News headlines in October 2011, page 16

Eric Saúl Majano stares blankly up at the ceiling in the government office in the Salvadoran capital that he is visiting to seek a disability pension, since he has been unable to work since 2002 due to schizophrenia. But achieving his goal will not be easy.

As the death toll from more than six months of popular unrest climbs past the 3,000 mark, the opposition to the government of President Bashar al-Assad is intensifying efforts to present a unified face to both the outside world and the Syrian people.

Former warlord Prince Johnson, who placed third in Liberia’s election last week, has endorsed the re-election bid of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who was named a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize just days before the vote.

Environmental innovation is gaining ground in the academic, private and government sectors in Mexico, with the creation of research and development centres for local good practices and incubators for green production initiatives.

A former immigration officer and a refugee lawyer both agree on one issue regarding a controversial Canadian bill: The government's plan to expedite anti-human smuggling legislation is unlikely to deter the flood of undocumented migrants to the country and instead bolsters Ottawa's stature as tough on protecting national borders.

International mediators meeting in a peace conference Monday in Spain's northern Basque region were hopeful that the armed separatist group ETA would respond positively to their call for the group to lay down arms.

Reducing poverty in Bangladesh will depend critically on sustaining the successes of the country’s microcredit (MC) programmes, says Muhammad Yunus, the economist who shared the 2006 Nobel peace prize with his creation, Grameen Bank.

When Al-Shabaab militants called the Somali national women’s basketball team captain, Suweys Ali Jama, and told her she had two options: to be killed or to stop playing basketball, she decided that neither was really an option at all.

As the India Brazil and South Africa Summit of heads of state and government starts Tuesday, editors from the respective countries have resolved to provide better coverage of the economic body.

Key neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks who championed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq are calling for military strikes against Iran in retaliation for its purported murder-for-hire plot against the Saudi ambassador here.