News headlines in 2013, page 164

MÁLAGA, Spain, Apr 24 (IPS) - Isabel Rodríguez decided to pull her then nine-year-old son Ulises out of the school system and homeschool him instead – an alternative chosen by more than 2,000 families in Spain, who are calling for a law that would overcome the legal vacuum surrounding the growing phenomenon.

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, Apr 24 (IPS) - Tourism, widely regarded as the mainstay of Caribbean economies, is being challenged to remain sustainable in an era of climate change and its impact on beaches, rivers and other attractions.

WASHINGTON, Apr 24 (IPS) - With climate change rapidly opening up new opportunities for shipping and resource extraction across the once permanently frozen Arctic, the United States and other northern countries are being compelled to re-examine their policies, both national and collective, towards this region of growing geostrategic importance.

ABEYAT, Occupied West Bank, Apr 24 (IPS) - Hind Ibrahim Abeyat has spent most of her life separated from her father. "Every house in Palestine has something – someone in prison, a martyr," the 19-year-old told IPS from her family home in Abeyat village, near Bethlehem.

COLOMBO, Apr 24 (IPS) - The eve of the much anticipated Sinhala and Tamil New Year, celebrated across the island of Sri Lanka in mid-April to mark the end of the harvest season, was marred by a series of attacks, reminding everyone that "peace" does not mean a lack of violence.

GOMA, DR Congo, Apr 24 (IPS) - When M23 rebels tried twice to arrange a protest march against a United Nations resolution to deploy an intervention brigade with an offensive mandate to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, they had to postpone it because the local population would not participate.

JOHANNESBURG, Apr 24 (IPS) - As the first of South Africa's troops are expected to begin arriving in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of the United Nations intervention force at the end of April, governance experts have welcomed the world body's new mandate in the Central African nation.

WASHINGTON, Apr 23 (IPS) - Advocacy groups here are applauding the publication of new government concerns, formally expressed Monday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over a recent assessment of the environmental impact of a major oil pipeline that would run between Canada and the U.S. Gulf Coast.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 23 (IPS) - The challenge for Venezuela is to strengthen democracy, and for its new president, Nicolás Maduro, it is to overcome a potential recall referendum and to further the interests of his political supporters, Marcelo Serpa, of the Latin American Association of Election Campaign Researchers (ALICE), told IPS.

SANTIAGO, Apr 23 (IPS) - More than 100 environmental, social and indigenous organisations protested Monday in the Chilean capital to demand that the state regain control over the management of water, which was privatised by the dictatorship in 1981.