News headlines in 2009, page 24

A promised election in military-ruled Burma next year will be held in a vastly different media culture compared to the last general election in 1990, Burmese journalists said at a regional media forum currently underway in this northern Thai city.

Posters in the arrivals hall of Copenhagen’s airport reminded delegates what is at stake here in the next two weeks. 'I am sorry,' a visibly aged Angela Merkel tells the world in 2020. 'We could have stopped catastrophic climate change... we didn’t.'

In formally accepting the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama enunciated a worldview that places him squarely within the realist and liberal internationalist thinking that dominated post-World War II U.S. foreign policy - at least until his predecessor's 'global war on terror.'

Bill McKibben is a U.S. writer, environmentalist and the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign. His first book, 'The End of Nature', was published in 1989 and is regarded as the first book written for a general audience about climate change.

'If there's ever been a time in which the G77 has been more united than ever, that time is right now,' was the categorical statement made by Venezuelan negotiator Claudia Salerno to TerraViva, after a tiny island nation in the south Pacific stirred things up at the COP15 climate meetings.

Zimbabwe’s ruling political party has been accused of launching a 'widespread and systematic campaign of rape and sexual terror' aimed at intimidating opponents and voters in the troubled African nation, according to a new report released here.

So what do we do if COP15 does not bring adequate emission reduction targets or if the targets are not implemented by countries? What if we are faced with an ecological crisis in the next 15-20 years?

'When the tenth man finished raping me they said they were going to rape my daughter. I cried out but I could not even stand up at this time...they raped my daughter (while) I was there and I couldn’t do anything to stop them. My daughter was five years old...'

Thanks to the inclusion of young volunteers and migrants in the cast and crew, a Lao television mini-drama series about the lives and struggles of young migrants who freely cross the border turned out to be just the right vehicle for getting their attention to migration and its risks.

For a centre-right politician, best known for his law-and-order stance and tough immigration policies, French President Nicolas Sarkozy would seem an unlikely champion of environmental issues