News headlines in October 2011, page 21

On the face of it, the sudden release of political prisoners in Burma would appear a triumph for the sanctions regime imposed on the Southeast Asian nation by Western governments.

In May 2011, Brazilian journalist Natália Garcia decided to spend one year travelling to different cities around the world to better understand how to make urban landscapes more liveable for inhabitants.

Degradation of land is the world's quiet crisis, undercutting food production, increasing water scarcity, impoverishing hundreds of millions of people and affecting two billion overall. Nearly 20 million square kilometres of the earth's arable lands — an area twice the size of Canada — have already been degraded.

Dina Apomayta is heir to the 3,500-year legacy of the Andean cultures of Tiwanaku and Lupaca, which venerated the land. And she and many other rural women in Peru continue to nurture the agricultural biodiversity that has been handed down from generation to generation.

It is a hot and humid morning in the village of Fube in southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Dust and smoke from morning fires and low-lying clouds mingle to give the horizon a distinctively fuzzy look.

South Korea's opposition party has said it will resist any bid to force a sweeping free-trade agreement with the U.S. through parliament, following ratification of the deal by the U.S. congress.

Libya's governing National Transitional Council (NTC) is holding about 2,500 detainees in the capital Tripoli alone, many of whom have been beaten and subjected to other ill-treatment and not given access to lawyers or judicial proceedings, says London-based human-rights watchdog Amnesty International.

Rural and indigenous women in northern Argentina, hit hard by the expanding agricultural frontier, deforestation and the spraying of toxic pesticides, spoke out about their problems and set forth proposals for discussion at the next global summit on climate change.

'Since the economic crisis, migrants are increasingly at risk from racism and xenophobia,' president of the United Nations General Assembly Nassir Abdulaiziz Al-Nasser said at a meeting on migration and communication in Helsinki Thursday.

After 23 years of enforced silence, media professionals and artists in Tunisia are enjoying a period in which their freedom of expression is being respected for the first time.