News headlines in June 2011, page 23

Twenty women from four continents consider the words discussion leader Anne Schoenstein, of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), has written on a flip chart. She strikes out in blue ink a previous sentence. She begins writing a new one - a demand aimed at aid donors - dictated by Nurgul Djanaeva.

The expansion of renewable energies in Latin America will drive up demand for metals like copper, which only recycling will be able to meet.

Providing electricity and modern cooking technology to billions of ‘energy poor’ people worldwide is one of the priorities of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - one that experts say is achievable over the next few decades.

Images of the immense, dark stain of oil covering the waters of the Gulf of Mexico made their way across the globe last year as one of the largest oil spills in history unfolded. Other images - of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, a gigantic pile of litter floating in the North Pacific Ocean; of countless felled trees in the Amazon; of tar sands in Canada - have gained much fewer headlines, but are likely to remain as monuments to the price tag of wanton human appetites.

Just a week after a group of civil society organisations petitioned Uganda’s constitutional court demanding that the government’s non-provision of essential services for pregnant mothers was a violation of the right to life; Margaret Nabirye lost her baby in childbirth.

Three-year-old David bolts up from his feverish stooper as a needle pricks his thumb, producing a tiny bead of blood. He looks down horrified but is too exhausted to cry and falls back into his mother's lap as the blood is wiped away

After a newspaper that Prudence* (16) used as sanitary wear fell from her while she played with friends at school, she left and never returned.

Reducing the need for costly and risky UN peacekeeping forces through conflict prevention is the key to reducing the UN’s $7.5 billion peacekeeping budget, according to an EastWest Institute report release here.

International campaigns against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria are headed for cuts in funding assistance, now that Japan is reducing its Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) budget in the wake of the disaster that hit the country in March.

A reduction in red tape and an improvement in political conditions means that sub-Saharan Africa is becoming a more attractive destination for foreign direct investment, especially from India.