News headlines in July 2011, page 16

Being educated during the country’s civil war was almost impossible. But Victoria Maja wanted to become a doctor, and in order to do so she had to leave South Sudan and live and study in the north. She was one of the lucky ones.

Besides attracting international investors, Cambodia’s new stock exchange is expected to nudge this Southeast Asian country towards greater transparency.

Iran’s extreme rate of seizures of opium and heroin spurs a meeting between Yury Fedotov, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to discuss counter- narcotics efforts.

Fedotov arrived in Tehran on a three-day official visit. This visit will also include the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Two of the greatest evils of the 20th century -colonialism and the Cold War- were both overcome with nonviolence: Gandhi's nonviolent campaign against British colonialism and the nonviolent demonstrations, especially in Gdansk and Leipzig, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, writes Johan Galtung, Rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University and author of "A Theory of Conflict".

Fortified by formal U.S. recognition as Libya's legitimate government, fighters loyal to the rebel Benghazi-based Transitional National Council (TNC) made a key advance Monday by reportedly gaining control of most of the eastern oil port of Brega.

Colombia's DAS domestic secret police service was under the authority of then president Álvaro Uribe 'and it is impossible to think that he didn't know about' the intelligence agency's illegal spying activities, Isabelle Durant, a vice president of the European Parliament, said on a recent visit to this South American country.

A new documentary showing graphic footage from the end of Sri Lanka's war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2009 refuels calls for an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While Kenya struggles to cope with the influx of refuges fleeing the drought in Somalia, it is estimated that about 1,300 people arrive daily at the Dadaab refugee camp, the country is facing its own crisis of malnutrition and starvation.

When weeklong negotiations on the control and regulation of the global arms trade were concluded last week, there was one missing link in the proposed treaty: riot control equipment used recently against peaceful demonstrators in the streets of Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Jordan.

The latest events in the Mediterranean and Middle East are a call for adequate responses to the region's need for economic and political stability, development, employment, and resolution of migration issues. Such responses should aim to optimise potential synergies, coordination, and mutual support for initiatives already under way and for new ones - essentially, a sort of coherent and broad-based Marshall Plan capable of gathering together all the key international actors to address the political, economic, cultural and social (migration) dimensions of the 'Arab Spring'.