Tag: Open Thread

Although the global economy looks brighter than when the Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers met in April, their closing statement said they would not remove economic stimulus until the recovery was well entrenched.

While the timing of these eventual policy reversals may vary, the G20 said for the first time there should be some coordination to avoid adverse international fallout.

The win by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) ended a half-century of almost unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and breaks a deadlock in parliament, ushering in a government that has promised to focus spending on consumers, cut wasteful budget outlays and reduce the power of bureaucrats.

“The people are angry with politics now and the ruling coalition. We felt a great sense of people wanting change for their livelihoods and we fought this election for a change in government,” said Democratic Party leader Yukio Hatoyama, 62.

The French foreign ministry said Paris has called a meeting of senior Western envoys to Afghanistan to discuss their response to presidential elections that have been marred by fraud allegations.

The White House, following on from revelations that its envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, had a testy meeting with President Hamid Karzai immediately after the August 20 vote, condemned any acts of fraud that might emerge.

Members of America’s most storied political dynasty said a private farewell to the Kennedy patriarch at a Mass in their Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, compound before accompanying his body to Boston for public tributes on Friday at the John F. Kennedy presidential library and for the funeral on Saturday.

Apart from depriving Congress of its most effective champion of healthcare reform, Kennedy’s death on Tuesday cost his Democratic party its essential 60th vote in the Senate, the number needed to beat Republican tactical blocking maneuvers.

The world body is working closely with the AU to find a replacement for Rodolphe Adada, a former foreign minister of the Republic of Congo, U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe said.

Other U.N. officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity that the United Nations and AU were considering several candidates from different parts of Africa.

The “Encyclopedia of Life” (http://www.eol.org), a project likely to cost $100 million launched in 2007, says it wants to describe all the 1.8 million known species from apples to zebras within a decade.

“We’re picking up speed,” James Edwards, EOL Executive Director based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said Sunday of the 170,000 entries with content in a common format vetted by experts. A year ago, it had 30,000 entries.

“The clients are not just harmless victims. They knew what they wanted to evade,” Kaspar Villiger, chairman of the world’s second-largest wealth manager, said in an interview with SonntagsBlick.

“But they trusted the bank that it would work. Now we have to correct that,” said Villiger, adding it was still not the responsibility of UBS to make sure clients paid their taxes.

It was Maliki’s first public comment since massive truck bombs killed almost 100 people in Baghdad on Wednesday. A few hours earlier, his foreign minister said he suspected police or soldiers might have colluded in the attacks.

Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari also criticized a decision by Maliki to remove most blast walls from Baghdad’s streets, saying it was one cause of the blasts.