News headlines in July 2009, page 5

The most complex genetically engineered corn (maize) yet has been approved for use next year in Canada and the United States without its potential health and environmental risks being investigated, anti-biotech activists charged Wednesday.

In recent days, China’s mainland intellectuals have publicly displayed a wave of patriotic support for the Xinjiang cause. They have expressed anger against 'hostile foreign forces', whom they blame for inciting the recent violence in the ethnic Muslim area.

The strategy of the major U.S. and British military offensive in Afghanistan's Helmand province aimed at wresting it from the Taliban is based on bringing back Afghan army and police to maintain permanent control of the population, so the foreign forces can move on to another insurgent stronghold.

The director of the Arab satellite television network al-Jazeera, Wadah Khanfar, is in Washington this week for the first time, part of a brief tour of the U.S. that will also take him to New York.

'Colombia’s indigenous people find themselves in a serious, critical and profoundly worrying human rights situation,' says the preliminary report by United Nations special rapporteur James Anaya, who just completed a visit to this country.

At a time in which countries in the Americas are facing not only the effects of the worldwide economic crisis but also significant health challenges, it is crucial to increase or to at least maintain public health spending while using this opportunity to undertake a strong primary health care-based reform of their health systems, writes Mirta Roses-Periago is Director of the Pan American Health Organisation.

'Reckless', 'cavalier', 'unscrupulous', 'petty politician, not statesman' these and such epithets applied to Benjamin Netanyahu by friends and foes alike - not that he ended up with many friends - when he was first Israel's Prime Minister back in the late 1990s.

Israel enjoys closer relations with the European Union than almost any other foreign country - and work on deepening ties with Israel continues, even as its oppression of the Palestinian people worsens.

Israel enjoys closer relations with the EU than almost any other foreign country - and work on deepening ties with Israel continues, even as its oppression of the Palestinian people worsens.

Isabelle Caillol, an activist with the Turkish branch of the human rights advocacy group Helsinki Citizens Assembly, sent a mass email to pro-migrant activists in Greece in May seeking help to find the family of Abbas Khavari, a 14-year-old Afghan refugee born in Iran.