By Waqar Gillani, New York Times, January 25, 2010
LAHORE, Pakistan — A teenage boy blew up himself on Tuesday evening while attempting to break through heavy security for a Shiite procession here, killing at least 10 and injuring 79, the police said.
The attacker was 14 to 16 years old, the police said, and was carrying a handbag that he said held CDs. When he tried to enter the procession and was to be searched, he detonated his explosives....
By Dan Murphy, Christian Science Monitor, January 25, 2011 Egypt's protests today appear to be the largest public call for democratic reform and an end to the Mubarak regime for years.
By Hussein Dakroub, Daily Star (Lebanon,) January 25, 2011
Tires set alight and roads blocked as Hezbollah-backed candidate secures requisite votes
BEIRUT: Public protests, including the blocking of roads with burning tires, erupted across Lebanon Monday hours after former Prime Minister Najib Mikati, the Hezbollah-backed candidate for the premiership, was assured of becoming prime minister-designate.
Burmese migrant workers: caught between a tyrant and a tiger
By Joseph Allchin, Poverty Matters blog @ guardian.co.uk, January 24
Malaysia's economic boom has been driven by the exploitation of cheap migrant labour, from Burma and Thailand. Underpaid and with no rights, this is their story.
Al Jazeera has obtained more than 1,600 internal documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.....These documents – memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations – date from 1999 to 2010.....
By Michael Slackman, New York Times, January 23, 2011
CAIRO — Egypt’s Interior Minister charged Sunday that a Palestinian extremist group with links to Al Qaeda was behind the New Year’s Eve bombing outside a church in Alexandria that killed 21 people and set off days of sectarian rioting around the nation.
In a nationally televised speech, the minister, Habib el-Adly said the authorities had “conclusive evidence” linking the attack on Egyptian Christians to the Army of Islam, a militant group based in the Gaza Strip....
Ny Gardener Harris, New York Times, January 22/23, 2011
The Obama administration has become so concerned about the slowing pace of new drugs coming out of the pharmaceutical industry that officials have decided to start a billion-dollar government drug development center to help create medicines.
By Catherine Rampell, "Economitrix Blog" @ New York Times, January 21, 2010
Today the chairman and chief executive of General Electric, Jeffrey R. Immelt, was named as the chairman of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. He was already serving on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board under Paul A. Volcker.
Here’s a short biography and a reading list on Mr. Immelt....
By Nicholas K. Geronios, Associated Press, January 19, 2011
SPOKANE, Wash. -- A bomb left along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade was sophisticated, with a remote detonator and the ability to cause many casualties, an official familiar with the case said Wednesday.
The bomb, which was defused without incident on Monday, was the most potentially destructive he had ever seen, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to release information about the investigation.
By Dave Itzkof, New York Times, January 14/15, 2011
A federal appeals court has ruled that Joe Berlinger, a filmmaker who was ordered to hand over footage from his 2009 documentary “Crude” to the Chevron Corporation, cannot invoke a journalist’s privilege in refusing to do so because his work does not constitute an act of independent reporting....
