News headlines in January 2010, page 7

Counter-narcotics and counterinsurgency often go hand-in-hand in Afghanistan, where the opium poppy trade bankrolls much of the Taliban's operations and greases political corruption.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's very cautiously-worded support for a negotiated settlement with the Taliban leadership in an interview published Monday is only the first public signal of a policy decision by the Barack Obama administration to support a political settlement between the Hamid Karzai regime and the Taliban, an official of McChrystal's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has revealed in an interview with IPS.

As Iran nervously awaits the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution on Feb. 11 - the day that has traditionally drawn the largest public demonstrations - a subtle change in public discourse can be detected.

Some 300 women a year die in Argentina of complications during pregnancy, childbirth or the postpartum period, from largely preventable causes. Many of the deaths result from unsafe abortions.

As the global financial crisis triggered alarms across Asia, Singapore responded with a government programme to aid its vulnerable workforce. The affluent city- state pumped in three billion U.S. dollars in an employment protection programme.

'Passport Please.' That's what everyone thought they'd ask if you queued up at that exclusive new ice cream shop in one of those smart new malls of fashionable south Delhi.

While the BASIC bloc countries - Brazil, South Africa, India and China - will submit their plans for voluntary mitigation actions by the Jan. 31 deadline stipulated by the Copenhagen Accord, they have taken care to emphasise that the agreement, reached at the end of the December climate change summit in the Danish capital, has no legal basis.

'It is a fact that global warming is happening. If the Arctic Sea ice is melting, how can the Himalayan glaciers not be melting?' glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain asked indignantly.

On the eve of a major international conference on Afghanistan, senior U.S. and British officials are hinting that they are more open to a political settlement with elements of the Taliban than at any time since Washington helped oust it from power nine years ago.

A call issued by social movements to evolve towards a more active role in generating concrete action marked the opening session of a seminar assessing the 10 years of the World Social Forum (WSF) Monday in this southern Brazilian city, the birthplace of the annual global civil society gathering.