Cancer patient Ahmed Abu Fuad needs chemotherapy to survive. Muhammad Subeh needs an eye-transplant while paramedic Alaa Sarhan desperately needs surgery to remove shrapnel from his body. But these Gazans are unable to leave the area to seek the required medical treatment elsewhere, and it is not because of the Israeli siege.

Six hundred delegates from more than 80 countries flocked to Montreal Aug. 20-23 for the CIVICUS World Assembly in search of innovative ways to approach global challenges like poverty and climate change.

Three scenarios were laid before the delegates here attending the CIVICUS World Assembly, a venue that attracts civil society, donors, government and business leaders from every region of the world.

The jails in Thailand are filling up with political prisoners, critics say, but how many political dissidents have been incarcerated since a military crackdown on an anti-government protest movement ended on May 19 remains shrouded in mystery.

International media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranks South Africa's press as among the freest on the continent. Two proposed new measures are drawing unfavourable comparisons to repressive laws in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.

"It's been days without electricity and water. We can't do anything, and it's unbearably hot now." Abu Fouad, 83, speaks of the power cuts plaguing all of the Gaza Strip.

An unknown number of agribusiness owners and public employees at all levels, as well as far-right paramilitaries, have a common link with rural people who have been forced off their farms or killed in Colombia: the land stolen from the latter group in the armed conflict.

The new World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation that HIV-positive mothers on antiretroviral therapy (ARVs) can exclusively breastfeed their babies for up to twelve months without infecting them has created confusion among HIV-positive mothers in Uganda as information about the new guidelines struggles to reach them.

Kenyans are still euphoric over the referendum endorsing a progressive new constitution; but the heat generated by its opponents around their main rallying point - abortion rights - is a reminder of the wide gap between law and implementation in Africa, particularly when it concerns women's rights.

"The threats change your whole life," said Jade Ramírez, a journalist who has been living for months with that burden, which also hangs over a growing group of her colleagues in Mexico.

Almost 25 years after the world's worst nuclear accident a series of new scientific studies have suggested the effects of the Chernobyl disaster have been underestimated.

Just off Omar Al-Mukhtar Street, Gaza City's main thoroughfare, in a narrow, sandy alley way is a little second-hand clothing shop. In the dimly lit store, with only intermittent electricity for some hours a day at best, sits a single battered and aging sewing machine.

Three hundred women from more than 30 countries converged in Canada last weekend for the Montreal International Women's Conference 2010 (MIWC), with the aim of building a global militant women's movement in the 21st century.

A growing number of activists is contradicting the claims of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) regarding the Gaza Freedom Flotilla debacle in May, including a large faction of both Israeli and U.S. Jews.

An initiative to keep girls in school by supporting income-generating activities for their mothers is bearing fruit in Burkina Faso, where poverty and cultural values still deprive many girls of an education.

After more than a century of existence, feminism is still around in Latin America and the world, but the history of this ideology that seeks equality for women is like a succession of breaking waves, with peaks and troughs.

A government programme designed to prosecute serious criminals is instead deporting people who received traffic tickets and committed other minor offences, according to immigration rights advocacy groups.

For seven years Majda Abdul Qader Sheikh, 38, has not been allowed to visit the home of her parents, just a few hundred metres from her house.

The doctors at the hospital that Khalida Begum's husband brought her to in the frontier district of Kupwara knew she was in a dangerous state. They thus recommended that she be transferred soonest to the maternity hospital here in Srinagar, where she was sure to receive far better care.

When the Colombian government announced in November that it had reached a deal to give the U.S. armed forces access to seven military bases, the news provoked surprise and protests, like when an unfair clause is discovered in a contract that was blindly signed.