News headlines in 2009, page 341

It happened decades ago when this region was gripped by the fallout of the United States’ war in Vietnam. But the ‘boat people’ phenomenon is back, and this time it has to do with Burma’s Muslim Rohingyas fleeing harsh realities at home.

During a recent appearance on the Fox News Channel's 'Fox and Friends' programme, Mike Evans accused former President Jimmy Carter of everything from helping overthrow the Shah of Iran to causing the Russians to invade Afghanistan and provoking the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

Six thousand tonnes of mercury enter the environment every year, posing a threat to human and animal health. Environment ministers meeting in Kenya have agreed to negotiate a treaty to reduce the supply and use of mercury worldwide.

Egyptian authorities are continuing to prevent humanitarian aid from crossing the border into the Gaza Strip, according to local sources.

Mesoamerica's salamanders appear to be joining the global decline in amphibian species, like frogs, adding to the evidence of ecological change around the planet.

Seventy percent of Iraq's doctors are reported to have fled the war-torn country in the face of death threats and kidnappings. Those who remain live in fear, often in conditions close to house arrest.

The relationship between the U.S. and Russia, which reached a nadir this past August during the war in Georgia, appears to have experienced a slight thaw during the first month of the Barack Obama administration.

Last year, rice farmers took to the streets of Ghana’s capital of Accra and accused the government of allowing imports to destroy their livelihoods.

One year after the historic apology made to indigenous Australians by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the nation, conjecture remains over whether enough has been done to support the acknowledgement of wrongs inflicted on the first Australians.

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón, known for prosecuting alleged tyrants, terrorists and perpetrators of corruption, believes that progress toward a global justice system began in 1996, with the trials in Madrid of Argentine and Chilean torturers, and especially with the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in October 1998.