The Washington Consensus, the neo-liberal economic prescription presumed to be universally and permanently valid, was broadsided by the current world recession, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of IPS news agency.

The disappointing results of negotiations in Bonn last week are indication that industrialised countries are unwilling to make substantial contributions to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

The Mississippi River may be on the other side of the world from the Mekong River, but Vietnamese environmentalists say they hope a new link between the agencies that look after these two river systems can lead to new thinking about ways to manage water resources in the Mekong region.

Call it that choice between looking at the half-full or half-empty part of the results. And it is almost half; 55 percent of schoolchildren passed their exams in Gaza this year.

Some 3,000 people make their living from rural community-based tourism in Costa Rica, according to the association of tour operators who connect visitors to the delights of rural life.

'Coming to Colombia is to enter a world that is always intense, captivating and heart-wrenching at the same time,' Susana Villarán, a former member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), wrote in April 2008.

While the swine flu pandemic has not hit India too hard, it has sorely tested the country’s ailing health delivery system and its plans to remedy the situation through ‘private-public partnerships.’

The lack of opportunities for dialogue and participation and the struggle for control over land and natural resources in Chile are hurdles to a solution to the Mapuche Indians' century-long conflict, which claimed a new victim this week: a 24-year-old activist shot by the police while taking part in an occupation of land claimed as indigenous territory.

News reports and right-wing blogs have been repeating reports which claim that Muslims and Arabs are among the donors to the J Street political action committee (PAC) which lobbies American policymakers to work on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and helps raise campaign funds for candidates who share the views of J Street on promoting American leadership in the peace process.

Immigrants in Spain are getting a raw deal from state institutions and at the same time from small and medium business owners, who not only take unfair advantage of them, but sometimes also physically ill-treat them.