News headlines in 2014, page 133

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 13 (IPS) - The largest annual gathering with special focus on issues which impact on women and thereby humanity as a whole is now taking place in New York.

BOGOTÁ, Mar 13 (IPS) - In July 2004, when paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso was demobilising, he admitted to the Colombian parliament that the illegal extreme rightwing forces controlled 35 percent of the seats. Ten years later the situation is very similar: one-third of the new senate, where congressional power mainly resides, is allegedly linked to the paramilitaries.

KAMPALA, Mar 13 (IPS) - Human rights campaigners who filed a recent legal petition against Uganda's draconian anti-gay law believe that they have a compelling case for its nullification. 

ALFAZ, Spain, Mar 13 (IPS) - There is much in a name. Ukraine means borderland. The position of the extreme West - like U.S. neocons - is clear: get all into NATO, encircling, containing, defeating Russia.

BERN, Switzerland, Mar 13 (IPS) - Switzerland has eased its restrictions on arms exports - in order to save a few thousand workplaces. Critics fear that Switzerland's credibility as an international peace broker will now suffer.

WASHINGTON, Mar 12 (IPS) - On Oct. 16, 1993, Alerte Belance was abducted from her home and taken to Titanyen, a small seaside village used by Haiti's rulers as a mass grave for political opponents. There she received machete chops to her face, neck, and extremities. Despite her grave injuries, Belance was able to save herself by dragging her mutilated body onto the street and asking for help.

DUMBARTON, St. Vincent, Mar 12 (IPS) - Allan Williams, 32, is an agriculture extension officer in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. But as a trained apiculturist, he has also been involved in beekeeping as a hobby for the past seven years.

CAPE TOWN, Mar 12 (IPS) - Despite an increase in diagnosis times, South Africa is facing a growing drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) burden as nationally there remains a large gap between the number of patients diagnosed with multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) and those who start treatment.

SEOUL, Mar 12 (IPS) - Old family bonds still seem to run deep in the South Korea of today. For evidence, one need only look at the yearning of the elderly to meet their long separated kin in North Korea during last month's historic family reunions.

ADDIS ABABA, Mar 12 (IPS) - Ireland's former President Mary Robinson has been working hard to include women from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Great Lakes Region in the regional peacebuilding process. Because without their involvement, she says, peace and security in the region will be unrealistic.