Hoping for better opportunities than they can find at home, many families from Kyrgyzstan travel to find work. Neighbouring Kazakhstan has the strongest economy in Central Asia, and tobacco farms attract workers fleeing Kyrgyzstan's high unemployment.

'People used to mock me, saying that I am competing with dogs for bones, but these taunts do not deter me,' says Sibongile Mararike with no sign of rancour.

Henry Teh gently slides down a blue hospital sheet to expose the bare belly of a pregnant woman. As he pokes around to feel the position of the foetus, the midwife-in-training knows he is breaking tradition and changing the face of obstetric care in Liberia.

Herculano Porto de Oliveira, of Brazil, said he felt forced 'to live in hiding on my own land, though I never fought with anyone or stole anything,' just for making a living from the biodiversity of the Amazon's Xingú River Basin, where he was born 66 years ago.

The failed 'war on drugs' has not only badly damaged countries where it is waged, it is responsible for driving up HIV infection rates in some countries, says an official declaration endorsed Wednesday by three former Latin American presidents in advance of the XVIII International AIDS Conference that begins Jul. 18 in Vienna.

Traffic now flows around the U.N. compound here in the Sri Lankan capital, and the dozens of policemen visible last week are no longer there. It is business as usual, a far cry from a week back when an angry minister’s death fast just outside the main U.N. office made the area the focus of international attention.

Egypt's Red Sea resort cities have grown up in the shadow of oil development, but with tourism booming and the country's oil reserves drying up, many stakeholders think it is time to exorcise the oil spectre.

Genetically modified (GM) foods will be introduced more quickly in Europe as a result of a new proposal, some Brussels officials fear.

Worries about its political survival will hound Japan’s ruling party after its setback in the recent Upper House polls, leaving it little room to pursue policies that the country’s neighbours had been looking forward to when the Democratic Party of Japan came to power in 2009.

Six months after Haiti's devastating earthquake, U.N. aid agencies say they are entering the challenging phase of replacing the tents that are home to the estimated 1.5 million people who remain displaced.