Armed with a sharp knife, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is on an austerity drive seeking deep cuts, amounting to about 155 million dollars, in the U.N.'s 2012-2013 budget, which comes into effect next January.

After a month and a half of conflict in Libya, the situation of political prisoners and prisoners of war on both sides is uncertain, and their fundamental rights are at risk.

Dengue infections and deaths here have declined significantly this year.

In the weeks since a motorist mowed down dozens of cyclists in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, the incident has becoming a rallying flag in the fight to create a more bike-friendly city.

A pioneering drug substitution programme in conflict-wracked Afghanistan has been hailed a resounding success as local doctors and international health organisations battle soaring heroin addiction rates and an HIV/AIDS epidemic.

'The pipeline will carry gas to Bolivia and seven provinces in Argentina, but we who live in Campo Durán, where the pipeline starts, will not have gas,' Julio Palavecino told IPS.

Kazakhstan's nine million registered voters went to the polls Apr. 3. Incumbent Nursultan Nazarbayev is not expected to lose. Observers have already given the country's election commission poor marks for allowing a questionable selection procedure through which three political lightweights are up against 'Papa' - as Nazarbayev is affectionately known.

For nearly five hundred years, sugar cane was used almost exclusively for making sugar, with a handful of by-products like rum, alcohol and molasses. Now, in Brazil, it has become a source of multiple derivatives, and the focus of much scientific and technological research.

Forces of law and order have abandoned their posts in Abidjan, creating a vacuum which has rapidly filled with violence, looting and fear. Residents of Côte d'Ivoire's commercial capital are shut in their homes, doors closed against scenes of pillage and assault of civilians, while reports of intercommunal clashes in the west of the country complete the picture of a country descending into chaos.

The state-controlled trade union federation that for over half a century was employed by Egyptian rulers to suppress workers' protests and mobilise voters for sham elections appears to be crumbling with the recent ouster of president Hosni Mubarak.