News headlines in March 2012, page 3

Spain’s centre-right government stood firm and announced that it would not modify the labour reforms that tens of thousands of people protested Thursday in a 24-hour general strike.

Debates in civil society, tension with internal opposition groups, demands from outside the country and inevitable comparisons with John Paul II’s visit to this socialist island in 1998 surrounded Benedict XVI’s visit 14 years later to a very different Cuba.

A novel research study in Argentina explored women's knowledge and beliefs about cervical cancer, in the provinces with the highest mortality from this highly preventable form of cancer, to design more effective policies.

A new report from Human Rights Watch says hundreds of women and girls in Afghanistan have been imprisoned for 'moral crimes', including running away from home and sex outside marriage.

Fifteen-year-old Aicha is one of the many spice vendors hawking their wares in the Dantokpa market, in Benin's economic capital, Cotonou. But a closer look at her tidy stall reveals a disturbing detail: the powdered spices are packaged in recycled medicine vials.

'Only God knows what will happen to me and my children - for two months there's been nothing to eat. We're living like beggars,' Henriette Sanglar, a mother of four in the Moursal quarter of the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, told IPS.

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) held its conference this month in Israel for the first time. Do future wars by land, sea and air belong to robots?

As 29-year-old Palestinian prisoner Hana Shalabi enters day 43 of her open- ended hunger strike Thursday from a hospital bed in northern Israel, over two dozen other Palestinian prisoners have now followed suit, refusing food as a way to protest their arrest, detention and treatment in Israeli prisons.

China may be the country that emits the most carbon dioxide (CO2), but oil-rich Venezuela and some of its Caribbean neighbours produce more of this greenhouse gas responsible for global warming on a per capita basis.

Hamid Yussef Bashir said he walked for 17 days with his wife and five children to get to a refugee camp in South Sudan. Here in Jamam, they joined about 37,000 other people who fled from the war across the border in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.