It is mid-morning and the temperature has already soared to 80 degrees centigrade.

European civil society organisations continue to demand that international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund apply the same standards of transparency and accountability to their internal affairs that they demand for governments across the world.

Catalina Salvador, an 87-year-old peasant farmer who grows pumpkins, beans, and above all corn on her small plot of land, was one of the opponents of transgenic crops who took part in the traditional corn festival in San Juan Ixtenco in the central Mexican state of Tlaxcala.

Their skill and dexterity in weaving textiles, to be worn on festive occasions or displayed in windows for sale to tourists, have become the mainstay of indigenous women and their families in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Sri Lanka’s capital city Colombo, the vibrant economic and administrative heart of the bustling island nation, is rapidly turning into a city of slums. Home to over 30 percent of the country’s population, one in every two people living in the Greater Colombo Area is a slum dweller.

Politicians in the United States must ritualistically assert that the U.S. is and always will be the world's leading economic, military and political power. This chant may help win elections in a country where respectable people deny global warming and evolution, but it has nothing to do with the real world.

As today’s conscientious travellers seek authentic experiences with the people of the lands they visit, tourism can be a vehicle for preserving ancient cultures, while socially and economically empowering marginalised or remote indigenous communities.

Mexico’s oases encompass significant environmental, cultural, social and economic wealth that must be properly assessed and preserved, warn experts.

In recent months, the dispute over the nature and intent of the Iranian nuclear development programme has generated increasing tensions throughout the Middle East region. When I consider all that is at stake here, I am reminded of the words of the British historian Arnold Toynbee, who warned that the perils of the nuclear age constituted a 'Gordian knot that has to be untied by patient fingers instead of being cut by the sword.'

The recent dramatic rise of youth unemployment across Europe — particularly in the Mediterranean member countries of the Eurozone most affected by the sovereign debt crisis and so- called ‘remedial’ austerity programmes — indicates that the continent is sacrificing its future on the altar of short-term budget consolidation.