News headlines in June 2011, page 17

The high economic growth enjoyed by many African states during the 2000s have not led to poverty elimination. This is because the growth did not happen in the sectors where poor people work, as in agriculture, or in the rural areas where poor people live, or simply did not involve labour provided by poor people.

There is a brief bustle and then a woman wails as the small body is wrapped in cloth and set on a cot by the door of the paediatric ward. Nurses in pristine white uniforms continue to pad quietly around the large room at Ola During Children's Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital city.

Rapid economic growth in China’s coastal regions has resulted in serious levels of ocean pollution, damaging marine life and posing a threat to humans. As much as half of China’s offshore areas are considered polluted.

If we're lucky, by the time a tough but fair international treaty to meet the climate change challenge is finalised, it will be largely unnecessary. The snail's pace of negotiations certainly gives countries plenty of time to understand the financial, social and environmental advantages of kicking their dangerous addiction to fossil fuels.

Last Friday’s recommendation to give the incumbent Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon another five-year term drew the international community’s attention to another opaque, non-democratic process that is the hallmark of the 15-member Security Council’s decision making.

By appointing women this month to two key ministries, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has nearly met her goal of having 30 percent of women in her cabinet, and is putting women in predominant roles at the Planalto Palace, the seat of government.

Access to treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) remains compromised, especially in developing countries, because too few pharmaceutical companies manufacture quality-assured drugs. Lack of competition has led to skyrocketing prices and this means that public health budgets are quickly spent.

Nuuk is a long way from my hometown of Durban, and the Arctic is a long way for an African to come to campaign about climate change. Yet, here I sit, in a jail cell, with my colleague Ulvar Arnkvaern, in the ‘Institution’, a prison in Greenland’s capital. I sit here for breaching an exclusion zone and climbing aboard a dangerous deep water drilling rig some 120 km off Greenland’s coast.

The man who, for the last eight years, embodied Israel's secret operations and had a penchant for the use of forged documents by his spies has been ordered by his former boss to relinquish his own diplomatic passport.

Public health authorities in Reykjavik have criticised plans for the expansion of the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant. They say that levels of the gas hydrogen sulphide could increase by 40 percent if a new geothermal field, Grauhnukur, is developed and nothing is done to ensure that the levels of the gas remain below maximum permitted levels.