News headlines in June 2013, page 12

WASHINGTON, Jun 17 (IPS) - Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex - the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country's 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

NEW YORK, Jun 17 (IPS) - Stories of struggle can be found all over the world, from a law classroom in Oklahoma and the brutal borderlands between the United States and Mexico to a Bedouin village in Jordan and wedding parties in Morocco, as the 24th Human Rights Watch Film Festival is showcasing.

ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) - Closing the gender gap between women and men on agriculture and food security could free over one hundred million people from hunger. 

ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) - The world can satisfy its growing appetite for meat and animal-based products without upsetting livelihoods, especially of developing country farmers, or worsening climate change.

HAVANA, Jun 17 (IPS) - "How much is a species worth? What is the price tag on the services provided by a river or a forest?" These are the questions biologist María Elena Perdomo is asking to encourage Cubans to take account of environmental costs, which may apparently be incorporated in the present economic reforms.

ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) - Since its founding in 2007 to help developing nations fight poverty, hunger, illiteracy, disease and gender discrimination, the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MDG-F) has financed about 130 joint programmes in 50 countries.

JOHANNESBURG, Jun 17 (IPS) - If a Free Trade Area were to be negotiated between Africa's two largest economies, South Africa and Nigeria, it would have a powerful effect on trade across the sub-continent and would challenge other countries to respond.

ROME, Jun 17 (IPS) - The growing consensus, momentum and commitment to eradicate world hunger may seem overly ambitious in view of the slow progress in reducing the number of hungry people in the world in recent decades.

MIKINDANI, Tanzania, Jun 17 (IPS) - In Kilwa District in southern Tanzania local community leader and fisherman Salim Riziki stands next to a set of turbines, newly imported from Dubai, talking about the gas finds on Songo Songo, an island 15 km off the mainland.

NEW YORK, Jun 17 (IPS) - As the debate on immigration reform continues in the Senate and fractured talks persist about the future of 11 million undocumented migrants, one New York-based group took to the streets to ask their senator a question.