News headlines in June 2013, page 21

FREETOWN, Jun 07 (IPS) - On a street corner in downtown Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital city, 12-year-old Kaita sits with a friend on a peeling steel railing watching the headlights of motorbikes cruising through the otherwise silent streets. It is after midnight, and motionless human forms lie curled up in doorways or stretched out on pavements nearby. For Kaita, these streets are home, and have been for almost six years.

LAGOS, Nigeria, Jun 07 (IPS) - Residents in the three Nigerian states where a state of emergency has been declared are living in fear as food prices soar and government soldiers conduct door to door campaigns to root out terrorists.

WASHINGTON, Jun 06 (IPS) - A quarter of all food calories grown for human consumption is being lost or wasted, either purposefully or otherwise, according to new estimates.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 06 (IPS) - When the United Nations launched its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in 2001, two of its primary objectives were to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 and promote gender empowerment worldwide.

KUALA LUMPUR, Jun 06 (IPS) - They had voted for "ubah" or change. What the youth of Malaysia got instead seems to be more of the same.

ISTANBUL, Jun 06 (IPS) - Few imagined that the symbolic act of standing in front of bulldozers in Istanbul's Gezi Park in an effort to block a development project near the city's central square would have caused the reaction it did.

ROME, Jun 06 (IPS) - Between 2010 and 2012, 868 million people worldwide were deemed hungry by a conservative definition. This figure represents only a small fraction of the world's population whose health and lives are blighted by malnutrition.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 06 (IPS) - Kevin's Carter's disturbing picture of the 1993 famine in Sudan won him a Pulitzer Prize.

ADDIS ABABA, Jun 06 (IPS) - Despite speculation that the first anti-government protest in eight years, which was held this week in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, might signal new levels of political tolerance by the government, leaders of the political party that organised the protest say this cannot be further from the truth.

YAOUNDE, Jun 06 (IPS) - Marlyse Aboui, a 40-year-old nurse, has still not gotten over the astonishment she felt when she heard that Cameroon's President Paul Biya had nominated her to the senate.