News headlines in February 2012, page 8

The international community has failed to grapple with the real underlying political and economic issues facing the troubled East African nation of Somalia, which has been surviving without an effective government for over two decades, according to a new study released here.

As the number of domestic workers flooding into Jordan from Indonesia, Philippines and Sri Lanka reaches 140,000 annually, non-governmental organisations on the ground are working hard to protect migrant labourers’ rights and expose the terrible working conditions in the rich households that employ them.

In 2005, there were 163 million more men in Asia, more than the entire female population of the United States. Asia is now facing serious consequences from sex selection, a situation the West might have inadvertently helped create.

'We don’t want a repeat of welfare-oriented programmes, because they are unsustainable,' said Rony Palacios of the National Network for the Defence of Food Sovereignty in Guatemala, criticising President Otto Pérez Molina’s Zero Hunger plan.

Pierre was in the next-door country of Dominican Republic when the January 2010 earthquake destroyed half of Port-au-Prince and killed at least 200,000 of his fellow Haitians, including his wife and his mother.

Budget constraints combined with exploding prison populations are prompting a number of U.S. states, including some of in the politically conservative south, to rethink their criminal codes.

As campaigning for the Apr. 1 poll in Burma (also Myanmar) gets into full-swing, there are misgivings on whether the National League for Democracy (NLD) party of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi will get a fair deal.

Unless governments work actively to build a brighter future for humanity, climate change, poverty and loss of biodiversity will worsen and continue to exacerbate existing global problems, top scientists warned ministers at the United Nations Environment Programme's (UNEP) governing council meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, on Monday.

Amid revelations of a well-funded U.S. organisation's plans to deliberately distort climate science, scientists and journalists at a major scientific conference called on the Canadian government to stop its muzzling of scientists.

Latin America and the Caribbean celebrated their 45th anniversary as a nuclear-weapon-free zone amidst allegations of British deployment of nuclear weapons to the South Atlantic and with no specific regime for the transport of radioactive waste.