January 2, 2010 (Saturday)
Armed conflicts and attacks
- The Ugandan army announces it has killed Bok Abudema, a senior member of the Lord's Resistance Army, in the Central African Republic. (AFP) (BBC)
- Piracy in Somalia
- Somali pirates seize an Indonesian chemical tanker with 24 crew in the Gulf of Aden and a British cargo ship with 26 cars 620 miles off the Horn of Africa. (Times of India) (RTT News) (BBC)
- The Israeli Air Force launches an attack against tunnels leading from Gaza into Israel in response to missile attacks and mortar fire. (Haaretz) (Al Jazeera)
Arts and culture
- 19-year-old Norwegian chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is confirmed as the youngest-ever world number one in the official January 2010 FIDE rating list. (Reuters) (TIME) (AFP) (Chessbase)
Discoveries
- An Antarctic expedition finds remains of the first aeroplane brought to the continent, a single-propeller Vickers plane of explorer Douglas Mawson. (Reuters)
Law and crime
- Police in Denmark shoot a 28-year-old male Somali after he breaks into the Viby J home of Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist at the centre of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005, and threatens his family with an axe. (BBC) (The Times) (Sky News)
Politics and elections
- A quarter of voters in Iceland sign a petition asking President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to veto a bill on repaying US$5 billion to foreign savers who lost their money when Icelandic banks collapsed. (ABC News) (Iceland Review)
- The Afghan Parliament rejects 17 out of 24 cabinet nominees proposed by President Hamid Karzai. (The Daily Telegraph) (Hürriyet) (Al Jazeera)
Religion
- Atheist Ireland purposefully publishes the words of Jesus Christ, Muhammad, Salman Rushdie, Mark Twain and Pope Benedict XVI on its website despite a new law banning them on grounds of blasphemy. (BBC) (CNN) (Irish Times)