News headlines in February 2012, page 20

President Nursultan Nazarbayev is orchestrating a media crackdown that editors and independent analysts say is the harshest since he began ruling this Central Asian republic in 1989.

Fisher Wanka Masani, 25, has been inseparable from his two-dollar transistor ever since a community radio (CR) station started up in this coastal town. The square black box blares popular songs while Masani waits for his brothers to land the daily catch.

Amid increasing reports of physical abuses resulting in deaths in youth detention and correctional centres across the country, an Indonesian state commission has embarked on a national campaign to scrap detention and imprisonment of children altogether.

What with rumours from Israel of war on Iran, a major showdown with the Egyptian military over the indictments of government- funded U.S. activists in Cairo, and continuing political paralysis in Iraq, you would think President Barack Obama has enough Middle East crises to deal with.

Thirty years after England and Argentina went to war over ownership of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, tensions have again been rising. Unlike the 1982 conflict, however, this time the main bone of contention is oil, local legislators claim.

The lack of international regulation in the trade of conventional arms is a 'scandal' that must be brought to an end, said a coalition of non-governmental organisations as they heightened their campaign this week for a comprehensive United Nations treaty.

Russia and China, two veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council described as key arms suppliers to the embattled regime in Syria, are now accused of supplying weapons and fuelling an ongoing conflict in another military hotspot: Sudan.

They called themselves the 'cut hands commandos' because they lopped off their victims' hands with machetes; the 'burn house unit', for the thousands of families who were locked into their homes and roasted alive; the 'born naked squad', in reference to the hapless hundreds who were stripped naked and raped before being bludgeoned or burned to death.

They survived floods and witnessed the horrific scenes of their houses, livestock, household items and gardens being swept away at the end of January. Now, the people of the Nsanje and Chikhwawa districts on Malawi’s southern border with Mozambique are facing another menace; a cholera outbreak, which has already killed one child and infected up to 103 people.

A recent series of public spats between Hong Kong locals and mainland Chinese have highlighted escalating tensions between Beijing and the former colony - and heralded in one of the most conspicuous anti-mainland campaigns seen in Hong Kong since the handover.