8 January 2015 Last updated at 09:28
The significance of ballots in 2015 will be felt around the world – here are 15 elections to watch out for
Charlie Hebdo massacre: Arrests as France hunts gunmen
Police in France have made seven arrests as they hunt for two named suspects over the deadly attack in Paris on staff at a satirical magazine.
The seven, connected to the two main suspects, were detained in the towns of Reims and Charleville-Mezieres, as well as in the Paris area, police said.
Photos were released of two brothers suspected of involvement in the attack.
France is mourning the 12 people killed when Charlie Hebdo was targeted by gunmen shouting Islamist slogans.
A gunman fired on police in the south Paris suburb of Montrouge on Thursday morning, injuring an officer before fleeing, security sources say. It is not known whether the incident is linked to the attack on Charlie Hebdo.
People power: voters making a world of difference across the globe in 2015
The significance of ballots in 2015 will be felt around the world – here are 15 elections to watch out for
In 2014 a record 1.5 billion people voted in the more than 100 elections held around the world. This year UK voters aren’t the only ones electing a new government; one third of EU member states will go to the polls, and with important elections due in Asia, Africa and the Americas, the significance of this year’s ballots will be felt around the world.
Here are the 15 elections – more or less in chronological order – to watch out for in 2015:
Sri Lanka
Mahinda Rajapaksa faces the toughest challenge of his long political career as Sri Lanka prepares for a crucial presidential election today. The key question is whether the common opposition candidate, Maithripala Sirisena, can cut significantly into Rajapaksa’s strong rural base among the majority Sinhala community. He already seems to have lost the Tamil and Muslim vote, and has been weakened by the defections of several members of parliament and aides, including Sirisena himself. Sirisena is backed by former president Chandrika Kumaratunga and several opposition parties. Maseeh Rahman
Pro-democracy lawmakers walk out of Hong Kong council over election law
Legislators raise yellow umbrellas, a symbol of last year’s Occupy Central protests, and leave
Clifford Coonan
Pro-democracy lawmakers raised yellow umbrellas and walked out of a debate on political reforms in Hong Kong after the government insisted it would stick with a plan to allow only candidates approved by Beijing take part in elections for the city’s top executive position in 2017.
The ruling from Beijing, which ruled out free elections for the Hong Kong chief executive position, sparked street protests late last year that lasted for more than two months and caused major disruption in the financial hub.
The 24 pan-democrat legislators raised their yellow umbrellas, a symbol of last year’s Occupy Central protests, and walked out after the city’s No 2 official, chief secretaryCarrie Lam, made a speech in the legislative council.
Top defector predicts North Korean regime's implosion
Jang Jin-sung was the official state poet to the Kim family in Pyongyang and part of the nation's elite, before he defected in 2004. Today, he believes the conditions that will end the regime he once served are in place.
Jang says there have been two "watershed psychological moments" in recent North Korean history that together strongly indicate that the regime of Kim Jong-un will end in an implosion. At most, he says, the present dictator of the world's most reclusive nation has seven years.
The first event to rock North Korean society was the sudden death of Kim Jong-il, in December 2011. The demise of a man known as "The Dear Leader" meant his son and successor, Kim Jong-un, assumed the leadership of the nation much sooner than expected and with far less experience than his father would have hoped.
That lack of experience may have been to blame for the second "watershed" moment, the public arrest and subsequent execution of Jang Song-thaek for crimes against the state. Seen by many as the mentor of Kim Jong-un, Jang's execution was apparently designed to demonstrate to the North Korean people that no-one was safe from the young dictator's wrath.
Fears Charlie Hebdo massacre will escalate Islamophobia
January 8, 2015 - 8:13PM
Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold
The sophisticated, military-style strike on a French newspaper known for satirising Islam has staggered a continent already seething with anti-immigrant sentiments in some quarters, feeding far-right nationalist parties like France's National Front.
"This is a dangerous moment for European societies," said Peter Neumann, director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London. "With increasing radicalisation among supporters of jihadist organisations and the white working class increasingly feeling disenfranchised and uncoupled from elites, things are coming to a head."
Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam and radicalism, called the Paris attacks "a quantitative and therefore qualitative turning point". "This was a maximum-impact attack, they did this to shock the public, and in that sense they succeeded," he said.
Three Cuban political prisoners released. More to follow?
Three Cuban political prisoners were released Wednesday, in what human rights activists say may by the start of a wider wave of liberation of political prisoners agreed upon in the US-Cuba deal.
HAVANA — Three Cuban political prisoners were freed Wednesday and a leading human rights advocate said he believed their liberation was part of a U.S.-Cuban deal to release 53 dissidents.
The head of Cuba's Human Rights and Reconciliation Commission, Elizardo Sanchez, told The Associated Press that 19-year-old twins Diango Vargas Martin and Bianko Vargas Martin were released without any of the judicial procedures that normally precede the liberation of those held in politically related cases. He said Wednesday night that Enrique Figuerola Miranda had just been freed under similar circumstances.
The releases followed days of mounting criticism in the U.S. of a rapprochement between Cuba and Washington that included an agreement on the release of 53 prisoners that the Obama administration wanted released.
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