Tag Archives: Global: Miscellaneous

Reuters: “The murders of 25 people by suspected drug hitmen on the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday was the bloodiest day in almost three years in an area gripped by an escalating drug war, officials said on Friday.”

Matt Gurney writing at The National Post: “While it may be impolitic to say it, men who engage in sex with men are indeed a high-risk group for the transmission of HIV/AIDS, relative to society as a whole. That responsible, healthy gay men should be denied the chance to donate blood on this basis is certainly unfair and no doubt hurtful, but is still justified.”

Telegraph: “France was told by the European Parliament in a rare move to stop its programme of forcibly sending Roma gipsies back to their home countries. In a resolution passed by 337 votes to 245, the European politicians requested that the French authorities to ‘immediately suspend all expulsions of Roma,’ saying that they ‘amounted to discrimination.’”

Wall Street Journal / New Europe: “Opposition to Poland’s possible adoption of the euro is growing in the country in reaction to the Greek public finance crisis, with 47% of Poles against the plan, according to the results of a survey conducted in June, Poland’s finance ministry said in a statement Thursday.”

CBC: “A gay Toronto man who concealed his sexual history on a blood donor questionnaire and was sued for negligence by Canadian Blood Services has lost in Ontario Superior Court. In a decision released Thursday, the court sided with CBS in its suit against Kyle Freeman for ‘negligent misrepresentation.’”

Associated Press: “The third Mexican mayor in a month was slain by suspected drug gang hitmen on the same day the U.S. secretary of state raised hackles in Mexico by saying the country is ‘looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago.’”

CNSNews: “The U.S. Export-Import Bank, an independent federal agency, loaned more than $1 billion to the Mexican state oil company PEMEX in 2009 to support the company’s oil drilling in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The bank has another $1 billion in loans in the pipeline for 2010, unless Congress objects.”

Guardian: “The HIV epidemic in Europe, including the UK, is being fuelled by the risky behaviour of young gay men, according to research published today . . . Those infected are almost all white, male, gay and young, they say. These men also tend to have other sexual diseases, such as syphillis, which suggests that they are involved in unsafe sexual behaviour and are not using condoms.”

Christian Science Monitor: “At a time when some governments are trying – and failing – to combat sex trafficking by legalizing prostitution, Sweden’s innovative approach stands out as an exemplary model of lawmaking that reduces prostitution, penalizes men, and protects women . . . Sweden does not penalize the persons in prostitution but makes resources available to them. Instead it targets and exposes the anonymous perpetrators – the buyers, mostly men, who purchase mainly women and children in prostitution. The key to the law’s effectiveness lies not so much in penalizing the men (punishments are modest) but in removing the invisibility of the buyers and making their crimes public.”

Reuters: “Luxury car maker Jaguar has cut its sponsorship of star Australia swimmer Stephanie Rice, a triple Olympic gold medalist, after she sent a tweet using an anti-gay slur.”

Findlaw (AP): “The United States expects to spend about $6 billion a year training and supporting Afghan troops and police after it begins withdrawing its own combat troops in 2011.”

Associated Press: “Philanthropist George Soros has announced a 10-year, $100 million grant to Human Rights Watch.” More from Human Rights Watch: “The grant is intended to support the internationalization of Human Rights Watch, enabling it to staff advocacy offices in key regional capitals around the world and to deepen its research presence on countries of concern. Human Rights Watch plans especially to increase its capacity to influence emerging powers in the global South to push a pro-human rights agenda.”

PinkPaper.com: “Labour leadership hopeful David Miliband has said government MPs must be made to fear for their seats to stop them cutting services to LGBT people . . . The current forerunner in the race to lead the party was speaking to PinkPaper.com yesterday after making a stop at the gay LoProfile bar in London’s Soho on his campaign trail.”

Howard W. French writing in The New York Times: “It has become a truism to observe that contemporary China is the scene of the most rapid, transformative change of any large country in the world today . . . As this society rapidly grows richer, its social fabric and mores have been changing in ways far more dramatic than even the physical landscape, and sexual choice and expression are arguably in the leading edge of this upheaval . . . Most interestingly for me, though, [a gender studies professor] mentioned the ‘sudden media exposure of lesbian and gay people’ in prime-time television in China.”

Washington Post: “As depositors thronged branches of Afghanistan’s biggest bank, Mahmoud Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a major shareholder in beleaguered Kabul Bank called on Thursday for intervention by the United States to head off a financial meltdown.”

Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister of France; Katsuya Okada, foreign minister of Japan; Charles Michel, development cooperation minister of Belgium writing at The Christian Science Monitor: “We are determined to find an effective way to finance development that would be alongside – and not in place of – public aid. In a world marked by substantial gaps in development and standards of living, we must promote innovative approaches and instruments . . . We approached the top specialists – legal scholars, economists, researchers, and even bankers – to analyze the different options. They proposed several different mechanisms for levies on financial transactions, including on foreign exchange movements (currency transaction development tax).”

Roger Scruton writing at Big Questions Online: “Everybody has an opinion about what we ought to do to fix our dreadful financial situation. Here’s a thought: why not listen to Muhammad? True, the Prophet did not hold an economics degree, nor was he a fixture on noisy cable chat shows about finance. Times have changed since the seventh century. But Muhammad knew a thing or two about human nature, which has not changed . . . The theory of refinancing and sovereign debt fills many a volume of innocent-seeming graphs and statistics. But this should not blind us to the truth that dawned on the Prophet, which is that we have another and truer way of perceiving these matters: the way of moral judgment. If you borrow money, you are obliged to repay it. And you should repay it by earning the sum required, and not by borrowing again, and then again, and then again. For some reason, when it comes to the state and its clients, those elementary moral truths are forgotten.”

Judith Reisman writing at WorldNetDaily: “Ah, change. We get an Arab mosque near Ground Zero and Iraqis get American pornography in Baghdad . . . The AP reporter hee-haws at the retail of female hate propaganda (pornography) by savvy young Iraqi bestial pushers. If Arab buyers find blondes too expensive, Hanoun offers ‘Cheap Meat.’ What is that? Why, ‘Syrian, Egyptian, Lebanese girls . . . all the Arabs.’ He also sells ‘movies of amateur Arab couples’ . . . Is this the ‘freedom’ envisioned by our Founding Fathers?”

Charles Kupchan writing in The Washington Post: “The European Union is dying — not a dramatic or sudden death, but one so slow and steady that we may look across the Atlantic one day soon and realize that the project of European integration that we’ve taken for granted over the past half-century is no more . . . This renationalization of politics has been occurring across the E.U . . . right-wing populism is on the upswing — a product, primarily, of a backlash against immigration. This hard-edged nationalism aims not only at minorities, but also at the loss of autonomy that accompanies political union . . . The renationalization of European politics is a product, first and foremost, of generational change.”

“The situation in the North Caucasus is now much more difficult than [Vladimir] Putin or [Dmitry] Medvedev imagine it. We are talking about a growing Islamist opposition and hundreds or even thousands of militants in Chechnya alone, with more young men joining them up in the mountains. It’s a civil war. Invisible or visible, it’s a war.”

Reuters: “The U.S. government told staff at its consulate in Monterrey to send their children out of the northern Mexican city where drug violence has been escalating, the consulate said on Friday.”

Catholic Culture: “Only 16 men are entering the seminary in Ireland this year– down from 39 in 2009, and over 150 during the average year in the 1980s. Ireland currently has 99 seminarians, while England and Wales have 150.”

Hugh Hewitt Show transcript: Peter Hitchens discusses the decline of Christianity in the West, and his book, The Rage Against God. Excerpt: “We are a country in very severe decline of all kinds, and there is, at the moment, no sign whatever of any serious attempt to recover from that decline. On the contrary, it’s embraced by a large part of the population . . . unless something is done about it very soon, then as a society, we will cease to function. We are becoming an uncivilized anarchy, and a very, very uneducated and immoral one as well. The other thing, the institution of marriage is in an advanced state of collapse here. Marriage simply doesn’t enter into the lives of many young people who set up home without even considering getting married. It doesn’t happen. It’s gone. The number of children being born outside wedlock is colossal. I think it’s now the majority.”

Associated Press: “An international child pornography ring that operated on Facebook has been brought down with the social networking site’s support, Australian police said Friday.”

The State Department has submitted a report to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in conjunction with something called the Universal Periodic Review . . . The very first line of the report states: ‘The story of the United States of America is one guided by universal values shared the world over–that all are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights.’ Perhaps I’m being too picky or hypersensitive, but I couldn’t help but ask upon reading that sentence, ‘Would it have killed you to say that all are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights?’”

The Falmouth Packet: ” The third gay pride festival will parade through the streets of Truro in a riot of colour and music on Saturday.”

Euro Weekly: “Alberto Linero Marchena, married to a gay partner, claimed last Monday that he was expelled from the Air Force after two years of ‘threats, abuse and propositioning’. Linero was stationed at the Moron de la Frontera base in Sevilla but has been on psychiatric sick leave since November 2009.”

The Jakarta Globe: “The former editor in chief of the short-lived Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine is just one piece of paper away from starting a jail term after a 2009 Supreme Court ruling convicting him of indecency charges was revealed this week.”

The Independent: “The 24-year-old claims bosses at Housing and Support Solutions Limited, in Cleethorpes, terminated her contract without reason just days after she announced her gender change decision.”

Associated Press: “A survivor has told police that 72 people found dead at a ranch near the Mexican border with Texas were migrants kidnapped by an armed group, a federal official said Wednesday.”

Associated Press: “Mexico is the most dangerous country in the Americas for journalists and the violence against reporters may increase, investigators from the United Nations and the Organization of American States said Tuesday.”

Associated Press: “Bombers and gunmen killed 55 Iraqis in two dozen attacks spanning the country Wednesday, mostly targeting security forces in seemingly coordinated strikes the day after the number of U.S. troops fell below 50,000 for the first time since the start of the war.”

Associated Press: “Fighting in Somalia’s capital flared for a third straight day Wednesday, killing eight people and pushing the week’s death toll past 80 as insurgents tried to force government troops back toward the presidential palace, officials said.”

Mike Brownfield writing at The Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “General Conway confirmed what Heritage Foundation analysts have been warning about for the last nine months, that the deadline is ‘giving our enemy sustenance.’ Conway revealed that indeed the U.S. has intercepted communication of Taliban insurgents telling each other that they only needed to hold out for so long.”

MercatorNet: “Expectations of stable majority government in Australia have been scuppered by a remarkable ‘Greenslide’ in Saturday’s national election. Neither the Labor government nor the conservative coalition won a clear majority, so it is not clear who will be leading the country – the incumbent Labor Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, or the Liberal leader Tony Abbott . . . If there is an intellectual inspiration for the movement, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, a theorist for the animal rights movement and a radical utilitarian who supports voluntary euthanasia and infanticide for disabled infants. Singer was one of the founding members of the national Greens and in 1996 he even ran unsuccessfully for the Senate as a Green candidate. He co-authored a book on the Green movement with Bob Brown.”

Vatican Radio: “Archbishop Martin said that Ireland is undergoing a revolution of its religious culture, and that there are many parishes in Dublin where the presence at Sunday Mass is at 5 percent, and in some cases even below 2 percent.”

OneNewsNow: “A Messianic Jewish leader and Israel supporter says she’s angered — but not surprised — by a report that Harvard University recently sold off all of its investments in Israel.”

Conn Carroll writing at The Heritage Foundation / The Foundry: “In another development from last week, this one virtually ignored by the establishment media, the Department of Defense released its annual Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China. According to the report, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) official budget, which has enjoyed double-digit annual increases for two decades, grew again by nearly 8 percent . . . More troubling, however, was what the report did not focus enough on: the threat to Taiwan. There is little discussion of the Taiwan military structure or its equipment . . . Meanwhile, while the Obama Defense Department is ignoring the threat to Taiwan, the Obama State Department has gotten off to a poor start defending human rights in China.”

Findlaw (AP): “The nude women on the DVD cover in a Baghdad street stall say it all: Change, whether you like it or not, is afoot in Iraq . . . The porn, in an odd way, has told the story of Iraq’s security and political situation since Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003. It emerged in the anything-goes atmosphere that erupted in the vacuum immediately following the U.S. invasion – then went back into hiding amid the anarchy when armed militias roamed the capital through 2008, targeting those they saw as immoral . . . The openness with which porn is sold in some of Baghdad’s streets is almost unheard of in the Arab world.”

The Christian Institute: “Hundreds of illegal pornographic magazines and DVDs have been discovered for sale in corner shops across Tyneside. Trading Standards Officers have seized scores of items which had been packaged to include what are believed to be illegal hardcore pornographic DVDs.”

The Christian Institute: “West Sussex Council has become the first English authority outside London to host a Stonewall employee in its offices, according to local press reports.”

Associated Press: “Contributors to the website say that doesn’t go far enough – calling for Queen Elizabeth II either to step down, or drastically reduce the number of her family members who receive public money. ‘The French have not had a monarchy for more than 200 years and tourists still flock to Versailles,’ one of the ideas posted on the Treasury site reads.”

MSNBC: “The last U.S. combat troops were crossing the border into Kuwait on Thursday morning, bringing to a close the active combat phase of a 7½-year war that overthrew the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, forever defined the presidency of George W. Bush and left more than 4,400 American service members and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.”

Wall Street Journal (Full text via Google News): “High-profile investor George Soros sold its ADR’s of Brazilian state-run energy giant Petroleo Brasileiro (PBR, PETR4.BR), or Petrobras, during the second quarter, amid uncertainties on company’s capitalization plans, according to a regulatory filing posted earlier this week.”

The Christian Institute: “Even primary school children are being affected by Britain’s hypersexualised society and it is a problem we’re not tackling, two feminist authors have said. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Kat Banyard and Natasha Walter hit out at the shear amount of pornography in society.”

CNN: “As one of the highest officials in the Mexican Catholic Church, Monsignor Victor Rene Rodriguez has been receiving the alarming reports from all over the nation . . . Rodriguez points to states like Chihuahua, the most violent in Mexico. Of the 28,000 drug-related deaths in the last four years, 40 percent have happened in this border state. In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, more than 100 pastors have reported threats, and extortion has become all too common.”

New York Times: “China has increased spending on a military that is becoming larger and more effective even as Beijing has rebuffed exchanges with the Defense Department that could improve stability, according to a Pentagon study released Monday.”

Yahoo News (AFP): “Israel has ‘eight days’ to launch a military strike against Iran’s Bushehr nuclear facility and stop Tehran from acquiring a functioning atomic plant, a former US envoy to the UN has said. Iran is to bring online its first nuclear power reactor, built with Russia’s help, on August 21, when a shipment of nuclear fuel will be loaded into the plant’s core.”

Bloomberg: “Standard Chartered Plc, the U.K. bank that earns most of its profit from emerging markets, plans to introduce Shariah-compliant contracts in Asia to hedge against changes in commodity prices.”

Haaretz: “Two prominent Israeli-Arab literary figures yesterday launched Qadita.net, an Arabic-language politics and culture website they say will tackle issues widely considered taboo in the Arabic press.”

Associated Press: “The figures underscore China’s emergence as an economic power that is changing everything from the global balance of military and financial power to how cars are designed. It is already the biggest exporter, auto buyer and steel producer, and its global influence is expanding.”

Associated Press: “For most of the last century, Turks were told to look askance at the Ottoman Empire. Nostalgia for the 1453 conquest of Constantinople and other early triumphs was fine – but the excesses of the sultans were the stuff of decay, no model for modern Turkey. Today, the legacy of the Ottomans is enjoying a makeover.”

Associated Press: “Some questions and answers about foreign countries planning to ban the use of BlackBerry’s messaging and Web services: Q: Which countries are involved? A: India, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have threatened to shut down some BlackBerry services in their respective countries. Lebanon and Indonesia have said they’re considering similar moves, but have no firm plans.”

The Christian Institute: “A Scottish council is set to shower thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on a controversial homosexual arts festival despite facing large budget cuts, according to the Scottish Daily Mail.”

Associated Press: “Billions of dollars in U.S. rescue funds wound up in big banks in France, Germany and other nations. That was probably inevitable because of the structure of the Treasury Department’s program, the Congressional Oversight Panel says in a new report issued Thursday.”

AFP: “Israeli troops arrested and evacuated some 30 Jewish rightwing militants who had illegally entered the West Bank town of Jericho on Tuesday to pray at an ancient synagogue, the army said.”

Associated Press: “Indonesia’s best-known radical Islamic cleric was charged Wednesday with planning terrorist attacks, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of death, police said.”

Reuters: “Indian demands are giving a new headache to BlackBerry maker Research in Motion after New Delhi threatened a shutdown that could affect one million of the smartphone’s 41 million users.”

Associated Press: “Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has told priests that the Vatican has rejected the resignations of his two auxiliary bishops following their reported involvement in the Roman Catholic Church’s cover-up of child abuse.”

Associated Press: “Hundreds of Muslim guerrillas have undergone combat training and sought more weapons in the southern Philippines to bolster their military muscle in case planned peace talks with the government falter, a military report said Wednesday.”

Toronto Sun: “A openly gay man who is married to his partner has won a bid for refugee status due to concerns his life may be in jeopardy if he is deported to his native Jamaica.”

Boston.com (AP): “This summer, Europe’s vacationers are hitting the highways with more or less uniform plates, after 12 years of slow-as-syrup and at times impassioned debate over color schemes and the EU’s role in everyday life. Belgium finally settled a political argument over the tags in June, clearing the last major hurdle to introducing the new plates in all 27 EU nations.”

The Guardian: “An 18-year-old Iranian is facing imminent execution on charges of homosexuality, even though he has no legal representation. Ebrahim Hamidi, who is not gay, was sentenced to death for lavat, or sodomy, on the basis of ‘judge’s knowledge’, a legal loophole that allows for subjective judicial rulings where there is no conclusive evidence.”

Zawya: “Morocco will shut more than 1,000 unsafe mosques in a bid to avoid a repeat of a minaret collapse in February that killed 41 people, the ministry of religious affairs said Tuesday.”

LifeSiteNews: “Despite regular polls showing that about 30 percent of Italian Catholics claim to attend Sunday Mass regularly, a closer look at the numbers reveals a more uncertain future for the Italian Church, and consequently for Italy as a moral vanguard in Europe.”

Associated Press: “In this impoverished town in central Mexico, a sinister trade has taken root: entire extended families exploit desperation and lure hundreds of unsuspecting young Mexican women to the United States to force them into prostitution.”

Simcoe.com: “Bradford West Gwillimbury won’t get any new adult video or novelty stores or strip clubs unless town council approves.”

The Christian Institute: “A transsexual man who harassed his neighbours for five years will not be jailed because a judge has agreed that prison would be ‘awkward and dangerous’ for him. Jan Krause, who lives as a woman, monitored his neighbours’ movements and even erected a roof-mounted device which emitted a high-pitched whine in the direction of his neighbours’ house, a court heard.”

Christian Science Monitor: “A new poll of Arab opinion finds that for the first time a majority of the public across the region – including a sizable minority in Saudi Arabia – believes a nuclear-armed Iran would be a positive development in the Middle East.”

FindLaw (AP): “The man who once served as Saddam Hussein’s leading lieutenant has appealed to the United States to extend its presence in Iraq, saying that President Barack Obama is abandoning the country, according to a British newspaper interview published Friday.”

Associated Press: “The government announced Thursday that it has charged 14 people as participants in ‘a deadly pipeline’ to Somalia that routed money and fighters from the United States to the terrorist group al-Shabab.”

AFP: “It’s not just any kind of prayer, but ‘proximal intercessory prayer’, or PIP — when one or more people pray for someone in that person’s presence and often with physical contact — that was found by a team of doctors, scientists and religious experts to have remarkable results in healing some patients.”

Christian Science Monitor: “Turkey is a member of a select geopolitical club: rising democracies. This club encompasses not only Turkey, but also India, Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa. Their emergence is a crucial – but untold – development of the 21st century. Rising democracies offer the West an opportunity to perpetuate the international order founded in the wake of the Second World War.”

Christian Today: “Virginia native John Upton was elected Saturday to lead the Baptist World Alliance as its new president.”

Wall Street Journal: “A new Google Inc. question-and-answer page for Chinese users was inaccessible in China on Monday less than two weeks after Google announced the service. Users in China reported problems viewing the site, www.google.com.hk/wenda, but a Google spokeswoman said the company was having no technical problems.”