News headlines in June 2011, page 38

A Pentagon plan to step up spending on nuclear weaponry would severely undermine global efforts geared towards disarmament, warn independent analysts on U.S. nuclear policy.

Honduras was allowed back into the OAS even though it never tried those responsible for the June 2009 coup that ousted then president Manuel Zelaya. But the international criticism and pressure for justice and action on human rights has not let up.

Emissions of radioactive materials from the burning of fossil fuels and the production of chemical fertilisers are another reason to come up with sustainable alternatives, experts say.

The time has come to take a stand, to say calmly and firmly that humanity cannot continue to subject itself to the interminable throes of a system that has resulted in the current grave and multi-faceted (social, financial, food, environmental, political, democratic, ethical) crisis, writes Federico Mayor Zaragoza, ex director-general of UNESCO, president of the Culture of Peace Foundation and president of IPS.

Samuel Weekes remembers when the hills stretching out beyond the heart of Freetown were green.

As you climb the ladder at the workplace, from the mid-management level to the senior leadership positions, you find fewer and fewer women. Little wonder then that Naz Khan - chief finance officer at Engro Fertilizers, a subsidiary of one of Pakistan’s largest conglomerates, Engro Corporation - says it gets lonely at the top.

If Burma’s quasi-civilian government was hoping for warmer ties with the U.S. government, Senator John McCain’s visit to this South-east Asian nation has placed such hopes on ice.

It is a scene replayed weekly in Palestine. In Gaza, groups of chanting demonstrators walk towards the border with Israel, singing, chanting, dancing. Ayat el Masari, 20, walks with the masses. An English major at Gaza's Aqsa University, the young woman is among many women who regularly attend Palestinian protests.

For 61-year-old Abd al-Rahim Bisharat, life in the Bedouin community of al- Hadidiya in the northern Jordan Valley is anything but easy. 'The problem is not only poverty, but the degree of how (the Israelis) treat us as humans, our rights as humans,' Bisharat told IPS over the phone from his home, with the sound of roosters crowing in the background. 'We have no transportation, no electricity, no water, no health, no education.

The family history of writer Manuel Martínez rises up in large, black letters on the walls and ceilings of his house in a low-income neighbourhood of the Cuban capital. Photos and objects from times past complete this different kind of a book, which you can start reading from any point.