News headlines in February 2015, page 8

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 11 (IPS) - More than 200 Darfurian women were reportedly raped by Sudanese troops in one brutal assault on a town in October 2014, with the conflict in war-torn Darfur escalating to new heights.

SYDNEY, Feb 11 (IPS) - The rapid rise of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the Pacific Islands, which now cause 75 percent of all deaths, is one of the greatest impediments to post-2015 development, health ministers in the region claim.

ST. JOHN, Antigua, Feb 10 (IPS) - ST. JOHN'S, Antigua. At 49 years old, Edison Liburd has established himself as one of Antigua and Barbuda's most recognisable artists. But Liburd was not always in the spotlight. In fact, you could say he was a man in hiding.

CHINTOOR, India, Feb 10 (IPS) - Laxman, a 10-year-old Koya tribal boy, looks admiringly at a fenced-in vegetable patch behind his home in southern India's Andhra Pradesh state. Velvety-green and laden with vegetables, the half-acre patch is where Laxman's family gets their daily quota of nutritious food.

BRISBANE, Feb 10 (IPS) - Nothing is more important to farmers like me than the weather. It affects the growth and quality of our crops and livestock, and has a major impact on global food supply.

EL PAISNAL, El Salvador, Feb 10 (IPS) - The memory of a priest killed shortly before civil war broke out in El Salvador is so alive in this small town that it is now the main attraction in a community tourist initiative aimed at providing employment and injecting money into the local economy.

KARACHI, Feb 09 (IPS) - Sumaira Salamat, a mother of three in her mid-40s, works every day from ten in the morning until half-past two in the afternoon. She travels between three homes, and in each one she dusts, sweeps, washes utensils, and does the laundry. For her efforts, she earns about 3,000 rupees (29 dollars) per month.

SEATTLE, Washington, Feb 07 (IPS) - "Enhanced interrogation": the George W. Bush administration bureaucrats who coined the term had perfect pitch. The apparatchiks of Kafka's Castle would have admired the grayness of the euphemism. But while it sounds like some new kind of focus group, it turns out it was just anodyne branding for good old-fashioned torture.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 06 (IPS) - The world's youth unemployment rate may be "six or seven times" what the International Labor Organisation's (ILO) latest figures state, according to a global youth advocacy group.