News stories by Johanna Treblin

The Olympic Games are widely viewed as a chance for countries to showcase their fastest, strongest, most skilled and disciplined athletes, a time when political, economic and cultural differences are set aside and individuals are judged on personal merit alone.

Hundreds of nurses and protestors from other professions gathered on Friday in Chicago to call on world leaders to adopt a Robin Hood Tax on Wall Street transactions as a way to raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year to help heal the U.S. and world economies.

For several decades, governments around the globe have turned to privatisation as the best option to help relieve the world's destitute by providing them with health care services, water and electricity. By and large, however, this effort has failed.

Grasshoppers and other insects might become the next generation of drones, if researchers with the Israeli research centre Technion who are studying the movements of these insects succeed. Ultimately, they hope to be able to remotely control where the insects fly.

Two years ago, Ashkan Delanvar was arrested by Iranian authorities and held in poor conditions for 14 days before he was sentenced to 10 months in prison.

Human development and biodiversity will not be the only focus of the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June, for which representatives of hundreds of states and non- governmental organisations (NGOs) will gather to discuss sustainable development.

Every minute, one child dies from malaria, yet the malaria rates have decreased by more than a third in the past decade, the World Health Organization WHO reports in the wake of World Malaria Day on Tuesday.

A Catholic priest from the Philippines, a mother of three from Argentina, and the founder of the NGO Friends of Lake Turkana in Kenya all have one thing in common: they have helped to motivate their respective local communities to protect the natural environment around them and to stand up for their rights.

Water privatisation has been proven not to help the poor, yet a quarter of all World Bank funding goes directly to corporations and the private sector, bypassing both governments and its own standards and transparency requirements in order to do so, says a new report released Monday.