News headlines in September 2011, page 14

'If this was a meeting about climate change, I am pretty sure that the room would have been more crowded,' Luc Gnacadja, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), commented at a press conference Tuesday.

The Peace Caravan led by poet Javier Sicilia ended its tour through southern Mexico with a loud call for the creation of a truth commission to distinguish between murders committed by organised crime groups and killings by the security forces.

As leaders from two of the world's largest financial institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, met for annual meetings here Tuesday, a delegation of activists from India called on the World Bank to follow through with its proposal to dramatically cut funding for coal-burning power stations.

Eager not to provoke a new round of tensions with China, U.S. President Barack Obama has reportedly decided to sell Taiwan upgraded versions of its main fighter jets instead of the new, more advanced models that the island state had preferred.

As the United Nations celebrated the birth of a new democratic Libya, the National Transitional Council (NTC), which has been duly recognised as the legitimate government, is faced with new political demands - even before it could get off the ground.

U.S. Special Operations Forces have been increasingly aiming their night-time raids, which have been the primary cause of Afghan anger at the U.S. military presence, at civilian non- combatants in order to exploit their possible intelligence value, according to a new study published by the Open Society Foundation and The Liaison Office.

Bananas are harvested where apples used to grow; cassava, a traditional crop, is disappearing from the Northeast; and the southeast is losing the fragrance of good coffee. This is the science fiction of a new distribution of crops in Brazil, South America's agricultural powerhouse.

Only two incidents of violence, triggered by the late start of voting and the suspicion of electoral fraud, were reported as Zambians went to the polls to elect a new president and government on Tuesday.

Soot and ash filled the air the day after a fire gutted Malawi’s Blantyre Market. Men and women merchants wore solemn expressions as they shovelled piles of debris from the site on Tuesday.

A formal strike of teachers has been averted and pupils in Sierra Leone returned to school on Tuesday, almost a week after the term was meant to officially start.