News headlines in October 2011, page 7

As the Thai Airways flight descends into Suvarnabhumi International Airport, passengers pull out cameras to snap pictures of flood waters rising inexorably and predicted to inundate the capital city by the end of the week.

When Mona Kareem, a member of the Bidoun population of Kuwait, was 11 years old, a neighbour Kuwaiti woman asked her where she was from. When Kareem answered, 'I am Bidoun,' the woman laughed at her. 'There is no country called Bidoun. There is no Bidoun.'

Every six seconds, a child dies of hunger-related causes. That disturbing reality seems as remote as the moon here in the ultra-modern Changwon Convention Centre, where delegates struggled to create effective ways to stem the ongoing decline of food-producing lands.

Arguing that an educated population is a country's greatest wealth, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) says there is no escape from poverty without a vast expansion of secondary education worldwide.

The United States and North Korea are resuming the joint search for U.S. soldiers still missing from the Korean War, one of the few positive areas of interaction between two countries estranged for more than 60 years.

The Venezuelan government's decision to expropriate 25 ranches to distribute 15,800 hectares of land to communities of Yukpa Indians in the northwest of the country partially makes up a long-standing debt to the native group.

Fátima Hernández, a young Nicaraguan rape victim who has become a symbol in her country in her fight for justice, is now working to help women in a similar situation, and preparing to take her case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia's Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.

A July United Nations report asserting that only 30 civilians died in targeted raids in Afghanistan during the first six months of 2011 reflected only a very small fraction of night raids in which civilians were killed, according to officials of the independent Afghan commission which had co-produced the 2010 report on civilian casualties with the U.N. Mission.

Civil society organisations are calling on governments in developing countries to stop leasing and selling out land to transnational corporations because it leads to land degradation and food insecurity.