News headlines in October 2011, page 29

Rather than taking any action to address the situation and terrified by recent drops on the stock exchanges, governments are bending over backwards to coddle the markets when what they should do is disarm them and make them submit to strict regulation. How long can we continue to allow financial speculation to set the terms for political representation? What is democracy for, after all? What is the use of voting when the markets dictate what the government should do? asks Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde diplomatique en espanol.

There are clear indications that the world is moving away from capital punshment: the legal abolition of the sanction in recent years in many states of the US -which saw a drop in executions from 52 in 2009 to 46 in 2010-, the drop that is apparently occurring in China, the reduction in the number of capital offenses in China and Vietnam, and the thousands of death sentences commuted in Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Burma, writes Emma Bonino, Vice president of the Italian Senate and a leader of the Radical Party.

'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you — then you win,' a middle-aged man yells into the microphone from a makeshift stage erected at the far end of Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC.

Garbage pickers, emaciated dogs and carrion birds alike all hunt for items of value at the Cambalache garbage dump, before they have to give way to the smouldering fire that burns up to 900 tonnes of waste a day in the open air, spreading its smoke over Ciudad Guayana in northeastern Venezuela.

When Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently addressed the U.N. General Assembly on the impact of migration on development, he counted himself as one of 214 million international migrants who live outside their home countries.

Dissension over Adm. Mike Mullen's accusation that the Haqqani network of Afghan insurgents is a 'veritable arm' of Pakistan's intelligence agency and the revelation that a U.S. official met with a Haqqani official have provided new evidence of a long-simmering struggle within the Barack Obama administration over how to deal with the most effective element of the Afghan resistance to U.S.-NATO forces.

It seems all of Liberia is paying close attention to the campaign for the Oct. 11 presidential and legislative elections. But Sekou Camara is one exception.

Indigenous children in the southwestern Colombian province of Cauca do not know what peace is. For the government forces and the leftwing guerrillas, the territory of the Nasa people is a strategic battleground.

Emmanuel Joseph and George Amoah, two disabled Ghanaians, occupy different ends of the spectrum. The former lies on a piece of cardboard in Accra Central, his half-naked body twisted and mostly paralysed, the sun beating down on him while he waits to collect three dollars, the average proceeds of a day’s begging.

Al-Shabaab has vowed to carry out more attacks in Mogadishu following a vehicle bomb blast that killed scores of people in the Somali capital.