Hopes for a more liberal Pakistan were dealt a blow with the assassination of Salman Taseer by his police bodyguard. The governor of Punjab province, the most populous in Pakistan, Mr Taseer was an outspoken critic of religious intolerance and of the country’s harsh and arbitrary blasphemy law. His murder compounds the woes of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, which saw its main coalition partner walk out. See article

In China brownouts, caused by a shortage of coal, afflicted the country. In some provinces power stations were down to just a few days of coal stocks. Government regulations keep coal well under the market price, reducing incentives to get it out of the ground. Harsh weather has compounded the problem.

The worst flooding for decades in Queensland cut off many cities and towns. Coalmining operations in the Australian state were severely hampered. See article

Not a great start

Hungary took over the rotating presidency of the European Union on January 1st, amid growing concern over media legislation recently passed by the country’s government that critics say threatens press freedom. Meanwhile, the EU said it would investigate a number of “crisis” taxes imposed by Hungary on banks and other firms that are mainly foreign-owned. See article

Boris Nemtsov, a prominent figure in the Russian opposition, was arrested in Moscow after a demonstration and given a 15-day jail sentence. A day earlier he had criticised the 14-year prison term handed to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oil tycoon who had been convicted of stealing oil. See article

A food-contamination scandal erupted in Germany when traces of dioxin were found in poultry and eggs. Officials said that the food presented “no acute health danger”.

The rate of value-added tax in Britain went up from 17.5% to 20%. The opposition Labour Party said it would hit the poorest hardest. Some economists feared the tax rise would threaten Britain’s recovery. The government said it was necessary to boost Treasury coffers. See article

Carnage among the prayers

At least 21 Egyptians, mostly Coptic Christians, were killed by a bomb in a church in the city of Alexandria, heightening anxiety among co-religionists across the Middle East who have recently felt beleaguered, especially in Iraq. It was unclear who perpetrated the atrocity. Muslim authorities in Egypt and elsewhere in the region expressed solidarity with their Christian- Arab brethren.

A leading anti-Western Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who is a crucial backer of Iraq’s new coalition government, returned home after three years in exile in Iran.

Laurent Gbagbo, who is almost universally deemed to have lost his bid for re-election as president of Côte d’Ivoire in late November, refused to heed the African Union and a string of visiting African leaders trying to persuade him to go. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the most influential regional body, aired the prospect of using military force to evict him. See article

In the run-up to a referendum on secession in South Sudan to be held on January 9th, the president of Sudan as a whole, Omar al-Bashir, said he would accept the result if, as expected, the southerners vote to secede. See article

Trouble persisted on the streets of towns in Tunisia, where the immolation in public of an unemployed youth in December, followed by his death on January 4th, sparked a wave of protests against joblessness, inequality and corruption at the top. See article

Dilma’s wish list

Dilma Rousseff took office as Brazil’s president. She promised to eradicate extreme poverty, control inflation, increase public investment, improve health, education and public security, open doors for women in public life and support political and tax reform.

On his last day in office Ms Rousseff’s predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rejected a request to extradite to Italy Cesare Battisti, a former member of an extreme leftist faction convicted of murder. Italy withdrew its ambassador to Brasília in protest; Mr Battisti’s lawyers said they would apply to Brazil’s supreme court for his release from prison.

The United States revoked the visa of Venezuela’s ambassador to Washington in retaliation for the rejection by Hugo Chávez of Larry Palmer, the nominated American ambassador to Caracas, who had criticised his government.

Venezuela devalued the bolívar for the second time in a year, abolishing a preferential rate of 2.6 bolívares to the dollar and unifying the official exchange rate at 4.3.

Faced with massive protests by many of his own supporters, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s socialist president, cancelled an increase in fuel prices of more than 70%. The government had earlier said that the price rise was needed to end an unsustainable subsidy and to encourage oil production, which has been falling. See article

Let the games begin

The 112th Congress convened in Washington with a cohort of fresh, mostly Republican, faces. One priority of the leadership in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives was to start a debate on repealing Barack Obama’s health-care-reform act; a vote on the matter was set for January 12th. In the Senate the Democrats, who now command a smaller majority in the chamber, tried to force changes to parliamentary rules that would narrow the ability of a senator to mount a vote-delaying filibuster. See article

America’s gross national debt passed $14 trillion for the first time, up by $2 trillion in little over a year. The figure is very close to the current debt ceiling, which Congress must raise if the government is to continue borrowing and avoid a possible default. Some Republicans have insisted they will resist any attempt to increase the debt limit.

As Mr Obama prepared to appoint new advisers to the White House, Robert Gibbs announced that he would step down as the president’s press secretary next month. Mr Gibbs has worked with Mr Obama since 2004, when he worked on his campaign to become a senator for Illinois.

New state governors were sworn into office, including Andrew Cuomo in New York and (the not-so-new) Jerry Brown in California. See article