News headlines in September 2009, page 7

Constitutional reforms that would ban same-sex couples from marrying and adopting children in El Salvador failed to obtain the required number of votes in Congress.

In the steep valleys of Lesotho's Maluti mountains, women carry yellow plastic buckets of water across fields of dark-brown earth; a group of men form a human chain to pass rocks between them to build a small dam wall across a mountain stream; clothes are being washed in rivers; and men draped in blankets ride donkeys or horses along the roadside.

Leaders of the Achuar people are challenging a decision by the Peruvian government to declare that a clean-up effort by the PlusPetrol oil company in the northeastern Amazon jungle has been completed.

Russia should reconsider its trade policy towards African states if it wants to keep up with the likes of China, the European Union (EU) and the U.S., say experts.

Eight months after Barack Obama launched his presidency by promising a speedy push for Palestinian-Israeli peace, that effort has stalled badly. And there are now growing fears that the top levels of Obama's peace team are torn by internal disagreements that may undermine the whole peace effort.

Charges by U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of France and Britain Friday that Iran is building a secret underground plant to enrich uranium appear certain to heighten tensions just days before critical talks between Tehran and its three accusers, as well as Germany, China and Russia.

Something that was perhaps only half-expected has happened in Pittsburgh: the G20 has moved on from being an event to becoming an institution.

An initiative to reform the International Monetary Fund (IMF) voting structure is causing tension at the G20 here as European delegations resist a U.S.-spearheaded effort to give greater clout to emerging economies, primarily because it would decrease European voting power.

As the world's attention increasingly turns to the impact of climate change, at least one project intended to reduce global carbon emissions is accused of displacing indigenous persons from their home in Uganda.

When some Eastern European states faced economic collapse as the financial crisis took hold, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in and offered governments huge loans.