SRINAGAR, Aug 05 (IPS) - Hospitals in Kashmir's summer capital are packed to capacity these days, their wards overflowing with pellet gun victims injured during violent clashes with government forces.

SANTIAGO, Aug 04 (IPS) - Education, the most powerful instrument in the struggle against exclusion and discrimination, is still elusive for indigenous people in Latin America who remain the most disadvantaged segment of the population despite their wide presence in the region.

AMBOASARY, Madagascar, Aug 04 (IPS) - Mirantsoa Faniry Rakotomalala is different from most farmers in the Greater South of Madagascar, who are devastated after losing an estimated 80 percent of their crops during the recent May/June harvesting season to the ongoing drought here, said to be the most severe in 35 years.

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 04 (IPS) - According to the World Bank, the MDG target of halving the share of the poor was achieved by 2008, well in advance of 2015, the target year. However, increased unemployment and lower incomes in recent times remind us that poverty is not an unchanging attribute of a shrinking group, but rather, a condition that billions of vulnerable persons risk experiencing.

Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM, Aug 03 (IPS) - The process for arguably the top political job on the planet is well underway.  And the time is right for a woman and a feminist to take the helm.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 03 (IPS) - An era of mega-events and mega-projects is coming to a close in Brazil with the Olympic Games to be hosted Aug. 5-21 by Rio de Janeiro. But the country's taste for massive construction undertakings helped fuel the economic and political crisis that has it in its grip.

ROME, Aug 03 (IPS) - The official reasons for the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003 were to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, end Saddam Hussein's support of terrorism, and free the Iraqi people.

However, immediately after the United States deposed and killed Iraq's dictator and established a new authority to govern the country, a chaotic post-invasion environment surfaced, militias formed, inter-ethnic violence between Sunnis and Shias increased, and the Abu Ghraib scandal came to light.

PENANG, Aug 03 (IPS) - The United Nations' leading development organisation UNCTAD recently obtained a renewed mandate for its work, but not without difficulty.

This is because the developed countries are now much more reluctant to give concessions to the developing countries, thus showing up the present shaky state of North-South relations and of development cooperation.

, Aug 03 (IPS) - With more and more governments narrowing space for dissent and activism, the UN has emerged as a key platform to air concerns about acute rights violations and develop protections for civil society and other vulnerable groups.

CAPE TOWN, Aug 02 (IPS) - As over 20 million sub-Saharan Africans face a shortage of food because of drought and development issues, representatives of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Pan African Parliament (PAP) met in Johannesburg to forge a new parliamentary alliance focusing on food and nutritional security.