News headlines in 2009, page 364

Current rates of deforestation suggest there will hardly be any tropical forests left in 20 years. Sixty percent of the rainforests, which survived for 50 million consecutive years, are already gone.

Both the top civilian and military leadership of the U.S. Department of Defence had busy days on Tuesday, fielding topically varied questions on their new policy priorities since President Barack Obama took office one week ago.

Reconciliation between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah is looking increasingly problematic as the two groups exchange serious accusations of treason, torture and extra-judicial killings.

Uncertainty and tension are running high in Baghdad ahead of the provincial election due Jan. 31. But this time fears are also touched by a new hope.

The Davos delegate seems short of faith this year about anyone's ability to save the world from the financial tsunami that the bosses have unleashed.

'My school was destroyed by (Pakistani) Taliban. I won’t be able to go back to it,' says Sumaira bibi, a grade 5 student from Matta in Swat district.

Voters in Bolivia, one of the countries with the highest concentration of land in the world, decided in Sunday’s referendum to limit the size of large landed estates, or 'latifundia', to 5,000 hectares.

Thanks to the deepening global financial crisis, capitalism will never be the same again, according to the director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analyses (IBase) and one of the main organisers of the World Social Forum (WSF), in an interview with Radio Tierra of Chile (a member of Amarc).

As humanitarian agencies warned of a major crisis unfolding in Sri Lanka, Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee made a quick dash Colombo to extract promises concerning the safety of some 250,000 ethnic Tamils trapped in fighting between separatist rebels and government troops.

Recently declassified government records from 1978 are a further indictment of Australia’s complicity in Indonesia’s 24-year occupation of East Timor.