Sonikumari Jha puts on her green camouflage fatigues, deftly laces up her boots and is ready to step out and announce her decision to embrace a new life. Her four-year-old son, who has been watching the same rote for years, is puzzled by an important omission. 'Mama, you have forgotten your gun,' he calls out.

Sonikumari Jha puts on her green camouflage fatigues, deftly laces up her boots and is ready to step out and announce her decision to embrace a new life. Her four-year-old son, who has been watching the same rote for years, is puzzled by an important omission. 'Mama, you have forgotten your gun,' he calls out.

A year after slamming the door on the International Monetary Fund and announcing that a small country like Hungary could pursue an independent economic policy, conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been forced to kneel to the IMF and ask for help. Was there ever an alternative?

Standing on the shimmering white beach and gazing out at the turquoise blue waters of the Arabian sea, it is hard to believe that a decade ago this international tourist destination was under siege by mounting heaps of garbage.

Majuli island on the Brahmaputra river in the eastern Indian state of Assam is quickly losing its landmass to erosion. Majuli has long been regarded as one of the largest inhabited river islands in the world along with Ilha de Marajo of Brazil.

With the recently-created Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Cuba is strengthening its regional reinsertion, while progress towards normal ties with the United States would appear to remain a distant prospect, and the return of the right-wing Popular Party to power in Spain could reopen tensions on that front.

Five months ago, Gayla Newsome was at work when she got the call. A sheriff had come to her home of 15 years and put her two pajama-clad daughters out on the curb of her West Oakland street. Newsome knew the bank was about to foreclose, but thought she still had time to fight it.

The forests in Africa absorb over 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon annually. With these diverse and natural forests, grasslands and prairie lands disappearing under investment schemes and the development of monoculture plantations for supposed 'green' energy alternatives like agrofuels, not much else remains to absorb the shocks of hunger and climate change.

Industrial pollution from a paper manufacturing factory in one of India’s most precious biodiversity hotspots is wreaking havoc on the local ecology, driving up the population of wild crocodiles in the area while simultaneously destroying the creatures’ habitat and food supply.

'The prospect of arriving home... being arrested at the airport - that's kind of scary,' said Osazeme O., a dual citizen of Nigeria and the UK, in a wry understatement.