News headlines in 2009, page 51

'This lie has got to end,' said a sobbing Luisa Marilef, a 55-year-old Mapuche woman who says her son's arrest and prosecution under Chile's anti-terrorism law was part of a set-up by the police and prosecutors.

Although it is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in Latin America and the Caribbean, after Brazil, and will be hosting next year's United Nations climate meeting, Mexico is heading to the Cophenhagen summit practically empty-handed.

In the aftermath of national elections widely condemned as fraudulent, the United States and its allies are wondering what to do about Afghanistan.

Under a beating sun in the grassy field where two U.N. helicopters landed in Grand Goave last week, 19-year-old Benson Blanc moved his hands as if rapid-firing a gun into the ground in front of him and made a 'tok-tok-tok-tok' sound. This is how the soldiers opened fire, he said.

As Barack Obama arrives home from his weeklong tour of East Asia, he confronts a growing list of ever more urgent problems in the Greater Middle East that he inherited from George W. Bush's 'global war on terror'.

Advances made in genetic profiling could be used to fight illegal timber trading, provide authentication of herbal medicines and map entire food chains, according to experts at a conference of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

Before 2002, Chanhpheng Sivila held training workshops for the many Lao disabled women and men at her own house.

Siamese crocodiles once ranged far and wide across South-east Asia, from Indonesia to Vietnam, Laos to Thailand. But habitat loss and poaching virtually wiped out the three-metre long animals. Twenty years ago they were classified as effectively extinct in the wild.

Nearly 15 years after a landmark international conference to advance the rights and freedoms of women, the picture in the Asia-Pacific region is mixed, says a leading women’s rights advocate and senior United Nations official.

Thailand’s capital, dubbed the ‘City of Angels’ and the ‘Venice of the East’, is threatened by long-term flood inundation as rising sea waters triggered by global weather change and monsoonal rains combine.