TOKYO – Japan says the country’s consumer prices fell for the 15th straight month in May as deflation kept its grip on the world’s second biggest economy.

The core consumer price index, which excludes fresh food, fell 1.2 percent from a year earlier.

The result compares Kyodo news agency‘s average market forecast for a 1.3 percent decline.

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TORONTO, Canada (AFP) –
Prime Minister David Cameron urged G20 and G8 nations to start delivering on their pledges, suggesting ahead of two key summits that such meetings had become merely “grand talking shops.”

Cameron, making his first appearance at the summits since taking power in May, said too often, high-profile talks among the most powerful world leaders “fail to live up to the hype.”

The premier — who will hold bilateral talks with leaders including US President Barack Obama, Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev and China’s Hu Jintao — made the comments in a pre-summit article for Canada’s Globe and Mail daily.

In separate comments to reporters, he added the weekend “isn’t about a row over fiscal policy,” amid signs of disagreements between the US and Europe, but instead should focus on global economic recovery.

“I come to the G8 and G20 in Muskoka and Toronto with a clear commitment to make sure these summits deliver for people,” Cameron wrote.

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The United Nations has no shortage of critics – indeed, it often seems it has nothing but critics. It’s slow, feckless and largely pointless. It’s anti-Israel (unless you think it’s anti-Arab), a tool of the big powers (unless you think it’s been hijacked by small states), anti-U.S. (unless you think it’s in America’s pocket). There are people who don’t even like its flag.

But say this for the U.N.: when they get something right they really get it right. And, as two reports issued this week indicate, one of the things they may have gotten very right is progress toward what are known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a set of global health and prosperity objectives agreed to by 192 countries and 23 international organizations in 2000. The MDG resolution set a hard target of 2015 to achieve a range of specific quality-of-life benchmarks everywhere on the planet, but especially in its poorest, most undemocratic corners. And the U.N. – yes, that U.N. – seems to be on track to get the job done. (See a photo gallery of a global look at longevity.)

The MDG was divided into sections, with signatories committing to make progress in eight areas: hunger and poverty, education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, environmental sustainability, economic and government reform, and combating HIV/AIDS and other diseases. The goals were framed so that they would apply to rich and poor countries alike – mandating that signatories reduce by half the number of people who suffer from hunger or HIV/AIDS, for example, or slash by two-thirds the under-five mortality rate or by three-quarters the maternal mortality rate. Whether those things are big problems or small problems in any one country, there’s always room for such incremental improvement. In addition, rich countries agreed to help the poor countries achieve all these goals through economic and other aid, and poor countries agreed to submit to global oversight so that money and resources didn’t vanish into the pockets of corrupt officials. (See a special on the battle for global health.)

With the U.N. planning an MDG update summit in New York in September and the G20 meeting in Toronto later this week, now was a very good time to step back and assess how much progress is being made toward the goals. The first of the two reports that did that was issued by the U.N. and the Overseas Development Institute, a U.K.-based think tank. On the whole, the analysts had some happy numbers to announce.

Currently, about 1.4 billion of the world’s 6.7 billion people live in extreme poverty, which seems like anything but happy until you consider that before the millennium development program was launched, the figure was 1.8 billion. That’s a 22% improvement rate and is all the more impressive considering that it’s been achieved in the face of a global population that’s rising overall. Nearly 45% of signatory countries are on track to meet their goal of halving childhood hunger rates by 2015 and 75% have succeeded in bringing the number down in the critical under-five group. A whopping 95% of all countries have improved their under-five mortality rate, with the worldwide figure falling from 101 deaths per 1,000 live births to 69. Maternal mortality rates have not fallen as dramatically, but there has been at least some improvement in 80% of countries. The biggest indicator of success in this category is whether a qualified nurse, doctor or midwife is present during a birth. These numbers are all over the map – literally – from a low of 6% in Ethiopia to highs 93% in parts of the Caribbean and nearly 100% in parts of the developed world. Still, the trend lines overall are at least up.

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NEW YORK – Following bloodshed over his capture, Jamaican gang leader Christopher “Dudus” Coke arrived in New York under tight security on Thursday to face charges he flooded the East Coast with shipments of cocaine and marijuana, authorities said.

Drug Enforcement Administration agents brought Coke by plane to an airport in suburban White Plains, N.Y., hours after he waived his right to extradition in Jamaica. He was expected to be taken to a federal lockup in lower Manhattan to await arraignment on Friday.

In agreeing to leave Jamaica without a legal fight, Coke said he was saddened by the 76 lives lost in street clashes between fiercely loyal supporters and security forces in his power base in Tivoli Gardens slum. He said he hopes his decision will help Jamaica heal.

“I take this decision for I now believe it to be in the best interest of my family, the community of western Kingston and in particular the people of Tivoli Gardens and above all Jamaica,” Coke said in a statement released to the news media, his first public comments since the U.S. requested his extradition in August.

Coke, 42, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison in the United States if convicted of drug and gun trafficking charges.

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