News headlines in April 2009, page 6

This Tuesday, Apr. 28, will mark five years since the world got its first look at the sickening photographs from Abu Ghraib on the U.S. television programme '60 Minutes.'

'Are you still unemployed? Take charge and complete the change. We the people shall write our own constitution,' read the many bright posters now adorning street walls, lampposts and rubbish bins in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.

When stock is taken of the Kenyan coalition government’s first year in office no marks will be awarded to its handling of extra-judicial killings in the country. Human rights activists claim that the police have murdered about 500 people in the past 16 months.

Already suffering significant impacts from climate change, indigenous peoples at the close of an international summit here rejected the concept of carbon trading and offsets. Many also called for a moratorium on all new oil and gas exploration in their traditional territories and the eventual phase-out of fossil fuels.

General elections currently being contested in India have brought an unusual issue to the fore - the repatriation of more than a trillion dollars believed to have been stashed away in Swiss and other tax havens around the world.

Using pieces from all sorts of useless equipment, students at the Computer Recovery Centre in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre have put 1,700 computers into operation in three years.

The United States will work on energy issues with the other countries of the Americas based on 'a variable geometry,' allowing governments to choose to cooperate in some areas but not others, said Jeremy Martin, head of the energy programme at the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San Diego.

At least three dozen detainees who were held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas appear to be missing – and efforts by human rights organisations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful.

The dismantling of a commando made up mainly of men described by the Bolivian government as foreign mercenaries could lead authorities to the people who organised around a dozen different attacks carried out since 2006 in the city of Santa Cruz.

As the debate heats up over what to do about recent disclosures of widespread abuse of war-on-terror prisoners, the 'third branch' of the U.S. government – the judiciary - continues to assert its independence from the other two branches – the executive and the legislative.