News headlines in March 2009, page 24

La Montañona, a forested mountain in northern El Salvador that reaches 1,800 metres above sea level, was a stronghold of the FMLN guerrillas during the country’s armed conflict. Today, its forests and stories of bombings and rebel hideouts have begun to draw ecotourism.

The meticulous vetting process that potential appointees for senior State Department and other posts must undergo is delaying full staffing of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration, even as it faces ever-more urgent crises both at home and abroad.

The sheer magnitude of the devastation left by this tiny beetle is shocking on its own.

Graciela Samaniego has her bags packed. Along with a number of fellow nurses, she is ready to leave her job at a public hospital in the Paraguayan capital and fly to a city in northern Italy, where she will work in a nursing home.

In an attempt to mitigate rising food insecurity and malnutrition, the Zambian government and the World Food Programme (WFP) have started to hand out food vouchers to the country’s urban poor. The programme was launched in February after agricultural experts forecast a shortfall in this year’s maize yields, Zambia’s staple food.

Sri Lanka is going on bended knee to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - an institution it chased away two years ago - for a bailout package worth 1.9 billion US dollars, as authorities scrape the barrel for foreign exchange.

'Post-neo-liberalism' - that mouthful of a word was making the rounds at an international congress on the economic turmoil in Berlin last weekend. Just another buzzword, as some participants thought, or something necessary to describe the world past the now exposed economics of neo-liberalism?

Eight months pregnant Shireen Abu Sbeh, 20, mother of a two-year-old, lives with eight other people in a two-bedroom apartment that is on a list of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem to be demolished by the Israeli authorities.

The guns have been silent in the Balkans for more than ten years now, but their images and echoes continue to torment thousands, the first study on health among war veterans in Serbia shows.

Tiny 14-year-old Precious sits on her orphanage bed in the southern port town of Harper, accused of witchcraft six months ago and exiled from her family and nearby community. She says she was publicly beaten and tied up to burn at a stake, until the Harper police were tipped off and saved her.