News headlines in March 2011, page 22

As donors retreat from funding HIV prevention and treatment, the vulnerability of national programmes reliant on external funding has become apparent. Without long-term sustainaibility, the lives of millions could be at risk.

Several incinerator facilities that were supposed to turn waste into energy have proven to be white elephants that are now adding to the country’s pollution woes, instead of alleviating them.

Bangladesh’s garment factories and overseas recruiting agencies have pledged to employ a substantial number of Bangladeshi expatriates returning from politically volatile Libya, following the violent crackdown on opposition forces by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime there.

Crowded into precarious mud-floored dorms or sheet-metal trailers or forced to live in tents of plastic sheeting, with neither piped water nor electricity, after working 14-hour days: these are the harsh conditions faced by hundreds of thousands of rural workers in Argentina despite bumper crops and record earnings for agribusiness.

Paradoxically, just as history is proving the World Social Forum right in many of its predictions and analyses, the major media, the "shapers of public opinion", are not increasing but decreasing their coverage of it, writes Mario Lubetkin, Director-General of IPS news agency.

Workers battling to contain the crisis at Japan's quake- stricken Fukushima nuclear plant were briefly moved to a bunker because of a rise in radiation levels, local media has reported.

Security forces in Bahrain have driven out pro-democracy protesters from the Pearl Roundabout in the capital Manama.

Eva, a Ghanian woman, was given five pigs and some training on how best to care for them. Eventually, her farm grew to 400 pigs and she was able to buy more land and a motorbike which she not only used for transporting her goods to market but for helping neighbours get to town and to hospital quicker.

Despite formal recognition of domestic workers' rights in South Africa, they still face a struggle for fair treatment.

Lack of donor funding, state phobia against western NGOs, and restrictive work permits for foreign aid workers have together hit the operations of several dozen Sri Lankan NGOs and their foreign counterparts.