WASHINGTON, Aug 15 (IPS) - The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has denounced in unusually harsh terms Wednesday's bloody military crackdown against supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

WASHINGTON, Aug 14 (IPS) - Major U.S. retailers are selling garden plants that are billed as "bee-friendly" but laced with pesticides known to be toxic to bees, according to a preliminary study, the first on the issue, released Wednesday.

MONTEVIDEO, Aug 14 (IPS) - Latin America and the Caribbean should play a central role in the construction of "sexual citizenship" - a concept that covers a series of population-related issues, rights and guarantees that this region helped build since the United Nations first emerged, says Brazilian expert Carmen Barroso.

NEW YORK, Aug 14 (IPS) - Like many people living in the path of Hurricane Sandy last fall, Lauren Scrivo needed more battery power. Despite a call offering help from the mayor of Fairfield, New Jersey, where Scrivo lives with her family, her concerns went far beyond extra water bottles and flashlights.

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 14 (IPS) - Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who has refused to describe the Egyptian army's ouster of a democratically-elected government last month as a "military coup", lambasted the country's security forces for Wednesday's massacre of civilians in the streets of Cairo.

MEXICO CITY, Aug 14 (IPS) - Marijuana and the closely related hemp can provide medicinal, food and textile industrial materials that could attract substantial investment and development in Mexico if cannabis were legalised and its cultivation and sale regulated, experts say.

HAR BRACHA SETTLEMENT, Occupied West Bank, Aug 14 (IPS) - Large spools of black tubing and plastic-wrapped water tanks lay strewn across a dusty construction site. A handful of Palestinian labourers, speaking quietly in Arabic, shuttle the items to the two unfinished, three-storey apartment blocs behind them.

HOWICK, South Africa, Aug 14 (IPS) - Over the course of a 28-day trek down South Africa's Umgeni River, which flows from the pristine wetlands of the Umgeni Vlei Nature Reserve to the Durban coastline, Penny Rees, a coordinator for the Duzi uMngeni Conservation Trust, witnessed the polar opposites of river health.

JOHANNESBURG, Aug 14 (IPS) - Leading bankers are concerned that the regulatory environment in some southern African states is preventing them from offering a full range of services to individuals and companies across the region.

WASHINGTON, Aug 14 (IPS) - With the inauguration of Iran's new president, Hassan Rouhani, the United States should take a more flexible approach toward Tehran to increase the chances of a successful resolution of the latter's nuclear programme, according to a new report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) released Tuesday.