News headlines in May 2011

The Ecuadorian government sent in the army to shut down illegal gold mining operations in the jungles of the northwest province of Esmeraldas, where the highly polluting activity is associated with drug traffickers and protected by armed militias and hired killers.

Voters in crisis-stricken Portugal will go to the ballot boxes next Sunday to choose not a government, but something more like delegates who will administer decisions already taken by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.

A gleaming new memorial towers in the centre of Gaza City's battered port. Flanked by flags of various nations whose citizens have sailed to the Gaza Strip to highlight the all-out siege on Gaza, the memorial's inscription bears the names of the Turkish solidarity activists who died one year ago when Israeli commandoes firing machine guns air-dropped onto the Freedom Flotilla, killing nine and injuring over 50 of the civilians on board.

Heads of state from the Amazon, Congo and Borneo-Mekong basins are meeting in the Congolese capital, Brazzaville: leaders hope to reach an accord on sound management of valuable rainforest ecoystems, but civil society actors believe the problems faced by local populations may be ignored.

The leaked reports over the past two weeks of a series of meetings between U.S. officials and a Taliban figure close to leader Mullah Omar seemed to point to real progress toward a negotiated settlement of the war in Afghanistan.

Microcredit in Brazil still has huge potential for expansion, even though microloans have already grown much more than traditional credit in the last eight years.

The leading killer of children over the age of five is not malaria or dysentery, but cars and trucks. And ninety percent of those children are killed on roads in developing countries.

Two months into the uprisings that have shaken the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, the outcome remains largely unclear. The Syrian government's repressive measures, complete with mass arrests, torture, and sizable military deployments, have severely dampen the movement but failed to extinguish the protests altogether.

In his first address to the board of governors of the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), Dr. Warren Smith, the new president of the region's premier lending financial institution, warned of insecurities engulfing Caribbean economies.

In times of war, the accurate mapping of enemy positions can be the key to victory. In the war on mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, mapping the distribution and habitat of mosquitoes can play a crucial role in combating epidemics at the source.