News headlines in November 2010, page 8

Robert Hörchner can only sleep for two hours at night before the sweating starts. His wife Annelies wakes up frequently, too; each time she hears a noise outside she opens the curtains, expecting to see police at the front door. The couple are traumatised because Robert spent ten months locked up in a filthy Polish cell. He has been accused of holding the lease to a property where cannabis was grown but insists that he is innocent.

Cecilia Tomoka's birthing centre stood unused for three years before the 2009 earthquake flattened it. Now she's rebuilding the house - and her practice - as Malawi's government lifts a ban on traditional birth attendants.

Mohsen Soltany Zand knows life inside Australia’s immigration detention system. Now an Australian citizen, Zand sought political asylum here after fleeing Iran in the late 1990s. He was held by Australian authorities in several detention facilities between 1999 and 2003. 'My experience was unbelievable. (I suffered) a lot of mental damage and many shocking things (happened). It was absolutely like hell,' he says.

'I was shocked when I saw them,' says 18-year-old detainee Chona (not her real name) of the first time she saw the duplex-style bungalows painted in pastel colours that make up her ‘home’.

Though there is widespread acknowledgement that the ambitions for this year's climate change conference are considerably lower than for last year's, the U.N. and other groups say even the deal struck a year ago will not go far enough to stop climate change.

'Men are drunks and batterers,' Lorena Maurin tells IPS before heading in to her computer class, an oasis for women in the 22 de Enero neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Many United Nations peacekeepers are not only failing to meet the needs of civilians, but they are also perceived as unresponsive once civilians convey their needs, says a new report by Oxfam International.

The office is chaotic. Huge piles of T-shirts and boxes of ballpoint pens are piled high on desks where indigenous men and women are busy packing these articles, together with placards, leaflets and fliers, at the headquarters of their National Commission on Statistics.

Deforestation rates have slowed in Brazil and elsewhere in expectation of a windfall of green gold from billions of dollars of carbon credits being mobilised for climate protection, some experts believe.

'I go out with my cart and collect plastic bottles, cardboard, paper, plastic bags; that is my work,' said Laura Cardozo, proud member of a recycling group that works the Paraguayan capital's streets.