News headlines in January 2012, page 6

El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world, with one of the highest murder rates. But the authorities cannot agree on whether or not most of the killings should be laid at the door of the youth gangs known as 'maras'.

Just a week ago at a cabinet meeting, Uzbek leader Islam Karimov hailed the achievements of the Uzbek economic model, which is basically a retrofitted command system. But Karimov clearly hasn't gotten out of the capital much lately. For many citizens in Central Asia's most populous state, electricity cuts and gas shortages have become a defining feature of this winter.

As Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon continues his search for a new team of senior managers for his second five-year term in office which began Jan. 1, two more heads have rolled at the world body.

Odette Klysinska, a Catholic French native, sits in her living room in an affluent neighbourhood in Beirut, clutching her will in one hand, shocked to learn that it is no longer legally valid in the country she now calls home.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the uprisings in Egypt that unseated an authoritarian regime and rekindled the spark of nonviolent resistance around the world.

European countries are imposing unprecedented sanctions against Iran in part in hopes of preventing an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations that could further destabilise the Middle East and wreak havoc on the global economy.

Running on promises of job creation, economic growth and wider stakeholder consultations, Jamaica's most popular politician and the country's first female prime minister Portia Simpson Miller swept to power in a victory almost no one had predicted.

At least six people have been killed as Syrian security forces continued attacks on protest hubs across the country, activists say.

Experts agree that Sri Lanka's free pre and postnatal clinics across the island nation have helped bring infant mortality down to 15 per 1,000 live births and the under-five mortality rate to 21 per 1,000 live births.

The Cuban government energetically rebutted what it regards as another campaign to discredit it, following the death in prison of a man who, according to the authorities, was not a dissident nor on hunger strike, as the opposition alleges.