News headlines in November 2011, page 10

Activists are hoping that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will take up a case against Mexican President Felipe Calderón, government officials and drug traffickers and indict those responsible for the violence wracking the country. But this is likely to be a complex and lengthy process.

The relative dynamism of emerging economies over the past several years has meant that these countries, many of them in Asia, have come to play an ever-growing role in the world and to account for a larger share of economic activity. Adjusting politically and organisationally to shifts in economic power takes time. As we work towards a new equilibrium in international cooperation, new relationships and leadership patterns will inevitably emerge, just as they have throughout history.

South Africa’s Rooibos tea has become a popular drink all around the globe. But prices of the herbal brew could shoot up within the next decade, as the Rooibos plant can only grow in one small region in the world — which is severely affected by climate change.

Kenyan tea and coffee farmers remain disgruntled about the minimal profits they make selling their cash crops, the country’s leading foreign currency earners, as the government receives millions in funding for training and subsidies that most of these farmers are yet to see materialise.

The issue seems rather similar to that of unconventional oil and has already sparked a major controversy in the West. But its implications for the debate on climate change are hardly known in countries of the Global South.

Who speaks for the Chinese people? With the advent of the blogosphere in China, the Communist party is no longer the uncontested spokesperson for the Chinese nation. A myriad of voices are vying for space and attention, but most of those, according to one of the country's most famous bloggers Wang Xiaofeng, are just 'letting off steam' and indulging a penchant for rant long suppressed in traditional media by the party's ruthless censors.

Twenty years after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, and a year after being released from house arrest, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is the subject of a sweeping film that may increase international pressure on Burma’s ruling regime to speed up tentative reforms.

For the past 10 years, Buruli ulcer has been eating Benjamin Essel’s leg. The skin above his ankle is totally gone, and a swollen, pulpy and reddish wound rises almost up to his knee and wraps around his calf. Even still, this is an improvement over recent years.

The administration of President Barack Obama has praised a damning report issued Wednesday in Manama on Bahrain's crackdown on the democracy movement earlier this year, as human rights groups called on Washington to further delay delivery of a pending 53-million-dollar arms package to the kingdom.

Sexual violence against women in Mexico is on the rise, alongside the escalation of violence between police and soldiers and the drug cartels, women's rights activists warn.