News headlines in April 2014

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 30 (IPS) - The upcoming mega sporting events in Brazil are paving a new route for slave labour among those migrating from rural areas to the cities in search of work.

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Apr 30 (IPS) - Tanzania's government has been urged to embrace sustainable charcoal production to protect the country's forest cover amidst failed attempts to abolish the local charcoal trade.

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 30 (IPS) - How will the U.N. prioritise the goals of its Post-2015 Development Agenda? Which goals deserve more funding? And which goals will help the most people? These are the questions that the Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC) seeks to answer.

GOMA, DR Congo, Apr 30 (IPS) - "There are several robots in the world, but that one which regulates traffic is made in Congo," Thérèse Izayi, a female engineer and the Congolese inventor of two very unusual traffic signals, tells IPS.

SYDNEY, Apr 30 (IPS) - The global spectre of state violence against political dissent, with paramilitary law enforcement units advancing against citizens they are employed to protect in cities such as Cairo, Bangkok and Kiev is daily news. But in some developing countries, the police are being used to put down indigenous opposition to the alliance of state and corporate power over resource extraction.

PORTLAND, Oregon, U.S., Apr 29 (IPS) - As a child, 78-year-old Yakama Nation elder Russell Jim was forced to go to a boarding school in Washington State and was beaten for speaking his language.

WASHINGTON, Apr 29 (IPS) - President Barack Obama's recent tour of Asia was an opportunity to reenergise his foreign policy after a series of setbacks in the global arena.

NAIROBI, Apr 29 (IPS) - Kenya's government was warned by Muslim clerics about the radicalisation and recruitment of youths by Al-Shabaab six years ago but did not take action, says Sheikh Ahmed, a management committee member of the Council of Imams and Preachers of Kenya.

ZANDUA, Ghana, Apr 29 (IPS) - Zainab Abubakar saves children's lives. A few years ago she was just an ordinary woman with no medical training living in rural Kpilo in Ghana's Northern Region. 

STOCKHOLM, Apr 29 (IPS) - Fidelis Molao was 33 when he became a member of parliament in Botswana for the first time in 2009. He was the youngest MP in the country at the time, and still is, now at age 38. He has long championed youth rights.