News headlines in July 2009, page 31

'Ialorixá' Gilda died of a massive heart attack in 1999 after members of a pentecostal church swarmed into her temple and hit her over the head with a Bible. Her death drew attention to the growing religious intolerance in Brazil, which was denounced this week at the United Nations.

Concern is mounting in Kenya that the government has leased a big slice of agricultural land to the Qatari foreign investors to produce food for export.

'Now the fish are going to disappear,' said Luis Umpunchi, an Awajún Indian, one of about 20 people gathered around a broken oil pipeline in the Jayais community, in the northern Peruvian province of Amazonas.

Africa must embrace agricultural biotechnology or risk being excluded from a major technological revolution that has had increased food production in the Europe, North America and Asia.

The Swedish government, which now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union for the second half of this year, says plans to bring Croatia into the EU have not been derailed despite recent political events in the country. Croatia is officially set to join the Union as its 28th member in 2011.

The final day of the African Union summit has been dedicated to the issue of the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, charged with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape and torture.

U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Russia next week is expected to bring significant but limited improvement in troubled relations between the two giants.

As Botswana prepares for general elections in October, gender activists are protesting against the lack of female parliamentary candidates.

Cuba and the United States are poised to resume talks on migration issues any time now, although the five Cuban agents imprisoned in the U.S. remain 'a formidable obstacle' to normalising bilateral relations, according to Cuban parliament president Ricardo Alarcón.

A day after the Delhi High Court's landmark judgment to overturn a colonial law that criminalised homosexuality, Indians expressed mixed reactions to the verdict.