News headlines in March 2012, page 2

Brazil and South Africa have experienced a widespread contraction of their manufacturing industries, with the latter suffering massive unemployment as well, thanks to the rampant volatility and misalignment of dominant global currencies like the dollar, trade experts from the two countries say.

A public authority in Sweden recently issued orders that the Stockholm-based Nobel Foundation must rein in and discipline the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, which is tasked with selecting the Nobel peace laureates, writes Fredrik S. Heffermehl, Norwegian lawyer and author.

We are two women and mothers ­one Irish and one American­ who have experienced the loss of children in our families to the senseless violence of war. We hope that none of you will experience such pain, write Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire whose sister Anne lost three of her children to the fighting in Northern Ireland and Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son, Casey to the Iraq war. Both started antiwar movements in their communities.

Climate change and nuclear war are the two most serious threats to human security and planetary survival. Governments are addressing the causes of climate change and the prevention of nuclear war, but political will to reduce greenhouse gases and eradicate nuclear weapons needs to be further strengthened. Climate change is now visible and palpable, but the threat of nuclear war remains relatively abstract and unperceived among some complacent world leaders, despite the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons in a world that still resolves conflict by going to war, writes Ronald McCoy, founder president of Malaysian Physicians for Social Responsibility and past co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

Bharti, a 15-year-old Hindu girl living in the Lyari area in Karachi, left home for her sewing class last December, never to return. Three days later, her father Narain Das was told she had converted to Islam.

A handful of makeshift homes built from small boulders and plastic tarps and secured with thick ropes sit in the isolated community of She’b El- Buttum in the South Hebron Hills. A few metres away, several rows of solar panels and two wind turbines are affixed to the rocky hilltop, providing electricity to the village’s 150 residents.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling Israelis that Israel can attack Iran with minimal civilian Israeli casualties as a result of retaliation, and that reassuring message appears to have headed off any widespread Israeli fear of war with Iran and other adversaries.

The United Nations, which is in the process of refurbishing its 62-year-old headquarters building at a cost of over 1.8 billion dollars financed by member states, is now seeking additional funds because of huge cost overruns.

Native communities in northwest Argentina turned to the Supreme Court to claim their right to be consulted about projects for prospecting and mining of lithium, regarded as the mineral of the future, located under an enormous salt flat.

At their summit in the Indian capital on Thursday, leaders of the coalition known as BRICS — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — made several poignant decisions that experts say hint at the converging of economic and political interests of a disparate regional bloc.