SINGAPORE, Jun 08 (IPS) - Turkey's parliament is this week fast tracking the dispatch of up to 3,000 troops to Qatar, home to the country's military base in the Middle East. Certain to stiffen Qatar's resolve to resist Saudi and UAE-led pressure to force it to change policies, the Turkish move comes amid hints that the kingdom and its allies may seek to undermine the rule of Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.

ROME, Jun 08 (IPS) - With a combined population of around 400 million inhabitants, 22 Arab countries are home to nearly 300 million youth--that's 1 in 3 people. Meantime, there are other 400 million youth living in Asia and the Pacific. In both regions, these 700 million young people aged 15–24 years account for up to 60 per cent of world's youth population. What future for them?.

MIAMI, Jun 08 (IPS) - With terror attacks on the increase worldwide, there are more people today who believe that it has something to do with the religion of Islam.

WELLINGTON, Jun 08 (IPS) - In January, the revelation that Peter Thiel, the libertarian Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Trump adviser, secretly got a New Zealand citizenship six years ago caused an uproar, mostly because he was the first to get one without pledging to live there.

LONDON, Jun 07 (IPS) - East of Mosul, many of the lands liberated from ISIS stand empty. Driving through the Nineveh plains, traditional homelands of Iraq's minority communities of Yezidis, Christians, Shabak and Turkmen, you pass one ghost town after another, peopled only by members of the armed militias known in Iraq as the Hashd al-Shaabi, or ‘popular mobilization'.

NEW YORK, Jun 07 (IPS) - The United Nations is stepping up pressure on Congo to ascertain the reasons for the brutal murder of Swedish-Chilean Zaida Catalán who was investigating human rights abuses in the country. "The latest news is that the inquiry will continue" says Carl Skau, Sweden's ambassador to the UN.

NEW YORK, Jun 07 (IPS) - As previously announced, the President of the United Nations Conference for the negotiation of a Convention on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, Costa Rican Ambassador Elayne Whyte-Gómez, unveiled last 22 May the draft elaborated after the first part of those negotiations in March.

ROME, Jun 07 (IPS) - By 2025 –that's in less than 8 years from today-- 1.8 billion people will experience absolute water scarcity, and two thirds of the world will be living under water-stressed conditions. Now it is feared that advancing drought and deserts, growing water scarcity and decreasing food security may provoke a huge ‘tsunami" of climate refugees and migrants.

PHUYUWASI, Bolivia, Jun 07 (IPS) - In this remote highlands valley community in central Bolivia, a group of Quechua indigenous women have learned how to combat the intense frosts and the shortage of water in solar tents, and to use what they grow to prepare nutritious new meals for their families.

GENEVA, Jun 06 (IPS) - Fifty years ago, this was the day I first heard the sound of war. I was three and a half years old and, while fragmentary, I can still remember military men milling around our home in Amman, an armoured car stationed nearby and later, planes that flew overhead.