News headlines in 2011, page 195

Educators in Indonesia are turning green with environmental advocacies they plan to integrate into the curriculum of state-run elementary and high schools through the 'Green Teacher Network'.

'The mosque was just 100 metres from our house. We prayed there every day, five times a day. But it was more than a house of prayer,' says Mohammed, a Beit Hanoun resident, of one of the 34 mosques completely destroyed during the 23-day Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-2009.

As Bahrain's government launches its much-touted 'national dialogue' with members of civil society, experts here are expressing scepticism that it will defuse growing tensions in the strategically located Gulf kingdom, let alone promote genuine reform.

Women in minority and indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to wide-ranging forms of violence, abuse and discrimination, according to a new report released Wednesday by Minority Rights Group International (MRG), a human rights group that works on behalf of minorities and indigenous peoples.

After protracted battles, women in Central America and southern Mexico have made headway in winning respect for their rights over the past decade, but the progress has been more formal than real, say women academics and activists.

A booming private security industry - triggered mostly by terrorist threats, domestic insurgencies and drug wars - deploys some 20 million armed personnel worldwide: twice the number of police officers, according to the annual 2011 Small Arms Survey released here.

Some 30 Spanish activists are occupying the embassy of their country in the Greek capital to demand that their government pressure Greece to allow the Freedom Flotilla II — 'Stay Human' to set sail for the Gaza Strip.

It was a tragedy on Mother's Day for Nuala Kerr. Her son Ronan had been a police constable for three months when he was murdered by dissident republicans in April.

Heat waves clearly can destroy crop harvests. The world saw high heat decimate Russian wheat in 2010. Crop ecologists have found that each one-degree Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum can reduce grain harvests by 10 percent. But the indirect effects of higher temperatures on our food supply are no less serious.

This is a very delicate period for Egypt. Confrontations between the secular-liberal front and the Islamist front, broadly understood, are growing increasingly polarised and often violent. A not always visible rift has opened between the student movement and the military, which is now often seen not as the guarantor of the people's demands for freedom and justice but as part of the old regime fighting for its survival. Peaceful protests are now banned and the press is muzzled, write Emma Bonino, vice president of the Italian Senate, and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.