News headlines in March 2011, page 9

In the shadow of towering colonial-style office buildings of the world's most powerful financial district, a crowd over 5,000-strong amassed outside Manhattan's City Hall Thursday, chanting 'The people united will never be defeated!'

North-central Namibia is experiencing the heaviest floods ever recorded, but unlike in previous years, the area is fully prepared.

The appointment of an ultra-conservative priest as apostolic administrator of the diocese of Sucumbíos, in northeastern Ecuador, triggered open rebellion among a large proportion of the area's Catholics, with the support of civil society organisations and even of President Rafael Correa himself.

Smallholder farmers in Bandundu Province are boosting their harvests with the help of the sweetly-named velvet bean.

The nuclear disaster in Japan has revived the debate in Latin America on the pros and cons of expanding the use of nuclear energy. While both Argentina and Brazil, which had put the greatest emphasis on nuclear power, plan to continue down that road, other countries have put plans and unfinished projects on hold.

Syrian security forces have opened fire on anti-government protesters in the city of Sanamin near Daraa, killing at least 20 people, according to one witness.

Turkish volte-face Thursday evening to make a sizeable military contribution to NATO's intervention in the Libyan crisis, after two weeks of fierce opposition to the Alliance's mingling with Arab affairs, has further blurred Ankara's position in the Northern African conflict.

Willing or not, the handful of nations armed with nuclear bombs will likely find it ever more difficult in the next few years to reject growing international opinion in support of complete abolition of nuclear weapons, anti-nukes activists and politicians say.

As protests in Bahrain continue, increasingly migrant workers are being victimised in violent hate crimes.

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) prepares to assume command and control of military operations in Libya after five days of the United States at the helm, U.S. President Barack Obama's doctrine of multilateralism is on the line.