News headlines in 2009, page 90

While campaigning in the last election, Margaret Roka Mauwa, Member of the Malawian Parliament, did not promise her voters that when she won she would buy them coffins.

Sexual violence is used as a weapon of war in Colombia by all parties in the country’s longstanding armed conflict, and its main victims are women and girls, states a report recently released by Intermón Oxfam, backing up claims made repeatedly by national and international human rights groups.

They call it Tortilla Flats - a haphazard cluster of tents and tarps sprawling across a sidewalk and a vacant lot smack in the middle of Fresno, a city of 500,000 in California's Central Valley.

Defending human rights in Colombia — never an especially safe endeavour — has become even more dangerous lately, several NGO leaders and Colombian human rights defenders testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), Italy is far from attaining gender equality.

Away from the media spotlight that focuses on the widening chasm between Israelis and Palestinians, a group of Israeli humanists is quietly working to break down barriers with their Palestinian neighbours.

The European Union is intercepting big shipments of medicines on their way to poorer countries, according to a new report published Tuesday.

Café by the Ruins, a popular rustic restaurant situated in Baguio City, the Philippines' famed mountain city resort, usually caters to tourists and residents who enjoy sipping their cups of brewed coffee while appreciating the artworks displayed on the café’s stone walls.

Feng Danya studied foreign languages. She had hoped to be part of a growing local company and grow with them, she says. But her timing was wrong. She graduated in the summer of uncertainty for the global economy and many Chinese start-ups.

More than 30,000 Angolans are stranded in transit camps after being abruptly deported from the Democratic Republic of Congo and there are growing fears of a cholera outbreak as the rainy season begins.