News headlines in 2013, page 176

MBABANE, Apr 09 (IPS) - For more than a decade after 1992, when Swazi gold miner Benson Maseko, 50, fell ill with chest pains and a nagging cough, he did not seek treatment.

BAJAUR AGENCY, Pakistan, Apr 09 (IPS) - "My sole motive is to serve my people, especially women who have had no role in politics so far. I feel we can make progress only by bringing in women into mainstream politics."

WASHINGTON, Apr 08 (IPS) - The World Bank will be placing stronger emphasis on issues of land tenure and socially and environmentally sustainable agricultural investing, it announced Monday.

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 08 (IPS) - Over 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2010. In fact, since 1980, the worldwide prevalence of obesity has doubled, according to the British medical journal the Lancet.

LONDON, Apr 08 (IPS) - I nearly died on the day I was born. My mother laboured for 24 hours in a bush hospital in northern Uganda that had no running water and no electricity. Fortunately, the midwife found a doctor, who had witnessed a Caesarian section, who managed to operate, saving my life and my mother's. Today, had I been born in one of the many places across the world without adequate maternal and reproductive health care, I may not have survived my own day of birth.

MÁLAGA, Spain, Apr 08 (IPS) - Wholemeal rye bread, lettuce and chard are some of the products on offer from the El Caminito urban vegetable garden at the small organic produce market in this southern Spanish city, with prices set in "comunes", one of more than 30 social currencies circulating in the country.

ADDIS ABABA, Apr 08 (IPS) - A combination of an abundance of bamboo and eager foreign investment is making Ethiopia a frontier for the bamboo industrial revolution in Africa, according to this country's government.

HONIARA, Solomon Islands, Apr 08 (IPS) - The Solomon Islands, a developing island nation in the south-west Pacific Islands, has one of the highest urbanisation rates in the region, and the basic service infrastructure is struggling to cater for the influx of people from the provinces to the capital, Honiara. Thirty-five percent of the city's population, who live in informal settlements, are facing the health consequences of a dire shortage of clean water and sanitation.

KIGALI, Apr 07 (IPS) - Bernard Kayumba, the mayor of Karongi district in western Rwanda, remembers just what it was like to be caught up in the genocide that claimed the lives of almost one million people in 100 days 19 years ago.

KARACHI, Apr 07 (IPS) - Oblivious to the cloud of dust they have kicked up in just a few minutes, panting and sweating, moving lithely, this way, then that, they jostle the ball smoothly until one team scores a goal.