The second World Outgames, held in the Danish capital, offered up a veritable smorgasbord of sport, politics and arts while celebrating sexual and gender diversity. But it also reminded participants that bigotry against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, sometimes culminating in violence, remains a scourge across the world.

In Tamilnadu, southern India, and Uttar Pradesh, northern India, villagers have revived ancient systems of storing surface and groundwater that are putting them in a good position to contend with today’s changing climate.

Kashmir’s carpet industry has been hit very hard by the global economic slowdown, 47-year-old Bashir Ahmad Bhat explained while working on his loom in a run-down hut in downtown Srinagar.

For years, fishing communities along Africa’s 30,000 km-long coastline have been raising the alarm on the depletion of their fish stocks, to no avail. Over-fishing by foreign vessels has been wiping out the livelihood of West African fishers, contributing to desperate migration attempts into Europe.

The Dakar rally, held this year for the first time in Chile and Argentina, caused severe damage to archaeological sites in northern Chile, according to a report by the Council on National Monuments.

Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), is fighting for its very survival as the movement faces implosion, and attacks from all sides.

In China, a reduction in the number of executions carried out in recent years was accompanied by a promising statement by the vice president of the Supreme Court that the country would gradually slow the implementation of capital punishment to the point that there is "a very limited number of executions", writes Elisabetta Zamparutti, a deputy in the Italian parliament, a leader of the Radical Party, and editor of the annual report on the Death Penalty in the World for Hands Off Cain.

Much of the world is side-tracked into the summer holiday mood, but the Obama Administration consistently stresses it won't allow its Middle East peacemaking effort to be side-tracked: We'll soon be hitting full stride, is the constant White House message.

Tens of thousands of children in Gaza are still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following Israel's three-week bombing December- January.

As the Zambian parliament resumes, civil society organisations (CSOs) have come out strongly to oppose the Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Bill, which seeks to regulate their operations.