News headlines in May 2012, page 4

If a series of 'golden rules' can be followed, a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) suggests, global natural gas usage could grow by more than 50 percent by 2035.

Foreign workers, mostly from Indonesia, now make up just over 10 percent of Malaysia’s workforce of 14 million people, both in the formal and informal sectors, according to the latest government statistics.

The reproductive rights agenda, from improving women’s access to education to systematic family planning to reducing birth rates and combating poverty, has become a cornerstone of most industrialised nations’ development policies toward the least developed countries (LDCs), comprised primarily of sub-Saharan African states.

The Moroccan government’s announcement that it would issue new public media guidelines at the end of May has reignited a stormy debate around independent media in the kingdom.

Mere weeks ago Arthur Smith, who has been farming here for more than 20 years, was dangling thousands of carrots in front of local consumers, but there were no buyers to be had.

Results of the first post-Mubarak presidential election last week have left most Egyptians stunned, with Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi coming in first and Ahmed Shafiq - ousted president Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister - coming in a close second. The two are now slated to face off in a hotly-contested runoff vote next month.

Hundreds of thousands of families - from Palestinians to Southeast Asian migrant workers to African refugees - struggle under Israeli policies that seek to limit the number of non-Jews within Israel and in the areas it occupies.

For years Gou Suqin had to rely on her husband’s meagre migrant’s income from the city to support their rural family. Now, following a 10,000 RMB (1,500 dollars) microcredit loan from UN Women, 50-year-old Gou runs a successful musk deer farm. She now earns 60,000 RMB (9,000 dollars) a year - or six times as much as her husband.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, otherwise known as Rio+20, is a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

For ages, rural women in the Peruvian highlands have been selecting and storing seeds, ensuring their preservation. But the authorities have failed to tap into this storehouse of knowledge and experience, despite the contributions it could make to the design of effective policies for adaptation to climate change, which poses a growing threat to the women’s livelihoods.