News headlines in 2009, page 94

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has appealed to the information and communications technology (ICT) community to help seal the deal at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

Zimbabwe's eight-month-old inclusive government suffered its biggest setback to date, when Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announced that his Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) was partly disengaging from the government.

Cuban President Raúl Castro is willing to risk unpopular measures to free the state from its excessive burden of subsidies and for-free services, as part of a programme to adjust public expenditure to shrunken government revenues and balance the budget.

A veteran Army officer who has served in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars warns in an analysis now circulating in Washington that the counterinsurgency strategy urged by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is likely to strengthen the Afghan insurgency, and calls for withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. combat forces from the country over 18 months.

A veteran Army officer who has served in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars warns in an analysis now circulating in Washington that the counterinsurgency strategy urged by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is likely to strengthen the Afghan insurgency, and calls for withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. combat forces from the country over 18 months.

The Paraná River delta in eastern Argentina is the only one in the world that is not disappearing, and that is due to deforestation for cultivating soybeans, explains geologist Jorge Codignotto, a former member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in this interview.

While economists at a prominent South African bank are excited about burgeoning investment by Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) in Africa, they are vague on the question of the extent to which it will benefit the majority of Africans. Ensuring this, they believe, is the responsibility of African states themselves.

'For almost one full day, we were desperate, wet and hungry,' said Raja Angamutthu. 'Our house, farmland, utensils, everything was floating in a watery grave while we looked on helplessly!'

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down, rifts between east and west Germany remain: east Germans vote differently, are earning less money, and are more pessimistic than west Germans.

A regional United Nations body dubbed by its critics as a 'talk shop' and with limited concrete achievements to its name appears set to change that image by striking a deal with one of Asia’s recalcitrant regimes — the Burmese military government.