Brazil spends some 10 billion dollars a year on health care for smokers — more than three times the tax revenue from the tobacco industry in this country, which is the world's top exporter and second producer of tobacco.

Kofi Annan, the joint United Nations-Arab League envoy to Syria, has admitted that his peace plan is failing and that the country's future will consist of 'brutal suppression, massacres, sectarian violence and even all-out civil war' if it continues on its current path.

A leading Chinese dissident imprisoned after the 1989 Tiananmen pro-democracy protests has been found hanged in hospital.

Small farmers in Mexico, who receive little institutional support, are drawing on their traditional knowledge to deal with and adapt to climate change, experts say.

To deal with looming food crises in the coming decades, Africa needs a Green Revolution on par with what took place in Asia during the 1960s and 1970s, according to experts in Washington.

To deal with looming food crises in the coming decades, Africa needs a Green Revolution on par with what took place in Asia during the 1960s and 1970s, according to experts in Washington.

Irreversible environmental damage threatens to destabilise the world's life-support systems unless urgent action is taken, according to the latest Global Environment Report (GEO-5) which looks to the Rio+20 summit as a crucial opportunity to halt this decline.

Since the forced disappearance of his son Jethro in May 2011, Héctor Sánchez has found an outlet for his grief in activism. So far he has turned down psychological support offered by the Mexican Attorney-General's Office and human rights organisations.

A transboundary initiative aimed at providing clean drinking water and proper sanitation between Angola and Namibia is making steady progress.

Bupe Bana-Victor has lived in the Mwense district of Luapula Province in northern Zambia all her life. And for her, water talk is synonymous with the Luapula River, which lies just 20 metres from her village and snakes through the entire region before it joins the Lualaba River — a tributary of the mighty Congo, Africa’s second-largest river.