garments factory she was working in. Subsequently, she organised a group of jobless women workers – and that marked her transformation into a labour activist.

CAMBODIA: Financial Crisis Forces More Teenage Girls into Labour

Until the global financial crisis hit, a journey out of poverty for women in rural Cambodia was assured by the vibrant garment sector that had taken root in the country’s capital. Tens of thousands of women in their twenties poured into Phnom Penh to secure jobs in the hundreds of export-oriented factories.

RIGHTS-INDIA: Hi-Tech Beats Sex Selection Ban

When a magistrate in the western port city of Mumbai convicted two doctors in November for advertising sex selection services, it showed determination to enforce laws aimed at stopping gender determination tests linked to the mass abortion of female foetuses.

JORDAN: Palestinian Refugees Live Out Lives in Limbo

Music enlivens the yellow taxi as it traverses the Jordanian capital. A small Palestinian flag hangs from the rearview mirror. Jihad, the cab driver, says his father fled here from the Palestinian West Bank in 1948.

JAPAN: Careers On Hold For Most Women

Tomoko Ando and her husband divorced because she refused to quit her job as a lawyer and start a family. The shortage of daycare centres has created a dilemma for women like Ando who want to continue working, but also start a family.

SOUTH KOREA: Low Birth Rate Blamed on Women

On Dec. 9, Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul organised an event titled, 'Happy Childbirth - Rich and Strong Future', aimed at trying to raise awareness about the country's very low birth rate.

PHILIPPINES: Belt-tightening by Migrant Workers Unfelt at Home

The global financial crisis may have dealt a severe blow to Filipino migrant workers, thousands of whom lost their jobs and fell into debt. But public schoolteacher Melinda Mendoza does not see this impact at all -- at least not within the four walls of her classroom.

HEALTH-EUROPE: ‘Czech Attitudes to HIV/AIDS Risky’

Complacency and ignorance over the risks posed by HIV and AIDS are threatening to send infection rates soaring in the Czech Republic, health authorities.