Tag Archives: Global: Miscellaneous

News from The Associated Press: Demonstrations against Romania’s harsh austerity measures took place across the country again on Wednesday, with protesters demanding the government’s resignation.

The Independent: Lord Wallace of Tankerness QC restated the UK Government’s view that the “Scottish Parliament has no power to deliver a referendum on independence”.

The Christian Institute: Britain’s Security Service, MI5, has been included in a lobby group’s top 100 employers for homosexuals for the first time.

News from The Associated Press: The number of Internet users in China has surged past 500 million as millions of new Web surfers go online using mobile phones and tablet computers, an industry group reported Monday.

News from The Associated Press: Thousands of mourners chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” on Friday during the funeral of a slain nuclear expert whom Iranian officials accuse the two nations of killing in a bomb blast this week as part of a secret operation to stop Iran’s nuclear program.

CSMonitor.com: Evidence of a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program is mounting. Yesterday’s assassination of an Iranian scientist tied to the program is just the most recent data point in the last year that indicates an accelerating effort to spread fear and slow the country’s nuclear work.

The Hill: Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), brushed off criticism of his group’s plan to allow for new Web domain endings in an interview with The Hill on Wednesday.

JPost: Clinton flatly denies US involvement “in any kind of act of violence inside Iran,” calls Hormuz threats “provocative, dangerous.”

NY Times: A bomber on a motorcycle killed a scientist from Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment site and his bodyguard-driver on Wednesday during the morning commute in Tehran, Iranian media reported, in an assassination that could further elevate international tensions over the Iranian nuclear program and stoke the country’s growing anti-Western belligerence.

News from The Associated Press: The World Economic Forum warned Wednesday that the financial crisis that has gripped the global economy for the past few years is fueling resentment that could lay the seeds for a rising tide of protectionism, nationalism and social unrest.

The Guardian: Alex Salmond has revealed he plans to stage his independence referendum in the autumn of 2014 after he resisted UK government demands to set an early date for the historic poll.

News from The Associated Press: Britain’s government says it will give Scotland the power to hold a binding vote that would give it independence from Britain, turning back centuries of history.

VOA News: an announced on Monday it had sentenced a dual U.S.-Iranian citizen to death for spying for the CIA, creating fresh grounds for hostility with Washington at a time when Tehran has responded to new U.S. sanctions with military threats.

Robert Wright at the The Atlantic: This is sheer conjecture; Ron Paul is no expert on Iran. But now someone who does have relevant credentials has weighed in, and the picture he paints is disturbingly reminiscent of the one Paul painted. It suggests we may be closer to war than most people realize.

Bonian Golmohammadi at the : Huffington Post: On December 15-16, governments, international agencies and civil society groups met to discuss hundreds of recommendations on sustainable development in preparation for the June 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development. Focuses ranged from creating green jobs, to improving food security, achieving universal energy access, bettering water resource management, and addressing shark finning and marine pollution.

NCPA Policy Digest: Considering that the United States has a 17.75 percent share in the IMF, these lending commitments put the U.S. taxpayer at risk for an almost $20 billion loss should those countries be unable to repay the IMF.

Religion Clause: Reuters yesterday reported on controversy that is being caused by the entry of the large U.S. investment banking firm, Goldman Sachs, into the Islamic finance market.

Bloomberg: The West is using cultural means to divide China (PRCH), which needs to be alert to this threat, President Hu Jintao said in a Communist Party magazine.

Catholic Culture: An unidentified buyer has purchased the internet address “vatican.xxx,” raising the possibility that a pornographic site could occupy that space on the web.

The Washington Post: The spokesman of Egypt’s ultraconservative Islamist party told Israeli Army Radio in unprecedented remarks broadcast Wednesday that the group is not opposed to the country’s historic peace treaty with Israel.

Gordon G. Chang at National Review Online: Beijing has, for decades, been buying the loyalty of the North’s generals and admirals faster than Kim Jong Il could purge them. Now that Kim is resting under glass in the Kumsusan Memorial Palace, the Chinese are going to own all the flag officers they need.

The Guardian: Two leading members of Iraq’s largest and most powerful Sunni tribe have warned of imminent sectarian chaos in the wake of the US withdrawal, claiming that the government of prime minister Nouri al-Maliki is promoting an anti-Sunni agenda.

CSMonitor.com: The scars of Iraq’s painful bloodletting are deep, and a powerful disincentive against a return to open warfare. But Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is moving against Sunni Arabs, his political enemies.

Washington Times: Vaclav Havel wove theater into revolution, leading the charge to peacefully bring down communism in a regime he ridiculed as “Absurdistan” and proving the power of the people to overcome totalitarian rule.

Breitbart: The 13,000 residents of Wukan, in the wealthy province of Guangdong, are in open revolt against officialdom and have driven out local Communist Party leaders who they say have been stealing their land for years.

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell: North Korea’s official media announced that Kim Jong-il, the country’s long-time leader, died on Saturday of “physical and mental overwork.”

TheHill.com: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, 69, has reportedly died after nearly two decades in power. The White House said it was closely monitoring reports that the reclusive leader was dead.

News from The Associated Press: Police arrested 112 people in 22 countries after a yearlong investigation into child pornography, Europol said Friday, warning that technology is making combating the spread of child abuse images ever more difficult.

News from The Associated Press: European Union officials say that a first draft of a new treaty setting up tighter budget rules for eurozone countries has been sent to governments Friday.

News from The Associated Press: The United States will hold talks with North Korea in Beijing on Thursday on the possibility of providing food aid to the impoverished country, the State Department said.

News from The Associated Press: Poland’s prime minister defended his government’s support for greater integration in the European Union during a lively parliamentary debate Thursday on the country’s relationship with the crisis-ridden bloc.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: An article in the New American reveals that some UN agencies will not account for a large amount of their funding.

News from The Associated Press: Britain’s unemployment hit its highest level for 17 years Wednesday, with women and young people bearing the brunt of the deepening jobs crisis in the wake of the government’s austerity measures and the economy’s general weakness.

NYTimes.com: senior European official said on Tuesday that Britain’s demands for measures to protect its financial services industry at last week’s summit meeting were impossible to meet and directly responsible for the collapse of e a Europe-wide agreement meant to help save the euro.

News from The Associated Press: Algeria’s Islamists, buoyed by election victories of their brethren across North Africa over the past two months, are looking to triumph themselves next spring in nationwide polls.

Reuters: It was billed as a summit to save the euro. It may be remembered as the day Europe lost patience with Britain, as most of the continent threw its lot in with EU founding members France and Germany and committed to binding their economies ever more tightly.

Yahoo! News: The European Union will outline a strategy on Monday to support activists living under repressive governments who are using technology to organise, mobilise and exercise their rights, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes said on Friday.

NYTimes.com: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other international leaders urged countries and private businesses on Thursday to fight increasing efforts to restrict access to the Internet by repressive governments and even some democratic ones.

News from The Associated Press: The biggest worry for many is an abrupt order for foreign workers and their employers to start paying up to 40 percent of their wages for pensions and other welfare.

News from The Associated Press: Chinese police arrested 608 suspects and rescued 178 children in busts of two separate child trafficking networks, authorities said Wednesday.

Yahoo! News: Russian authorities should annul the parliamentary vote results and hold a new election, ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev urged Wednesday as popular indignation grew over widespread reports of alleged election fraud.

The Washington Post: French lawmakers are expected to pass a symbolic resolution that would condemn prostitution as linked to human trafficking and violence before beginning debate on a tough proposed law that would punish clients.

Fox News Radio 550 KFYI: A new report details how DEA agents allowed hundreds of millions of dollars walk to Mexico in a failed attempt to trace the money to its source.

NationalJournal.com: The evidence of an extensive Western covert program against Tehran, and Iranian retaliation, is now too obvious to ignore.

LaTimes.com: At an Iranian military base 30 miles west of Tehran, engineers were working on weapons that the armed forces chief of staff had boasted could give Israel a “strong punch in the mouth.” But then a huge explosion ripped through the Revolutionary Guard Corps base on Nov. 12, leveling most of the buildings.

FT.com: Standard & Poor’s has warned Germany and the five other triple A members of the eurozone that they risk having their top-notch ratings downgraded as a result of deepening economic and political turmoil in the single currency bloc.

CNN: The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.

Andy Stern at WSJ.com: Andy Grove, the founder and chairman of Intel, provocatively wrote in Businessweek last year that, “Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.”

BBC News: Zhai Meiqing has had an extraordinary career. She is now the president of Heung Kong Group, a huge conglomerate with interests which include finance, metals, retailing and real estate.

News from The Associated Press: China wants to convert some of its mountain of U.S. government debt into investment in renovating American roads and subways, the commerce minister said Friday.

News from The Associated Press: Syria has entered a state of civil war with more than 4,000 people dead and an increasing number of soldiers defecting from the army to fight President Bashar Assad’s regime, the U.N.’s top human rights official said Thursday.

News from The Associated Press: Here are some questions and answers about the crisis . . .

News from The Associated Press: America’s strengthened military pact with Australia is a figment of “Cold War thinking” that will destabilize the Asia-Pacific region, China’s Defense Ministry said Wednesday, in Beijing’s strongest criticism yet of a move widely seen as intended to counter China’s rising assertiveness.

EUobserver.com: China is looking to buy EU factories and railways instead of wobbly government bonds as prices fall amid the eurozone crisis. Minister of commerce Chen Deming articulated the strategy at a business congress in China on Monday (28 November).

Al Jazeera English: Kuwait’s cabinet has resigned after protesters and opposition deputies demanded that the prime minister step down over allegations of corruption, state-run television has reported.

News from The Associated Press: China’s sovereign wealth fund wants to invest in improving neglected U.S. and European roads and other infrastructure to spur global growth, the fund’s chairman said in comments published Monday.

CBS News: Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has signed an agreement ending his 33-year rule, transferring power to the country’s vice president.

News from The Associated Press: Newly found coins underneath Jerusalem’s Western Wall could change the accepted belief about the construction of one of the world’s most sacred sites two millennia ago, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday.

News from The Associated Press: Israel expects a “grave erosion” in its peace agreement with Egypt and is even preparing for the possibility of the historic deal collapsing altogether, a Cabinet minister said Wednesday, in the first official assessment of the unrest rocking Israel’s southern neighbor.

Josh Gerstein at Politico: When Romney steps on stage tonight for another debate, this one devoted to foreign policy, that kind of China-bashing is likely to be a favorite theme. With a moribund economy, and relatively little traction for other international issues, the threat posed by cheap Chinese imports and Chinese purchases of U.S. debt is an irresistible target.

European Commission: New approach to migration would establish agreements with EU neighbours and other countries to benefit the people and the countries concerned.

American Family Association Rightly Concerned: Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year?

Paul.House.Gov: The public is increasingly unwilling to be bilked to make bankers whole. The riots and the violence in Greece should tell us something about the sustainability of this system. If we continue to bail out banks and bankers so they can continue to lose money, if we cavalierly put this burden on the taxpayer, it is all too predictable what will happen here.

ZDNet: Major pornography companies have filed a lawsuit against ICANN over adult TLD .XXX.

CSMonitor.com: Queen Elizabeth II attended a ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey Wednesday to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, often considered the most influential book ever printed in the English language.

The Washington Post: Just don’t bring your cellphone or BlackBerry, don’t try to send an e-mail, don’t plan to stroll down a street, and never try to talk to strangers or take pictures of ordinary people. None of that is allowed.

Forbes: With little fanfare two weeks ago, a key United Nations commission made a remarkable statement: it declared, unambiguously, that broadband access is a basic human right, right up there with the right to healthcare, shelter and food.

News from The Associated Press: China, the largest foreign holder, bought 1 percent more to bring its total holdings to $1.15 trillion. China had cut its purchases 3.1 percent in August.

News from The Associated Press: Germany will create a national database as a clearing-house for information on far-right extremists amid mounting criticism its security agencies failed to detect a neo-Nazi terror group for years.

Yahoo! News: German and French officials have discussed plans for a radical overhaul of the European Union that would involve establishing a more integrated and potentially smaller euro zone, EU sources say.

MiamiHerald.com: The cost to house a captive at Guantánamo Bay is $800,000 per year, far in excess of other federal or state lockups.

WSJ.com: In Italy, as in Greece, Spain and Portugal and eventually France, the welfare-entitlement state has hit a wall. Successive governments on the Continent, right and left, have financed generous entitlements with high taxes and towering piles of debt.

TheHill.com: This strange fact occurs almost entirely because of our tax laws. If a company wants to bring back money it has made in China or India, it must pay a 35 percent U.S. tax on that repatriation.

MSNBC.com: A top U.S. general in Afghanistan was relieved of duty Friday for “inappropriate public comments” after calling the Afghan government “isolated from reality” and President Hamid Karzai “erratic.”

News from The Associated Press.