BANGKOK, Sep 10 (IPS) - After decades of grinding poverty under successive military dictatorships, Myanmar’s rice farmers have a chance at a better future through rural reforms ushered in by the country’s quasi-civilian government. Microfinance is at the root of it. 

DHEISHEH REFUGEE CAMP, Occupied West Bank, Sep 09 (IPS) - Asmahan Ramadan and her family have taken thousands of photos on the rooftop of their home. Not of themselves, or of the overcrowded Dheisheh refugee camp they see every day.

BANGKOK, Sep 09 (IPS) - As government negotiators from the world’s poorest countries ended a round of United Nations climate change talks in the Thai capital, they sounded a grave note about what appears imminent when they assemble in November in Doha – the reading of the last rites of the Kyoto Protocol.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 08 (IPS) - When U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the High-Level Forum on Culture of Peace later this week, he will transmit a message that underlines his political philosophy: all disputes need to be resolved by peaceful means, not through military might.

JABALIYA, Gaza, Sep 08 (IPS) - "Gaza's economy is expected to grow modestly and people will likely still be worse off in 2015 compared to the mid-1990s," reads a press release announcing the United Nations' August 2012 report, ‘Gaza in 2020 – A Liveable Place?’

JEJU, South Korea, Sep 08 (IPS) - Regulations that stand in the way of conservation programmes lower their likely success, experts warned at the World Conservation Congress of the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Jeju, South Korea.

WASHINGTON, Sep 08 (IPS) - The U.S. State Department on Friday declared the Haqqani network, a militant group based in Pakistan, a “terrorist organisation”.

WASHINGTON, Sep 08 (IPS) - With their respective party nomination conventions behind them, both President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney travelled to the tiny northeastern state of New Hampshire Friday, one of at most a dozen “swing” states whose voters are likely to decide the winner in the Nov. 6 election.

WASHINGTON, Sep 07 (IPS) - Unlike the flattening or even declining rates of HIV infection among nearly all other communities, the epidemic among gay men globally is rapidly expanding.

WASHINGTON, Sep 07 (IPS) - Diplomats from an unidentified country and a Washington research organisation considered close to the International Atomic Energy Agency have alleged in recent weeks that Iran has covered two buildings at a military site to hide a clean-up of evidence of nuclear weapons related testing.