News headlines in June 2009, page 5

The G20, comprised of a tiny fraction of the world's nations, is not the best place to work out the details of how to address the multiple global crises the world faces. The details need to be addressed at the UN, which has 192 member states, writes Kumi Naidoo, co-chair of Global Call to Action Against Poverty.

The financial meltdown generated by Wall Street and the "too big to fail" culture of global money-centre banks and financiers is generating local initiatives and demands to decentralise and democratise finance, writes Hazel Henderson, author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2006), president of Ethical Markets Media, an independent social enterprise covering local economies, new currencies, and the growing green sectors.

If ever an international conference was bound to fail, it is the coming G20 meeting in London, billed as a 'new Bretton Woods' that would forge a coordinated global response to the developing depression and create a new order of global economic governance, writes Walden Bello, professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.

The G8 leaders meeting early July must address a crisis resulting from a sharp decline in investment in agriculture, Oxfam demands in a new study.

A group of Christian environmentalists met in Pistoia in central Italy over the weekend to call for an end to mass consumption and a return to family values.

With half her body immersed in muddy red water, Esther Nyarambi closely inspects the contents of her wooden panning dish, locally known as zamba. Having spent the entire day pounding gold-bearing rock, she hopes her efforts will be rewarded with even the smallest nugget of gold.

A majority of the U.S. House of Representatives is now in support of a historic bill by Republican lawmaker Ron Paul to audit the Federal Reserve (the Fed), the privately run central bank that sets monetary policy for the United States.

Governments and interest groups around the world followed the U.S. House of Representatives' vote Friday on the first U.S. policy to limit the country's greenhouse gas emissions. They were especially interested in Europe, where a system similar to the bill's cap-and-trade scheme already exists and where EU countries agreed last December to tough emissions targets.

In this Arab town in northern Israel, Michael Zantovsky, the Czech Republic ambassador, is throwing an end-of-term party, an event markedly different from customary diplomatic bashes.

The torture of drug addicts who had turned to the Serbian Orthodox Church for help has sent shock waves across the country.