News headlines in 2011, page 179

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon Tuesday appealed to the international community to maintain resources for the Aid for Trade programme, especially those assigned to the least developed countries LDCs). He made his plea in a speech relating to the Third Global Review of Aid for Trade.

Growing concerns about the slow death of the dollar rather than a saviour’s goodwill are underpinning China’s widely publicised purchases of European government debt, according to experts. But as the Eurozone debt crisis spreads from Greece and Portugal to countries like Italy and threatens the very survival of the euro, China’s finance mandarins and keepers of the country’s 3 trillion dollars foreign reserves are looking yet again at gold as the anchor of stability.

Monthly ‘visiting hours’ at the female ward of Sri Lanka’s notorious Welikada Prison are as traumatic for the inmates as they are for their family and friends. A tiny room, measuring 10 feet by seven feet, is divided in half by a mesh counter. On one side, mothers, fathers, children and relatives jostle for standing room. On the other the inmates, in white prison clothes, shout to be heard over the din.

In a blow to those calling for a new constitution to be drawn up before elections are held, Egypt's ruling military council last week reiterated its intention to hold parliamentary polls later this year.

'I have never seen anything like it. Many mothers have lost three or four children. It's a tragedy out here,' Austin Kennan, regional director for the Horn of Africa for Concern Worldwide, told IPS from within the crisis zone.

With nearly 40 percent of the world's population lacking adequate sanitation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced an initiative Tuesday to invest 42 million dollars in new grants to help 'reinvent the toilet'.

Chess player Roberto Galván, 33, was detained Jan. 25 by the police in the northeast Mexican state of Nuevo León as he sat on a bench in the central square of General Terán, a town 100 km from Monterrey. No one has seen him since.

A video showing a group of 16 Pakistani policemen, hands tied behind their backs, being executed by Taliban gunmen in the Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is only the latest in a series showing brutal acts designed to strike terror in the areas bordering Afghanistan.

Ethel James cannot wait for the gravity-fed water scheme in her area to be fixed so that she and the other women in her village will no longer have to wake up before dawn everyday to queue for water.

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.