News headlines in July 2010, page 5

A new law gives private oil companies in Ecuador four to six months to renegotiate new service contracts.

Football functions on so many levels. It can be big business, moving astronomical quantities of cash, with obscene salaries for owners, coaches and star players. And it can be a widely played sport, found in every park, street or vacant lot. And it can be the common ground for multicultural coexistence.

Posseh Sesay will never be able to bear children again following a tragic birthing experience at the hands of her village traditional birth attendant (TBA).

The freedom of information bill pending in opposition-ruled Selangor state may be just at the state level, but it throws a direct challenge to the federal government of Malaysia and its strict controls on the media.

Like any other Friday morning, hordes of people flocked at the shrine of 11th-century Sufi saint, Hazrat Ali Hajveri, that is near Bhaati Gate inside Lahore’s walled city on Jul. 2. By that afternoon, a much larger crowd had gathered at the site, this time for the usual Friday prayers.

Eleven-year-old Irene Thembo* lies curled like a foetus on a white wooden bench for outpatients at a clinic in rural Zimbabwe. The orphan, whose parents died of HIV-related illnesses, is terribly sick.

Fifty-three percent of Peru is covered with native rainforest, but the agencies in charge of protecting and monitoring this vast area are toothless and have neither the staff nor the resources to cope with the job, according to a report from the Defensoría del Pueblo (Ombudsperson's Office).

Unlike so many immigrants who have come to Spain in search of jobs and a better standard of living, 39-year-old Flávio José Carvalho da Silva moved to this northeastern Spanish city from his home country of Brazil because he fell in love with a local woman.

For a country plagued by a weak judiciary and where government officials have profited from a culture of impunity, Monday’s verdict in the first case to try a surviving commandant of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime broke new legal ground in Cambodia.

While some believe that restrictions on natural resource exports should be done away with, this could cause an increase in such exports that would be detrimental to the environment and bad for development.