As recently as the mid-1980s, China relied on steam-powered relics to transport citizens and goods around its vast territory. Today, the country is home to 6,900 kilometres of high-speed passenger train routes in what is the largest rail network in the world – and growing.
Harassment and sexual exploitation by border officials seeking bribes constitute the biggest obstacles for female informal cross-border traders in Africa, according to a United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) research study.
The mooted restructuring of the revenue-sharing agreement of the world’s oldest customs union could lead to at least two of its Southern African members collapsing into "failed states" status as well as macroeconomic crises in two of their neighbours in the sub-region.
Quality of life in Eastern European cities will continue to fall unless outdated systems of city life dominated by cars are abandoned, NGOs in the region say.
"Xenophobia is part of life. We do not live easy here. We only survive," says Somali shopkeeper, Abdinasir Shaikh Aden, looking tense.
Is urban regeneration feasible in Mexico's capital city? This is a question asked by planning experts and by a large proportion of the city's population. Some projects currently underway indicate that the answer could be yes.
Every morning, Mexican biologist Luis Zambrano walks with his daughter to her school, less than a kilometre from his house, in the Magdalena Contreras district, located in the southwest of the Mexican capital.
While India's opposition parties are agitating against moves by the pro-reform government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to remove subsidies on petrol and other fuels, experts say the country has laboured too long under price distortions that have not benefited poorer people -- or the environment.
Transport workers are concerned that measures to mitigate climate change, like greenhouse gas emissions reduction, may put their jobs at risk, while experts are urging a transformation of the predominant transport model worldwide.
The five permanent members of the Security Council - the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China - are accused of facilitating the transport of conventional weapons and cluster munitions to countries where they could be used to commit human rights violations and war crimes.
"Without this opportunity, I might never have been able to get a higher education," says Paolo Carabajal, one of the beneficiaries of a digital development plan in this city in northwestern Uruguay.
South Africa, where the FIFA Football World Cup is to kick off Jun. 11, has introduced cleaner transportation, while Brazil is planning ecological stadiums for the championship it will host in 2014. But these and other initiatives clash with the countries' overall environmental performance.
The Group of 20 should show its concern about those that the global economic crisis "is leaving behind" by putting the plight of least developed countries on the agenda at its meeting later this month.
The 74 pillars that will hold up the bridge over the Negro river to join this major city in Brazil's Amazon jungle to nearby urban districts have mostly been laid, without environmental protests or major debates on the impact of a fast-growing metropolitan area in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
The European Union Danube Strategy (DS), unfolding this year, is proving to be a litmus test for the viability of the concept of ‘green growth’ in Eastern Europe.
Two years after a law was enacted that held out the promise of better road safety in Argentina, the country's death toll from traffic accidents is still one of the highest in Latin America.
Iceland's volcanoes contributed to conditions that may have hastened the French Revolution, and could now speed changes in air transport, which not only is vulnerable to natural disasters but is suffering from heavy congestion of its routes in Europe.
Three years after vehicle-makers succeeded in weakening new European Union (EU) pollution standards for cars, many of the same firms are hoping to frustrate efforts to make vans more fuel-efficient.
In a measure that was delayed by supply problems, this year Argentina is beginning to require that gasoline be mixed with ethanol and diesel fuel with biodiesel, at a proportion of five percent, to possibly reach 20 percent by 2015.
The collapse of the Uganda Railway Corporation 15 years ago opened up lucrative opportunities for privately-owned road transporters. But the high cost of maintaining the highways carrying heavy truck and bus traffic is leading government to take a fresh look at the rails.
If one were a night passenger on any airline flying out of New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport in the past week, chances are one would have spent many a nail-biting moment waiting endlessly to board the aircraft.