News headlines in 2009, page 26

'They came to my house and spent an hour going around from neighbour to neighbour, drilling them for information, knowing full well there was nothing there. They just wanted to harass us,' Mercedes Murillo told IPS, describing a night raid by soldiers.

Corruption is preventing the world from reducing extreme poverty, from averting child deaths and even from fighting epidemics like HIV/AIDS.

Advocates for greater freedom of information are expressing approval of the Obama administration’s new ‘Open Government Directive’ - but some are sounding cautionary notes that executive agencies are still hiding behind 'national security' to conceal government misconduct.

While the war in Iraq triggered massive demonstrations across the globe, the ratcheting up of the number of troops in Afghanistan has generated no more than brief debates in parliaments. Why? asks Roberto Savio, founder and president emeritus of IPS news agency.

Climate change presents a challenge of leadership the likes of which the world has never seen, writes Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, founder of the Green Belt Movement and a co-founder of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.

A heated debate about the future of the Mekong River at a media conference in this northern Thai city exposed a fault line triggered by the regional giant China’s plans to build a cascade of dams on the upper stretches of South-east Asia’s largest waterway.

Countries in the Mekong region have indeed opened their borders and former foes become friends, but several of them are still ruled by authoritarian governments that put limits on media and other freedoms.

The World Bank proudly defended the global carbon market in the Danish capital Tuesday for its 'contribution' to efforts to mitigate climate change, in spite of criticism from civil society.

Camila lasted just one day at the junior high school in Gruta de Lourdes, a poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of the Uruguayan capital. This brief taste of secondary education proved to be as difficult and boring as she had been warned by her cousins, who had dropped out of school before her. But then she found a special kind of classroom that changed everything.

Chansa Kabwela faced a five-year jail sentence when she sent photographs of a woman giving birth without help in the country’s largest hospital to government officials.