IRAQ: Trafficked to Baghdad’s Green Zone

Ukrainian and Bulgarian workers are currently camped out on a construction site of half-built luxury villas in Baghdad’s elite "Green Zone" – a vast security enclave housing government offices, embassies and international NGOs - demanding their salaries before being shipped back home.

LIBYA: Evidence of ‘Mass Execution’ in Tripoli

Al Jazeera has found evidence of a possible mass execution of political activists in Libya.

BRAZIL: Fight for Gay Rights Making Strides

Brazil is making progress in cracking down on homophobia and upholding the rights of homosexuals. The latest step was the introduction in Congress of a bill on sexual diversity, sponsored by the bar association in consultation with civil society.

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?

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.

LIBYA: Rebels Storm Gaddafi Compound in Tripoli

Rebels have entered the fortified compound of Muammar Gaddafi in Bab al-Azizya in Tripoli, following intense fighting with forces loyal to the Libyan leader.