News headlines in October 2016

DHAKA, Oct 31 (IPS) - Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people, has made significant progress in its efforts to accelerate economic growth, reduce poverty and promote social development, but it now faces certain challenges in consolidating these achievements and marching forward on the higher trajectory of development, says one of its leading economists.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 31 (IPS) - Stressing the enduring relationship between injuries inflicted by slavery and contemporary injustices, a UN committee has recently issued a strongly-worded call for reparations for black U.S. Americans.

ADDIS ABABA, Oct 30 (IPS) - The Paris Agreement on climate change is set to enter into force on Nov. 4, after it passed the required threshold of at least 55 Parties, accounting for an estimated 55 per cent of the total global greenhouse gas emissions, ratifying the agreement.

ROME, Oct 29 (IPS) - They are not just data or numbers for statistical calculations. They are desperate human beings fleeing wars, violence, abuse, slavery and death. They hear and believe the bombastic speeches about democracy and human rights and watch the many images of welfare and good life in Europe.

OSLO, Oct 28 (IPS) - President Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union and recipient of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize, has appealed to world leaders to reduce the dangerous tensions, which today threaten to plunge human civilization and the biosphere into an all-destroying nuclear war.

QUITO, Oct 27 (IPS) - "We as mayors have to govern midsize cities as if they were capital cities," said Héctor Mantilla, city councilor of Floridablanca, the third-largest city in the northern Colombian department of Santander.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Oct 27 (IPS) - From the 1980s, various studies purported to portray the public sector as a cesspool of abuse, inefficiency, incompetence and corruption. Books and articles with pejorative titles such as ‘vampire state', ‘bureaucrats in business' and so on thus provided the justification for privatization policies. Despite the caricature and exaggeration, there were always undoubted horror stories which could be cited as supposedly representative examples. But similarly, by way of contrast, other experiences show that SOEs can be run quite efficiently, even on commercial bases, confounding the dire predictions of the prophets of public sector doom.

ROME, Oct 27 (IPS) - Almost inadvertently, humankind is getting closer everyday to the point of no-return towards what could be called the ‘climate doomsday'.

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 (IPS) - After 25 years of voting against a United Nations resolution condemning the United States (U.S.) embargo on Cuba, the U.S. Wednesday chose for the first time to abstain from voting. An overwhelming 191 UN member states voted for the resolution, with only Israel joining the United States in abstention.

NAIROBI, Oct 26 (IPS) - Land degradation already affects millions of people, bringing biodiversity loss, reduced availability of clean water, food insecurity and greater vulnerability to the harsh impacts of climate change.