News headlines in 2009, page 370

A supposed new paramilitary group’s threat to kill a criminal every 24 hours in Ciudad Juárez has further fanned the flames of the violence in that border city, which gained notoriety over the past decade and a half for the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women and has more recently seen an increase in drug-related murders.

On Thursday, his second full day in office, Pres. Barack Obama took some bold steps that could have wide and positive repercussions in the Middle East.

Days before families across China sit down for the Chinese New Year’s feast, the country’s leaders have moved to restore public confidence in the safety of their repast. A Chinese court has sentenced two men to death and awarded stiff sentences to others implicated in the country’s worst food-tampering scam.

In November 2007, Zimbabwe's then Minister of Finance, Samuel Mumbengegwi struggled through the reading of the 2008 budget, his tongue tripping over figures in the trillions and quadrillions of Zimbabwean. So embarrassed was Mumbengegwi that he even shied away from announcing the total budget figure of 7.84 quadrillion Zimbabwe dollars, then a record amount.

Nationalism, both as an internal and an external consideration, has been a major factor in geo-political wrangling in the 21st century. But strangely, the populations of most countries don't necessarily see their governments as carrying out estimably moral foreign policies, according to a new poll.

The global recession is causing a heightened sense of job insecurity among millions of migrant workers making them more vulnerable to abuse, say migrant rights advocates.

The discovery of more and more bodies of victims of Peru’s dirty war on the grounds of the Los Cabitos military base, which served as a torture and extermination centre during the 1980-2000 armed conflict, have substantiated the accounts of political prisoners who managed to survive.

The war of words continues in Gaza, in spite of the ceasefire. Nancy Snow, propaganda expert, talks to IPS about information spin strategies and whether we, the public, have learnt any lessons from Iraq.

In his first major diplomatic moves since his inauguration, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday named two accomplished negotiators, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Amb. Richard Holbrooke, as special envoys to deal with the Israel-Arab conflict and 'the deteriorating situation' in Afghanistan and Pakistan, respectively.

In the 1967 movie classic the 'Battle of Algiers', which recreated Algeria's war of independence against France, a handcuffed and shackled insurgent leader, Ben M'Hidi, is brought before a group of highly-partisan French journalists for intense interrogation.