News headlines in 2012, page 5

BUENOS AIRES, Dic 21 (IPS) - Artists-in-residence, once found only in the industrialised North, can now be found throughout Latin America, which is hosting artists from different parts of the world to produce and exhibit their work. There are also opportunities for visiting artists simply to seek inspiration.

MÁLAGA, Spain, Dic 21 (IPS) - A recurring question in crisis-stricken Spain is how to ensure that surplus agricultural products reach those most in need. One response is citizen initiatives to protest the waste of food and to advocate efficient management along the full length of the food chain.

CARACAS, Dic 21 (IPS) - Chagas disease, the third most serious infectious disease in Latin America, is developing a "new face" and moving into urban areas, while a new treatment may offer hope for millions of sufferers.

PESHAWAR/KARACHI, Dic 21 (IPS) - The murder of nine health workers vaccinating children against polio in Pakistan's northwest cities of Peshawar and Charsadda in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, and its southern port city Karachi, have elicited shock and outrage.

RIFT VALLEY, Kenya, Dic 21 (IPS) - Runners Hosea Nailel and Julius Muriuki, who are from Kenya's rival ethnic Kalenjin and Kikuyu communities respectively, met during a half marathon when they broke away from the pack and remained in the leading group.

BARGUNA, Bangladesh, Dic 21 (IPS) - Scientists predict that in the coming years, Bangladesh will be battered by even more climate disasters than it has already endured. Global warming has caused devastating damage in this lower Himalayan delta country of 150 million people, where seawater intrusion, increasingly intense cyclones, dried up rivers and extreme weather events have become the norm.

KOLKATA, Dic 21 (IPS) - In a small dingy room on the edge of a brothel in west Kolkata, capital of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, a 42-year-old former sex worker is trying to eke out a living selling cooked food in her neighbourhood, while tending to her sick husband and a paralysed son.

WASHINGTON, Dic 20 (IPS) - The International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s internal auditor has criticised the Fund's recent policy on foreign currency reserves, and has offered an implicit warning that the United States' outsized influence within the institution has resulted in policy that was insufficiently evidence-based.

BOGOTA, Dic 20 (IPS) - Colombia's large-scale agricultural producers and peasant farmers managed to listen to each other for the first time about the core cause of the decades-long armed conflict: the concentration of rural land ownership and the social and economic development of the countryside.

JERUSALEM, Dic 20 (IPS) - While the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip hasn't been so quiet for the past two decades, it's now the turn of the occupied West Bank to show signs of eruption.