News headlines in March 2010, page 3

When Mbuyiselo Botha decided to take the African National Congress League President, Julius Malema, to court for hate speech against women, he was confident from the start that the case had merit. But he also knew it was a toughest test yet in his 15 years of gender activism.

Mary Pamire will never forget the day a group of men took turns to rape her.

The emails started arriving two weeks ago, first in a trickle but slowly in increasing numbers. They talked about a public forum to discuss plans for the controversial redevelopment of a historical area of the Chinese capital Beijing.

If Burma’s military regime goes ahead with its promised general election this year, some 27.2 million voters will be deprived of the chance to cast a ballot for the political party that has come to symbolise democratic hope in that oppressed nation.

Last November, Muhammad Al Saba, 36, from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip was sentenced to death by hanging by a military court in Gaza for alleged acts of 'treason and collaborating with hostile forces.'

On an empty road in Cite Militaire, an industrial zone across from the slums of Cite Soleil, a group of women are gathered around a single white sack of U.S. rice. The rice was handed out Monday morning at a food distribution by the Christian relief group World Vision.

Hopes that a humanitarian prisoner-for-hostage swap may be negotiated in Colombia before August added to the emotion over the release of Sergeant Pablo Emilio Moncayo by the FARC guerrillas Tuesday and his reunion with his family after more than 12 years in captivity in the jungle.

Sierra Leone has become a place of torment for journalists practicing their profession.

A different way of fighting global warming will be tried out in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba when government representatives and thousands of activists gather for the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

Against all expectations, it's becoming the forerunner of a peace plan. Indeed, it might in the end even surprise the world as Israelis and Palestinians are forced into a peace. Even if, for now, it's shaping up as anything but peaceful.