News headlines in May 2014, page 15

SRINAGAR, India, May 05 (IPS) - Forty-seven-year-old Shahmala's husband has been missing since 1993. In India's restive Jammu and Kashmir state, she is what is known as a half-widow, a woman who has no clue whether her husband is dead or alive.

SINGAPORE, May 04 (IPS) - U.S. President Barack Obama's weeklong visit to Asia was meant to reassure allies in the region of American support and re-engagement. But it raised Chinese hackles and failed to dispel doubts over his administration's ‘pivot to Asia' strategy.

ATTAPPADI, India, May 04 (IPS) - The death of a 10-day-old girl last November in the Attappadi tribal belt of Kerala, one of India's best performing states in terms of human development indices, shows how the country's battle against child mortality is far from won.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 04 (IPS) - Blaming Afghan refugees for a surge in crime, Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has placed restrictions on the movement of those who do not possess legal documents to stay in the country.

QAMISHLI, Syria, May 04 (IPS) - Malki Hana says his men are afraid of cameras. "Most of them are army defectors and they may easily get in trouble," says this commander of a mostly unknown armed group in Syria.

WASHINGTON, May 03 (IPS) - The recent suspension of the U.S. -engineered Israeli-Palestinian talks signals a much deeper reality than the immediate factors that caused it. The peace process and the two-state solution, which for years were on life support, are now dead.

LAHORE, Pakistan, May 03 (IPS) - Amina Bibi, an 18-year-old from Pakistan's Punjab province, was allegedly raped by four men on Jan. 5 this year. All the accused were granted bail. A desperate Amina set herself on fire outside a police station on Mar. 13 and succumbed to burn injuries the next day.

NEW DELHI, May 03 (IPS) - Bhure Lal, a 33-year-old street-food vendor, has been selling his spicy ‘chaat' outside the New Delhi Railway Station for 15 years. But despite a punishing 12-hour work schedule, and a new law to protect hawkers like him, he doesn't take home enough to feed his family.

WASHINGTON, May 02 (IPS) - Two key federal agencies here are in the final stages of approving a new herbicide-resistant crop "system" that would constitute the second phase of genetically engineered agriculture, following an announcement this week.

CAR NICOBAR, India, May 02 (IPS) - While the United States Geological Survey (USGS) is sparing no effort to fill a rapidly widening sinkhole in Florida since Apr. 23, India's Geological Survey has closed its field station in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands where sinkholes have sprung up all over as an aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami.