News headlines in 2010, page 72

Cuba's biotechnology industry is hoping to conquer the European Union market with Heberprot-P, a therapeutic drug used to prevent foot amputations in patients with diabetes.

'I think I am successful now,' says Fanta Jabbah. 'I am able to take care of my three children and support my husband; now I have a say in my household.'

Although it was to be expected, former president Álvaro Uribe's return to politics in Colombia has caused a stir and has a clear aim: to block two of his successor Juan Manuel Santos's pet projects -- reparations to victims of the armed conflict and the restoration of land to displaced peasant farmers.

Neither hurricanes nor floods, nor the devastating January earthquake or Haiti's chronic political instability managed to wipe out the organic gardening initiative underway in that country since 2005. The seed was planted in Argentina twenty years ago.

Acre, the small Brazilian state that is a symbol of the struggle to preserve the Amazon rainforest, is facing the challenge of ensuring that the development ushered in by two paved roads that will link the state to both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans will be sustainable.

Damming a river may bring electric power, but it often comes at the price of high-quality food fisheries, experts say. When dams are proposed for power, flood control or irrigation, the often devastating impacts on fisheries in rivers and lakes are ignored or discounted.

When Francisca arrived at the historic Curicó Hospital — a staple in the Chilean central valley for nearly one and a half centuries — for the birth of her first child, she didn't know it would be her only one.

Poor indigenous and peasant farmers who have developed initiatives to gain access to land have been invited to take part in a global competition that will award prizes for innovative, effective approaches to the struggle for property rights.

Activists here are calling for the use of democratic mechanisms and enhanced transparency to 'hedge' risks posed to Taiwan by a series of agreements negotiated between Taipei and Beijing.

Few outside of Gaza would consider its history much beyond the decades of Israeli occupation. But Gaza is a historical treasure house. Many of those treasures are now in Israeli museums, and those that remain are becoming difficult to preserve due to the Israeli siege.