Citizens

Image: Health employees protest outside the Health Ministry in Athens against pay and budget cuts. Fewer resources for malaria treatment and mosquito control may be contributing to malaria's comeback in Greece. Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images

npr.org - October 26th, 2012 - Michaeleen Doucleff

After a 40-year hiatus, malaria is returning to Greece.

Some 70 cases have been reported there this year, and at least 12 people appear to have been infected in the country. (The others picked up the disease elsewhere.)

That's a concern for health workers because it means malaria may now be endemic to Greece — and not just hitching a ride with travelers.

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Image: A Google map locating protests around the world tied to a low-budget video produced in canyon country north of Los Angeles. Photograph: Google

guardian.co.uk - September 14th, 2012 - Matthew Weaver, Brian Whitaker and Tom McCarthy   

Protest activity smoldered in Cairo, Tunisia, Lebanon and elsewhere after a day of upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa. Relatively small but intense protests outside US embassies across the region resulted in multiple fatalities in Tunis and at least one each in Lebanon and Cairo.

Gunmen staged a raid on a peacekeepers' outpost in Sinai, with three foreign soldiers, believed to be Colombian, reportedly injured. The raid was described as major, with dozens of fighters and vehicles, and was not of a kind with the protests outside US diplomatic outposts.

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Image: Actor, filmmaker and environmental advocate Robert Redford. (photo: Contour/Getty Images)

readersupportednews.org - Robert Redford - September 3rd, 2012

From September 6-15, some 10,000 environmentalists will converge on Jeju Island to attend the World Conservation Congress (WCC), organized by the oldest environmental organization, the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN's slogan is that it promotes "a just world that values and conserves nature." If recent actions are any indication, nothing could be further from the truth.

The WCC will take place only a few minutes away from Gangjeong, where the construction of a naval base is threatening one of the planet's most spectacular soft coral forests and other coastal treasures, assaulting numerous endangered species and destroying a 400-year-old sustainable community of local farmers and fishers.

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People who fled the Darfur region of Sudan amid brutal attacks are coming back. A Darfurian in Nyuru, peacekeepers behind her.   Sven Torfinn for The New York Times

The New York Times - by Jeffrey Gettleman - February 26, 2012

NYURU, Sudan — More than 100,000 people in Darfur have left the sprawling camps where they had taken refuge for nearly a decade and headed home to their villages over the past year, the biggest return of displaced people since the war began in 2003 and a sign that one of the world’s most infamous conflicts may have decisively cooled.

The millions of civilians who fled into camps, their homes often reduced to nothing more than rings of ash by armed raiders, are among the most haunting legacies of the conflict in Darfur, transforming this rural landscape into a collection of swollen impromptu squatter towns.