In support of the official U.S. assertion that Iran is arming its sworn enemy, the Taliban, the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Dennis Blair, has cited a statement by a Taliban commander last year attributing military success against NATO forces to Iranian military assistance.

Frustrated by the continued intransigence of the Honduran regime that ousted President Manuel Zelaya, the U.S. State Department followed through Wednesday on threats to cut off aid to Honduras.

The 130-member Group of 77, the largest single coalition of developing nations, is at loggerheads with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon over an upcoming one-day global summit on climate change in New York on Sep. 22.

A 'mini-ministerial' meeting has been convened by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Delhi to help member countries draft a roadmap to conclude the troubled Doha round and set the stage for the G20 later this month and the WTO ministerial in Geneva in November.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Il Jung, Hitler, the Holocaust, ecological disasters, poverty in Africa, wars around the world, Obama and Martin Luther King: the appropriate images were all there, an overwhelming backdrop on the huge stage for the Queen of Pop's rendition of her song, 'Get Stupid' in Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park.

Environmental organisations, organic farmers and indigenous people in Chile are opposed to a draft law that would expands the rights of the developers of new varieties of plants, while the government and seed companies argue that there will be no negative impacts on small farmers and biodiversity.

Achieving sustainable growth is one of the major challenges facing Brazil, an emerging power and the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. To do this it will have to curb emissions, 30 percent of which are caused by industry, power generation and the transport sector.

Farmers could be losing tonnes of crops every harvest just because no one has bothered to tell them that scientists have found more effective methods of using water to farm.

Until Monday, Omar and Khaled Al-Habil were the owners of a 20m fishing trawler staffed by five or six fishermen at a time, but employing around 18 in cycles. But that morning the vessel came under heavy Israeli navy machine-gun fire, and then shelling. The trawler caught fire.

It is a walk that no one has taken in the last quarter of a century. The nation having been beset by a bloody sectarian war, who would have thought of travelling the length of Sri Lanka south to north, let alone walk the distance, in the name of peace?