News headlines in July 2011, page 3

When news of the disastrous BP oil well explosion reached the residents of Jean Lafitte, Louisiana last April, Mayor Tim Kerner did the only thing he could think of to stop the oil from destroying his community. He encouraged everyone in his town to join him on the water, working day and night throughout the disaster to clean-up the spill.

'We were in prison for three days in Mexico,' Amarilis Rodríguez from Guatemala says between sobs. 'When we crossed the border at Piedras Negras, in Tamaulipas, into the United States, we were chased by the 'migra' (border patrol agents). They caught me, but my brother escaped and I haven't heard from him since.'

The head of the Libyan rebel's armed forces and two of his aides were killed by gunmen Thursday, the head of the rebel leadership said.

More than half a million people remain displaced by Ivory Coast's post-election conflict and many are too afraid to return home for fear of ethnic reprisals, Amnesty International says in a report.

General Abdel Fatah Younis, the chief of staff of the rebel forces in Libya, has been arrested by the National Transition Council.

As the Barcode of Life project continues the work of sequencing specific segments of genes in Mexican animals and plants, there are some concerns about how to safeguard the biological samples collected from the threat of commercial exploitation.

As he basks in the congratulatory messages coming from countries near and far, Irwin LaRocque knows the next three years will not be easy for him and the Caribbean regional integration movement.

As the first of food aid from the United Nations World Food Programme was airlifted into Mogadishu on Wednesday, it came too late for Qadija Ali’s two- year-old son Farah.

Many migrants from southern Brazil who clear forests in Brazil’s state of Amazonas are making their living as small-scale land speculators and not as farmers or as cattle ranchers, new research has found.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for second-hand clothes traders like Susanne Jabavu to do business because of rising costs to import bales of clothing from neighbouring countries.