News headlines in August 2011, page 22

Anders Breivik was driven by a calling to save Christianity -Catholic essentially- from a European civil war with Islam. He believed that Islam's entry into Europe was facilitated by multi-culturalism, which was promoted by social democrats, like the youth in the camp on Utoya Island. Dialogue with an implacable, fanatic enemy was impossible. Violence against government facilities and the killing of young supporters, however deplorable, was necessary. Norway, and Europe, needed a wake-up call to return to their origins, writes Johan Galtung, founder of Transcend, a peace-development- environment network.

More than a year after a private company operating in public waters retched 170 million gallons of crude and two million gallons of toxic dispersants into the Gulf of Mexico, creating an environmental catastrophe, we still lack reliable statistics on the BP oil disaster's impact on the health of residents.

Six years ago Shantimaya Dong Tamang went to Kuwait to work as an illegal domestic worker, falling for brokers’ tales of how she could earn good money and stand on her own feet.

As it gears up for the creation of a major petrochemical complex of regional scope, this Cuban city faces the challenge of ensuring the sustainability of development that could compromise the health of the Bay of Cienfuegos, its main natural resource.

Cuba may be the only country in the world whose citizens have, for half a century now, not been allowed to freely acquire a car or a home. Indeed the very words have a very different connotation on the island, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

The decision by the Constitutional Court of Guatemala to bar Sandra Torres, the former wife of President Álvaro Colom, from running in the Sept. 11 elections strengthens the national justice system, according to activists and analysts.

The problems plaguing Chile's education system are not unknown in the rest of Latin America, but are especially complex in this long, narrow country sandwiched between the Andes mountains and the Pacific ocean.

Recent victories in Libya’s western mountains have led to a brief reprieve from violence and local fighters and civilians are slowly trying to piece their lives back together.

Since the beginning of protests in Morocco on Feb. 20 women have been at the vanguard. Many of the spokespersons of the protest movement have been women - observers and activists see this as a new phase of feminine emancipation in this North African country.

'I’m sick with worry about my daughter. I’m afraid of what they are doing to her. She has done nothing to deserve this. If they have anything against her why don’t they bring her to trial?' Yehiya Al Shalabi asked IPS rhetorically.