News headlines in August 2011, page 23

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.

On Apr. 16, 2006, for reasons still unknown to them, two U.S. contractors in Iraq's Red Zone were handcuffed, blindfolded and transported to Camp Cropper, a U.S. military facility located a few miles from Baghdad International Airport.

A United Nations report on Iraq says the human rights situation there remains fragile, and huge development challenges loom as the country transitions out of a near decade-long conflict.

While the exit of the Al-Qaeda-backed rebel group Al Shabaab has led to the first U.N. relief airlift in five years in the capital of famine-wracked Somalia, the situation for women and children remains precarious, humanitarian workers warn.

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.

Only six sub-Saharan African countries have failed to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth over the last two decades. High-spending South Africa is among them, with maternal mortality rates more than quadrupling since 1990. Human Rights Watch researcher Agnes Odhiambo says this is largely due to a lack of accountability.

Late last week, the son of a top dog in Mexico's notorious Sinaloa drug cartel filed pleadings in a Chicago federal court accusing the U.S. government and its agencies of giving the cartel 'carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States'.

The World Bank, which has often pressed borrowing nations to adopt more robust financial transparency regulations, has refused to disclose the financial records of one of its senior officials despite allegations of corruption, abuse of authority and mismanagement of public funds while he served as a minister under the now toppled Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt.

It took some serious digging in the sock drawer, but eventually I found my 'Environmentalists for Obama' button left over from the '08 campaign. I needed it because I'm headed to Washington in a couple of weeks to get arrested in front of the White House, and I wanted to make sure I wouldn't be misunderstood.

The most critical though least debated action required today is changing the business model. Our economic system has long been driven by efficiency without ever considering sufficiency. Greed, not need, has been the muse of the ranks of business. And the gap between the world's richest and the poorest has never been so large, writes Gunter Pauli, author of the Blue Economy and entrepreneur.