News headlines in May 2011, page 39

Tadanori Anzai and his wife Michiko left their town in Minamisoma, Fukushima prefecture, more than a month ago to escape the radioactive contamination spewing from the earthquake-damaged nuclear power plant located close to their home and tiny eatery.

LGBT social networks and experts with Cuba's National Sex Education Centre (CENESEX) announced Tuesday that events surrounding the Day Against Homophobia will last a month this year in this Caribbean island nation.

Far from concluding the war on terror, both Western and Muslim-majority countries - many emerging or still embroiled in months of popular protests — will continue to face a threat from extremist ideology after the United States' decade-long campaign to capture or kill Osama bin Laden has come to an end, most analysts say.

The U.S. discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in a compound some 50 kilometres from Islamabad is a 'defining moment' for a U.S.-Pakistan relationship fraught with duplicity and dashed expectations.

The United Nations is predicting that come Oct. 31, the world population will hit the seven billion mark - and keep expanding till it reaches 9.3 billion by the year 2050.

Every minute, somewhere in the world, a child goes blind according to the World Health Organization. Three in five poor children who go blind are likely to die within two years of losing their site - yet half of cases of childhood blindness are avoidable.


In Burkina Faso, Niger, Kenya, Uganda: governments are worried by soaring prices - and by newly confident and enraged civil society. Governments are being challenged to take decisive action, despite lacking the tools to address rising global oil prices. Their responses could have important consequences for their legitimacy and survival.

When George W. Bush rejected a Taliban offer to have Osama bin Laden tried by a moderate group of Islamic states in mid- October 2001, he gave up the only opportunity the United States would have to end bin Laden's terrorist career for the next nine years.

While Mexico played host to a meeting for the creation of a Green Climate Fund, doubts have been raised over whether the millions of dollars in financing the country has already received in recent years have been effectively implemented to combat global warming and its consequences.

The upsurge in the use of the toxic pesticide endosulfan, targeted for prohibition by the international community, illustrates one of the dilemmas of intensive agriculture in Argentina and Latin America in general.