News headlines in January 2010, page 4

Renewable energy projects in the Middle East could be scaled back or scuttled unless fresh sources of financing are found.

With the French regional elections coming up in March and a debate on national identity raging, the burqa polemic is keeping the immigration and 'values' issue alive here.

Po Po has been enduring long hours of hard work, poor pay and abuse within the confines of her employer’s home for the past seven years. Poverty forced her to leave her family in eastern Burma and abandon a university education to work as a domestic helper in Thailand.

'Rage is sometimes the appropriate response' to the failure of the world's leaders to craft a new climate treaty at the Copenhagen summit, says British economist Tim Jackson.

Black communities have for the most part remained out of sight and out of mind in Paraguay, but now they are organising and claiming equal economic and social rights, while building an Afro-Paraguayan identity.

Afghanistan may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but official figures do not quite paint a picture of a country deep in the throes of poverty and underdevelopment.

When Benjamin Netanyahu dug a spade here and in another West Bank settlement this week, some thought the Israeli Prime Minister was actually digging a hole into current United States-sponsored peace efforts.

After the wave of de-privatisation of water services facilities that started across the world two years ago, municipalities in Europe are now buying back the electricity utilities they sold to private investors in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This month’s trial of four pro-democracy activists in this major Vietnamese city has generated a flurry of online posts from concerned citizens seeking to express their sentiments against the country’s communist regime though knowing full well the risks involved.

New vaccination programmes against rotavirus are starting to have a positive impact, and could eventually prevent hundreds of thousands of child deaths a year, according to a new report.