COLOMBIA: New Breed of Paramilitaries Infiltrate Urban ‘Refuges’

Legend has it that Ciudad Bolívar, a poor neighbourhood strung along the hills on the south side of the Colombian capital, is so called because independence hero Simón Bolívar briefly took refuge in the area after narrowly escaping an assassination attempt in 1828. Today, it is riddled with the concrete failure of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's push for paramilitary demobilisation.

LABOUR-JAPAN: Pay Now Linked to Performance, Not Seniority

Hiroo Nishimura, 57, head of dining room services with a large restaurant chain, is bitterly opposed to moves by the management to adopt a salary system that is based on performance rather than seniority.

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA: Housing Solution Needed, Not Tear Gas and Fire

While the Canadian city of Vancouver hosted the third World Urban Forum this week to discuss ways to improve the lives of the world’s one billion slumdwellers, in Cali, Colombia the police forcibly evicted a group of homeless families twice after negotiations for a solution fell through.

LATIN AMERICA: Building Unity – and Decent Housing

In Uruguay, 16,000 families have a proper home as a result of housing construction cooperatives, while in Bolivia people living in the ravines of La Paz have a system to deal with housing risks thanks to a non-governmental network.. And further south, in Chile, self-build social housing projects are mushrooming.

SOUTH AMERICA: Flushing Public Gender Violence Out of the Shadows

Their behaviour is shifting almost imperceptibly, but as women grow increasingly fearful of their safety, their movement in the cities of South America has become ever more restricted - especially at night.

SPORTS-GERMANY: Taking the World Cup to the Streets

Excellent football does not require fancy stadiums or million-dollar contracts. That is the view shared by the organisers of the Street Football World Festival, to be held alongside the World Cup in Germany.

MUSIC-AFRICA: Refugee All Stars Stir Hope From Despair

While the international community has invested Sierra Leone's recovery in trials and tribunals, Sierra Leoneans themselves have relied on family and sheer inner will to rebuild lives devastated by the country's civil war.

SRI LANKA: EU Monitors Exit as Peace Ebbs

The white flags and banners fluttering all over Sri Lanka this week told the plaintive tale of a country yearning for peace that is rapidly ebbing away

BRAZIL: Effective Policies Needed to Fight Rising Murder Rates

More than 800,000 people have been murdered in Brazil since 1980, and the annual figures continue to grow, but this tragedy with the dimensions of a full scale war has still not prompted the adoption of serious public safety policies by state and society.

RUSSIA: Rising Youth Gang Activity Worries Officials

The number of crimes committed by Russian teenagers is growing steadily, according to a new report by the interior ministry, prompting soul-searching in the country about the erosion of Russian families.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY: Sudan’s Other Crisis

The eastern areas of Sudan near the Eritrean-Ethiopian border are drought-stricken and dry during the hot months, and in recent years, a steady decline in rainfall continues to threaten basic survival efforts such as the cultivation of land and raising of livestock.

ENVIRONMENT-INDIA: Private Hydel Project on Naramda River Halted

Once again, the government has been compelled to suspend work on the Maheshwar dam over the Narmada River in central India.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY: A Sudanese Teenager Transforms Pain Into Art

The drawing shows a woman clasping a child to her chest. Aptly titled 'Embrace', it depicts a memory that has haunted the artist, a former child soldier from the civil war in southern Sudan who goes by the name of Commander Spoon.

DEVELOPMENT-PAKISTAN: Expressway to Nowhere for Displaced People

Munira has skipped going to work because she is waiting in a queue for the municipal tanker to bring water to the residents of Taiser Town, a vast new settlement of 95,000 people, many of them displaced when their homes were demolished to make way for the Lyari Expressway in Pakistan's commercial capital.

RIGHTS-VENEZUELA: Step Back Renews Women’s Drive to Move Forward

A recent Supreme Court ruling that undermines the safety of domestic violence victims has galvanised activists in Venezuela, who vow to step up the fight against a scourge that the country's advanced gender-equality laws have so far failed to eradicate.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY-SOUTH AFRICA: Hope in a Suitcase

Conflict in Rachael Mukoma's country, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), made it impossible for her to stay there. At the same time, it was very difficult for her to leave.

EDUCATION-LATIN AMERICA: Reading, Writing…and Then What?

María del Carmen Cervantes has learned to read the mysterious signs she couldn't decipher before, and now she wants to "go on reading and studying," a goal that is not always possible for recently literate adults in Latin America, because of deficiencies in the literacy programmes.

MIDEAST: Holocaust Memories Hover Over Sudanese Refugees

Some 200 Sudanese refugees who have crossed the border from Egypt into Israel seeking asylum are posing a thorny moral dilemma for a country that was born out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

ECUADOR: Is Indigenous Unity More Than Skin Deep?

The selection by Ecuador's indigenous movement of a presidential candidate of its own for the October elections could be interpreted as a sign of unity and strength, but a closer look reveals underlying divisions.

RIGHTS: Iraq Exodus Ends Four-Year Decline in Refugees

An exodus of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis escaping growing violence in their homeland last year increased the total number of refugees around the world to some 12 million, according to the World Refugee Survey 2006 released here Wednesday by the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI).

US-MEXICO: ‘We’ll Do It Ourselves,’ Say Minutemen

The United States is facing an "invasion" of illegal immigrants, so the border should be fenced off and large numbers of soldiers deployed to intercept them, the national executive director of the Minutemen movement, Al Garza, told IPS. If these measures are not taken, "we'll do it ourselves," he warned.