News headlines in January 2012

Radio Mega FM’s transmission tower rises from the centre of Gulu town, transmitting talk shows and the latest Ugandan radio hits to listeners across the district. But it also serves as something of an informal memorial to community radio-driven peace efforts during the Lord’s Resistance Army’s destruction of northern Uganda.

The relentless wave of femicides in Guatemala, which has one of the highest female murder rates in the world, has prompted actions by the government, civil society groups, and two Nobel Peace laureates to try to put a stop to this brutal violence against women, which has reached horrific proportions.

After the climate change negotiations in Durban, South Africa in December, there is space to continue advancing in the short and medium term. Now the attention of Latin America and the rest of the world is turned towards the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development taking place this June in Rio de Janeiro.

International and local human rights groups Tuesday strongly denounced the ruling by an investigating judge in Haiti that former dictator Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier should not face charges for massive human rights abuses committed during his 15-year reign, from 1971 to 1986.

Ignacia Matute looks back nostalgically on the days when the hills around her home in northwestern Nicaragua were blanketed in green, and she woke every morning to the sounds of birds singing in the treetops and the rushing waters of the nearly Coco River.

The launch of Sierra Leone’s first online mining database in West Africa comes with a promise to increase transparency and accountability in the country’s rich natural resource sector.

The women languishing in Serbia’s Pozarevac Penal Correctional Institution are victims twice over: survivors of decades of domestic violence, they have been imprisoned for killing their partners and often spend up to 15 years in jail.

With more and more communities in the U.S. South turning to cooperatives as a way to produce and consume food in a sustainable manner, several cooperatives are hoping to expand on what they view as more than just a 'shopping experience' but a way of life.

Zhang Daliu, 46, a carpenter from China never imagined himself in the dreadful confines of a stinking and overcrowded Zambian jail where conditions are so terrible that they lead to gastronomic disorders and skin diseases within days of confinement.

Home to over 44 million small retailers, many of them family- owned, neighbourhood stores no bigger than 200 square feet, India is a land renowned for its various 'wallas' — small traders who produce, hawk, repair or deliver just about anything you could want at any hour of the day or night.