The rain was falling hard in the early hours of April 17, when forty detainees kicked down the doors to their cells at the National Palace of Corrections, scaled the prison’s barbed wire fence and rear watchtower, and disappeared into the dark, sodden jungle.

The global financial crisis is on everyone’s lips. With first hand reports of job losses, house foreclosures and citizens living on credit card debt, the impact of the crisis on the individual worker in the developed world is clear. In Africa, there have been threats of closures and retrenchments in the Zambian copper mines and Botswana’s diamond mines, amongst others. But the impact on the individual citizen and African women in particular, given the existing gender inequalities, has not been well documented.

The issue of nuclear disarmament being discussed with new vigour in the halls of the U.N. as the third and final preparatory committee leading up to the 2010 review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) meets over the next two weeks.

The United States is considering whether to endorse a major U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for the recognition of the rights of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples over their lands and resources.

Alarm bells are ringing in Washington, with the U.S. fretting over what could happen if the 'worst, the unthinkable' were to happen and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), toppled the country's year-old democratic government and got hold of its nuclear arsenal.

Scientists have been surprised by the rapid recovery of coral reefs from mass bleaching on Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef, but they warn that reefs remain particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Almost a full fortnight before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is received at the White House, and already political nerves here are all a-jangle. Is a showdown with Israel's staunch ally about to materialise?

The economic crisis is hitting migrants harder than most other people, and it looks set to get worse for them.

Beit Daniel is an Israeli pluralist religious organisation promoting coexistence between Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land. Executive director Rabbi Meir Azari speaks here to IPS about the war in Gaza, the importance of compromise, and the moral dilemmas of Israel.

Till two months back, Shireen Zada of the private television channel Express News would carry a pistol whenever he covered the news in the restive Swat Valley in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP).