News stories by Kanya D'Almeida

Inside a dimly lit restaurant in New York City's historic Harlem neighbourhood, on an unusually warm night in the middle of February, an audience of 120 people sits spellbound while a forgotten gem is dusted off, polished and presented to the crowd.

They called themselves the 'cut hands commandos' because they lopped off their victims' hands with machetes; the 'burn house unit', for the thousands of families who were locked into their homes and roasted alive; the 'born naked squad', in reference to the hapless hundreds who were stripped naked and raped before being bludgeoned or burned to death.

When images of North London's gutted and burning buildings, broken shop windows and refuse-lined streets appeared on TV screens and front-page headlines during the four-day Tottenham riots last August, many dismissed the damage as the work of 'hoodlums' and 'delinquents'.

While Indian retailers are losing sleep over the possible entrance of multinationals like Walmart into the dense South Asian consumer market, very little thought has been given to the Indian small farmer, who stands to lose even more at the hands of the world's biggest commercial food retailer.

Home to over 44 million small retailers, many of them family- owned, neighbourhood stores no bigger than 200 square feet, India is a land renowned for its various 'wallas' — small traders who produce, hawk, repair or deliver just about anything you could want at any hour of the day or night.

In most mainstream media the words 'corruption' and 'election fraud' accompany images of makeshift polling stations manned by armed guards in Burma or burning tires beside tattered ballot boxes in South Sudan — the insidiousness of stolen elections and a crumbling democracy is very seldom associated with the United States.

The indigenous people of southeast Mexico are demanding to be included in the official programmes planned for 2012 to take advantage of the world's interest in the 'Mayan prophecy', while at the same time fearing a 'doomsday tourism' that could damage and contaminate their sacred sites.

Eighteen-year-old 'Kettlyne', a Haitian orphan living in the rubble-strewn Croix Deprez camp — one of the many remaining tent-cities that houses refugees from the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake — is unable to feed her three-year-old daughter.

The forests in Africa absorb over 1.2 billion tonnes of carbon annually. With these diverse and natural forests, grasslands and prairie lands disappearing under investment schemes and the development of monoculture plantations for supposed 'green' energy alternatives like agrofuels, not much else remains to absorb the shocks of hunger and climate change.

While the United Nations climate talks in Durban enter their fifth day of political feet-dragging, researchers and peasants around the world are busy connecting the dots between so- called 'green climate solutions', industrialised agriculture and chronic hunger.