News headlines in March 2009, page 28

The arguments for maintaining a major U.S. combat force in Iraq at least through 2011, escalating U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and assuming a confrontational stance toward Iran appear to assume that the United States remains the dominant military power in the region.

Caribbean leaders emerged from a one-day special summit on Wednesday night to announce new mechanisms to deal with some of the problems plaguing the region's financial sectors, occasioned not only by the ongoing global crisis, but by several homegrown scandals as well.

The government of Costa Rica hopes to increase its power generation by tapping into volcanic hot spots, and to that end it has introduced a controversial bill in Congress that would allow drilling into volcanoes in national parks.

When Paulina was interviewed for a job at a local Wal-Mart in the Mexican capital, the first thing she was asked was whether she was pregnant – a question she did not know at the time was illegal.

Violence was a trademark of João Bernardo Vieira’s life: he survived a coup, four attempts on his life and 13 years fighting the Portuguese colonial army in Guinea-Bissau. But the legend died at the hands of the corruption and violence he himself fed.

Her small tattered book is full of lists of orders for goods such as beer, maize-meal and chemicals. On another page are addresses and phone numbers of store managers while, on another, a list of names has been jotted down along with corresponding amounts.

Ruby Dhalla, a Liberal member of Canada's Parliament, is also a community activist, doctor, and one of the leading progressive voices in North American politics today.

A conference held this week in Cairo devoted to the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip succeeded in raising more than 5 billion dollars from international donors. But some critics say the issue is being used as a means of isolating Gaza-based resistance faction Hamas.

The obvious objective of the first visit to the Middle East by the Obama administration's U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was to contain the still potentially explosive situation in Gaza following January's Israeli offensive against Hamas, and to rescue the two-state solution policy in face of the emergence of a far-right administration in Jerusalem.

The Ukraine-Russia gas dispute has boosted plans for construction of the South Stream and North Stream gas pipelines that would eventually divert Russian gas supplies through the Black Sea and the Baltic seabed respectively to European consumers.