News headlines in October 2011, page 4

The public media are growing in Latin America, with a few focus that puts an emphasis on independence from the state and the backlash from the private media, said journalists, academics and officials meeting in the Paraguayan capital.

Three years after her husband’s disappearance, Phyllis Chamnai Kipkeyo from Mount Elgon, Kenya cannot stop thinking about him. She does not know if he is dead or alive. All she knows is that he was one of the over 300 people said to have disappeared during an insurgency in the region between 2006 and 2008.

In a move that highlighted its sub-par human rights record, the government of Burma announced Oct. 11 that it would release 6,359 prisoners, but how many of these will be drawn from the country's estimated 500 to over 2,000 political prisoners remains uncertain.

As digital technology begins to spread across classrooms the world over, the United Nations says the next generation of children will be educated far differently from their counterparts in the past.

Workers in Haiti's apparel manufacturing sector charge that factory owners are repressing attempts to organise workers in the capital, after the dismissals of six of seven leading members of a new union within just two weeks of its formation.

China is contemplating new legislation to define terrorism more precisely, raising fears that the government is using the so-called ‘war on terror’ to crack down on Uyghur separatists in the country’s restive Muslim region of Xinjiang.

As sub-Saharan Africa grapples with high food prices in some regions and famine in others, many experts argue that increasing food production through a programme of hybrid seeds and chemical inputs is the way to go.

The Sugar Association of the Caribbean (SAC) has been buoyed by a large crop this year, but a recent proposal by the European Union to abolish domestic quotas would likely cut into preferential sugar exports by the SAC and other sugar associations in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries to European markets.

Hundreds of Yemeni women have set fire to traditional female veils in protest against the government's brutal crackdown on the country's popular uprising, as overnight clashes in the capital and another city killed 25 people, officials said.

A bill for protection, recovery and use of water resources in El Salvador, drafted by a platform of about 100 social, religious and academic organisations, has been bogged down in parliament for the past five years in spite of the country's water crisis.