News headlines in March 2012, page 18

Millions of Chinese micro-blog users will be forced to hand over their details this week in a real-name registration drive. The new state regulations - piloted in five Chinese cities - have created uproar amidst fears the move will bring heightened censorship and a crackdown on users.

'I would like to use contraception, but my husband is against it,' says Bintou Moussa*. The 32-year-old mother has just given birth to her sixth child at the Abobo General Hospital in Cote d’Ivoire’s commercial capital Abidjan.

A major U.S. civil rights group filed a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts Wednesday on behalf of a Ugandan gay rights organisation, the Sexual Minorities of Uganda (SMUG), against a right-wing evangelist leader for inciting hatred against homosexuals that has led to increased violence against LGBT persons in the East African country.

The International Criminal Court delivered its first verdict Wednesday: Thomas Lubanga Dyilo was found guilty of recruiting children under the age of 15 to fight in a militia group in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The trend of privatisation and commercialisation of water services, which set in in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s, has come to a halt due to the process’ own failures, and has given rise to a return of those services into efficient public management, according to a new book.

Less than a year since South Sudan's independence, thousands of people in the region continue to face the stark realities of secession.

Wind energy developers installed a record 41,000 megawatts of electricity-generating capacity in 2011, bringing the world total to 238,000 megawatts.

Last January, several pupils coming out of a high school in Kallithea, a central residential neigbourhood in Athens, attacked a Pakistani passer-by.

Against the backdrop of a politically-waffling, nuclear-armed North Korea as its unpredictable neighbour, South Korea is hosting a nuclear security summit later this month to be attended by over 40 heads of state and government.

'Watch out! The caustic soda is dangerous,' shouts Rea Pigiaki, while she blends the soda with lavender to prepare her scented soaps, which are very famous in Ierapetra, a small town in Southeast Crete.