News headlines in 2009, page 342

The world economic recession is threatening the progress Latin America has made in fair trade. The leaders of this alternative form of exchange are making emergency contacts in order to assess the situation and come up with strategies to confront it.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama must take a leadership position in championing human rights in the Middle East and North Africa by using U.S. economic and trade leverage and confronting the growing global threat of authoritarianism being promoted by Arab regimes, advocates say.

President Barack Obama decided to approve only 17,000 of the 30,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, and Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM commander, after McKiernan was unable to tell him how they would be used, according to White House sources.

Imagine turning on your television and all you see is black and white fuzz.

European Union aid has been given to an Israeli oil company which has reduced the supply of fuel to Gaza as part of an economic blockade internationally recognised as illegal, Brussels officials have admitted.

Earth's two ice-covered polar oceans may be the most inhospitable places on the planet, but more than 12,000 species of animals have been found there, according to new research released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here.

Negotiations for the political endgame of the recent Gaza war have proven much more difficult than - presumably - the Israeli cabinet imagined last December, when it took the final decision to start the war.

On his first foreign visit as U.S. president, Barack Obama's rhetoric of 'hope' and 'change' came face to face with the hard, divisive policy realities of climate change from Canada's tar sands, a growing insurgency in Afghanistan and the sputtering world economy.

The skeletons are tumbling out of China’s cupboard of buried memories. The 30th anniversary of China’s brief but bloody war with Vietnam may have gone unmarked but for the fact that Feb.17 also saw the start of the trial of the chief torturer of Cambodia’s grisly Khmer Rouge.

United States diplomats are back in force at the U.N., after having distanced themselves from the world body for several years. This week they contributed to successful mediation between Georgia and Russia, although they did not help resolve a stalemate on gay rights.