News headlines in August 2011, page 8

By the end of 2010, the United States was home to 25 percent of the world’s inmates, with roughly 2.4 million people behind bars and over seven million under 'correctional supervision'.

Eighty thousand tiny houses dot the countryside near this coastal city, located just west of the epicentre of the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake that killed some 200,000 and displaced over one million.

'We have been living here for thousands of years. Unfortunately, we are the original people of this land, but we get no respect,' says Vivian Milligan, in a tone filled with sarcastic laughter.

We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence. In theory, then, we forswear mob rule and paramilitary organisations, we occasionally accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment, we delegate the responsibility to declare and prosecute war to our legislative and executive branches, and we put guns into the hands of the army and the police.

When world leaders meet in Brazil next June for a U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the third since the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the question lingering in the minds of many is: what really is 'sustainable development' in the context of a fast-changing world of growing poverty, hunger, pollution, political repression and social unrest?

If India’s powerful central government that rules over the destinies of 1.2 billion people quails before a slight 74-year-old man, it is because he is armed with a weapon that has rarely failed in this country — extreme renunciation through a fast-unto-death.

As Kenya's inflation rate reached 15.53 percent, compared to 3.18 percent in October 2010, the country's poor have been struggling to afford the most basic of essentials. In some areas families can no longer rely on regular meals and have reduced them to one a day, others mostly eat potatoes to get by, and in one Rift Valley slum, poor families now buy toothpaste by the drop.

The port of Pecém in Brazil's impoverished Northeast region received a large order to unload and store cement factory equipment imported from China. The port authorities were unable to accept the original order, as the cargo would have occupied 40,000 square metres of storage space, nearly half the total available.

Marguerite Kassa feared she would find herself alone in the small crowd of a dozen other pregnant women at the integrated health centre in Mossendjo, in the southwestern Republic of Congo. 'I am six months pregnant already, but I hesitated to come here before now, because there is so much contempt for us,' the thirty-year-old indigenous woman tells IPS. 'Yet I was warmly welcomed.'

Every night, Adlemi Marrufo goes out to catch bait crabs used to fish for octopus in this small seaside town and others along Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, as part of a women's cooperative that is working to adapt to and fight climate change.