A report from Amnesty International from Guatemala: Amnesty’s latest report cites police figures which show that 229 women and girls were killed in Guatemala in the first six months of 2006. Many of the murders were exceptionally brutal, with the victims suffering sexual violence, mutilation and dismemberment. Amnesty says that it knows of only two convictions out of 665 murders of women in 2005. The Guatemalan government appears to be slow in investigating. Up to 70% of murders of women are not investigated and no arrests are made in 97% of cases, Amnesty says. Contrast this to the response of the Thai government when a British girl was murdered on a beach in Phuket – in this case, the police may have appeared to be over zealous, and maybe their motives were influenced by the cost of adverse publicity to the country’s tourism coffers, but even so. A similar problem is happening in Mexico with the killing of street boys and girls.

UN officials and aid workers say that millions of North Koreans will face famine and starvation during the country’s winter if the international community cuts off humanitarian food aid in retaliation for their government’s nuclear test. Before the recent test explosion the people of North Korea face a food crisis after a long-term decline in foreign food aid and summer floods that killed hundreds and washed away fields of rice and wheat. Aid communities fear that a cut in aid could lead to a repeat of the famine of the late 1990s when up to three million are estimated to have starved to death.

Does no-one realise that N Korea’s mad despot leader, Kim Jong Il simply does not care what happens to the people of N Korea? Sanctions are not an effective way to curb the mad and despotic powers of a crazed megalomaniac.

Dubai’s ruling family says a legal case filed against it in Miami in the United States for allegedly enslaving thousands of young camel jockeys is without foundation. The law suit accuses Dubai’s ruler, his brother Hamdan and 500 others of being involved in trafficking and enslaving young children from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan and Mauritania.

The case alleges that tens of thousands of boys as young as three were kept in poor conditions against their will and forced to take part in camel races. The Dubai family say they have overhauled the sport, banning the use of child jockeys and have been helped by Unicef in providing a rehabilitation programme for the child jockeys. It has been illegal to use children as camel jockeys in the UAE since 1993, but only recently has the law been rigidly enforced. When the new racing season begins in November, remote control robots will ride the camels in place of jockeys.

British comedian Sacha Baron who plays a fictional TV reporter called Borat has been invited by Rakhat Aliyev, Kazakh first deputy foreign minister and a powerful son-in-law of President Nursultan Nazarbayev to go to Kazakhstan to see the truth for himself. No doubt the Kazakh authorities have invited the comedian TV reporter to show him that their country is not a nation of horse urine-drinking misogynists.

The Central Asian state’s Foreign Ministry threatened Cohen with legal action last year after he hosted an international music show as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle. The Kazakh authorities shut down Cohen’s www.borat.kz site, prompting a move to a new homepage, www.borat.tv. Rather him than the Beetle who would be afraid of being boiled alive or something equally unpleasant.

The US State Department Mozambique’s recently announced that Mozambique’s 670km long railway line, Sena Railway, which has not been used for 20 years, has been cleared of mines and unexploded ordnance laid in 1984 by insurgents during Mozambique’s civil war.

The railway connects Mozambique’s main port city, Beira, with its resource-rich interior. The US State Department should know – they have invested $13 million in the clearance project, which took just over two years to complete. The Government of Mozambique believes that once operational, the railway will enable the country to tap into its valuable resources such as gold, copper and diamonds. There is no indication when trains may start running again.

When wearing a money belt, first make sure it is cotton and machine washable, they can get awfully hot snug under your clothing. Secondly, use one of those small oblong plastic wallets you often get from Forex bureau’s to keep your money in, inside your money belt as sweaty money is both unattractive to handle and also to feel against the skin.

Reuters recently reported that in Miami, Florida, a leaping spotted eagle ray stabbed an 81-year-old Florida boater in the chest, leaving its poisonous barbed sting lodged close to his heart in an incident very similar to the one that killed Australian TV naturalist Steve Irwin last month. The grandfather of two survived.

A shuttle boat powered entirely by the sun has been launched on the Serpentine lake in London’s Hyde Park. The 14.5m (48ft) Solarshuttle, thought to be the biggest of its kind in the UK, will carry 42 passengers every half-hour between the north side of the Serpentine and the jetty in the south, near the Princess of Wales memorial fountain. It cruises at 4mph and is silent and pollution-free. When not in use and docked, any surplus electricity generated by the boat’s solar panels will be fed back into the National Grid, they say. Designer Christoph Behling was also behind one of the world’s largest solar boats, the Hamburg Solarshuttle, which now ferries passengers across the city’s harbour.

Darts, the game of throwing small pointed missiles at a board divided into scoring segments is normally associated with British pubs and the consumption of large amounts of alcohol, has found a new following in ultra-conservative Iran. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians, including Muslim clerics and soldiers, are enthusiastically picking up their ‘arras’. Darts brings “happiness and joy and fun at a very cheap price”, according to Masoud Zohouri, head of the Iranian Darts Association.

Daintree forest, a World Heritage site in northern Queensland, one of the oldest rainforests on the planet and home to Australia’s most diverse range of species, has been saved from becoming a housing estate. The land was sold off by the state’s maverick Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the early 1980s, and for the last 20 years has been the centre of a battle between developers and environmentalists. At the end of September 2006, the local mayor banned all development in the forest.