News stories by IPS Correspondents, page 3

RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 28 (IPS) - Issam Ali Hassan spent more than four years in an isolated desert camp in Jordan before he was taken in by Brazil. The son of Palestinians had been living as a refugee in Baghdad when he had to escape after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

OUAGADOUGOU, Aug 28 (IPS) - The seeds were sown, and the harvest is beginning to come in. Burkina Faso farmers are reaping the benefits of their government’s programme to develop and popularise improved varieties of maize.

BANGKOK, Aug 28 (IPS) - Impoverished Laos is unlikely to cancel a Thai project to build a mega dam across the Mekong River at Xayaburi, despite warnings from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that it could devastate the region’s rich biodiversity.

MANILA, Aug 27 (IPS) - This year’s floods, one of the worst in Philippine history, destroyed a staggering 57 million dollars worth of crops, pushing this climate vulnerable country to implement disaster risk reduction measures.

WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (IPS) - U.S. weapons sales around the world have massively expanded over the past year, setting several records. Agreements for foreign arms sales in 2011 totalled around 66.3 billion dollars – three times higher than the previous year and constituting an “extraordinary increase”, according to the Congressional Research Service. 

SAN SALVADOR, Aug 25 (IPS) - The two main youth gangs in El Salvador and the government have exchanged the main points they would like to discuss in talks aimed at bringing to an end to two decades of spiraling criminal violence. But the media, legislators and the public at large remain hostile to the possible start of negotiations.

KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug 25 (IPS) - With Pakistan’s last major stands of deodar (cedar) threatened by a ‘timber mafia’, the local people in the Chitral district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are resorting to direct action to stop the denudation of their picturesque alpine homeland.

RIMINI, ITALY, Aug 24 (IPS) - Speaking at an international forum here, Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, President of the General Assembly, said it was unfortunate that in some parts of the world there is growing intolerance, xenophobia, and incitement to hatred.

WASHINGTON, Aug 24 (IPS) - By mid-September, the Royal Dutch Shell Oil (Shell) group hopes to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of northern Alaska, provided it can secure federal permission from the U.S. government and overcome other logistical obstacles. But a prominent environmental group warns that drilling will do “irreparable damage” to the area.

WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (IPS) - As violence in Syria spikes after a short lull, the prospect of international military intervention appears to be growing by the day. Earlier this week, almost exactly one year after President Barack Obama first called on Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad to step down, Obama warned of “enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons”.