News headlines in June 2013, page 7

MEXICO CITY, Jun 23 (IPS) - Mexican cities with populations of more than 500,000 face serious obstacles in monitoring air quality and reducing air pollution, but as of July local authorities will be required to do both, and to submit mandatory reports on their efforts to the federal government.

CAIRO, Jun 23 (IPS) - Ethiopia's diversion of part of the Blue Nile late last month has both rocked Cairo's relations with Addis Ababa and provided fodder for Egypt's ongoing war of attrition between its Islamist government and secular opposition.

KAMPALA?, Jun 23 (IPS) - When Eunice Namugerwa, an 18-year-old living in Kampala's Kisenyi slum, decided to start a business to support her family last August, she scrawled three ideas down on a bit of scrap paper: a piggery, a fashion boutique and a chicken farm.

CODRINTON, Barbuda, Jun 22 (IPS) - Arthur Nibbs was known for his staunch opposition to sand mining in his homeland of Barbuda, a Caribbean island with dazzling white sand beaches that comprisemost of its deserted coastline.

SYDNEY, Jun 22 (IPS) - With South-South trade on the rise and growth in emerging economies set to outstrip production in industrialised countries, the international mining sector has been quick to follow global trends.

BANJUL, Jun 22 (IPS) - In February 2013, 20-year-old Mohamed*, like hundreds of thousands of other Eritreans, fled the brutal dictatorship in that East African nation in search of a better life in neighbouring Sudan.

PRAGUE, Jun 22 (IPS) - A deeply-engrained culture of graft across Eastern Europe is destroying bonds between politicians and the people as populations lose faith in what they see as a self-serving elite "enriching" themselves at their expense, anti-corruption campaigners have said.

OROCUÉ, Colombia, Jun 21 (IPS) - Along the unpaved road between the town of Orocué and the Wisirare private reserve in the eastern Colombian department of Casanare, biologist Juliana Cárdenas asks the driver to stop the bus so she can collect a specimen of West Indian foxtail, a kind of grass growing along the road.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 21 (IPS) - Shooing off a quartet of hens that come pecking, twenty-four-year-old Kamala Batra sits guard over a sack of coarse rice spread out on the courtyard. After small black insects slowly crawl away in the sun's heat, she gathers it to cook for the day's free midday meal - a pan-India government food security scheme for school students.

CAIRO, Jun 21 (IPS) - Egyptians are deeply divided and the majority are dissatisfied with the performance of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, but also have little confidence in the main opposition figures or their future, a new poll has found.