News stories by Baher Kamal

MADRID, Jan 16 (IPS) - It is no longer a secret that at major global summits there are more lobbyists than official delegates. There, they participate as ‘guests,’ and most of them work for big business corporations. Their goal? To deter the adoption of policies that conflict with their employers’ interests.

MADRID, Dec 20 (IPS) - Perhaps demographers would consider designing a new classification system to separate from their estimates of the world’s total population—eight billion plus—the billion humans who live without legal identity and, thus, are deprived from the most basic rights.

MADRID, Dec 17 (IPS) - Planet Earth is drying up, relentlessly. Over three-quarters of all lands have become permanently drier in the last three decades. This is not jut a statistic but a stark scientific fact. But while such an ‘existential crisis’ affects nearly every region, guess where -and who- are the most hit? 

MADRID, Dec 11 (IPS) - The available data is self-explanatory: business-prompted human activities have already altered over 70% of the Earth’s lands, with 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil lost due to industrial agriculture, the excessive use of chemicals, overgrazing, deforestation, pollution and other major threats.

MADRID, Nov 26 (IPS) - In most Western European countries you can purchase –or rent- a 60 square-metres flat that is equipped with two toilets, one for her and one for him. Larger apartments may feature even more.

For those who can afford it, such facilities are taken for granted. Yet, nearly half the global population—over 3.5 billion people—live without access to safely managed sanitation, including 419 million forced to practice open defecation.

MADRID, Nov 20 (IPS) - Did you know that hundreds of millions of children around the world are currently suffering from physical, sexual, and psychological violence, including child labour, child marriage, female genital mutilation, gender-based violence, war, trafficking, bullying, and cyberbullying?

MADRID, Nov 13 (IPS) - During his electoral campaign, incoming U.S. President Donald Trump highlighted that the U.S. holds more oil reserves than any other country, even surpassing Saudi Arabia. In this context, he openly encouraged big businesses to tap into these reserves with the words: 'Drill, baby, drill.'

MADRID, Jul 10 (IPS) - A quick glance at the current European political map would clearly show how far the extremist ideology has been installed in European countries –those who still wave the French Revolution’s flag of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”

MADRID, Jun 27 (IPS) - How come that in a world where technology is - or is about to be - able to detect an ant in a jungle, the traffickers of death continue to carry out their lucrative criminal activities everywhere and in all fields, from weapons to prostitution, enslavement and drugs, to deadly fake medicines, through oil, gas and poisoned food.

MADRID, Jun 22 (IPS) - The abuse of human rights has sharply increased with the steady rise of the right and far-right parties in the wealthy industrialised countries, whose extremist ideology is now spreading faster than ever in Europe.