News headlines in 2009, page 6

Tragic as it was, the Asian tsunami wrought a sea change in the lives of survivors in the sleepy coastal hamlets of southern Tamil Nadu state, where some 8,000 people are known to have died.

Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is les than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years.

If Asia, already unsettled by China’s economic rise, needed a reminder that economic power would be followed by more political assertiveness, then none was more compelling than Beijing’s unconcealed sway on Cambodia to expel 20 Uyghur asylum seekers over the weekend.

The traditional campaign for a Christmas without Hunger in Brazil is in its 17th year. But in spite of ongoing programmes, food insecurity still affects 15 million people in South America's giant, according to official figures.

One year after the devastating attack on Hamas in Gaza a new wave of reports castigating Israel for war crimes has emerged.

During the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Yaowapa Donsay was laid off from the Thai garments factory she was working in. Subsequently, she organised a group of jobless women workers — and that marked her transformation into a labour activist. As coordinator of the Women Workers for Freedom Group, she campaigns for the rights of women workers and for gender equality in the workplace.

After a bus driver was shot to death in Sololá, a city in southwestern Guatemala, an angry mob captured two men and one woman suspected of committing the crime, beat them and burnt them alive in the central plaza.

Early on Christmas Eve morning, the United States Senate will vote on the health care reform legislation that has been at the forefront of President Barack Obama's domestic agenda since he was sworn into office just over 11 months ago.

Sierra Leone’s parliament has come under serious scrutiny by opposition legislators, civil society and members of the public for ‘breaching procedures’ and ‘undermining the constitution’.

It is only a matter of days before Marcela Vázquez, an undocumented immigrant, leaves the southwestern U.S. state of Arizona for good. And before she does, she's putting as much as she can up for sale - including her three children's beds.