News headlines in May 2010, page 12

Australia may be the land of the ‘fair go’, yet not all seems fair where equal representation of men and women is concerned.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is helping Israel to construct an apartheid road infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian West Bank by financing nearly a quarter of the segregated road system primarily for the benefit of Israeli settlers.

These days, First Vice-President of Garment Association (GAN) of Nepal Udaya Raj Pandey is mostly seen at the National Campus rather than the GAN office that he once frequented almost every day. The reason: He has shut down his garment company — Sirin Garments Industries Pvt Ltd — and invested in the educational institution.

Ambassador Anwarul Karim Chowdhury, a former U.N. under-secretary-general, offered a piece of advice to anti-nuclear activists campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons: 'Don't depend on governments - and don't depend on the United Nations.'

Textile cooperatives founded by former slave labourers from Argentina and Thailand will jointly launch a new brand of clothing in June to raise awareness about exploitation and promote decent jobs in the garment industry.

France is likely to have a law banning the burqa by autumn of this year, but human rights groups say that such legislation would be discriminatory, counter-productive and also difficult to enforce.

Saving the planet from environmental catastrophe is undoubtedly very important, but one of the reasons many people are not doing their bit could be that being green does not seem much fun.

This is the month for Palestinians to remember their Nakba, or 'catastrophe', in which more than 700,000 women, men and children were pushed off their land and rendered homeless refugees by the Zionist attacks before, during and after the founding of Israel in 1948.

Romania’s trade unions have warned that a series of protests against drastic cuts in pensions and salaries would turn into full-fledged general strikes by month-end unless the government heeded to the needs of ordinary people.

Junko Hamada, 59, is now in her 12th year as an elected member of the city council of Isehara, a sprawling bed town west of Tokyo with an estimated population of 150,000.