News headlines in September 2011, page 31

Armed groups are withholding aid and preventing Somali famine refugees from leaving camps to ensure the continued supply of food by aid agencies that they are presently selling on the open market.

While 10 years after the 9/11 Al- Qaeda attacks, most U.S. citizens say they respect diversity and the freedom of religion, they don't always apply those principles to Islam and immigrants, according to a survey released here Tuesday by two major think tanks.

As human rights cases from Argentina's 1976-1983 military dictatorship move ahead in the courts, cases of judges and prosecutors who were accomplices in the crimes are coming to light.

Development aid is ineffective mostly because it is tied to contracts worth billions of dollars awarded to firms in developed countries in a phenomenon called boomerang aid, a new study says.

Thousands of victims affected by toxic waste dumping in 2006 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire's commercial capital, still have not received the economic compensation they were promised.

As Canada's aboriginal community celebrates last month's milestone legal ruling regarding clear-cutting in Ontario and the forestry sector mulls its future strategy, discussions are taking place about how to carry out an impact assessment evaluating damage incurred by decades of industry encroachment on traditional lands and forests.

A richly biodiverse rainforest the size of 3,000 soccer fields in central Bolivia will be the first victim of the road planned to run through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), say environmental activists.

When Johanna Sigurdardottir was sworn in as Iceland's head of government back in February 2009, she was described as the world's first openly gay prime minister.

The Catholic Church seems to be expecting a rise in religious sentiment among the Cuban population as a result of the climate of dialogue and more relaxed relations with the government seen since the 1998 visit of Pope John Paul II.

European investigators had a hard time dealing with cases of misuse of European Union funds in Kosovo due to the complex bureaucracy that regulated the relationship between the EU and the United Nations administration, which was the only official international decision-making authority in the former Serbian province.