South Korea's Institute for National Security Strategy warned this weekend of increasing 'unexpected moves' as North Korea's military 'scrambles to display its loyalty' to heir apparent, Kim Jong-un.

In many ways, 2010 is a year you may want to relegate to the filing cabinet quickly. It began with a massive earthquake in Haiti and wound down with North Korea once again being an enfant terrible – bizarrely trying to conduct diplomacy through brinkmanship.

In between came Toyota recalls and egg scares, pat downs at airports and unyielding unemployment numbers, too little money in the Irish treasury and too many bedbugs in American sheets. Oil gushed from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for three months, mocking the best intentions of man and technology to stop it, while ash from a volcano in Iceland darkened Europe temporarily as much as its balance sheets.

Yet not all was gloomy. The winter Olympics in Canada and the World Cup in South Africa dazzled with their displays of athletic prowess and national pride, becoming hearths around which the world gathered. In Switzerland, the world's largest atom smasher hurled two protons into each other at unfathomable speeds. Then came the year's most poignant moment – the heroic and improbable rescue of 33 miners from the clutches of the Chilean earth.

There were many transitions, too – the return of the Republicans in Washington and the Tories in Britain, the scaling back of one war (Iraq) and the escalation of another (Afghanistan), the fall of some powers (Greece) and rise of others (China, Germany, Lady Gaga).

To get the new year off to the right start, we decided to ask various thinkers for one idea each to make the world a better place in 2011. We plumbed poets and political figures, physicists and financiers, theologians and novelists. Some of the ideas are provocative, others quixotic. Some you will agree with, others you won't. But in the modest quest to stir a discussion – from academic salons to living rooms to government corridors – we offer these 25 ideas.

• Contributing to this report were staff writers Gregory M. Lamb, Mark Clayton, Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, and Christa Case Bryant in Boston; Robert Marquand in Paris; Scott Peterson in Istanbul, Turkey; Ben Arnoldy in New Delhi; Sara Miller Llana in Mexico City; and Gloria Goodale in Los Angeles; as well as film critic Peter Rainer in Los Angeles; and correspondents Harry Bruinius in New York; Jane Arraf in Baghdad; Todd Wilkinson in Boseman, Mont.; Brendan O'Neill in London; Stephen Humphries in Los Angeles; Jina Moore in San Francisco; and Nora Dunne in Boston.

Inflation in Britain continues to stay above the Bank of England's target.

AP - A band of frigid weather was snaking up the East Coast on Sunday, promising blizzards and a foot of snow for New York City and New England, while several states made emergency declarations as the storm caused crashes and deaths on slick roads.

AP - An East Coast snowstorm put a damper on after-Christmas shopping Sunday. But shoppers across the rest of the country scoured clearance racks and spent gift cards during the afterglow of the best holiday season for retailers since 2007.

AP - West African leaders are giving the man who refuses to leave Ivory Coast's presidency a final chance to hand over power and are threatening to remove Laurent Gbagbo by force if needed, though doubts exist about whether the operation could be carried out.