News headlines in July 2011, page 10

'We could enter the Guinness book of records for the longest running weekly sit- ins in the world,' Nasser Farrah, from the Palestinian Prisoners' Association, jokes dryly. Since 1995, Palestinian women from Beit Hanoun to Rafah have met every Monday outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, holding photos and posters of their imprisoned loved ones, calling on the ICRC to ensure the human rights of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel's 24 prisons and detention centres.

A series of Taliban attacks selectively targeting Pakistani security forces is being seen as an attempt to shore up the flagging popularity of the fundamentalist Islamic scholars.

When the international community commemorates the first anniversary of a historic General Assembly resolution recognising the right to water and sanitation as a basic human right, there will be no joyous celebrations in the corridors of the United Nations, come Jul. 28.

For the past nine weeks, Belarusians have been getting out in the hundreds into the main squares of big and small cities across the country on Wednesdays at seven in the evening. They clap, or let their mobiles ring all at once. The ‘Revolution through Social Networks- movement’ started by five students, and growing on the Russian equivalent of Facebook, Vkontakte, is posing a new threat to the Lukashenko regime.

The powerful Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), in southwest Colombia, has called a 'minga' or protest march to 'curb the militarisation driven by the army and the FARC,' the main guerrilla group, which set off a car bomb on a busy market day in a Nasa Indian town on Jul. 9.

Community organisations say the major infrastructure works for the 2014 football World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games in Brazil do not reflect the spirit of the social legacy promised by the government and business community, which project 68 billion dollars in economic benefits from the first event alone.

A young girl in Somalia sits chained to a tree. Women in the Ukraine wander aimlessly in the halls of a decrepit psychiatric hospital. Those are the startling images in a recent article by a global panel calling the world's attention to the extent and tragedy of hundreds of millions suffering from mental illnesses and who go untreated in the global south.

When Callixte Munyabikari, a potato farmer from Gakenke in northern Rwanda, was rushed to a regional hospital after he fell ill with diarrhoea, he thought it was just a bad case of food poisoning.

As the Pakistani public grows increasingly outraged at the United States' drone attacks in the northwest region of the country, a recent study by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism is contradicting U.S. officials' insistence that 'not a single civilian life' has been claimed in the covert war.

There are lives that closely mirror the history of their countries, like that of Beatriz Echeverry, whose life has been shaped by some of the main human-caused and natural tragedies in Colombia over the last 60 years: forced displacement, a volcano-triggered mudslide that killed thousands, and kidnappings by the leftwing guerrillas.