News headlines in 2011, page 69

Mary Mingle thought she had a boil on her breast, so she bought some medication and tried to treat it at home. Two months later, bothered by persistent pain, she went to the doctor.

The growing frequency of weather-related disasters in Central America has led to greater organisational efforts for risk management and emergency response. But during the most recent storm in the region, the fruits of these efforts were still not visible.

A chair stood empty at the launch here Monday of a report on the repression of human rights defenders, a physical reminder that its would-be occupant - Ales Bialiatski, president of Human Rights Centre Viasna in Belarus — has been languishing in prison since August.

With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia's Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.

Members of the regime of ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak have demanded to be allowed to run in upcoming elections and warned of violence if legislation to prohibit their political ambitions is passed.

As Israel moves ahead with a plan to forcibly displace tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins in the occupied West Bank, Mohammad Al-Korshan and his family are facing the real prospect of not only losing their home, but their traditional way of life.

'If one were to search for a positive outcome to the ongoing armed conflict in Jammu and Kashmir state, it would be the growth of journalism,' says Prof. Shams Imran at the department of journalism, Central University of Kashmir.

As the Thai Airways flight descends into Suvarnabhumi International Airport, passengers pull out cameras to snap pictures of flood waters rising inexorably and predicted to inundate the capital city by the end of the week.

When Mona Kareem, a member of the Bidoun population of Kuwait, was 11 years old, a neighbour Kuwaiti woman asked her where she was from. When Kareem answered, 'I am Bidoun,' the woman laughed at her. 'There is no country called Bidoun. There is no Bidoun.'

Every six seconds, a child dies of hunger-related causes. That disturbing reality seems as remote as the moon here in the ultra-modern Changwon Convention Centre, where delegates struggled to create effective ways to stem the ongoing decline of food-producing lands.