News headlines in October 2014, page 2

NAIROBI, Oct 30 (IPS) - Recent discoveries of sizeable natural gas reserves and barrels of oil in a number of African countries — including Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya — have economists hopeful that the continent can boost and diversify its largely agriculture-based economy. 

VIENNA, Oct 30 (IPS) - As representatives of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), we are sometimes asked whether industrial development is still relevant to a world which many observers have claimed over the past decades to have entered the "post-industrial age". Our answer is always an emphatic "yes", shaped both by the evidence of history and current events.

COLOMBO/BALI, Oct 30 (IPS) - Disregarding the rights of indigenous people to their traditional lands is costing companies millions of dollars each year, and costing communities themselves their lives.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 29 (IPS) - As the world marks the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the famous Berlin Wall leading to the reunification of the country and the end of the cold war, a little noted event occurred nearly two decades before the fall that ushered in a trend having profound consequences for the future of Germany as well as for Europe:  German births declined below deaths.

PASTURES, St. Vincent, Oct 29 (IPS) - Glenda Williams has lived in the Pastures community in eastern St. Vincent all her life. She's seen the area flooded by storms on multiple occasions.

KURIGRAM, Bangladesh, Oct 29 (IPS) - Jahanara Begum, a 35-year-old housewife, is surrounded by thatched-roof homes, all of which are partially submerged by floodwater.

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, Oct 29 (IPS) - "You cannot continue with your education. You have to get married because this man has already paid dowry for you," Matilda H's father told her. Matilda, from Tanzania, was 14 and had just passed her primary school exams and had been admitted to secondary school. She pleaded with her father to allow her to continue her education, but he refused.  

WASHINGTON, Oct 29 (IPS) - Officials in Panama have fined the local facility of a U.S. biotechnology company for a series of permitting and regulatory failures around a pioneering attempt to create genetically modified salmon.

AMUDA, Syria, Oct 28 (IPS) - There was never anything particularly remarkable about this northern town of 25,000. However, today it has become the lab for one the most pioneering political experiments ever conducted in the entire Middle East region.

GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 28 (IPS) - On Oct. 14, Guatemala's Court for High-Risk Crimes ruled that charges would be brought against two members of the Army for sexual slavery and domestic slavery against q'eqchís women in the military outpost of Sepur Zarco, and other serious crimes perpetrated in the framework of the government counterinsurgency policies during the armed conflict.