News headlines in 2013, page 125

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania, Jun 12 (IPS) - Khadija Komboani's nearest well is filled with salt water thanks to the rising sea around Tanzania's Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar.

JERUSALEM, Jun 12 (IPS) - The struggle for gender equality and Jewish pluralism took a highly symbolic turn on Sunday at the Western Wall, Judaism's most revered site and emblem of unity, as a group of women known as "Women of the Wall" prayed legally and in a way they saw fit.

CAIRO, Jun 12 (IPS) - The bio-gas digester on the roof of Hussein Farag's apartment in one of Cairo's poorest districts provides a daily supply of cooking gas produced from the kitchen waste his family would otherwise discard in plastic bags or empty into the clogged sewer below his building.

WASHINGTON, Jun 12 (IPS) - The world - especially the Greater Middle East – has become less peaceful than it was five years ago, according to the 2013 edition of the annual Global Peace Index (GPI) released here Tuesday by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP).

WASHINGTON, Jun 12 (IPS) - A broad-based alliance of public interest and other groups is warning that years of attacks by business interests has made the U.S. regulatory so inefficient that public safety is being put at risk.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 11 (IPS) - The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is convinced there is sufficient global capacity to produce enough food to adequately feed the world's seven billion people.

MAHACHAI, Thailand, Jun 11 (IPS) - Next time you visit Walmart and throw that packet of frozen shrimp in your shopping cart, pause a moment.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 11 (IPS) - Author Malcolm Gladwell draws on the science of epidemiology in his book "The Tipping Point" to explain how ideas spread through a population, in the same way as an infectious disease can proceed from a few cases to a full-blown pandemic.

TUCURINCA, Colombia, Jun 11 (IPS) - José "Goyo" Hernández has never been given a mask to keep him from breathing in the coal dust blowing off the 13 trains that pass daily through this village in the municipality of Zona Bananera in the northern Colombian department of Magdalena, during his 12-hour shift at the railway crossing.

VILNIUS, Lithuania, Jun 11 (IPS) - As former presidents, senior diplomats and experts meet in the Lithuanian capital to discuss a litany of rights abuses, lethal epidemics and social destruction caused by repressive drug policies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, pockets of hope for drug reform are emerging across the region.