News headlines in February 2012, page 6

When the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held its inaugural meeting in London back in 1946, the U.S. delegate, Eleanor Roosevelt, read an open letter to 'the women of the world' calling on governments to encourage women everywhere to participate in national and international affairs.

'It’s awful to see people who are criminals treated as heroes,' said Dorila Márquez, one of the survivors of the El Mozote massacre committed by Salvadoran army troops in December 1981.

The government of Honduras hopes to reach friendly settlements with the families of inmates killed in the Comayagua prison fire, to avoid international lawsuits.

The failure of a mission by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to get Iranian permission to visit a military testing site mentioned in its latest report has been interpreted in media coverage as a stall to avoid the discovery of confirming evidence of past work on nuclear weapons.

Cleaning up a stream that used to be a garbage dump and restocking it with fish, or helping demobilised far-right paramilitaries reintegrate into society by returning to school, are some of the early outcomes of a project involving community radio stations in a remote area of northwest Colombia.

There are two women among the 14 candidates contesting the first round of Senegalese presidential elections that will be held on Feb. 26. But according to several analysts, this overwhelmingly Muslim West African country is not ready to be governed by a woman.

The urgent need for a paradigm shift in economics and its financial and mathematical models has been widely recognized for decades. Recently, Credit Suisse research as well as complexity theorists at the Swiss Technical University in Zurich have demonstrated the concentration of companies in the current global economic system. They used network analysis of positive feedback effects (the network grows faster as more join, like Facebook). These dynamics also concentrate connectedness and produced a pattern: of the 50 largest companies in the world, 45 are financial intermediaries (‘ Global Finance Lost in Cyberspace"), writes Hazel Henderson, president of Ethical Markets Media (USA and Brazil) and author of many books.

First the government devalued the Sri Lankan rupee by three percent in November. Then interest rates were hiked. And to cap that U.S. sanctions hit Iran, which meets 90 percent of this country’s oil needs.

With an international meeting aimed at resolving the political crisis in Somalia set to take place Thursday, the local media in this East African nation is awash with scepticism, referring to the efforts as a new system of re-colonising the country.

Imported television shows watched by millions will be canned during the country’s prime 'golden time' hours, the government announced last week. Last month, popular prime time entertainment programmes were slashed by two- thirds. This was after programmes featuring time travel were all but banned last year.