News headlines in January 2011, page 28

With Middle East peace talks at a standstill, a group of activists is taking matters into its own hands. The Parents’ Circle Families Forum, a group comprising Palestinians and Israelis who have lost family members in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, aims to build a bridge between the two fractured communities.

At a marketplace near Colombo, consumers scramble for coconuts being sold from a state-owned truck. Sri Lanka is the world’s fourth largest coconut producer and a major exporter; but a crop shortfall and a drought have forced the country to import coconuts.

Edgard Walters, who belongs to the Association of Disabled and Active Divers of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, has been in a wheelchair since 2003, when he made his last dive for lobster in the waters of the Caribbean.

This is the story of Francis Odong, a southern Sudanese man from Eastern Equitoria state.

Unemployment in Chile's fishing industry will rise this year, experts and the association of small-scale fishers warn, due to the reduction in catch quotas adopted in response to overfishing and plunging stocks of key species, particularly jack mackerel.

A tribal leader in Sudan's flashpoint region of Abyei has given a war warning, six days before south Sudan votes on whether to split from the north.

Health rights activists in Malawi are expressing concern over the recent rejection of the country’s proposal for close to six hundred million dollars to the Global Fund to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria between 2011 and 2016.

The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there.

'This year there haven't been many 'dorados', but they're beginning to appear now,' Ramón Díaz says hopefully as he disembarks with his fellow fishermen after spending the entire night out on the water.

'Sex workers rights are human rights', close to a hundred people shouted during a recent march in Rose-Hill, a major town in Mauritius. Their aim was to sensitise the population, particularly the parliamentarians, to the state of sex workers on the island.