News headlines in June 2009, page 17

'My worry is that my children are going to be slaves because they won't have anything. These foreign people come to South Africa with nothing, but tomorrow he has cash, third day he owns a shop and fourth day he has a car. Where do these foreign people get this money?'

Many of the firearms fuelling Mexican drug violence originated in the United States, says a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released Thursday.

Video camera in hand, Isidro Romero is getting ready for another day of classes in the Paraguayan capital. He is studying Communications as part of a programme aimed at breaking down the barriers that have blocked access to university level studies by the country’s small indigenous minority.

As U.S. President Barack Obama attempts to navigate the treacherous currents of the ongoing political crisis in Iran, he faces a heated attack on his right flank from neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks, who are urging him both to offer unequivocal support to the protesters supporting moderate presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi and to scuttle his planned diplomatic engagement with Tehran.

With the snow-capped peak of Mount Kilimanjaro providing a backdrop under simmering tropical sunshine, a group of women in Mijongweni village break into song.

A campaign in the United States led by two girl victims from Bhopal, highlighting lingering toxicity left behind by the 1984 gas disaster in their city, has paid off with a group of 27 members of the U.S. Congress asking Dow Chemicals to clean up the site.

Graciela González answers phone calls, organises meetings and gives interviews as part of her work to save a river from ecological disaster. Thousands of kilometres away, farmer Gonzalo Rodríguez helps take air samples in a region polluted by petrochemicals.

In a makeshift room inside an unfinished building in the Manyatta slums in the Western Kenyan city of Kisumu, the neighbourhood’s men regularly congregate to discuss community matters, usually in the presence of the area chief.

'Biddun mey, fish heyya', they say in Arabic for a universal truth: 'Without water, there is no life'.

As uncertainty persists about the results of the Iranian election last Friday, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama remains quiet on just exactly what the next tack will be on engaging the Islamic Republic, which experts say is entering a new and unknown period in its history.