News headlines in 2008, page 4

Diovie Arcilla is happy to be home for Christmas. This Singapore-based computer programmer values being with her family and friends in the holiday season. But news that some of her colleagues have been retrenched is making Arcilla anxious.

Bangladesh goes to polls on Monday after a military-backed interim government spent two years trying to cleanse the country's electoral system of fraud and get rid of rampant corruption in public life.

Anger, shock and revulsion at the continuing carnage in Gaza has ignited spontaneous demonstrations and riots across the West Bank and Israel, sparking concerns of a possible third Palestinian uprising or Intifadah.

At least 300 Palestinians have been killed and more than 900 wounded as Israel continues to carry out its severest military attack on Gaza since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

'The chapter is closed, and the Pakistan People’s Party [PPP] is dead. It doesn’t matter who killed her,' said Mohammad Sharif, a young driver working for a voluntary agency, referring to former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination on Dec. 27 last year.

'I am making much more profit selling seawater than I used to get from selling groceries and small household goods,' Carlos Marufu, a holy water dealer based in Harare told IPS.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay last week lambasted the Israeli government for detaining and expelling a human rights expert, Richard Falk, who was on a U.N.-mandated assignment to probe the human rights situation in the occupied territories.

The eight rows of pews at St. Fatima’s church in Colombo were mostly empty despite the festive look from Christmas decorations.

The killing of a student in front of a nightclub in Studentski Grad (Student City) in Sofia has brought to the fore the chaotic and insecure living conditions of tens of thousands of students housed in the quarters.

More than half a million Peruvians who lost their personal documents during the 1980-2000 civil war will no longer have to assume the often impossible task of proving their identities, thanks to a new law.