News headlines in April 2011, page 11

'It would be bad news for poor countries in Africa if the Doha Round of trade talks fails. This round was meant to rebalance the rules of world trade in favour of developing countries. We have put a lot of resources and hopes into this process and a collapse would be a big betrayal for us.'

YES to sexual diversity! NO to transgenics! LONG LIVE @! In stark contrast to the political apathy of many of their contemporaries, some sectors of Cuban youth are radically re-writing the standard slogans, opting for active participation and fomenting 'new revolutions within the Revolution.'

Civil society organisations in Japan have traditionally been on the sidelines in influencing mainstream policy, but the massive Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of Mar. 11 is becoming a catalyst for important change.

'Most of the houses in our villages are still made with small branches that we have collected, while our timber and our medicinal plants are taken by people who are enriching themselves elsewhere,' said Ampiobo Amuri, a traditional pygmy chief.

The plans and agreements approved at the recently-concluded Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party has left people with a wide range of reactions, from hope, to scepticism, to fear, satisfaction, the sense that old ideological principles have been renounced or that such certainties are no more than window dressing. But the Congress left no one with a feeling of indifference. Cuba's magnetism -sometimes morbid, sometimes admiring- prevents that from happening, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into more than fifteen languages.

Even as the conflict in Libya appears increasingly stalemated, the administration of President Barack Obama seems determined to resist growing allied pressure to commit more U.S. military resources to the fight.

Long considered a sign of weakness or a bourgeois indulgence, psychiatry is slowly entering the mainstream here, with a growing number of Chinese willing to talk through their problems with a therapist.

Sanauddin Baloch never expected the joyous welcome from his family and neighbours when he returned to Pakistan last month, after being held captive at sea by Somali pirates for almost a year.

Will India, the world’s biggest manufacturer of the pesticide endosulfan, and also the biggest victim of the toxic pesticide, persist with opposing its ban globally?

Hezbollah’s hardening stance in the Bahraini crisis has sowed discord between Lebanon and the Gulf island, currently home to about 5,000 Lebanese expatriates. As the situation escalates, many fear that the status of other Lebanese in the rest of the Gulf could come under threat.