News headlines in February 2009, page 9

The relationship between the U.S. and Russia, which reached a nadir this past August during the war in Georgia, appears to have experienced a slight thaw during the first month of the Barack Obama administration.

Last year, rice farmers took to the streets of Ghana’s capital of Accra and accused the government of allowing imports to destroy their livelihoods.

One year after the historic apology made to indigenous Australians by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the nation, conjecture remains over whether enough has been done to support the acknowledgement of wrongs inflicted on the first Australians.

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón, known for prosecuting alleged tyrants, terrorists and perpetrators of corruption, believes that progress toward a global justice system began in 1996, with the trials in Madrid of Argentine and Chilean torturers, and especially with the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in October 1998.

The world economic recession is threatening the progress Latin America has made in fair trade. The leaders of this alternative form of exchange are making emergency contacts in order to assess the situation and come up with strategies to confront it.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama must take a leadership position in championing human rights in the Middle East and North Africa by using U.S. economic and trade leverage and confronting the growing global threat of authoritarianism being promoted by Arab regimes, advocates say.

President Barack Obama decided to approve only 17,000 of the 30,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, after McKiernan was unable to tell him how they would be used, according to White House sources.

Imagine turning on your television and all you see is black and white fuzz.

European Union aid has been given to an Israeli oil company which has reduced the supply of fuel to Gaza as part of an economic blockade internationally recognised as illegal, Brussels officials have admitted.

Earth's two ice-covered polar oceans may be the most inhospitable places on the planet, but more than 12,000 species of animals have been found there, according to new research released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here.