News headlines in 2011, page 178

South African companies are being urged to use the leverage of its government’s strong political relationship with India to develop new business and investment opportunities.

Many countries are facing dangerous water shortages. As world demand for food has soared, millions of farmers have drilled too many irrigation wells in efforts to expand their harvests. As a result, water tables are falling and wells are going dry in some 20 countries containing half the world's people.

When Bahraini ambassador Houda Ezra Nonoo arrived in Washington three years ago, she was greeted as the representative of a close U.S. ally with a reputation for more openness and tolerance than most Gulf nations.

Cuba may be the only country in the world whose citizens have, for half a century now, not been allowed to freely acquire a car or a home. Indeed the very words have a very different connotation on the island, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

If you use the internet, you will have come across CAPTCHA, a test to determine whether the computer user is human or a machine. What you may not know is that one of its inventors, mathematician Luis von Ahn, comes from one of the poorest countries in Latin America, Guatemala.

Tens of thousands of starving Somalis have made their way to the government- held part of Mogadishu in search of food, but many parents have made the anguished decision to leave a child too weak to make the journey behind in hope of saving the others.

The most pressing global challenge to children's rights may be the increasing number of military attacks on schools in war zones, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday.

The United Nations Monday commemorated the second annual Nelson Mandela International day, a day marking not only the birthdate of the former South African president, but also to recognize his work as a freedom fighter and peacemaker.

The United Nations Monday commemorated the second annual Nelson Mandela International day, a day marking not only the birthdate of the former South African president, but also to recognize his work as a freedom fighter and peacemaker.

In the midst of heated debate with agribusiness, the Bolivian government has launched an agricultural production model aimed at boosting food sovereignty by supporting small farmers, in order to generate surpluses to cushion the swings in international food prices.