News headlines in 2010, page 69

Ngoun Thy shuffled through the darkened room. To the right, mortar shells, lined up in a row. To the left, a spool of aged wiring and a pile of metal.

China’s imperious behaviour in recent territorial spats with its edgy neighbours has touched a raw nerve. Anxiety about its intentions and the future outlook loom large as leaders of the 16-nation East Asia Summit gather this weekend in Hanoi to discuss regional matters.

An 81-year-old Jesuit missionary in Venezuela ended a week-long hunger strike Monday after the government agreed to high-level talks to negotiate the release of three indigenous prisoners facing murder charges and to discuss land claims by Yukpa communities.

As part of a more general promise of reform to U.S. development policy, the U.S. Agency for International Development is poised to fundamentally alter the way it tackles poverty overseas.

Delegates to the world summit on biodiversity here are calling for a moratorium on climate engineering research, like the idea of putting huge mirrors in outer space to reflect some of the sun's heating rays away from the planet.

Wednesday is census day in Argentina, and an army of census-takers will be knocking on doors to collect data on, among other things, the number of blacks and indigenous people, and same-sex couples, in the country. But it is happening under a cloud of controversy and distrust.

At a time when more and more women around the world are taking up jobs in male-dominated domains, 41-year-old Sithabile Ruswa is also making her mark, albeit far from the air-conditioned boardrooms usually reported on.

Two revelations await the reader of the Wikileaks section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths, and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported.

A newly released Wikileaks document on Iraq and the new political alignment between Moqtada al-Sadr and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki both provide fresh evidence that Gen. David Petraeus's war against Shi'a militias in 2007-2008 was a futile exercise.

The world's traditional peacemakers - a title long conferred on women - may be undergoing a gradual transformation.