World - The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS - – French President Nicolas Sarkozy is no longer head of the European Union. But that has not stopped the peripatetic dynamo from a ceaseless search for a Middle East cease-fire.

Cairo - Few members of Egypt's street protest movement for political reform are as recognizable as Nora Younis. Since Egypt's troubled period of political opening began in 2004, she has made her mark both online and in the street with visual flair and persistence.

The Promise of Change was central to Barack Obama's presidential election.

DIYARBAKIR, TURKEY - In an office on the outskirts of this city in Turkey's predominantly Kurdish southeast, a group of gray-bearded men – all retired clerics – gather for a nightly meeting.

ATHENS - The shooting of a Greek policeman Monday escalates a simmering conflict between police and leftist groups – and raises new concern over a resurgence of the militant left in a country with a long history of such violence.

Beijing - A 6 a.m. wake-up call. Afternoon drills in military bearing and formations. And a grueling regime of push-ups and leg lifts before the 9:30 p.m. lights-out.

Johannesburg - With Islamist militias in control of much of the country, pirates using Somali coasts to attack commercial ships with ease, and mounting hunger among civilians, Somalia is a failed state begging for new ideas in 2009.

The Israeli drones are driving me crazy. I go outside only to buy food, water, and medicine, or to recharge my cellphone at a nearby mosque that is powered by generators. Inside my Gaza City apartment, electricity and phone lines are out. Heat is a luxury. We sleep with the windows open in case an Israeli shell lands nearby, which would shatter the glass.

Baghdad - Just inside the gateway of the new United States Embassy in Baghdad, a US Army lieutenant colonel acted as the diplomatic equivalent of a Wal-Mart greeter, welcoming guests Monday afternoon to the dedication ceremony for the largest – and most expensive – American mission in the world.

Moscow - Thermometers are plunging across Europe, and so is the pressure in the natural-gas pipelines connecting the continent with its key supplier, Russia.

NAIROBI, Kenya - How bad was it for Africa in 2008? The highlight of the year for most of the continent just might have been the election of a half-Kenyan to lead a nation thousands of miles away.

Hamas threatened reprisals against Israel, including the possibility of new suicide attacks, after an Israeli airstrike killed one of the Palestinian group's top officials Thursday. The ongoing fighting has also sparked concern in the UN about a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Tel Aviv - While war between Israel and Hamas reverberates from Gaza City to southern Israel and to Arab capitals, the fallout will also be felt within the Israeli Knesset.

PANAJACHEL, GUATEMALA - Tricia Downie started to cry.

Kabul, Afghanistan - At times in 2008 Afghanistan eclipsed Iraq in levels of violence, and international attention is returning to the country for the first time since 2001. With the Obama administration planning a massive troop increase, Afghanistan and Pakistan look to be at the center of the administration's foreign policy for 2009.

BEIJING - In recent years, China scrapped many of its export-friendly policies – a turn welcomed by foreign competitors as a step toward freer, fairer trade.

PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC - He has called global warming a myth, backed Russia's recent invasion of Georgia, likened bank bailouts to socialism, and refuses to fly the European Union flag over his office in the Prague Castle.

Tel Aviv - On the fourth day of airstrikes in Gaza Tuesday, one of Israel's many targets was a Hamas military commander's home within the teeming Jabaliya refugee camp. He wasn't there, but seven civilians died as a result of that attack.

MOSCOW - In what is becoming an unpleasant New Year tradition, Russia again threatened to cut off Ukraine's gas supplies if the struggling post-Soviet state failed to pay off at least $2 billion in arrears by Dec. 31.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - While practicing takedown flips with a dummy, Hristo Stoilov's phone rang. The wrestler, covered in sweat and wearing tights, listened for a minute, shook his head, then returned to grappling.

VELINGRAD, Bulgaria - When Atanas Birnikov was a child, his parents' rolling farmland at the base of the Rodopi Mountains was seized by the communist regime.

Sofia, Bulgaria - Many residents of the European Union's most corrupt and violent member state say that apart from the uniforms there's little difference between Bulgaria's cops and mobsters. But over at the Simeonovo Police Academy, on the sprawling eastern edge of the capital, cadets Elena Kolcheva and Danail Velichkov are champing at the bit to get the bad guys.

SOFIA, Bulgaria - This spring, after Bulgaria recalled Meglena Plugchieva from her ambassadorship in Berlin to clean up widespread corruption and misuse of European Union funds, she warned fellow ministers they must act to prevent the loss of massive funding from Brussels.

Dhaka, Bangladesh - Bangladesh ended two years of rule by a military-backed caretaker government when it voted in a new government Tuesday.

As a history undergraduate, Kartum Setiawan liked nothing better than to walk alone through the streets of this city's crumbling colonial quarters, armed with old maps and a vivid imagination. He pictured the Dutch merchants rowing their boats along the canals. In a cobbled square, he recalled the trams that came in the 19th century, opening up new suburbs to the south.

Ashkelon, Israel - After Israel's 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiite militants emerged claiming victory and exalted across the Arab world. Even its harshest critics praised the group's endurance against overwhelming Israeli force. Today Hezbollah is more powerful – politically and militarily – than ever before.

BEIJING - China's dispatch of two warships to help battle Somalian pirates has drawn an ambivalent global reaction – a sign of the decidedly mixed feelings toward its bid for big-power status.

CHROYAMONTREY, Cambodia - In this village, and others like it throughout Cambodia, Muslims and non-Muslims live side by side in harmony, their existences unmarred by the toxic cocktail of government repression, separatist ambitions, and growing radicalism characteristic of many neighboring countries.