News headlines in 2009, page 31

Young people from 44 countries are demanding that world leaders take decisive action on climate change. The time for talk is over, they declared at the end of a weeklong Children's Climate Forum here.

Turkey is signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but that does not stop minors in the country's Kurdish dominated eastern and southeastern regions from ending up with stiff jail sentences.

Despite being hit by powerful earthquakes this year, Indonesia is still reeling from the lack of an effective disaster management system that could prevent extensive loss of life and damage to property.

Fifty-five years after the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung, Kwame Nkrumah's exhortation to the developing world to unite for socioeconomic transformation remains resonant.

The ruling South West Africa People's Organisation party (SWAPO) has won legislative elections in Namibia, with voters also giving incumbent President Hifikepunye Pohamba a second five-year term in office. New comers Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) will become the official opposition.

Mauritian experts are helping set up cogeneration systems to feed the hunger for electricity in Tanzania, Zambia and elsewhere. An example of how appropriate technology can be applied to problems common to countries in the global South.

U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen argued in Senate Testimony Wednesday that the 30,000-troop increase is necessary to prevent the Taliban from giving new safe havens to al Qaeda terrorists.

Some 8,000 kilometres from the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Native American environmental experts from 66 tribes came together at a summit here this week to address the most pressing needs in their communities - problems, all emphasised, that know no geographic boundaries.

U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen argued in Senate Testimony Wednesday that the 30,000-troop increase is necessary to prevent the Taliban from giving new safe havens to al Qaeda terrorists.

A group of local residents from Villa 1-11-14, a slum on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, put out a magazine aimed at breaking down the stereotypes propagated by the mainstream media, which associate neighbourhoods like theirs only with drugs, crime and marginalisation.