News headlines in March 2011, page 24

Surrounded by lush green wheat and yellow flowering mustard fields at Ekdanta primary school, it is noon and the 57 children in two combined classes are fidgety - impatient for the school served midday meal.

Food supplies are running low, ambulances have been detained for hours at checkpoints, and hundreds of young men have been held, interrogated and beaten up, some requiring hospitalisation, in the Palestinian village of Awarta in the northern West Bank. The village has been under continuous curfew for four days.

As Japan continues to battle the threat of nuclear meltdown in the wake of Friday's devastating earthquake, lawmakers, environmental activists and the nuclear industry in the United States are squaring up for a heated contest over the future of atomic energy in this country.

Analysis based on satellite images and maps is helping to identify the flows of people fleeing the political violence in Libya to neighbouring countries.

After years of decline, the cooperative movement in Mexico is reviving as a relatively safe haven from the shocks of the neoliberal free- market model of production and the financial and food crises that have affected the country.

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.

The 15-year jail sentence handed down over the weekend to U.S. citizen Alan Gross, who was found guilty in Cuba of 'acts against the independence and territorial integrity of the state,' is part of a new chapter in the conflict between Havana and Washington, which is now playing out in cyberspace.

The international community's efforts to deny embattled president Laurent Gbagbo access to funds from cocoa exports have resulted in hundreds of thousands of tonnes of Ivorian cocoa surfacing in neighbouring countries.

Peggy Kapanda has bad memories of the time she spent living with her uncle when she was young. She was treated as a second-rank child. But this only motivated her to do a better job herself. At her small home in John Laing compound, in Zambia's capital Lusaka, she and her husband take care of two other children in addition to their own three young boys.

When the ban on traditional birth attendants was lifted last year, pregnant women quickly appeared at Dorothy Chirwa's door in Malombe village in Mangochi, a district on the southern shores of Lake Malawi. Chirwa was among the thousands of TBAs banned from providing women with care in 2007.