News headlines in March 2010, page 11

A replica of the historic Cuban slave ship Amistad, which was taken over by the Africans aboard in 1839, is visiting Cuba, where academics and community leaders have begun to publicly debate the problem of racial discrimination that has not been stomped out in Cuban society.

Peru is enthusiastically espousing free trade, and has signed six tariff-lowering agreements in the space of a year. But it has not matched them with the internal policies needed to reduce their impact on labour rights, the environment, and sensitive areas like agriculture, social organisations and experts say.

Anger against the popular rap and hip-hop singer Akon, whose music video has footage of bikini-clad women dancing near a Buddha statue, may have been just a ruse used in this week’s attack on a private media house in Sri Lanka, media advocates fear.

The Tunisian government should stop the harassment of political prisoners after their release from jail, say rights groups in two new reports.

Like many residents of this slow-paced Lao capital, graduate student Packno usually enjoys meeting up with her family and friends for dinner at any of the restaurants along the Mekong River.

Rampant illegal fishing is hitting some of the poorest West African countries the hardest as this practice is globally most rife in the east central Atlantic Ocean area, which covers the territorial waters of some 15 African countries from Morocco and Mauritania in the north to Angola in the south.

Legislators say it would encourage more Islamic behaviour and cure social ills, but critics say a complete ban by Bahrain on selling alcohol would mean big losses in tax revenues and lead to a black market in liquor.

In early February, 41-year-old Fayez Ahmed Faraj, a father of nine from the city of Hebron, 30 miles south of Jerusalem, in the southern West Bank, was shot dead in his home town by Israeli soldiers after he allegedly tried to stab one of them.

When the G20, representing some of world's politically and economically powerful developing and industrial nations, suddenly gained a higher profile with the onset of the global financial crisis two years ago, there was apprehension the group would sooner or later try to upstage the United Nations and its key decision-making role.

Although social organisations in the region got the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to agree to a process of internal reforms, there are still doubts about how the changes will be reflected in the multilateral lender's new strategy.