News headlines in 2009, page 9

You are driving through the streets of the Ugandan capital and suddenly a traffic police officer waves you down. He immediately notices that the side-mirror on the passenger’s side is missing. He threatens to give you a penalty ticket that costs 50,000 shillings (25 dollars).

The impending privatisation of the Zambia Telecommunications Company (Zamtel) is being opposed by civil society organisations and opposition political parties, who accuse the government of lacking transparency in selling one of the last remaining state-utility firms.

Some 100,000 Guaraní people live in the area where Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge, according to a new map drawn of the indigenous group's ancestral territory, which also highlights the threats, such as expanding soy cultivation, to their natural surroundings.

The sun is about to set over Jabel Mukaber. The call of the muezzin envelops the valley beneath Naim Aweisat’s balcony and, rolling from the mosques of Abu Dis across the wall in the West Bank, rebounds from the stark concrete Israeli security wall to answer the minarets that peer over the walled Old City.

More than 50,000 people are expected to take to the streets of Gaza on Dec. 31 for a mass march designed to send a message to the United States, a key supporter of Israel's army, that the situation in Gaza violates international human rights laws.

The more than 800 small-scale farmers belonging to co-operatives around the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) capital, Kinshasa, could produce enough rice and vegetables for the capital's estimated eight million inhabitants, according to the country's agriculture ministry.

Students in Indonesia are learning science the fun way via a monthly comic magazine that also prepares them for the highly debated national examination.

At a small bakery in Cairo's Boulaq district, dozens of hands thrust through a barred window waving coins and small banknotes. The clerk inside deftly takes the money and deals loaves of round flatbread into plastic bags.

The villages of Ranmala, Nandagane, Shirgaon and Mengdewadi, in Pune, Sangli and Satara districts, western India, have one thing in common.

As western nations and the values of liberal capitalism received a battering in the financial storm, China’s emergence as a pillar of economic stability and growth has fed a new craze in all things Chinese — from language to philosophy and culture.