MBUJI MAYI, DR Congo, Sep 05 (IPS) - Despite the desperate lack of access to water for domestic use in Mwene Ditu, in the central Democratic Republic of Congo, Dieudonné Ilunga spent a good part of July blocking up residents' wells.

WASHINGTON, Sep 05 (IPS) - President Barack Obama’s explicit warning that he will not accept a unilateral Israeli attack against Iran may force Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to step back from his ostensible threat of war.

, Sep 05 (IPS) - Peru will debut a new mechanism for prior consultation with indigenous peoples by seeking their approval for a new stage of oil drilling operations in the infamous Lot 1AB in the northeastern Amazon region of Loreto.

JUBA, Sep 05 (IPS) - Police in South Sudan have begun press-ganging every "idle" youth they can find to provide labour on police farms. The State Police Commissioner in Northern Bahr al Gazal state says young men cannot be left to drink tea and play cards all day while food insecurity threatens the country.

WASHINGTON, Sep 05 (IPS) - As reports surfaced Tuesday that U.S. negotiators, in Cairo for the past week, are closing in on an agreement to cut a billion dollars from Egypt’s bilateral debt, the State Department here announced that a record-sized U.S. business delegation would travel to Egypt later this week.

WASHINGTON, Sep 05 (IPS) - A human rights crisis has engulfed the Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives since the ousting of the former president, Mohamed Nasheed, on Feb. 7, activists warned here Tuesday.

SANTIAGO, Sep 04 (IPS) - Relations between the families of people “disappeared” by Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship and the forensic institute, which have been tense since a 2006 scandal when the state body admitted that it had misidentified 96 of the 126 bodies found in a common grave in 1991, are beginning to mend.

ABIDJAN, Sep 04 (IPS) - Yacouba Coulibaly was pursuing a doctorate in education at Cocody University in Abidjan before Côte d’Ivoire’s post-election violence started in 2010. But his classes were routinely disrupted by armed members of a powerful student federation that wished to hold meetings instead.

DAKAR, Sep 04 (IPS) - Thousands of farmers are earning a living growing fruit and vegetables in the Niayes, a strip of fertile land running north along Senegal's western coastline from the outskirts of the capital, Dakar. But land speculation threatens the future of this market gardening.

SANTIAGO, Sep 04 (IPS) - A Chilean Supreme Court decision ordering a halt to the construction of the Castilla thermoelectric power plant has sparked a debate over the country’s energy security.