News headlines in August 2009, page 2

As U.S. cities consider the urgent need for sustainable public transportation options, advocates are looking for ways to achieve the environmental benefits of such projects without displacing residents through gentrification of surrounding areas.

It's early spring in the fertile Breede River farming region, with the fruit orchards a blur of pink blossoms and the first green shoots starting to sprout in the vineyards, but for household gardener Ishmael Shiki it's been a bad start to the growing season.

Mexico is beginning to take on the environmental debts left by the oil industry, applying biological techniques to break down alcohols, solvents, glycerines, gasoline, benzene and acetone, turning them into carbon dioxide and water.

Abu Abed can't make a profit, and although 54 years old, he still has not married. 'I can't pay my rent, I can't afford a wedding.'

When is a telephone call considered sexual harassment?

At a special summit Friday in Argentina, the presidents of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) questioned the agreement under which Colombia will allow the United States to use seven military bases in its territory.

One night in February 1988 in the native Nasa territory of Jambaló, in southwest Colombia, soldiers barged into Etelvina Zapata's home and snatched her 21-year-old son, barefoot and clad only in shorts, accusing him of working with the leftwing guerrillas.

In 2001/2002, Ethiopia enjoyed a bumper maize harvest - so good in fact, that prices tumbled, and many farmers simply left the grain in the fields. When the rains failed the next season, famine loomed.

Africa is the canary in the mine of global security, as climate change threatens to redraw the maps of the continent and the world.

'Did I have a feather on my head and kill the policemen myself?' Mercedes Cabanillas responded when journalists asked her if, as interior minister of Peru, she assumed responsibility for the operation that led to the deaths of 24 members of the police and at least nine indigenous protesters near the Amazon jungle town of Bagua.