News headlines in March 2011, page 38

The world's key arms manufacturers are still firmly entrenched in the United States and Western Europe, while some of the newly-emerging military industries in China, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Israel, Turkey and Kuwait are trailing mostly far behind.

Fresh protests have taken place in the Gulf sultanate of Oman, following a wave of pro-democracy demonstrations across the Arab world. The unrest in Sohar has been a rare outbreak of discontent in the normally calm sultanate of Oman.

How does a woman challenge deeply entrenched cultural practices to convince her husband, her brother or father that she can demand equal rights?

Lighting up dark areas of Cuban society with youthful vigour, Muestra Joven (the Young Cinema Exhibition), a local independent film event, reached its 10th anniversary characterised by experimentation and subjects that are both complex and invisible in the national media.

Corruption is a main enabling factor in drug trafficking, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Vienna- based International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), And vast profits generated in drug markets often exceed the financial resources of state institutions, making these drug empires political forces,with the power and authority of legitimate organizations.

Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe are poised to sign a memorandum of understanding to improve power generation along the length of the Zambezi River.

As violent unrest continues unabated in Libya, with the potential to descend into what U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called a 'protracted civil war' in statements to lawmakers here this week, international rights groups are raising the alarm over the resulting humanitarian crisis and the particularly desperate plight of stranded immigrant labourers.

Ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak portrayed himself as a paradigm of stability in a country he once described as a 'powder keg' of sectarian unrest. Yet far from promoting stability, his regime may have actually been the source of much of the religious strife it claimed to suppress.

Thousands of foreign labourers here are squeezed into houses the government says are uninhabitable, but they are unlikely to get any relief soon, with the non- stop protests in the capital hurting many businesses.

The first in a new series of 11 dams planned across the Mekong, South-east Asia’s largest river, could break a special bond between two communist-ruled countries.