News headlines in February 2012, page 10

The flood of economic woes devastating Greece and Portugal are evidence that the German prescription imposed by a troika of multilateral creditors is not working, and that both countries are heading into a blind alley, says economics professor Mario Olivares.

Igor Malitski, an 87-year-old professor of mechanical engineering from Ukraine, stands in the snow underneath a metal gate. He is wearing a thick winter jacket and big plastic headphones. A blue and white cap covers his head.

Humanity's failure to halt the deepening planetary emergency of climate change, extinctions of species and overconsumption of resources is a failure of imagination and mistaken beliefs that we act rationally.

Nearly a year after the Barack Obama administration began negotiations with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai on a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, both sides confirmed last week that the talks are still hung up over the Afghan demand that night raids by U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) either be ended or put under Afghan control.

A growing list of U.N. Security Council Resolutions acknowledges the importance of gender in processes for peace. Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889 and 1960 note that women continue to be marginalised in peace negotiations and their potential is not fully utilised in humanitarian planning, peacekeeping operations, peace building, governance and reconstruction.

The largely invisible work of small local groups of indigenous farmers in Mexico who are spearheading the defence of their territory and identity and of native seeds is strengthening ecologically sound family farming, experts say.

Extraordinary political changes in the year since former army general Thein Sein came to power in Myanmar have prompted European powers to ease restrictions on the isolated nation, raising questions whether such rewards are too little or too much.

On the day Israel released some 550 Palestinian prisoners in the second half of a swap for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who had been held for five-and-a-half years by Hamas in Gaza, an Islamic Jihad activist started an agonising hunger strike.

Jesse Mtembe, a nursing officer at the Akithenesit Health Centre in Teso North, in Kenya’s Western Province, cannot wait for his centre to be connected to a new software system for diagnosing HIV in infants that is being developed in the country’s leading private university.

The governing Popular Party (PP) is making it clear that it knows how to dominate the communications game and seize the initiative, writes Guillermo Medina, a journalist and writer, is ex-director of the newspaper "YA" , ex-deputy, and ex-president of the Defence Commission of the Spanish Congress.