News headlines in August 2010, page 17

Regional economic integration plans in southern Africa are not rooted in reality, according to civil society organisations holding a parallel meeting alongside the Southern African Development Community (SADC) summit in Namibia’s capital of Windhoek.

In April, the United Nations World Food Programme estimated it would need 190 million dollars to respond to a food crisis threatening more than 7 million people in Niger. By July, the WFP had revised the amount needed upwards to $371 million: a month later, the U.N. agency has been forced to scale back aid for lack of funds.

'My daughter had repeatedly tried to describe to me what her step-father would do to her when I was not home,' says Wanza*, a 28-year-old mother resident of Nairobi's Mathare slum. 'On this particular night I pretended to be asleep and watched as he left our bed and went for my eight-year-old daughter.'

'If you come to a fork in the road, take it.' Sometimes, the nonsensical quote of the legendary New York Yankees baseball catcher Yogi Berra has a real message. It can pointedly be applied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on peace with the Palestinians.

Soon after she had her second child, Rathna fell into a frenzied state and had to be brought to a hospital here in the southern Indian village of Dharmapuri. After a month-long series of tests, doctors issued their diagnosis: Rathna, they said, was suffering from a psychiatric aberration that seems to occur often among adolescent mothers.

In the last two weeks, Mexico's Supreme Court has taken two fundamental steps in recognising the rights of gays and lesbians. On Monday, it voted to uphold a Mexico City law that allows same-sex couples to adopt.

Joelle Nsamira Kajuga, a female agricultural researcher has a ready answer to describe which modified crop will produce a higher yield, which will be resistant to bacteria, and which will ensure food security and generate a higher turnover for poor small-scale farmers in different regions in Rwanda.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon returned from Pakistan Monday calling the floods there the worst disaster he has ever witnessed and urging the world community to speed up assistance to the Pakistani people.

Hop over a seep of filthy sludge behind a bathroom screened with ragged sacks, turn past the toilet with battered cardboard walls, crab between mud-brick shanties roofed with rusty metal... There: emerge into a small, neat yard where a dozen women and girls are filling plastic buckets from five water taps sticking out of concrete wall.

'The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has proved that music can break down barriers previously considered insurmountable,' its Argentine-Israeli conductor, Daniel Barenboim, told IPS on a visit to Ecuador.