, Feb 25 (IPS) - Some 370 people, believed to be Rohingyas of Myanmar and Bangladeshis, are estimated to have died in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea in 2015, says the UN Refugee Agency.

"The deaths were caused not from drowning but from mistreatment and disease brought about by smugglers who abused and in many cases killed passengers with impunity," it said in a statement on UN News Centre on Tuesday.

BLANTYRE, Malawi, Feb 25 (IPS) - Imagine fleeing from your home because you feel unprotected by the people who are required to so by law. And when you get to where you feel safer, the very same people come to persuade your keepers to let you come back with them, claiming you are running away from nothing! Well, this is the situation some 5,800 Mozambican nationals have found themselves in. Hundreds of them, including unaccompanied children, have been fleeing from Tete Province, near the Malawi border, since late last year following renewed fighting between government forces and opposition Renamo fighters.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24 (IPS) - The UN Development Programme (UNDP) celebrated its 50th anniversary this week with a pledge to help implement the UN's post-2015 development agenda aimed at eliminating extreme poverty and hunger by 2030.

When the agency was founded in 1966, one in every three people was living in poverty. But that number has changed to one in eight, according to UNDP figures.

, Feb 24 (IPS) - More than 1,000 women are killed in the name of honourin this country every year, according to official figures. But the actual numbers are believed to be much higher. Saba Qaiser, 19, would have been one of them had she not miraculously survived drowning in a river after having been shot in the head. Unsurprisingly, those who tried to finish her off were none other than her own relatives her father and uncle as happens in most such cases of `honour`crime.

, Feb 24 (IPS) - Protesters today confined the Dhaka University vice chancellor over the death of a student of the varsity, accusing the authorities for it.

MIAMI, Feb 24 (IPS) - At this stage of the process that began in December 2014 with the surprise announcement of the opening of relations between the United States and Cuba, hardly anything counts as spectacular news. The detail in the decision by Washington and Havana that made news in the traditional sense (man bites dog) was that the plan to sit down and talk implied that Cuba gave up its prior demand that the embargo be lifted. The United States, for its part, accepted that Cuba did not undertake to make any special changes to its own political system.

, Feb 24 (IPS) - PRIME Minister Nawaz Sharif recently watched A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, Sharmeen Obald Chinoy`s Oscar-nominated documentary about `honour` killings. In a statement following the screening, he told Ms Chinoy and his audience that there is no `honour` in murder.

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 24 (IPS) - By 2020, approximately 3.8 billion men and women across the developing world will be connected to the Internet through mobile phones, but 40 per cent of the population will still lack access.

CANBERRA, Australia, Feb 24 (IPS) - Resource-rich Papua New Guinea (PNG) is seen as an economic powerhouse in the Pacific Islands with a state-led focus on resource extraction initially expected to drive one of the world's highest growth rates of 15 per cent last year. But in the wake of falling commodity prices, GDP growth has plummeted from 8.5 per cent in 2014 to a forecasted 3 per cent this year. As the government faces a growing deficit between revenue and expenditure, exacerbated by high public debt, experts in the country believe greater efforts to diversify the economy are essential.

HAVANA, Feb 23 (IPS) - U.S. President Barack Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raúl Castro will go down in history as two statesmen who managed to overcome more than half a century of hostility to bring back together two neighbouring countries with too many shared interests to remain at loggerheads.