News headlines in January 2009, page 5

As humanitarian agencies warned of a major crisis unfolding in Sri Lanka, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee made a quick dash Colombo to extract promises concerning the safety of some 250,000 ethnic Tamils trapped in fighting between separatist rebels and government troops.

Recently declassified government records from 1978 are a further indictment of Australia’s complicity in Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor.

The president of the United Nations General Assembly was a last-minute no-show at the U.N.'s annual ceremony commemorating the Holocaust, following an intense lobbying campaign by pro-Israel organisations to have him removed from the programme.

When U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates accused Iran of 'subversive activity' in Latin America Tuesday, it raised the question whether he is trying to discourage President Barack Obama from abandoning the hard line policy of coercive diplomacy toward Iran he has favoured for nearly three decades.

A series of unexpectedly swift moves to begin addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict taken by Barack Obama in the week since he was sworn in as the U.S. president is being hailed by many regional specialists here who were deeply frustrated by George W. Bush's relative indifference and virtually unconditional support for Israel.

A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message 'SOS Amazon' to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF).

The United Nations children's agency UNICEF said Tuesday that it must raise over a billion dollars this year to meet the basic needs of women and children in disaster zones worldwide, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

International human rights groups have expressed mixed reactions to the European Union's lukewarm pledge to accept some detainees from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay once the facility closes.

The Ethiopian parliament has voted into law a controversial bill which bars any civil society organisation receiving more than 10 percent of its funding from foreign sources from engaging in human rights issues.

The ZANU-PF government’s efforts to gain access to foreign exchange (also known as forex) by imposing an expensive licensing system on Zimbabwean enterprises, enforced with the threat of prosecution, is undermining one of the last remaining means of survival in the collapsing country.