News stories by Patricia Grogg, page 18

The impacts of climate change on human health will require new approaches to development, based on mitigation and adaptation programmes in line with policies that ensure equal access to health care.

Women in Cuba cite a variety of reasons to explain their decision to have only one child, ranging from the housing shortage to the rising cost of living and the many work responsibilities they have to shoulder. But many say that if things were different they would have a bigger family.

Three new international cooperation agreements channeled through the United Nations system in Cuba are aimed at strengthening food security, especially in the poorest parts of the country.

Cuban President Raúl Castro is willing to risk unpopular measures to free the state from its excessive burden of subsidies and for-free services, as part of a programme to adjust public expenditure to shrunken government revenues and balance the budget.

While the Cuban government has intensified its protests against the U.S. embargo, typically hostile signals between the two nations have been mixed with hints of a more relaxed tone since U.S. President Barack Obama took office.

Every summer in Cuba, the complaint is heard over and over again: 'These beaches are filthy!' Empty beer and soft drink bottles, plastic bags and cups, the remains of someone's picnic lunch, and innumerable cigarette butts are strewn on the sand every day, despite the threat of fines and the pleas of ecologists.

Even with her house practically in ruins, Isabel García wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else. She’d rather stay where she knows that no matter what corner she turns she’ll always be able to gaze out into the blue sea or raise her eyes up to the green mountains that shelter her beloved city of Santiago, in eastern Cuba.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez complained that the U.S. embargo against Cuba has remained intact under the government of Barack Obama, who he said has 'a historic opportunity' to eliminate the 'obsolete' and 'unacceptable' blockade in place for nearly half a century.

A moderate dissident group in Cuba that aspires to become a 'political majority' in the future announced Thursday that it would hold a congress in 2010.

Cuba is facing the challenge of boosting agricultural output under difficult climate conditions and on soils badly deteriorated by erosion, salinity and other problems. And scientists have a strategic role to play, provided they do not sit in their laboratories but get out into the fields where the action is.