News headlines in 2009, page 17

Bhagwati Adhikari was a teenager when she was married off to a village boy of the same caste. Just a few years later when she was in her early 20s, she became a widow. Her husband, who worked as a security guard in Kathmandu, was murdered. Adhikari was left alone to support her family.

The five children of Mary Muwombi have grown up in the war of south Sudan. It was a harsh existence - living on the brink of death and eating whatever they could find just to survive.

If some Asian states appeared to be disunited in the lead-up to the climate change talks currently underway in Copenhagen, now they are rising in unison to get the developed world to accede to their demands.

Human and rights advocates and members of the Republican Party found unusual common ground Monday.

In advance of U.S. President Barack Obama's end of the year deadline for Iran to respond to negotiations aimed at bringing a halt to the Islamic Republic's nuclear programme, the House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday to sanction companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran.

Despite major progress in recent days in forging an agreement over a 2011 referendum on independence for south Sudan, activist groups here are calling on President Barack Obama to impose tough new sanctions against the government in Khartoum.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal Monday to review a lower court's dismissal of a case brought by four British former Guantanamo prisoners against former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the detainees' lawyers charged Tuesday that the country's highest court evidently believes that 'torture and religious humiliation are permissible tools for a government to use'.

The Barack Obama administration is refusing to acknowledge an offer by the leadership of the Taliban in early December to give 'legal guarantees' that it will not allow Afghanistan to be used for attacks on other countries.

July 2011 and beyond, no country will have been more closely integrated with U.S. President Barack Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal's counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan than the Canadians.

A war is raging in the eastern part of the country, once the centre stage for battles during the 10-year civil war and the place where 'blood diamonds' where once mined.