News headlines in January 2014, page 2

OXFORD, Jan 30 (IPS) - In a radio broadcast in October 1939, Winston Churchill described communist Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Many people in the West today have the same feeling about Iran under the ayatollahs. One hears many pundits refer to Iranian politics as mysterious, inscrutable, baffling and unpredictable.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan 30 (IPS) - As the temperature dips to zero degrees Celsius, a chill has set into the lives of people like 44-year-old Rasool Khan at the Jalozai camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Pakistan. Huddled in tiny tents, with just a plastic sheet over their heads and no heat, they pass sleepless nights in the bitter cold.

WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (IPS) - The United States' main foreign aid funder, USAID, released a mission statement Wednesday that includes new focus on ending extreme poverty while also promising to be more inclusive in incorporating civil society and other input in its decision-making.

WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (IPS) - Even as the United States and European Union begin to lift some sanctions on Iran, U.S. law continues to prohibit some businesses that provide non-controversial services, such as online education, from operating in Iran and other countries.

WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (IPS) - The subtitle of Gareth Porter's new book, "The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare," is well-chosen. Large parts of "A Manufactured Crisis" are indeed untold till now. They amount to what the author terms an "alternative narrative".

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 29 (IPS) - As violence rips through South Sudan and ongoing conflict plagues the Central African Republic and Syria, developing countries stand at a difficult crossroads – struggling to grow economically and politically, yet fielding deep inequalities within their own borders.

Jan 29 (IPS) - Last July, authorities in Tajikistan confiscated the only manuscript of a little-known novelist's latest book. In what can only be described as an Orwellian sequence, after the manuscript was seized at a Dushanbe printing house, the author was hauled in for interrogation and asked questions like, "who ordered you to write this book?"

NAIROBI, Jan 29 (IPS) - In early January 2008, during the violence that rocked Kenya after disputed general elections, a man knocked at Lucia Wakonyo's gate at Mathare Valley, in the sprawling Mathare slum. 

SYDNEY, Jan 29 (IPS) - Long-term dependence on development aid in Pacific Island nations, many of which have been independent for 30-40 years, continues to cause concern.

EL RASHID, Egypt, Jan 29 (IPS) - It only takes a light covering of seawater to render land infertile, so Mohamed Saeed keeps a close watch on the sea as it advances year after year towards his two-hectare plot of land. The young farmer, whose clover field lies just 400 metres from Egypt's northern coast, reckons he has less than a decade before his field – and livelihood – submerges beneath the sea.