News headlines in January 2010, page 6

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is using West Bank mosques as a new battle ground in its political offensive against its opponents within Hamas as well as critics from its own Fatah party.

Reformist leader Anwar Ibrahim, 63, who has been inflicted with various harms in his four-decade-old campaign to build ‘a just, prosperous and democratic Malaysia’, is facing probably the final battle of his epic career.

The Czech Republic’s strong heritage of cooperative movements, dating from the interwar period, is serving as inspiration for new initiatives in the post-communist era and acting as 'harbingers of a new global economic system'.

The stern warning given to China by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning internet censorship and responding to allegations that Chinese hackers had accessed Google email addresses has received a pointed response from the Chinese government, raising questions over what the next move will be for Google, the United States, and U.S. firms that do business in China.

While President Barack Obama's first State of the Union Address Wednesday night will almost certainly focus on the economy, unemployment, and other pressing domestic issues, an increasingly worrisome international situation is likely to be tugging at the back of his mind.

Diamonds haven't been among the first concerns at the World Social Forum these last 10 years. But through the recession and the still tottering recovery, a new sparkle in that business is pointing the way to a brighter world that is also better in a WSF sort of way.

Some signs are emerging of a new trend shown up by the recession: local governments (and the people) are going one way, national ones another.

The agreed, if dubious, solution to the financial crisis was to get people and governments - in the richer countries - to borrow more in order to spend more. What is not in doubt is the growing numbers of people who will be able to neither borrow nor spend.

Ten-year-old Tembuso Magagula sat outside her classroom with her shoulders hunched against the cold today, tears streaming from her eyes. Her long-awaited first day of school had turned into a nightmare.

A decision by Iraq's controversial Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) Monday to remove 59 candidates from a list of over 500 candidates banned from running in the March parliamentary elections appears to be a sign that the AJC is softening its stance following widespread domestic opposition and a visit by U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden to Baghdad last week.