The Autonomous Port of Pointe-Noire has evicted 8,000 residents of a fishing village to make way for expanded facilities. The move is a blow to the community's livelihoods, as well as closing down the market that supplied the city's poor with affordable protein.

A land route to the Pacific, long coveted by Brazil, would not reduce the cost of transporting Brazilian exports to China and other markets in Asia and would not make them more competitive, as advocates of paving roads and building bridges through the Amazon jungle argue.

In times of inflationary pressures the price of patriotism too goes up. The news that an 18th century Chinese porcelain vase sold for a record-breaking 68 million dollars at a London auction to a mainland China buyer this month did not go down well either with Chinese government regulators fretting about asset bubbles or with a Chinese public angry about income inequality.

Robert Hörchner can only sleep for two hours at night before the sweating starts. His wife Annelies wakes up frequently, too; each time she hears a noise outside she opens the curtains, expecting to see police at the front door. The couple are traumatised because Robert spent ten months locked up in a filthy Polish cell. He has been accused of holding the lease to a property where cannabis was grown but insists that he is innocent.

Cecilia Tomoka's birthing centre stood unused for three years before the 2009 earthquake flattened it. Now she's rebuilding the house - and her practice - as Malawi's government lifts a ban on traditional birth attendants.

Mohsen Soltany Zand knows life inside Australia’s immigration detention system. Now an Australian citizen, Zand sought political asylum here after fleeing Iran in the late 1990s. He was held by Australian authorities in several detention facilities between 1999 and 2003. 'My experience was unbelievable. (I suffered) a lot of mental damage and many shocking things (happened). It was absolutely like hell,' he says.

'I was shocked when I saw them,' says 18-year-old detainee Chona (not her real name) of the first time she saw the duplex-style bungalows painted in pastel colours that make up her ‘home’.

Though there is widespread acknowledgement that the ambitions for this year's climate change conference are considerably lower than for last year's, the U.N. and other groups say even the deal struck a year ago will not go far enough to stop climate change.

'Men are drunks and batterers,' Lorena Maurin tells IPS before heading in to her computer class, an oasis for women in the 22 de Enero neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Many United Nations peacekeepers are not only failing to meet the needs of civilians, but they are also perceived as unresponsive once civilians convey their needs, says a new report by Oxfam International.