SPOKANE, Washington, Sep 13 (IPS) - After more than two years of fighting to prevent their release, the Department of Justice has released numerous documents related to domestic spying on U.S. citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the previously-secret court opinions that authorised the NSA's controversial programmes to go forward.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 13 (IPS) - Despite existing local expertise and strategies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to build peace-supporting structures at the community level, official debates and media coverage continue to focus predominantly on military interventions.

HARARE, Sep 13 (IPS) - He is the architect of what critics call Zimbabwe's most repressive media laws, and the press here anticipate that journalists arrests and media suppression may intensify now that he has been appointed minister of media and information. But Professor Jonathan Moyo has dismissed the concerns and told IPS "journalists had nothing to fear but fear itself."

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sep 13 (IPS) - "I miss my mother and cry every night," eight-year-old Afaq Ali tells IPS. He is a Class 5 student at the University Public School in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the administrative centre for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to its west.

WASHINGTON, Sep 13 (IPS) - With state and federal government agencies investigating a U.S. farmer's complaint that his alfalfa crop may have been contaminated by a genetically modified strain, consumer rights groups are suggesting that such reports were inevitable.

MEXICO CITY, Sep 12 (IPS) - On his first day of fourth grade, Efraín found there were no desks or benches in the classroom in his Mexico City school. His parents had to help the teacher haul in furniture from other rooms so the children wouldn't have to start the new school year sitting on the floor.

SAN SALVADOR, Sep 12 (IPS) - A recent report by the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics called attention to the fact that, at the present rate of inequality, by the year 2025, the United Kingdom will have returned to the unequal society of the end of the 19th century. In other words, we are going back to the times of Queen Victoria!

MOGADISHU/NAIROBI, Sep 12 (IPS) - After his first year as president of the world's most dangerous and failed state, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is still grappling with limited financial resources, corruption, a lack of service delivery, and the ongoing assassinations of government officials, including attempts on his own life.

LUCERNE, Switzerland, Sep 12 (IPS) - Refugee rights organisations are demanding an EU-wide temporary protection regime for Syrian refugees. The announcement by some countries that they can take a few thousand refugees is not enough, the groups say.