News headlines in March 2009, page 4

A yet-to-be released report by Australia’s human rights watchdog into the 2005 treatment of a group of Chinese asylum seekers held at the immigration detention here has concluded that serious breaches of civil and political rights were made by the immigration department.

In the shadows of a critical Arab summit in Doha this week, a parallel Arab- South American heads of state meeting is expected to seal key political and economic cooperation agreements between the two regions.

This could be the moment when a fatal blow is delivered to the world's tax havens. Or it could be another largely cosmetic change that allows offshore financial centres such as Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein to deflect attacks on the system by sacrificing the few tax miscreants that governments catch in their nets.

On a recent morning, tourists who visited a former high school in this city, turned into an infamous torture chamber during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in the mid-1970s, were in for a surprise – the presence of a man who lived to tell the tale.

Countries must put people first if they are to prevent the economic recession from becoming a social recession, concluded the two-day gathering of self-styled progressive world leaders that ended Saturday in this Chilean resort city.

The main issue before the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists (PFUJ) meeting over the weekend in the central Punjab city of Faisalabad is the threat faced by journalists in this conflict-ridden South Asian country.

The argument for deeper U.S. military commitment to the Afghan War invoked by President Barack Obama in his first major policy statement on Afghanistan and Pakistan Friday - that al Qaeda must be denied a safe haven in Afghanistan - has been not been subjected to public debate in Washington.

Japan’s Self-Defence Forces (SDF) have been readied to shoot down a North Korean satellite-fitted rocket if it disintegrates or veers over its territories early next month.

A bipartisan, blue-ribbon task force is urging the United States to formally announce a policy of 'positive engagement' with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and send an observer to its 2010 Review Conference.

For decades, prosecutors, historians, activists and the families of victims of the political violence of the late 1960s and the 1970s in Mexico have blamed former president Luis Echeverría for the 1968 massacre of student protesters in Tlatelolco square in the capital and the disappearance of hundreds of people in the country’s 'dirty war' on leftists and other dissidents.