News headlines in 2009, page 34

A small group of indigenous people have travelled here to the historic Copenhagen climate talks to show negotiators dramatic documentary videos they made about the immediate impacts of climate change on their homelands and way of life.

Freddy Garcete, a 50-year-old painter who works in the construction industry, travelled to Spain in search of better wages two years ago, becoming one of the 500,000 Paraguayans forced to seek work abroad because of the conditions at home.

Governments expressed the will at the seventh ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to finish the Doha Round of trade negotiations as soon as possible. But the Africa Group still deems development to be a more important priority than a speedy conclusion.

The catastrophic risk insurance shared by the countries of the Caribbean could serve as a model for collective strategies for dealing with natural disasters resulting from climate change, John Nash, the World Bank's lead economist for Latin America and the Caribbean, told Tierramérica.

Chile is a classic example of the concentration of media ownership in too few hands, says Chilean journalist María Olivia Mönckeberg in her latest book 'Los magnates de la prensa' (The Press Magnates). If the state does not exercise stricter regulation, democracy itself may be undermined, she warns.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) appears to be successfully countering the Israeli government's refusal to work towards a two-state solution to end the decades- long conflict.

Without an efficient bureaucracy, occupation of the land of another people cannot be sustained. This is all the more true of Israel's 42-year occupation of Palestinian lands.

'Young and old, whether you’re against them (the Ampatuans) or not, were (forcibly) taken from their homes and brought to a place somewhere in Maguindanao, where they were tortured and later killed,' recounted a resident of Cotabato City—a major city bordering Maguindanao in southern Philippines— who declined to be named out of fear for his life.

In an instant the Philippines emerged as the world’s most dangerous place for journalists, effectively displacing Iraq, which, until the massacre in an impoverished town in southern Philippines, held that dubious distinction.

'It is clear that there are huge discrepancies within Sub-Saharan Africa, but overall the region is doing extremely well in terms of political empowerment,' says Saadia Zahidi, head of the Women Leaders and Gender Parity Programme at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in a telephone interview from Geneva.