News headlines in January 2011, page 14

For close to 10 years, Patrick Marzouca has just managed to keep his tiny car factory afloat in a rapidly declining productive sector.

One billion dollars and just over four years after Boeing won a contract to build a 'virtual fence' on the Arizona-Mexico border, the high-tech project was canceled last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid widespread recognition that it has been a failure.

Defusing the North Korean crisis can be achieved with a bolder military alliance, say Japan, South Korea and the United States. But peace proponents beg to differ, arguing that inclusion and engagement with the Stalinist state and its ally China is the only way to build trust and lay the foundation for stability at long last in East Asia.

Indigenous children under five in Peru's highlands regions still bear the brunt of chronic malnutrition, even though local authorities in those areas received millions of dollars worth of taxes between 2006 and 2010 from the mining companies operating there.

The new school year opened with hope - and hunger - in Swaziland this week: an estimated 140,000 orphans and vulnerable children are among the small, eager faces in the mountain kingdom's classrooms. Poverty and the AIDS pandemic threaten to make an early mark on the next generation.

Women’s rights in Eastern Europe have been put into the spotlight as a Hungarian midwife faces five years in prison for assisting with home births.

In China, a country with a history of famine and where rural dwellers still use the greeting 'have you eaten?', food is close to sacred. Feeding the country’s massive population remains one of the biggest threats to future economic growth and social stability, experts warn.

The scene outside a temple in Kannur district in Kerala recently was something unusual in modern India. Sitting on one side of a balance scale hanging in front of the Kannadipara Muthappan Temple was a woman, and on the other side, a bucket of coconut wine.

An hour and fifteen minutes each day: Melina Kalunga has plenty of time to measure how long it takes to resolve a legal battle over Malawi's Electoral Commission.



Ten days before the two-month deadline for a negotiated solution to Cote d'Ivoire's presidential deadlock comes due, pressure is mounting to end the stalemate in Abidjan, as observers pin the outcome of the power struggle on the future of the region as a whole.