JAKARTA, 25 June 2008 (IRIN) - Faisal, 13, has no idea why his parents dropped him off at a crowded orphanage in Jakarta six years ago and never returned. "I think they couldn't afford my school," he said, struggling to remember their faces. Nearly a decade after Indonesia was ravaged by the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, more and more children are facing a similar fate.

KISUMU, 24 June 2008 (PlusNews) - The reproductive health NGO, Marie Stopes Kenya (MSK), has started a mobile circumcision pilot project in the western, largely non-circumcising province of Nyanza.

BEIRUT, 24 June 2008 (IRIN) - As the UN’s Palestinian aid agency UNRWA appeals for US$445 million for three years of reconstruction and recovery in and around Lebanon’s Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, a mixed picture of aid agency coordination has emerged from interviews with key players.

ACCRA, 23 June 2008 (IRIN) - A militia group wielding knives, clubs, machetes and rocks known as the “Arakan Barracks Boys” has gained notoriety in the Ghanaian capital Accra, not as a threat to the peace, but as a defender of it.

DAKAR, 23 June 2008 (IRIN) - Mauritanians expelled from their homeland in 1989 during a wave of ethnic violence have started to return to Mauritania from Senegal, as part of an ongoing repatriation process run by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.