News headlines in July 2011, page 26

Every time Bijaya Dhakal goes out to meet people and tell them what she does for a living, the simple task becomes an act of courage requiring nerves of steel. Dhakal is the founder of Nepal’s first and only organisation of women sex workers now trying to make the state and society listen to a community long hushed by poverty and discrimination.

By suspending 800 million dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan, the administration of President Barack Obama appears to be taking a calculated gamble that Islamabad — and especially its powerful army — has no interest in substantially escalating the growing crisis in bilateral relations.

'Coffee! Get your plastic bags here! Cream cheese, the very best…!' The voices blend in with the cries of other vendors and the noise typical of Cuban markets. Elisa, 64, was one of the hawkers until she was fined for selling her products without a permit. 'I paid dearly for it,' she says.

Tens of thousands of Bosnia Muslims gathered on Monday to bury the remains of 613 people at Srebrenica to commemorate the 16th anniversary of the 1995 killings of thousands of Muslims in and around the town.

The head of the United Nations refugee agency has described the situation in drought-hit Somalia as the 'worst humanitarian disaster' in the world, after meeting with those affected at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.

The mere rumour that El Salvador's Supreme Court (CSJ) might be thinking of repealing the amnesty law was enough to trigger an institutional crisis in this country, showing how fragile its recovery is from the wounds left by the 1980-1992 civil war.

Several rivers in the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso are likely to become chains of artificial reservoirs feeding small hydroelectric plants (SHP), sometimes with larger power stations in between.

While in New York to celebrate the launch of UN Women's flagship biennium publication, 'Progress of the World's Women: In Pursuit of Justice', Botswana's Unity Dow sat down with IPS to discuss the United Nations' newest entity, its landmark report, and the road ahead for women.

In Kenya buying medicine from any unregistered pharmacy outlet means that you are running a higher risk of buying either substandard or counterfeit drugs that form 30 percent of all drugs sold in the country.

In Europe, the financial crisis is not in Athens but in Brussels. The governments of the eurozone allowed Greece into the monetary union without performing the necessary evaluations despite suspicions that its balance sheets contained false entries and that Athens' deficit was far higher than it declared, writes Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency.