News headlines in July 2010, page 6

Dark oil slicks are spreading from the middle of Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo towards the shores -- the wetlands, mangroves, beaches and docks. Oil is permeating fishing nets, coating the garbage dumped into the water, killing off wildlife and driving away residents and tourists.

Sandwiched between giant car and furniture stores on a motorway stop-off, a blue-and-white Star of David flag droops nonchalantly on a stifling summer's day. The factory-like building beside it could easily be missed by a traveller who blinks too soon, yet the work undertaken here in the Israel Centre is far from commonplace. Its staff and management are dedicated not to the manufacturing of goods or to devising sales strategies but to drumming up support for a contentious political project: expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

'It was consensual, I owe an apology to no one other than my wife and two children. They're the ones who've suffered from this. And myself.'

The coalition of 11 major opposition parties which boycotted July 23 national assembly elections will also boycott elections to the senate on July 28. The Alliance of Democrats for Change, as the coalition is known, claims that two previous polls - to elect Burundi's district administrators and the president - were characterised by 'massive fraud'.

A small group of students gathered, drawn like butterflies to the sweet sound of soft rock and pop music. Home to one of the most vibrant student communities in Singapore, Ngee Ann Polytechnic is no stranger to loud music and louder fashion sense. What was unusual for the crowd, though, was the concert’s mission — to drum up youths’ support against human trafficking.

Fourteen years ago, Fang Xin declared war on her parents.

Monday's release by WikiLeaks of tens of thousands of classified documents detailing the travails of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan's secret support for the Taliban from 2004 through 2009 comes amid a growing crisis of confidence here in the nearly nine-year-old war.

The 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks, and reported Monday by the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, offer no major revelations that are entirely new, as did the Pentagon Papers to which they are inevitably being compared.

The families of victims of the political violence in the impoverished southern highlands province of Ayacucho, the epicentre of Peru's 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war, complain that the government of Alan García has set new conditions for the start of the payment of reparations.

The Barack Obama administration has found success in passing healthcare reform and legislation touted as an 'overhaul' of the U.S. financial system, but last week it became clear that the Democrats wouldn't advance a climate change bill until after the August recess and, more likely, until next year.