News headlines in May 2011, page 41

By a few minutes before midnight on May 1, huge jubilant crowds had amassed outside the White House in Washington D.C. and around Ground Zero and Times Square in New York City.

In Mexico, the country in the Americas facing the worst wave of violence against reporters, different journalistic initiatives are combating this dynamic, which fuels a tendency towards self-censorship.

Appointed to the gigantic task of building international understanding of violence against children and adolescents, 58-year-old Portuguese lawyer Marta Santos Pais is based in New York and works with a small staff of only seven people.

Sunday's killing of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden by a small, helicopter-borne team of U.S. Navy Seals could result in significant impacts on U.S. relations and strategy both in Pakistan, where the raid was carried out, and neighbouring Afghanistan, where it was launched, according to policy experts here.

He was all over the place during the 2008 local council election campaign, but no one's seen the councillor since he won his seat, says Freetown journalist Ismael Bakarr. 'He just disappeared.'

When the General Assembly meets on May 20 to elect 15 new members for the Human Rights Council (HRC), the four candidates from the Asian Group - India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Syria - were until now considered certain winners for one primary reason: they remain uncontested on a 'clean slate' for four vacant uncompetitive Asian regional seats.

Israel has lashed out at the recent ground-breaking deal in Cairo, which will see unification of the two main Palestinian political factions after four years of bitter infighting, by threatening economic sanctions against the Palestinians.

It has been two years since the end of Sri Lanka’s decades long war, and life in general has begun to slowly edge back towards normalcy here. Not so for the country’s besieged media community, according to observers and journalists alike - reporting still feels hemmed in and muzzled, they say.

The military offensive waged by the conservative government of President Felipe Calderón against drug cartels in northern Mexico has resulted in an appalling death toll and grief-stricken relatives mourning the victims, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire. Now the drug war is beginning to affect the capital, which had so far escaped the worst of the violence.

The Confebask business association in northern Spain reported that it received a letter from the armed Basque separatist group ETA, announcing the cancellation of 'the revolutionary tax' that it has charged businesses over the last 40 years.