News headlines in August 2011, page 6

As students and teachers continue their massive protests in the streets of Chile's cities, one of the most extreme methods of demanding higher-quality, free public education is the hunger strike being undertaken by 28 youngsters at secondary schools across the country, four of whom have not taken food for nearly 40 days.

Women are still a small minority on Cuba’s hip hop scene. 'If the situation is hard for us nationwide, imagine what it’s like in the eastern region, where this genre has very little recognition,' says Yaneidys Tamayo, leader of the group Las Positivas.

As industrial production penetrates all corners of the planet and transnational capital gains have unfettered access to virtually every country and community, the United Nations has declared 2012 to be the ‘International Year of Cooperatives (IYC)’.

The 'green economy' will not solve the problems of poverty and natural disasters in Central America as long as the development model continues to be based on over-consumption and over-production, regional experts say.

Ukrainian and Bulgarian workers are currently camped out on a construction site of half-built luxury villas in Baghdad’s elite 'Green Zone' — a vast security enclave housing government offices, embassies and international NGOs - demanding their salaries before being shipped back home.

Counterfeit medicines have flooded the market in Ghana and have even made their way into government hospitals as the country’s drug regulator struggles to control the importation of drugs.

Al Jazeera has found evidence of a possible mass execution of political activists in Libya.

Brazil is making progress in cracking down on homophobia and upholding the rights of homosexuals. The latest step was the introduction in Congress of a bill on sexual diversity, sponsored by the bar association in consultation with civil society.

With drug trafficking rampant in the small Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, social workers and drug treatment centres are noting an increasing number of children and youth are now becoming addicted to drugs.

The statistics coming out of Africa are staggering: 40 percent of Africa’s 1 billion people live in urban areas an 60 percent live in slums, where water supplies and sanitation are 'severely inadequate', according to the Nairobi-based U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).