News headlines in 2009, page 50

As if he were showing off a treasure, Dionicio Sarmiento holds up his seed potatoes with a smile. 'Look how nice they are, all ready to plant. It'll be a good harvest,' says the peasant farmer from Huancavelica, Peru's poorest province, where most of the population depends on subsistence farming.

'We lived like fishes in the water. We were not lazy. We worked hard. We lived a very natural way of life by eating fish and green vegetables and fruits that was abundant in the forests. Nature was our refrigerator.'

The Beijing Platform for Action in 1995 set out an agenda to address gender equality in priority areas, including poverty, education, and health care. It also committed governments to address violence against women, equitable access to economic resources and decision-making power.

A Taliban fighter infiltrated the Afghan police force, killing seven Afghan officers and British soldiers. Similar attacks have taken the lives of U.S. troops.

October and November have been bloody months for Lebanon's migrant domestic workers - over the last five weeks nine women have died. Most deaths have been reported as suicide.

A special U.N. summit of world leaders, scheduled to take place next year, is expected to make 'a final push' to help reach the world body's widely-touted development goals by the targeted date of 2015.

The impacts of climate change on human health will require new approaches to development, based on mitigation and adaptation programmes in line with policies that ensure equal access to health care.

The families of three young women murdered in Ciudad Juárez, in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua on the border with the United States, had to wait eight years for justice, which they finally obtained through the inter-American system.

When Kgomotso Mogami threw her name into the hat to contest the Gaborone Central parliamentary seat it was easy for many people to write her off.

Whether a new internationally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and forestall climate change will be signed next month remains to be seen. What is clear though, is that if there is a place in the world that deserves to be the stage where this treaty ought to be signed, it is the Danish capital of Copenhagen.