WAR OF WORDS - By Anne K Walters - US unemployment fell in January to a rate last seen just after President Barack Obama entered office three years ago, but as the economy looms as the central issue of the 2012 presidential election, Republicans wasted no time in pummelling him. Government figures

By Amulya Ganguli - SINCE the Manmohan Singh government in India is at the receiving end of the Supreme Court’s stinging indictment of its role in the spectrum scam, it is the Congress which will suffer the most during the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh and Goa. The party would be grateful that

By Susan Cornwell - MISSILE defence, an issue that has poisoned US-Russia relations, could be a “game-changer” that transforms ties if the two sides co-operate on a shared system, says a report by former top officials from both sides of the Atlantic. Recent headlines in both countries have been rem

By Britta Guerke - WAS there once a golden age where children could just be children and everyone knew their place in society? If anyone ever showed the 19th century was not like that, it was Charles Dickens. With his descriptions of hardship in Victorian London, he unmasked bourgeois illusions. Ami

By Rhys Jones/Tim Hepher - BIG decisions on warplane purchases by Japan and India have intensified competition in the global market, with Western defence firms scrambling for orders in Asia and the Middle East as their home-country budgets shrivel. Growing international unease over China’s military

By Henry Orrego - BATTLES between three Mexican billionaires over control of the telecoms sector heated up again, intensified by international criticism of monopolistic practices. Carlos Slim — the world’s richest man according to Forbes magazine — received a boost to his dominance of the Mexican c

By Laura Zuckerman - SELENIUM contamination from a phosphate mine in southeastern Idaho is linked to fish deformities such as two-headed trout, and the problem would worsen if discharge limits were eased, a new government report found. The findings come as Smoky Canyon Mine, run by the J R Simplot

FRONTRUNNER - By Lennart Simonsson - HEADING into the Finnish presidential runoff tomorrow, former finance minister Sauli Niinisto of the conservatives, has kept his lead over Pekka Haavisto of the Green Party, polls showed. Since the first round of voting January 22, the duo have been targeting vo

By James Pomfret - AS Hong Kong’s outgoing leader Donald Tsang looks ahead to retirement, an unusually toxic public debate over the burden placed by a flood of mainland Chinese visitors has struck at the heart of Hong Kong’s often rocky transition from British colony to Chinese special administrativ

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin - GLOBAL protests against a treaty combatting web piracy have invigorated Germany’s Pirate Party, a political group currently polling up to 6 per cent nationwide. Rumblings against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty have spread mainly through web communiti