News headlines in September 2012, page 4

HAVANA, Sep 26 (IPS) - “The most important thing for Cubans is their home,” says Raimundo Pérez, a real estate broker who is familiar with the travails of finding housing, despite the latest incentives made available by the Cuban government.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 (IPS) - Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and representatives from more than 50 non-governmental organisations, including actor-activist Sean Penn, met in New York on Monday to present a new roadmap for humanitarian aid in the country.

SAN CRISTÓBAL, Venezuela, Sep 26 (IPS) - It's a straightforward calculation: a litre of gasoline costs 62 times more in Colombia than in Venezuela, a difference that fuels smuggling and crime along the border.

MÁLAGA, Spain, Sep 26 (IPS) - On a parcel of land a few kilometres outside the southern Spanish city of Málaga, unemployed activists are growing 2,000 seedlings of stevia, a plant used by the Guaraní indigenous people for centuries as a natural sweetener that is awakening ever greater interest in Spain.

KAMULI, Uganda, Sep 26 (IPS) - Three years ago, after Irene Kamyuka finished her sixth year of primary school in Uganda, her father ran short of money. With four siblings ahead of her in school, Kamyuka’s father told her she would have to drop out until his finances turned around.

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts, Sep 26 (IPS) - Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas remembers how quiet - even uneventful – this tiny twin-island federation was for the first four decades of his life.

Sep 26 (IPS) - Rule of law is the foundation of governance. Societies, from their inception, have had their own set of rules, norms and boundaries, to govern their lives for themselves and their relationship with others. Applied by the governors unto the governed, this universal tenet applies to all of us in the family of humanity. The fundamental application of laws creates societies and paves the way for civilisation, making it the litmus test between barbarism and civilisation.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Sep 26 (IPS) - Over thirty thousand children in the remote Tirah area of the Khyber Agency, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Northern Pakistan, have waited four years for protection from polio, a viral disease that is sometimes referred to as ‘infantile paralysis’ due to its crippling effects on children.

ABIDJAN, Sep 26 (IPS) - Nouma Camara, a 40-year-old tailor, remembers waking up on Aug. 20, 2006 to a smell he described as “something catastrophic.” His home in Akouedo village, in Côte d’Ivoire’s commercial capital city of Abidjan, lies adjacent to a large, open-air dumpsite where toxic waste had been dumped the night before.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 (IPS) - At a high-level event at the United Nations in New York on Tuesday, U.N. Women, the United Nations body for female empowerment and gender equality, called for stronger action from world leaders to prevent and punish sexual violence in conflict.