News headlines in 2013, page 64

COLOMBO, Sep 03 (IPS) - That it would be a visit fraught with diplomatic tension was undoubted. Navanetham ‘Navi' Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was into the third day of her week-long visit from Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 to Sri Lanka when her entourage broke into animated discussion. 

ERBIL, Iraqi Kurdistan, Sep 03 (IPS) - "Life is almost normal in the centre of Damascus," local resident Hisham says from the predominantly Christian neighbourhood of Bab Touma. "Only the occasional noise of artillery on the outskirts reminds me that we are at war."

LIMA, Sep 02 (IPS) - Venicia Ávalos, a 65-year-old indigenous woman from Peru's highlands region of Ayacucho, looks for her son's name among a labyrinth formed by thousands of small grey stones.

MEXICO CITY, Sep 02 (IPS) - "No one can stop me from working for migrants' rights, because no one is above my own conscience," said Mexican Catholic priest Alejandro Solalinde.

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 02 (IPS) - When the General Assembly declared 2013 the International Year of Water Cooperation (IYWC) three years ago, the U.N.'s highest policy-making body was conscious of the perennial conflicts triggered by competition over one of the world's most critical finite resources.

LONDON, Sep 02 (IPS) - A Dangerous Delusion is the work of one of Britain's most brilliant political commentators, Peter Oborne, and an Irish physicist, David Morrison, who has written powerfully about the misleading of British public and parliamentary opinion in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War.

HAVANA, Sep 02 (IPS) - The stray cat's fur was burned and its eyes were hanging from its sockets when pensioner Neida González found it on a street in the Cuban capital. The cat, which she named Grenlito, now lives with her eight other pets.

MOGADISHU, Sep 02 (IPS) - Somali clan leaders say that an Aug. 27 agreement between the government and only a few leaders from the country's three southern Jubba regions, which aims to resolve the ongoing dispute over who controls the area, creates more problems than it solves.

MOSCOW, Sep 02 (IPS) - A Kremlin compromise on nuclear disarmament looks as far away as ever as Russian president Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama use their countries' strained relations to bolster their own domestic political agendas, experts say.

CAIRO, Sep 02 (IPS) - It is Anna Betanova's second visit to Egypt and very different from the last time. The 26-year-old accountant from St Petersburg, Russia, is in Hurghada, the prominent resort destination on the Red Sea coast, some 400 km southeast of capital Cairo. "The beaches are almost empty," she told IPS, "and we spend most of the day watching TV."