News headlines in January 2011, page 19

Wednesday's collapse of the government of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri adds to the growing list of challenges faced by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama across the Middle East.

A Wikileaked January 2009 diplomatic cable from the United States' Beijing embassy forecasting the next three decades of U.S.-China relations warned of the Asian giant's 'rapid military modernisation'.

With seven Latin American countries formally recognising Palestine as an independent state, there is one question floating in the corridors of the United Nations: will Asia and Africa follow suit?

When the price of salt in Ohio skyrocketed 236 percent in the winter of 2008, Ted Strickland, the governor of the state, asked the state inspector general to figure out why. Investigators quickly found that two government contractors — Cargill and Morton Salt — were responsible for this sudden price increase.

In Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's eight years as president of Brazil, he signed decrees creating just 88 indigenous reserves, far fewer than his immediate predecessors.

Famine-hollowed farmers watch trucks loaded with grain grown on their ancestral lands heading for the nearest port, destined to fill richer bellies in foreign lands. This scene has become all too common since the 2008 food crisis.

A report released Thursday by the World Bank indicates that for the next two years, developing nations are better poised on the road to economic recovery than their more developed counterparts.

Touring Iran's Arab rivals this week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sounded almost triumphant as she asserted that economic sanctions have helped slow Tehran's nuclear progress.

John Garang, the revered late leader of the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement, once said that women are the 'the poorest of the poor and the marginalised of the marginalised'. As the reality of an independent South Sudan approaches, the region's women have vowed they will not remain second class citizens.

Since antiretroviral drugs became widely available in many countries, AIDS has gradually come to be seen more like a chronic disease. But the treatment that restored the hope of people living with HIV has posed a new challenge, which is generally played down by health professionals.