News headlines in 2010, page 386

The Dominican Republic, which has historically regarded its Haitian neighbour with suspicion, has turned toward Haiti with a tremendous outpouring of aid and love since a devastating earthquake rocked Port-au-Prince on Tuesday.

'We weren't poor until colonisation made us poor,' indigenous leader Marcos Terena said at the Rio de Janeiro launch of a United Nations report on the State of the World's Indigenous Peoples.

Journalists are the target of such violence in Mexico that many have been forced to seek refuge in the United States, or to give up their profession. And the outlook at the start of this year is even grimmer for media workers in this country.

With civil society gearing up for the 2010 World Social Forum, and later this summer, the 2010 U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan, activists here say new alliances created at the first USSF in 2007 are going strong.

Eleven-year-old Memory’s grandmother wanted her to drop out of school because she is not going to live long enough to complete her studies.

The recent diplomatic crisis between Turkey and Israel has raised questions about the future of relations between the two closest allies of the United States in the region and the direction of the markedly independent foreign policy agenda that Turkey has pursued in recent years.

The roof of Haiti's national penitentiary is missing. The four walls of the prison rise up and break off, leaving only the empty sky overhead.

A year after coming into office, Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is finding some parallels between the challenges of governing this divided South-east Asian kingdom and one of his favourite books, the ‘Myth of Sisyphus’ by French existential novelist Albert Camus.

The global financial crisis led many European economists and civil society activists to believe that the neo-liberal paradigm in social and economic policies across the industrialised world and many developing countries had passed away, victim of its own flaws.

The initiatives were already there, in the form of cooperatives and a variety of related activities. But they have a new connectedness thanks to the growing solidarity economy, which has opened up new horizons for alternative forms of production and social relations.