News headlines in June 2011, page 2

As protests persist in Syria, the economy is becoming an increasing concern for many, who wonder if it will eventually falter in light of the recent unrest.

Seventy-five-year-old Verdiana Protas is worried that the 20 cattle she bought with her pension money will soon die because the 10-kilometre-long river in her village in northwest Tanzania has been dry for two years now and finding alternative sources of water is getting more and more difficult.

Mark Bowden, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, urged an effective response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in the African country. 'If we are not able to respond rapidly, there will be many more lives lost as result of malnutrition,' Bowden said on Wednesday at the United Nations.

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders, including the new Haitian President Michel Martelly, will gather here Friday for their annual summit as impatience grows with an array of stalled regional integration initiatives.

After decades of being relegated to the sidelines, Japan’s fledging renewable energy industry is now basking in the limelight as the nation struggles to cope with the Fukushima nuclear accident.

Egypt has cancelled plans to borrow 3 billion dollars from the International Monetary Fund because of conditions that violated the country’s national sovereignty and a public outcry that warned against terms that were blamed for impoverishing many Egyptians.

'We are in a multi-polar world now,' Robert Gates told a Washington Post columnist within a year of his taking over the Pentagon in early 2007.

Political will is all that's needed to bring electricity to the 2.5 billion people with no or unreliable access to power, or to feed the one billion who go hungry every day, or to finally begin to slash carbon emissions to avoid dangerous climate change, or just about any other global problem.

Activists and experts on education flatly reject a proposal by the leftwing government of Mauricio Funes to bring back compulsory military service, for young people at risk of being recruited by youth gangs and organised crime.

While humanitarian organisations try to bury the corpses scattered across Southern Kordofan, aid to the thousands of people displaced by the fighting is slow as the country’s humanitarian commission has prohibited most aid organisations from working in the area.