News headlines in 2013, page 131

MAPUTO, Jun 05 (IPS) - Lined up along the streets of central Maputo, Mozambique's capital city, are expensive, European-style bars and restaurants with sophisticated names like Café Continental, Nautilus, 1908 and Mundos.

ADDIS ABABA, Jun 05 (IPS) - Ethiopia's long-term hydropower strategy is proving to be both a source of economic sustenance and contention. In becoming Africa's leading power exporter through the construction of a series of dams across the country, Ethiopia could threaten the lives of millions who depend on the Nile River's waters.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 04 (IPS) - The 193-member U.N. General Assembly (UNGA), in its supreme wisdom, has declared over 100 commemorative "days" dedicated to peacekeepers, refugees, children, migrants, girl children, rural women and indigenous people, among others.

WASHINGTON, Jun 04 (IPS) - The U.S. government announced Tuesday that it would be going forward with long-discussed plans to auction federal leases off the Atlantic Ocean coast for the development of offshore wind energy.

RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank, Jun 04 (IPS) - Hazem Maher, 16, from Hebron in the southern West Bank, works a backbreaking 12-hour day in the fruit and vegetable market in the city of El Bireh, next to Ramallah. He earns just over 15 dollars a day as a porter.

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 04 (IPS) - For years, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in China's arid northwest has been the setting of clashes with the central government and ethnic violence between Muslim Uyghurs and Han Chinese.

HAVANA, Jun 04 (IPS) - Many lesbians and gays in Cuba find different ways of achieving their dream of becoming mothers and fathers and forming families. But this is complicated in a country where neither civil unions nor adoption by non-heterosexual persons are legally recognised.

GENEVA, Jun 04 (IPS) - The old theories governing the way that countries produce and trade are being replaced. The pattern of trade is being transformed by increasingly sophisticated technology and innovations in transportation; and the topography of actors is shifting to reflect new poles of growth.

BOGOTA, Jun 04 (IPS) - Drugs and arms traffickers are muscling in on Colombia's Pacific coastal region, forcibly displacing local people, according to a new report by the Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES).

QUITO, Jun 04 (IPS) - The "páramos" or high plateaus of Ecuador, a crucial source of water, are showing signs of extreme fragility and a troubling loss of capacity to conserve this vital resource and sustain the survival of numerous species found nowhere else on earth.