Today's news

--> Los Angeles, CA: Democrat Barack Obama raised $32 million in the month of January alone for his presidential bid, CNN's Candy Crowley confirms.

That total roughly equals his previous best three-month fundraising haul. The campaign would not divulge how much money it has on hand — a more accurate measure of a campaign's financial health going forward.

--> Washington, D.C.: As many as 121 Army soldiers committed suicide in 2007, a jump of more than 20 percent over the year before, officials said Thursday.

The rise came despite numerous efforts over the past year to improve the mental health of a force stressed by a longer-than-expected war in Iraq and the most deadly year yet in the now six-year-old conflict in Afghanistan.

--> Asia: Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

India's Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia.

Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.

--> China: A huge state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical company that exports to dozens of countries, including the United States, is at the center of a nationwide drug scandal after nearly 200 Chinese cancer patients were paralyzed or otherwise harmed last summer by contaminated leukemia drugs.

Chinese drug regulators have accused the manufacturer of the tainted drugs of a cover-up and have closed the factory that produced them. In December, China’s Food and Drug Administration said that the Shanghai police had begun a criminal investigation and that two officials, including the head of the plant, had been detained.

--> Kenya: A second Kenyan opposition lawmaker was shot to death on Thursday, and riots immediately exploded in opposition strongholds.

The lawmaker who was killed, David Kimutai Too, was shot by a policeman in Eldoret, in the country’s volatile Rift Valley, where many people have been killed or have fled their homes.

Kenyan government officials were quick to say the latest killing was connected to an illicit love triangle. The opposition, however, called it an assassination.

The violence led to the postponement of talks being brokered by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. The current secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said he would travel to Nairobi on Friday to help address the crisis.