Updates

As French President Hollande promises troop withdrawal this year, and the rest of NATO plans to exit by 2014, Afghanistan's best hope may be the disunity and ill-discipline of the Taliban.

Read the full article in the Christian Science Monitor.

At least 200 have died in Syria in the two months since a UN-backed cease-fire went into effect, but Ban Ki-moon rejects assertions that part of the problem is the low number of monitors on the ground.

Read the full article in the Christian Science Monitor.

A land dispute is apparently behind violence that left 30 dead near the Sari village, in north-west Burkina Faso, along the border with Mali, based on a toll released by Burkina’s Territorial administration minister Jérôme Bougouma reported by the local ‘Observateur Paalga’ newspaper.

Francis Markus in Japan

As family disagreements go, the issue over Kenichi Sakuma’s beautifully cultivated traditional Japanese garden, seems gentle and good humoured by any standards. But it just may be emblematic of the tensions and splits which are being engendered as this community tries to get back to some semblance of normal life.

Surveying the perfectly positioned rocks and flowering trees and bushes, Mr. Sakuma, 66, says with his guffawing laugh: “It’s taken me years to get it this way! I couldn’t bear to see it torn up and flattened.”

Some 13,000 people have been treated and 132 have died in the cholera outbreak underway in Haiti since the start of the year, according to the OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). Data that adds to the toll released in mid May by the ministry of Public Health and population (MSPP) of Port-au-Prince, reporting 7,000 deaths on over 540,000 cases since the outbreak of the epidemic in October 2010.