The United Nations estimates that at least one billion people—20% of the world's population—live in crowded, unsanitary slums of the central cities and in the vast shanty towns and squatter settlements that ring the outskirts of...

Shanty towns (also called squatter camps, barrios, or favelas) are illegal or unauthorized settlements of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap plywood, corrugated metal, and sheets of plastic. Shanty towns, which are...

Turkey's prime minister on Saturday proposed imposing limits on the number of people moving to Istanbul as well as restricting car ownership in the country's most populous and congested city.Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of the city that counts more than 12 million residents,...

Banco del Libro, a nonprofit Venezuelan network that has been distributing books to children for nearly half a century, is the 2007 winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for Literature.The award, which includes a cash prize of $710,000, was established by the Swedish government...

The U.N. health agency plans to vaccinate nearly 3 million children in the Horn of Africa this year against polio, a crippling disease that experts fear could spread rapidly along the region's volatile and porous borders. The campaign,...

More than 4 million Iraqis have now been displaced by violence in the country, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday, warning that the figure will continue to rise as Iraqi authorities struggle to provide food and medical services amid the current poor security situation.The number...