The poppy harvest: Burma's boom industry
Efforts to curb the rise in opium production are being undermined by ethnic conflicts
Ongoing ethnic conflicts in Burma are undermining efforts to tackle opium poppy production in the country, which has recorded its sixth consecutive increase in cultivation. The latest finding from the UN suggests claims by the Burmese authorities that cultivation will be eradicated within two years will prove false.
Although unprecedented efforts to destroy poppy fields resulted in almost 60,000 acres being ripped up last year, the amount of land under cultivation still increased by around 17 per cent. Burma is the world's second-largest producer of opium, after Afghanistan.
Officials from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said cultivation had increased most sharply in Kachin and Shan states, where government troops are involved in ongoing and bloody clashes with ethnic fighters. Many of the farmers producing opium poppies have inadequate access to the land and are often short of food. They can earn almost 20 times as much growing poppies as they can producing rice.
LIBYA
Amid protests, Libya overwhelmingly approves cabinet
Libya's parliament has approved the country's new cabinet in a vote of confidence. Protesters disrupted the session for a second day in a row, complaining about the makeup of the cabinet.
The overall vote on Wednesday was 105 in favor, nine against and 18 abstaining. The spokesman for Libya's parliament said that five of the 27 ministers, picked from both liberals and Islamists, would be reconsidered after concerns were raised over their ties to the deposed regime of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
Unlike Tuesday, when demonstrators broke into the chamber derailing a first attempt at a vote, security forces firing rifles in the air kept the protesters out of the building Wednesday.
Prime Minister Ali Zidan said he tried to strike a geographical balance in the new cabinet. Libyans are trying to reverse practices of the Gadhafi regime, including the marginalization of many cities.
Jobless in the CrisisEuro-Zone Unemployment Higher than Ever Before
The European debt crisis and related austerity measures continue to drive up unemployment across the euro zone. In September, according to statistics released on Wednesday, fully 18.5 million people were without work in the common currency area, more than ever before.
Global financial markets have, for the moment, been calmed. The European Central Bank has embarked on its program to buy unlimited sovereign bonds as needed from euro-zone countries suffering from high borrowing costs and all of those countries have adopted strict austerity programs to get their budgets in order.
That, though, has not been good for economic growth -- and now the European Union has released new figures highlighting a struggling euro-zone economy. According to a report released on Wednesday by Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office, unemployment in the 17-nation common-currency area stood at 11.6 percent in September, the highest it has ever been.
The numbers represent an up-tick against the 11.5 percent rate reported for August. In total, Eurostat estimates that 18.49 million people were out of work in the euro zone, up 146,000 over August. The rate indicates a significant rise against the euro-zone unemployment rate in September 2011, which was 10.3 percent.
1 November 2012 Last updated at 00:40 GMT
Have India’s poor become human guinea pigs?
Drug companies are facing mounting pressure to investigate reports that new medicines are being tested on some of the poorest people in India without their knowledge.
"We were surprised," Nitu Sodey recalls about taking her mother-in-law Chandrakala Bai to Maharaja Yeshwantrao Hospital in Indore in May 2009.
"We are low caste people and normally when we go to the hospital we are given a five rupee voucher, but the doctor said he would give us a foreign drug costing 125,000 rupees (£1,400)."
The pair had gone to the hospital, located in the biggest city in Madhya Pradesh, an impoverished province in central India, because Bai was experiencing chest pains.
Their status as Dalits - the bottom of the Hindu caste system, once known as Untouchables - meant that they were both accustomed to going to the back of the queue when they arrived and waiting many hours before seeing a doctor.
Mexico City's new subway line to cut down on commute, pollution
Mexico City's new subway line will eliminate 860 buses from the city's congested streets and expand one of the most used metro systems in the Western Hemisphere into poorer districts.
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy / October 31, 2012
For hundreds of thousands of Mexico City residents, daily life grew less arduous and less expensive Tuesday with the inauguration of a new subway line that reaches deep into poor districts of one of the world’s biggest metropolises.
The mostly underground line, which cost nearly $2 billion to build, will shave average daily commute times from about 150 minutes to 78 minutes for riders who take the speedy train. The reduction in time comes from taking riders off buses that crawl along congested streets.
“The importance of returning an hour of their day to people to use as they please is probably one of the greatest social and personal impacts of a project like this,” President Felipe Calderon said.
The project also is expected to help improve the capital’s air quality, by eliminating 860 buses from the city’s streets.
EDITORIAL
Romney Versus the Automakers
When General Motors tells a presidential campaign that it is engaging in “cynical campaign politics at its worst,” that’s a pretty good signal that the campaign has crossed a red line and ought to pull back. Not Mitt Romney’s campaign. Having broadcast an outrageously deceitful ad attacking the auto bailout, the campaign ignored the howls from carmakers and came back with more.
Mr. Romney apparently plans to end his race as he began it: playing lowest-common-denominator politics, saying anything necessary to achieve power and blithely deceiving voters desperate for clarity and truth.
This started months ago when he realized that his very public 2008 stance against the successful and wildly popular government bailout of G.M. and Chrysler was hurting him in the valuable states of Ohio and Michigan. In February, he wrote an essay for The Detroit Newscalling the bailout “crony capitalism on a grand scale” because unions benefited and insisting that Detroit would have been better off to refuse federal money. (This ignoresthe well-documented reality that there was no other cash available to the carmakers.)
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