INDIA: Indigenous Rights Versus Wildlife Rights? – Part 2

As the amount of protected forest dwindles rapidly in India, indigenous groups and wildlife find themselves living cheek to jowl in an increasingly contested space.

INDIA: Indigenous Rights Versus Wildlife Rights? – Part 1

Tucked away in a dense and ecologically diverse tiger reserve in Southern India, tribes-people and wildlife defenders are locked in a battle of indigenous peoples’ rights versus wildlife rights.

Price Hikes, Sliding Currency Rattle Iranian Consumers

Massive uncertainty, severe sanctions on its economy and a diminishing supply of hard currency have sent the Iranian currency, the rial, into a tailspin that appears unlikely to stabilise anytime soon.

CHINA: Getting Worse in Tibet

A Tibetan ‘Living Buddha’ who set himself on fire in protest against Chinese rule died this week, sparking a vigil of thousands of Tibetans and creating fears that self-immolations are spreading.

SRI LANKA: Peacetime Can Mean Hard Times

It’s a new year, a new beginning but probably a harsher reality in Sri Lanka's former war zone. As the country enters its third year since the end of a bloody sectarian war that tore the nation's fabric apart, for many of the survivors of the worst fighting, a tough but true reality is dawning. Life in peacetime may yet be a hard struggle.

PAKISTAN: New Price Tags on Stranded NATO Supplies

From a distance, the neatly stacked red, blue and orange containers suggest that business is good at Karachi’s Kemari port.

MEDIA-PAKISTAN: Balochistan a Hornet’s Nest for Journalists

"This could well be my last interview." There was audible nervousness in Jamal Tarakai’s voice as it crackled over the telephone line from the city of Quetta. The thirty-five-year-old journalist, hailing from the restive Balochistan province in Pakistan, believes he could be killed at any time.

SRI LANKA: Female Unemployment Rises With Education

Every weekend it has been the same ritual for so many months. Buying the newspaper, going through the classified and the employment sections inch by column inch, marking job offers that could offer a chance, even remotely.

China Greets Gloomy New Year

For much of last year world politicians and market watchers dreamed of China coming to the rescue of a stumbling global economy while Beijing mandarins sat on the fence fretting about high inflation and social instability inside their country. As China prepares to greet the Year of the Dragon later this month, many predict more gloom and doom, and some are expecting that the battle to stave off recession will be fought closer to home.

TAIWAN: Poll Will Decide Nuclear Plant’s Fate

Voters in Taiwan’s upcoming presidential and national legislative elections will also decide the fate of a bitterly controversial 9.3 billion dollar nuclear power plant.

AFGHANISTAN: Trains Face a Rough Political Terrain

Last month the first cargo train crossed the ‘Friendship Bridge’ from Uzbekistan to the border town Hairatan in northern Afghanistan, and rolled along 75 kilometres of newly laid track to Mazar-e-Sharif.

BANGLADESH: Farmers Bet on Climate-Proof Crops

With floods, droughts and other calamities battering deltaic Bangladesh regularly, farmers need little prompting in switching to climate-resistant varieties of rice, wheat, pulses and other staples.

PAKISTAN: Girls Defuse This Taliban Bomb

Suicide bombing is down, bomb attacks are fewer, but the Taliban are keeping up attacks on girls’ schools. In retaliation, a growing number of girls are going for school education – without school buildings.

AFGHANISTAN: Catch ’em Young, for Prostitution

Soma was a teenager in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif when her grandfather arranged her marriage to a husband she had never met.

JAPAN: New Year Brings Economic Aftershocks

Hideo Sato, 47, and his family escaped to this snowy city 200 km from the radiation emitting Fuksuhima power plant that was struck by a massive earthquake-driven tsunami on Mar. 11.

INDIA: Fighting for a Less Corrupt New Year

After failing to muster support in parliament for the passage of a watered- down anti-corruption bill, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must find ways to satisfy opposition parties, allies and civil society that his United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government is serious about curbing graft in the New Year.

NEPAL: Peace Brings More Violence Against Women

Four months after her murder, you can see Rosy Maharjan flashing the two- finger victory sign - from a Facebook page. With police arresting the 21-year- old’s boyfriend and the people he hired to kill her due to jealousy, agitated civil society members have opened accounts on social networking sites, demanding justice for the slain college student.

AFGHANISTAN: Killing Heroin With Saffron

Weaning Afghanistan’s poppy farmers away from growing the raw material for the bulk of the world’s illicit heroin has never been easy, but Kashmir’s saffron cultivators may have the answer.

AFGHANISTAN: Husband, 60, Wife, 8

Activists voice concern that Afghan women’s rights continue to be marginalised, and nowhere is gender inequality more starkly illustrated than in the country’s flawed justice system.

BANGLADESH: Lighting up on Solar Power

The sun never shone brighter on rural Bangladesh with low power solar systems transforming the lives of tens of millions of marginalised rural people who are unconnected to the national grid.

DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Tribal People on the Warpath

This small town, barely 150 km away from the bustling eastern metropolis of Kolkata, hit news headlines in December 2008 when adivasis (indigenous people) led by Maoist rebels briefly captured it.