'My classmates from Utupampa had to walk an hour to get to school,' said Yasmín Sena, a young woman from a village in Peru's highlands. 'That community is way up in the mountains; no cars can go there.'

The U.N. Security Council is poised to vote this week on a new resolution condemning Israeli expansion into the Occupied Palestinian Territories and calling for an immediate freeze on settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but the United States has already declared its intention to again deploy its veto power.

The plaintiffs in the case against Chevron tried in Ecuador, who won a historic 9.5 billion dollar verdict after a nearly 18-year struggle over environmental and health damages caused in a quarter-century of oil operations in the Amazon jungle, are not disheartened by the road still ahead.

Human-induced heating of the planet has already made rainfall more intense, leading to more severe floods, researchers announced Wednesday.

Egypt's revolution appears to have stiffened the spine of the Barack Obama administration when it comes to Iran.

A universal Basic Income Grant (BIG) would create laziness and dependence among Namibia’s poor, say politicians. A daring pilot project set out to prove that this untrue. IPS spoke to one of the beneficiaries of the BIG.

A universal income grant in Namibia would alleviate poverty in one of the most unequal societies on earth, say campaigners. Free handouts only lead to laziness, responds an unwilling government.

With U.S. President Barack Obama's release of his Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 foreign affairs budget Monday and a proposal currently in the U.S. House of Representatives for massive cuts in FY 2011 international spending, the fight to sustain U.S. aid abroad is intensifying.

Major progress has been made in Ecuador over the last few years in reducing child malnutrition and expanding educational coverage.

Without in-depth scientific documentation of marine mammal strandings, natural history and animal behaviour, the prediction of seismic events based on behaviour of marine mammals is not widely accepted. Sceptics often dismiss such predictions as conjecture.