News headlines in December 2008, page 11

It is late at night. The city is quiet and strangely empty. Only some spooky figures appear here and there, police in civilian cloths, photojournalists looking for telling pictures.

The Balkans region, crippled by the wars of the 1990s and then pushed through painful transition to a market economy, has been hit hard by the global economic crisis just when everyone believed the time had come for promising new development.

As the Rudd government continues to speak of the need to balance concerns for civil liberties with maintaining intrusive counter-terror legislation to protect Australia, rights groups are stepping up their campaign against the laws.

The international community is shying away from one of the most politically-troubled and dangerous war zones in the Horn of Africa: the perpetually strife-torn Somalia.

A motion calling for an end to the United States embargo against Cuba accentuated the anti-imperialist tone taken on by the summit of Latin American and Caribbean leaders that ended Wednesday in this tourist resort in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia.

A new U.S. investigative panel is demanding answers from the U.S. Treasury about how the agency has spent money from the 700-billion-dollar bailout fund.

At 5.30 AM the fog was just starting to lift in the freezing cold mountains of eastern Cauca, in southwest Colombia, when indigenous leader Darío Tote came across the red pickup truck riddled with bullet holes. At the wheel was Edwin Legarda, who was critically wounded.

Pirate attacks in East African waters this year have disrupted the delivery of much-needed food aid to Somalia. With millions of lives at stake, U.N. World Food Program officials said the commencement last week of a European Union naval escort mission should help guarantee regular food shipments in the early months of 2009.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the European Union may fall by as little as four percent between now and 2020 as a result of a new decision by the bloc's law-makers.

They call it an orchestra, but this atypical all-percussion group is far from featuring the range of musicians found in a conventional ensemble. Which does not mean that the music they make is not rich and varied, as the young amateur musicians produce an amazing array of sounds.