News headlines in February 2012, page 4

The police have cracked down hard on demonstrators in the southern Chilean region of Aysén, who have been protesting the area's isolation and high local prices of fuel and food for the past two weeks.

Amid mounting tensions between Iran and the United States over Tehran’s nuclear programme, perhaps nothing less than an Oscar to the acclaimed feature film 'A Separation' could have brought smiles to the faces of millions of Iranians who see most news as bad news these days.

While top officials in the Barack Obama administration insist that U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is working, the violent aftermath of last week's apparently inadvertent burning of copies of the Quran at a military base is fuelling growing pessimism about the U.S. and NATO mission there.

Illegal spying on human rights activists and journalists is still happening in Colombia, according to a new report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

A plan by the Malaysian government to privatise the public healthcare system and get consumers to pay for it through salary cuts is rapidly turning into a major election issue.

Agriculture currently provides a livelihood for roughly 1.3 billion smallholder farmers and landless workers, of which nearly half — close to 560 million — are women.

While the international community discusses Somalia's future in London and Brussels, European and Somali non-governmental organisations are calling for a radical shift from a military to a humanitarian approach as the only solution to the country's war-torn condition.

This week more than half the residents eligible to vote in Libya’s embattled coastal city of Misrata cast their ballots for local council representatives in their first democratic election in decades.

'Sometimes I think of giving it all up,' Aura Canache, a small farmer in Venezuela, told IPS. 'My neighbours get loans and aid, but I never have. The farm assistance plans are for men, although there are many women living off the countryside too.'

Demonstrators in nearly two dozen cities in Spain raised their voices Friday to protest against the use of public funds to bail out banks while the budgets for basic services like education and health are being slashed.