At the tender age of 10, Rodel Morozco was working in a goldmine and crawling inside tunnels, until one day he fell 200 feet underground because his father had blasted the tunnel with dynamite.

Emerging countries like Brazil and China are building numerous hydroelectric dams at home and abroad to help drive their economic growth. But while in Latin America the phenomenon is touted as an integration process, in Asia it has generated tension over the shared use of rivers.

While the curtain was being raised Tuesday on a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initiative to pour one billion dollars of federal funding into the Partnerships for Patients Act — a new project designed to save thousands of lives and millions of dollars — the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) held a media briefing here simultaneously presenting studies from their theme issue on 'Infectious Diseases and Immunology'.

As the international community readies to cope with a rising world population of some seven billion people by the middle of this year, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warns that financial assistance for population-related activities has made no visible gains since 2008.

China’s rise as a leader in the environmentally friendly, low-carbon economy is giving the Asian giant new diplomatic muscle for this year’s round of climate change negotiations leading up to the COP17 U.N. summit in Durban, South Africa in November.

If President Barack Obama wanted to place Washington 'on the right side of history' during the ongoing 'Arab Spring', his reaction to recent events in Bahrain will likely make that far more difficult, according to a growing number of analysts and commentators here.

The international contact group on Libya has agreed to set up a temporary 'trust fund' to help the international community channel assets to the opposition Transitional National Council in Benghazi.

The Pakistani military's recent demands on the United States to curb drone strikes and reduce the number of U.S. spies operating in Pakistan, which have raised tensions between the two countries to a new high, were a response to U.S. military and intelligence programmes that had gone well beyond what the Pakistanis had agreed to in past years.

Many farms and crops were devastated when the January floods hit South Africa at the start of this year. Farmer organisation Agri South Africa (AgriSa) estimated damages as high as 270 million dollars.

Mariana García is a child of the 1990s, when Cuba was in the grip of the severe crisis that hit the island after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist bloc. She grew up bombarded by the first video games and surrounded by people who talked more about how to get by than about their dreams and ideals.