News headlines in 2009, page 39

South African President Jacob Zuma admits that before to coming to Trinidad for the bi-annual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), he met with its secretary general, Kamalesh Sharma, to discuss the relevance of the grouping in today's evolving global power structure.

The fate of one prisoner locked in an Israeli jail could release the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process from its own jail - provided the timing is right.

The ocean punishes Carahatas every time a hurricane tears through the region. The sea combines with the flow of a nearby river, and floods the houses with water a metre and a half deep, or more. Nevertheless, the residents of this Cuban town are deeply attached to the sea.

The list of high-profile foreigners heading to Burma to engage and advise the country’s military regime is about to get longer. The latest due to join that flow is Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

African countries are ready to conclude the Doha Round on the basis of current proposals, but warn against any attempt to renegotiate them at the seventh ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that opens in Geneva today. Meanwhile, the Africa Trade Network demands a moratorium on the Doha talks.

Traffic flowing in and out of her office, each interruption addressed with effortless calm, the nurse in charge of Hospitalisation and Immunisation at Nyamata Health Center in Bugesera District, is a confident woman in her element.

The luxury brands and fashion powerhouses that line the streets of the Lebanese capital seem to suggest that this country is enjoying an hour of glory as the world is in the throes of a severe recession.

For a long time, activists had believed that rainforests in the vast northwest Borneo state of Sarawak were being logged unsustainably, rapidly making way for tree (acacia) plantations, oil palm plantations, dams and secondary growth. But few listened.

Left-wing candidate José Mujica was elected president of Uruguay with nearly 52 percent of the vote Sunday, seven to eight percentage points ahead of his rival, the right-wing Luis Alberto Lacalle, according to projections by pollsters.

National governments and the international community, the U.N. in particular, must rethink and debate the way post-conflict reconstruction is carried out, says a long-time U.N. expert and author.