CORINTO, Honduras, Sep 03 (IPS) - The clock marks 9 AM when a bus coming from the Mexican city of Tapachula reaches Corinto, on the border between Honduras and Guatemala. It is the first bus of the day, carrying children and their families sent back from a failed attempt at making it across the border into the United States.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 03 (IPS) - In the small rural village of Svetlaya Polyana, not far from the city of Karakol in Issyk Kul Province, north-eastern Kyrgyzstan, there is no sewage system and 70 percent of households lack access to hot water.

WASHINGTON, Sep 03 (IPS) - While the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama ponders broader actions against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Amnesty International Tuesday accused the group of carrying out ethnic cleansing in Iraq on a "historic scale."

WASHINGTON, Sep 02 (IPS) - A United Nations panel reviewing the U.S. record on racial discrimination has expressed unusually pointed concern over a new pattern of laws it warns is criminalising homelessness.

KABUL, Sep 02 (IPS) - "The smell of faeces and urine isolates them completely. Their husbands abandon them and they become stigmatised forever" – Dr Pashtoon Kohistani barely needs two lines to sum up the drama of those women affected by obstetric fistula.

NEW YORK, Sep 02 (IPS) - It is ironic that at this moment in history when so many people and nations around the world are acknowledging the 100^th anniversary of our planet's hapless stumble into World War I, great powers and their allies are once again provoking new dangers where governments appear to be sleepwalking towards a restoration of old Cold War battles.

JOHANNESBURG, Sep 02 (IPS) - The killings of hundreds of civilians, including scores of children, in Gaza – whose only fault was to have been born on the wrong side of the wall – was a major point of contention at the United Nations Human Rights Council at the end of July.

NAIROBI, Sep 01 (IPS) - Agriculture in Africa is in urgent need of investment. Nearly 550 million people there are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, while half of the total population on the continent live in rural areas.

LOTOFAGA VILLAGE, Samoa, Sep 01 (IPS) - Pacific Island states are surrounded by the largest ocean in the world, but inadequate fresh water sources, poor infrastructure and climate change are leaving some communities without enough water to meet basic needs.

BEIRUT, Sep 01 (IPS) - At a time when HIV rates have stabilised or declined elsewhere, the epidemic is still advancing in the Arab world, exacerbated by factors such as political unrest, conflict, poverty and lack of awareness due to social taboos.