News headlines in April 2011, page 13

Supporters of asylum seekers here say that the government’s response to recent suicides in Australian immigration detention centres ignores what is already well-known: that indefinite, long-term detention in crowded facilities results in deaths.

The prime minister of Côte d'Ivoire, Guillaume Soro, held his first cabinet meeting away from the Golf Hotel on Tuesday. The meeting - at the Prime Minister's Office in the Plateau d'Abidjan - was symbolic, intended to signal a return to normal life in a city that endured heavy fighting between Mar. 30 and the fall of former president Laurent Gbagbo on Apr. 11.

While Belgium’s politicians, academics, business leaders and feminists grapple with the concept and reality of a law banning headscarves in public institutions and beyond, two entrepreneurial women have joined forces to rescue the headscarf from the country’s political debate. Inge Rombauts and Fatima Rafiy run the exclusive hijab boutique Noor D’Izar, which offers women, 'a fashionable solution regardless of their reasons for wanting to wear a headscarf,' Inge Rombauts tells IPS.

A knock on the door of his home in Bhutan one midnight turned middle-level government official Balaram Paudyal into a fugitive overnight, after he managed to elude policemen arresting him for 'anti-government activities', and then fled the country.

In mid-March, Egypt's transitional government formally dissolved the hated State Security Investigations (SSI) apparatus, meeting a longstanding demand of the opposition. But in the month since, authorities have remained tight- lipped about the SSI's planned successor agency, raising fears that the transformation will be in name only.

The summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries showed up both the strengths and the limitations of the caucus of emerging economies, says former Indian foreign minister Shyam Saran in an interview to IPS.

Accompanied unexpectedly by Fidel Castro, his brother Raúl brought the sixth congress of Cuba's Communist Party (PCC) to a close Tuesday with a call to 'change everything that should be changed,' but without abandoning the socialist path taken on Apr. 16, 1961.

Countries around the lower Mekong have failed to reach a consensus on a controversial proposal that could see Laos build the first hydropower dam on this part of the vital river.

Soaring international prices for oil and gas are driving the expansion of renewable energies in Central America, a region that has plenty of untapped potential for producing hydroelectricity, wind power and geothermal energy.

The highly-contested Principles on Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI), a set of priorities that peasants’ collectives and food rights groups have been battling for years, are back on the table this week, as the annual Conference on Land and Poverty opened at World Bank headquarters here Monday.