PORTUGAL: Portuguese doctors are staging a 48-hour strike to protest against austerity measures they say are weakening the country’s publicly-funded health service.
The government has to reduce health spending as part of deep budget cuts promised in return for a 78 billion euro bailout last year.
MEXICO: Killings by criminal gangs in the drug violence-wracked border city of Ciudad Juarez fell by 42% in the first six months of this year from the same period of 2011, Mexico’s army said.
General Emilio Zarate, the local army commander, attributed the drop to the weakening of the local Juarez drug cartel and the rival Gente Nueva gang, which is allied with the powerful Sinaloa cartel.
CHINA: China’s state-controlled Catholic church is investigating the ordination of a bishop who announced he was quitting the government body.
The departure was a major embarrassment to Beijing.
JAMAICA: A tiny blood-sucking parasite that infests fish on Caribbean coral reefs has been named after Jamaican reggae singer Bob Marley.
Arkansas State University marine biologist Paul Sikkel discovered the parasite off the US Virgin Islands a decade ago but it was only recently unveiled as Gnathia marleyi as an homage to the singer.
AMERICA: Kristin Chenoweth has been injured on the New York City set of the CBS drama The Good Wife and has been taken to a hospital.
Her publicist, Jill Fritzo, said she was hit in the head by scaffolding and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.
COLOMBIA: Indigenous people angry at being forced to live in the crossfire of Colombia’s long-running civil conflict jeered President Juan Manuel Santos as he visited their war-ravaged south western region.
Leaders of the 115,000 Nasa people are demanding government troops and leftist rebels alike go away and leave them in peace.
AMERICA: A US federal judge continued to block a state law that threatened to shut down Mississippi’s only abortion clinic and make it nearly impossible for a woman to get the procedure in the state.
US District Judge Daniel P. Jordan III temporarily blocked the law on July 1 and extended that order, though he did not say when he would rule on the clinic’s request to put the law on hold for a longer period.
