News headlines in June 2010, page 30

Israel's disastrous raid in international waters Monday on a Turkish-flagged flotilla carrying humanitarian supplies to Gaza has resurrected a long-running debate over whether Washington's close alliance with the Jewish state really serves U.S. strategic interests.

Farmers across Eastern and Southern Africa will soon have a new organic insecticide effective enough to kill one of their most deadly foes — the armyworm.

Even though tuberculosis (TB) is a major cause for illness and mortality in children, South Africa lacks the political will to tackle the disease, health experts say.

From the moment he wakes up each morning, Abraham Fraijo feels the absence of his daughter Emilia, one of the 49 children who died Jun. 5, 2009, in a fire at the ABC child-care centre in the northwestern Mexican city of Hermosillo. It is the battle for justice that keeps him going.

The Global Compact (GC), which celebrates its 10th anniversary with a summit meeting later this month, has been described as a key initiative of the United Nations to prod private companies and blue-chip corporations to pro-actively address environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues relating to the workplace.

Rising global wealth spells disaster for the planet, with environmental impacts growing roughly 80 percent with a doubling of income, reports the first comprehensive study of consumption.

Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, which form the so-called Central American Northern Triangle, have many weak points when it comes to natural disasters. The were exposed once again this week by tropical storm Agatha, which claimed nearly 200 lives and left millions of dollars in infrastructural damage.

The policy of a saturation police presence in the favelas or shantytowns that are home to around 20 percent of the population of this Brazilian city is merely a means of criminalising poverty, because it does nothing to address the underlying question of social exclusion, which drives the violence, human rights groups complain.

Normally, in this non-descript sleepy Arab town in Galilee, TV sets are tuned to Al-Jazeera or Al-Arabiyya, the round-the-clock Arabic networks.

Some CIA officers involved in the agency's drone strikes programme in Pakistan and elsewhere are privately expressing their opposition to the programme within the agency, because it is helping al Qaeda and its allies recruit, according to a retired military officer in contact with them.