News headlines in June 2013, page 9

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 (IPS) - United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay have advised "maximum restraint" following media reports of a violent police crackdown on peaceful protestors in Istanbul's Gezi Park.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 (IPS) - The bold strategy implemented by the Brazilian government has achieved an 84 percent reduction in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest in the last eight years. But when the natural resources and pesticides used in agricultural production are taken into account, the environmental progress made is not so impressive.

PHNOM PENH, Jun 20 (IPS) - The violence that defined Cambodia during the years of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) may have been relegated to the realm of history, but the actions of the ruling party ahead of the Jul. 28 election smack of the dirty politics that once ruled this Southeast Asian country.

ZURICH, Switzerland, Jun 20 (IPS) - Once more, Swiss voters have lashed out against asylum seekers, further tightening the country's already strict asylum law. The government has meanwhile announced a radical restructuring of the asylum procedure.

MOGADISHU, Jun 20 (IPS) - Seven-year-old Istar Mumin lies on a bed, motionless, in one of the rooms of her family home in Mogadishu's Hamarweyne district. She has just gone through the horrifying ritual of "the cut," which was carried out by a local Somali nurse.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 (IPS) - Yves Norodom, a 21-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Brazil, is one of 45.2 million displaced people around the world – the largest number in 20 years.

WASHINGTON, Jun 19 (IPS) - Reactions have been mixed to President Barack Obama's call for greater nuclear arms reductions in the United States and Russia, made during his speech in Berlin on Wednesday.

TARAWA, Kiribati, Jun 19 (IPS) - A growing chorus of politicians, scientists and environmentalists are urging President Anote Tong of Kiribati to actually do what he claims was already done in 2008: create the world's most effective marine protected area in a remote archipelago in the Central Pacific Ocean.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 19 (IPS) - The powerful tractors and other farm machinery that landowners recently used to block roads at a dozen points from north to south in Brazil illustrated the economic clout of big agriculture, which rose up against the demarcation of indigenous reserves.

COLOMBO, Jun 19 (IPS) - The Monetary Board of Sri Lanka's Central Bank, tasked with keeping the island's economy on an even keel, does not only keep tabs on exchange rates, gold prices and inflation – it also has an eye on a less obvious indicator of economic stability: water levels in the country's main reservoirs.