News headlines in August 2009, page 5

An Organisation of American States (OAS) mission of foreign ministers to Honduras failed to persuade the de facto regime to consider Manuel Zelaya's reinstatement as president.

Exports by Latin America and the Caribbean will fall 11 percent this year – the worst performance since 1937, according to a new United Nations report.

On Jul. 11, 15 women between the ages of 22 and 28 landed by a Gulf Airlines flight at Nepal's Tribhuvan International Airport.

Thailand’s reputation as a South-east Asian country with strong anti-smoking laws is facing a direct challenge from the tobacco multinational companies, who are due to gather here in November for a major industry congress and exhibition.

Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of former South African president Thabo Mbeki, believes that the government’s centrepiece policy of black economic empowerment was in fact the creation of the country’s white economic oligarchs to co-opt black leaders.

By all accounts, 14-year-old student Anuthara Jayawardene was an unobtrusive child. But her death, by hanging herself inside a toilet in her school premises on July 22, has brought her right into the middle of media attention. Her name and the circumstances surrounding her death are now at the centre of a public dust storm.

The message machine of the Barack Obama administration appears to need oiling, as the U.S. president's push for a Sep. 15 deadline for a bipartisan deal on healthcare reform in the U.S. Congress continues to meet stiff resistance.

Cuba's communist government is being challenged to move toward a more participative and inclusive socialist system, one that offers real economic well-being and responds to the social and political demands that have built up and been expressed in different ways in recent years.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned that unless the siege of Gaza is lifted and a political solution implemented, Gaza's badly damaged health system will go from very bad to worse.

The 12 giant wind turbines tower more than 100 metres above the sea, some 50 kilometres north of Borkum island in the North Sea close to the border with the Netherlands.