Alternative Global Forum for Life, Environmental and Social Justice gets under way in CancunVery different from the Arctic temperatures at Moon Palace, where the United Nations climate change conference is under way, a large open-air gymnasium and basketball court is the venue for the alternative Global Forum for Life, Environmental and Social Justice, which began here on Saturday.Protests plannedLed by Via Campesina, or the International Peasant Movement, farmers have been...

The United Nations health agency today mapped out what countries can do, including raising more funds and spending it more efficiently, to ensure that everyone who needs health care can access it despite rising costs. The World Health Organization (WHO) notes that Governments worldwide are struggling to pay for health care, which is rising as populations get older, as more people suffer chronic diseases, and as new and more expensive treatments...

Ajit Kumar Singh loves driving his father CP Singh’s brand new Mahindra Xylo on the potholed roads much more used to tractors carrying sugarcane in Ashokpur Tikia village of Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh. “It takes to the road in these interior regions much easily than the humble Alto we had earlier,” says the 20-year-old law student at the local degree college in Gonda, tapping his fingers on the freshly washed...

India's Public Distribution System (PDS) has been in a bad shape for decades, often thought to be beyond repair. Recent experience, however, suggests otherwise. Political will, increased transparency and community participation have led to an amazing revival of the PDS in Chhattisgarh though the state has only shown contempt for people's rights in other contexts… Somehow, the PDS became a political priority in Chhattisgarh and a decision was made to turn...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...