News headlines in 2009, page 5

U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a 'neutron initiator' for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

In a move that places greater weight on growing regional solidarity over historical ties with a western superpower, Thailand ordered its military to forcibly return over 4,000 men, women and children from the Hmong ethnic community to Laos, the country they had fled in search of political asylum.

Mai Asi has never stopped mourning for her two fishermen sons. They have been held behind bars in India for poaching in the waters of neighbouring Pakistan—a crime for which they were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

Resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along the two-state parameters seems less with Israel torn between accepting a Palestinian state and the settler ideology which calls for Israel’s exclusive rule over the whole of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Economic figures have now confirmed what analysts have long predicted would be the defining event of 2010. After 30 years of spectacular growth, China is poised to overtake Japan as the world’s second largest economy and firmly establish itself as the leading source of global growth.

An animal 'black death' that has devastated livestock around the world for thousands of years, causing famine and untold human misery, is about to be permanently consigned to the history books.

More than a year ago several hundred newly trained Liberian soldiers staged a one-day strike at the Armed Forces of Liberia (AFL) headquarters.

When he ordered his colleagues at the Water and Sanitation Association of Zambia to save all their urine in a plastic bottle in the office toilet, they thought he was mad. But German sanitation specialist Christopher Kellner wanted to demonstrate why he calls urine 'liquid gold'.

For women in Pakistan’s North Western Frontier Province (NWFP), 2009 has been particularly hard.

What happens to language and the way women are addressed when they start to occupy positions of responsibility? Well, it depends on the language.