News stories by Kanya D'Almeida, page 2

The United States' delegation at the 17th annual Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCC) in Durban, South Africa has come under heavy fire from civil society leaders and activists around the globe for standing in the way of real solutions to climate change.

On World AIDS Day, all eyes are fixed on the global south, where a preventable HIV/AIDS epidemic across Asia, Africa and Latin America has infected almost 33 million people.

Today marks the first of '16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence', a campaign launched in 1991 to insist that 'women's rights are human rights'.

Metal detectors. Teams of drug-sniffing dogs. Armed guards and riot police. Forbiddingly high walls topped with barbed wire.

While the Occupy movements sweeping the U.S. have become almost synonymous with democracy, consensus-based processes, human microphones and other symbols of unity, many populations in the country have felt isolated by the language and tactics of the movement.

Barely a month after the first group of protesters set up its encampment in Zucotti Park in New York City, the phrase 'We are the 99 percent' has already become legendary.

The year 2010 endured 950 natural disasters, 90 percent of which were weather-related and cost the global community well over 130 billion dollars.

The World Bank drew attention to the ongoing devastation wrought by one of the world's longest standing conflicts with the publication Monday of a report documenting high levels of donor dependency in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you — then you win,' a middle-aged man yells into the microphone from a makeshift stage erected at the far end of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC.

Home to a fast-growing network of farmers' markets, cooperatives and organic farms, but also the breeding ground for mammoth for-profit corporations that now hold patents to over 50 percent of the world's seeds, the United States is weathering a battle between Big Agro and a ripening movement for food justice and security.