From Newsday, Jan. 10:

The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the city on Tuesday, challenging restrictions on people's right to photograph public places after an award-winning filmmaker from India was blocked from videotaping near the MetLife building.

From Newsday, Jan. 11:

A criminal court judge in Manhattan has held that the city's main weapon in its campaign against the Critical Mass bicycle ride is unconstitutional.

From The Scotsman, Jan. 12:

A man armed with a knife wounded several people, including a rabbi, at a synagogue in Moscow yesterday. One Jewish official said the man called out as he burst into the building: "I will kill people, I will kill Jews."

Naga separatist guerillas in India's remote northeast are once again being hunted down by the authorities in neighboring Burma (Myanmar), where they had previously been granted refuge. This appears to be leading to a two-front insurgency in which the Naga separatists are seeking an independent state straddling the current Burma-India border. On Jan. 10, Naga guerilla leaders claimed to have killed seven Burmese soldiers while losing three rebel fighters in a heavy gun battle in Burmese territory.

From AP, via the New York Times, Jan. 10:

President-elect Evo Morales of Bolivia met with President Hu Jintao of China in Beijing and called China an "ideological ally," a day after he invited it to develop Bolivia's vast gas reserves. China has been developing links with Latin American nations as sources of fuel and raw materials and as markets for its exports. Mr. Hu promised to encourage "strong and prestigious" Chinese companies to invest in Bolivia, the official New China News Agency reported. On Sunday, Mr. Morales met with Tang Jiaxuan, the Chinese state councilor, and invited China to help with his country's gas industry after he carries out plans to nationalize its reserves.

From Arab Monitor, Jan. 8:

US occupation troops burst into the Umm al-Qura Mosque compound in western Baghdad and ransacked the offices of the headquarter of the Association of Muslim Scholars. The troops arrested a member of the Association, two employees and two guardsmen. Pictures taken by Reuters TV showed that many doors had been forced open and explosive charges and shotgun shells strewn on the ground, while Christian crosses had been scrawled on the shelves used for deploying the worshippers' shoes.

Lt. Gen. Urano Teixeira da Matta Bacellar, the Brazilian head of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), was found dead in his room at Port-au-Prince's Montana Hotel on Jan. 7 after apparently shooting himself in the head, according to United Nations (UN) officials. The Brazilian military initially described the incident as a "firearm accident," while reports circulated that Teixeira had killed himself the evening of Jan. 6 after a dispute with the UN general secretary's special representative in Haiti, the Chilean Juan Gabriel Valdes.

On Dec. 30, a Border Patrol agent shot 20-year old Guillermo Martinez Rodriguez, a native of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, as he and his brother, Agustin Martinez Rodriguez, were fleeing back into Mexico. The brothers had sought to enter the US through the Zapata de Tijuana canyon but reversed course after being discovered by Border Patrol agents. An agent fired at them as they were returning to Mexico, hitting Guillermo Martinez with a bullet in the back near the wall separating Tijuana from San Diego. Agustin Martinez took his brother to a Red Cross facility in Tijuana, Baja California, where after 16 hours in intensive care and two operations, Guillermo Martinez died on Dec. 31. (La Jornada, Mexico, Jan. 2; AP, Jan. 4)