News headlines in January 2012, page 17

Massive uncertainty, severe sanctions on its economy and a diminishing supply of hard currency have sent the Iranian currency, the rial, into a tailspin that appears unlikely to stabilise anytime soon.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sought to freshen up his international image on a tour of Latin America and demonstrate that his country does have friends in the world, while almost every day events place him at the epicentre of fraught geopolitical tensions.

Sitting in the shade under a tree at a careful distance, Francisco Sosa watches his son prepare the land for planting by spraying the weeds with an herbicide from a tank carried on his back.

A Tibetan ‘Living Buddha’ who set himself on fire in protest against Chinese rule died this week, sparking a vigil of thousands of Tibetans and creating fears that self-immolations are spreading.

It’s a new year, a new beginning but probably a harsher reality in Sri Lanka's former war zone. As the country enters its third year since the end of a bloody sectarian war that tore the nation's fabric apart, for many of the survivors of the worst fighting, a tough but true reality is dawning. Life in peacetime may yet be a hard struggle.

Ayman Siam, 41, is not growing carnations as usual this year. It’s limonium and statice flowers instead because they are hardier. Given the risks of an Israeli blockade, it’s a political decision.

Eighteen-year-old 'Kettlyne', a Haitian orphan living in the rubble-strewn Croix Deprez camp — one of the many remaining tent-cities that houses refugees from the Jan. 12, 2010 earthquake — is unable to feed her three-year-old daughter.

Brazil, for decades a source of migrants to the United States and Europe, is now facing its own humanitarian challenge: applying the international solidarity it trumpets to the Haitians who are arriving in the thousands, in search of a better life.

For two years now, since her husband was one of the estimated 230,000 Haitians killed in the massive earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010 and she and her three children became homeless, little has changed for Dieulia St. Juste.

Sitting in the shade under a tree at a careful distance, Francisco Sosa watches his son prepare the land for planting by spraying the weeds with an herbicide from a tank carried on his back.