News headlines in August 2012, page 8

BANJUL, Aug 24 (IPS) - Mohamed Ceesay, a 20-year-old farmer from the Central River Region in the Gambia, is a high school dropout. But thanks to an initiative to discourage local youths from emigrating to Europe, he earns almost half the salary of a government minister from his rice harvest.

KARACHI, Aug 24 (IPS) - Narain Das, a cloth merchant from Jacobabad in northern Pakistan, blesses his lucky stars that he has three sons, aged 18, 16 and 12. “If they were daughters, I, too, would seriously be thinking of migrating from here,” he reflects on the lack of protection his community faces.

JIMANÍ, Dominican Republic, Aug 24 (IPS) - Getting around on market day along the muddy border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is almost impossible for those unfamiliar with the art of dodging the trucks, motorcycles and bicycles swerving amidst the messy piles of products scattered all over, and weaving among the hundreds of people coming and going between the two countries.

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 24 (IPS) - Eight years ago Kenbesh Mengesha earned an uncertain income collecting firewood from local government forests and selling them to her fellow slum-dwellers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She would earn on average about 50 cents a day, if she was lucky.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 24 (IPS) - A new system to calculate the amount of greenhouse gases generated by deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon jungle region has come at a good time for assessing the effects of the reform of the country’s forest code.

RIMINI, ITALY, Aug 24 (IPS) - Speaking at an international forum here, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, President of the General Assembly, said it was unfortunate that in some parts of the world there is growing intolerance, xenophobia, and incitement to hatred.

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (IPS) - By mid-September, the Royal Dutch Shell Oil (Shell) group hopes to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of northern Alaska, provided it can secure federal permission from the U.S. government and overcome other logistical obstacles. But a prominent environmental group warns that drilling will do “irreparable damage” to the area.

GIRKE LEGE, Syria, Aug 24 (IPS) - The smuggler wants 200 dollars but Jewan negotiates him down to 100. That’s still a lot for this 26-year-old Syrian Kurd, but he can hardly wait to cross the border to Syria from Iraq. It’s been three years since he last saw his family.

HAWAII, U.S., Aug 24 (IPS) - It must be considered pure fortuity for the Islamic Republic of Iran that the decision to hold the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) summit in Tehran was made three years ago in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (IPS) - The ambitions of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran, as harboured by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak, have been defeated by internal opposition, a growing number of observers have come to believe in the wake of dramatic opposing statements by prominent Israeli leaders, including President Shimon Peres.