News headlines in September 2011, page 35

When Ali Sumerian, an editor for Al-Sabah newspaper, and three local media colleagues sat down for a restaurant meal after reporting on a demonstration in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square on Feb. 25 this year, security forces detained them. 'We were accused of encouraging an anti-political process,' says Sumerian. It was only after their arrest triggered a media outcry, he says, were they released 12 hours later. The four were just some of the journalists attacked and arrested that day.

Israeli soldiers and security forces have conducted a string of arrests and violent raids over recent weeks, at Jenin’s renowned Freedom Theatre, in their investigation into the murder of actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, the theatre’s former director and co-founder, earlier this year.

In the first of what is likely to be a tidal wave of polling in the run-up to the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, a survey released here Thursday by the Pew Research Center found some important shifts in U.S. public opinion over the past decade.

Speaking to the U.S. congress in May, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu boasted that his country is a beacon of freedom in the Middle East and North Africa, that it is the only place where Arabs 'enjoy real democratic rights'.

Almost a year and a half after floods wreaked havoc in a large part of the state of Rio de Janeiro, a group of women are struggling to rebuild their lives. They lost everything except their will to pick themselves up again and make the best of the aid they receive, to become self-sufficient again.

A forthcoming study obtained by IPS reveals new information on significant racial bias in military death sentencing, adding fuel to the growing momentum led by rights groups against the death penalty in the United States.

As rebels moved to consolidate control over a post-Gaddafi Libya, foreign policy analysts here are debating whether Washington's role in the nearly six-month civil war in the oil-rich North African nation marks a new model for military intervention and 'regime change' in objectionable countries.

Although he is accused by the opposition of failing to live up to his promises of transparency, job creation and security, Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom has received praise from all sides for his government's successful social programmes.

The year 1994 was marked by blood. Between April and June, more than 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days, in a terrible genocide that followed the assassination of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and the explosion of racial tensions between the country's two major ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis.

While many scientists, academics and politicians still theorise about ways to adapt to climate change, a South African civil society organisation has launched a hands-on project that mobilises communities to take easy steps to reduce carbon emissions.