News headlines in 2010, page 78

A biological control method used to eradicate screw-worm, a livestock parasite, in the United States, Mexico and Central America, has just been tested successfully in South America, where its adoption is being considered in the countries of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur): Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Zimbabwe’s debt burden of about 8,3 billion dollars, owed to internal and external institutions, is crowding out essential national budget items such as health and basic services, with detrimental effects for particularly women.

Nearly than two years after the Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity was proposed to the United Nations General Assembly, many civil society groups say that little has been done to safeguard the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people around the world.

New information on the Central Intelligence Agency's campaign of drone strikes in northwest Pakistan directly contradicts the image the Barack Obama administration and the CIA have sought to establish in the news media of a programme based on highly accurate targeting that is effective in disrupting al Qaeda's terrorist plots against the United States.

Women candidates seem to be getting scarcer in Bahraini elections, but women leaders here say female poll participation is no longer about getting into office.

Forget speculators, forget biofuel farmers. The real cause behind the permanent food and agricultural crisis is the imperial food regime, squeezing money out of agriculture, a Dutch professor says.

The headlines of the day’s newspapers strike passersby as being strangely out of sync with today’s events: ‘China’s quick deployment in the war with India astonishes the world’. Or ‘Corruption dealt with the bullet by Mao Zedong’, and ‘The true reason why Stalin repeatedly postponed Mao Zedong’s visit to the USSR’.

In the context of ongoing conciliation between the Cuban government and the Roman Catholic Church, the communications media of the latter are growing quickly on this Caribbean island where the press remains under strict state control.

Straddling the hills overlooking the Mediterranean Sea is Roumieh, Lebanon's largest and most notorious high-security men's prison. Crowded into its dank and depressing concrete cells are those convicted as religious extremists, murderers, mobsters and spies.

How many litres of water are needed to produce one kilogram of table grapes? The current effort to measure the 'water footprint' of this and other Chilean exports could give us some answers by year's end.