Global News
The coming days: The week ahead
America's Senate ponders whether the Lockerbie bomber was set free on grounds of compassion or commerce
• AMERICA'S Senate is set to open hearings on July 29th addressing the possibility that lobbying by BP played a pivotal role in the decision made by British and Scottish governments last year to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man to have been convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie. The officials who were most involved in the decision to grant Mr al-Megrahi his early return to Libya, where he was treated to a hero’s homecoming, flatly deny that Britain had cut a deal to help British firms secure oil deals with Muammar Qaddafi. They insist that he was let home on compassionate grounds, after being diagnosed with cancer.
• A VERDICT in the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, or “Comrade Duch”, to be handed down on Monday the 26th, is likely to represent the first conviction on war crimes handed down to any member of the Khmers Rouges, who ruled Cambodia with unprecedented brutality from 1975-79. Duch was not among the regime’s highest rank of political cadres, but for his role in presiding over S-21, or Tuol Sleng, a notorious torture prison in Phnom Penh, he has become one of its most emblematic figures. His 16-month trial before a UN-backed tribunal, which has descended into disarray in its final months, was supposed to establish a model for the prosecution of the other surviving leaders of the Khmers Rouges. ...
July 25, 2010
The coming days: The week ahead
Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, visits Barack Obama in Washington
• ISRAEL'S prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is set to travel to Washington for a meeting with Barack Obama on Tuesday July 6th. Mr Netanyahu’s previous date with America’s president at the beginning of June was postponed after Israeli forces killed nine people in a raid on a boat attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza in defiance of an Israeli blockade. Mr Obama will be keen to find a way to encourage Israeli and Palestinian leaders to begin direct talks again. Face-to-face negotiations were suspended in December 2008 after Israel’s deadly offensive against Gaza intended to stop rocket attacks from the territory. In a sign of a thawing of relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Ehud Barak, the country’s defence minister, said that he would shortly meet Salam Fayyad, the PA’s prime minister.
• THE lower house of France’s parliament begins debate on Tuesday July 6th over the controversial issue of banning women from wearing full Muslim veils in public before a vote likely to be held the following week. A burqa ban, which has the backing of President Nicolas Sarkozy, is also winning support in other parts of Europe. Belgium’s lower house has approved a similar measure and Spain Senate recently narrowly voted to impose a ban too. But the Council of Europe, an institution that oversees the human rights of Europeans, has voted unanimously to oppose any national bans on the burqa in EU countries. It also called on Switzerland to reverse its ban on the construction of minarets. ...
July 04, 2010
Death in Lahore: Bombing the Light of God
A sinister and deadly new twist in Pakistan’s dreadful saga of terrorist atrocities
On the night of July 1st, when the throng of worshippers in the shrine of Lahore's patron saint, Ali Hajvery Data Ganj Bakhsh, was at its peak, two suicide-bombers blew themselves up. The attack, at the heart of a 1,000-year-old centre of Sufi Islam in Pakistan, killed at least 42 people and injured another 175.
"The terrorists have done the unthinkable," said a grieving woman at the site of the bombing. Not so long ago many Pakistanis believed the Taliban and al-Qaeda were just innocent Islamists battling the evil Americans. The country is paying a heavy price for their refusal to face up to their true nature. ...
July 02, 2010
The coming days: The week ahead
A trade pact will draw China and Taiwan closer togther
• IMPROVING relations between China and Taiwan will get another boost with the signing of a groundbreaking free-trade pact by the end of June. Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s president, was elected in 2008 on a platform that called for better ties with China. A free-trade pact with the mainland is the cornerstone of his cross-strait policies. Taiwan, already isolated diplomatically, feared commercial marginalisation when the effects of a free-trade agreement between China and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) begins to be felt later this year. Mr Ma has already overseen the establishment of direct flights and shipping routes across the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.
•AMERICA'S Supreme Court is likely to hand down a decision involving the Sarbanes-Oxley act of 2002 on Monday June 28th. The legislation, intended to tighten the auditing of public companies in the wake of the accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, has been widely criticised for imposing costly and burdensome regulations on American businesses. The court will rule on the constitutionality of the board created to oversee independent audits of big companies. But firms may fear that if Sarbanes-Oxley is overturned a Congress on the brink of introducing tough regulation of Wall Street’s financial firms might well replace the act with something even tougher. ...
June 27, 2010
Australia changes prime minister: Rudd on the tracks
Losing popularity, the Labor Party ditches its leader
LESS than a year ago Kevin Rudd rode high as one of Australia’s most successful prime ministers. Suddenly, his spectacular career has come to a crashing end. With his rating in the opinion polls sliding disastrously, and a federal election due soon, a panicked ruling Labor Party on June 24th dumped Mr Rudd as leader. They replaced him with Julia Gillard, his deputy. She will give a country once branded as a bastion of male chauvinism its first female prime minister.
As his support crumbled among Labor’s 115 federal parliamentarians, Mr Rudd had declared defiantly the previous evening that he would fight a leadership challenge from Ms Gillard. But the coup turned out to be bloodless. Faced with a humiliating defeat, when the moment came Mr Rudd stood aside. His colleagues elected Ms Gillard unanimously. Wayne Swan, the treasurer, will take over as deputy prime minister. ...
June 24, 2010
The coming days: The week ahead
World leaders gather for G8 and G20 summit meetings
• LEADERS of the G8 group of rich countries gather in Muskoka, a Canadian holiday resort, for a two-day summit starting on Friday June 25th. The meeting overlaps with the two-day G20 summit that begins the next day in Toronto. Both get-togethers will give the opportunity to world leaders to discuss global financial regulation, reforming international financial institutions and responses to the crisis in the euro zone. The Canadian hosts have been criticised at home for the vast cost of the summit, in particular on the creation of a huge artificial lake for the media centre in a country with more real lakes than anywhere else in the world.
• ANXIETY in Britain is likely to be high as George Osborne, the country’s new chancellor (finance minister), unveils details of a tough emergency budget on Tuesday June 22nd. The new budget will set out the overall trajectory of spending, which is likely to be sharply downward. Mr Osborne’s colleagues have been making scary speeches about the parlous state of public finances. And gloomy independent forecasts for growth and the public finances from the new Office for Budgetary Responsibility suggest that hefty spending cuts and tax rises are inevitable. ...
June 20, 2010
Reforming France: State of denial
Reactions to a modest plan to increase the retirement age show how hard reform is in France
THE French government’s long-awaited pension reform, which was announced on June 16th, turns out to be at once symbolically bold and yet ultimately disappointing. Under a plan unveiled by Eric Woerth, the labour minister, France intends to raise the legal retirement age progressively from 60 to 62 by 2018. Since this alone will not meet the state pension-fund shortfall, the government will increase the top rate of income tax from 40% to 41% from next year, and tax capital gains, stock options and other financial income more heavily. It will also align civil servants’ pension contributions with those in the private sector by 2020. In all, the government thinks it can balance the pension fund, which currently has a €32 billion deficit, by 2018.
The symbolism of this change is clear. It was President Francois Mitterrand in the early 1980s who introduced retirement at 60 as a mark of progress, and it remains a totem for the left and the right. Martine Aubry, the Socialist Party leader, instantly called the government’s plan “irresponsible”, and says that the Socialists will reverse it if they are elected to power in 2012. Union leaders too have queued up to denounce the reforms. Francois Chereque, one union boss, called it “a provocation”. A day of strikes and protests is planned for June 24th. ...
June 16, 2010
Violence in Kyrgyzstan: Stalin's harvest
What lies behind the violence in Kyrgyzstan
CLASHES in southern Kyrgyzstan have spiraled out of control. Thus far 118 people have been confirmed dead, a further 1,500 as injured, and tens of thousands of ethnic Uzbeks have fled to neighbouring Uzbekistan. The number of those killed over the past four days are without a doubt significantly higher than these estimates suggest. Local Muslim custom requires that the dead are buried within 24 hours. Many people are burying family members immediately without registering their deaths.
Although Uzbeks make up only 15% of Kyrgyzstan’s population of 5.4m, most of them live in the southern part of the country, where they make up the majority. The Fergana Valley, where most of the killing happened, was divided arbitrarily by Stalin in the 1920s among Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. As a result, the Kyrgyz Soviet republic was left with a sizeable Uzbek population, the Uzbek Soviet republic with a Tajik population, and so on. While the Soviet Union existed and the republics were part of the same country, this made little practical difference. But when the Soviet Union fell apart, these artificially created borders became final, separating newly independent states and fomenting ethnic tensions. ...
June 13, 2010
The coming days: The week ahead
Iraq's new parliament will be in session; oil executives will be grilled by Congress
•IN IRAQ, the first session of the new parliament begins on Monday June 14th. Iyad Allawi's Iraqi National Movement, known as Iraqiya, narrowly won the general election (which took place at the end of March), giving him the right to try to form a coalition. This will not be easy. Making a stable government out of the available ingredients—which include the State of Law alliance, led by the current prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki; a Shia religious alliance that includes followers of a populist cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr; and a Kurdish alliance—could take months.
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June 13, 2010
Japan's new prime minister: Meet the boss
Can Japan's fifth prime minister in four years succeed where others failed?
WHEN Japan's outgoing prime minister announced his resignation this week, Tokyo's financial markets barely budged, underscoring the depressing regularity with which the country's leaders have come and gone in recent years. However the election by Japan's Diet (parliament) of Naoto Kan as prime minister on June 4th may represent a change. The past four prime ministers hailed from wealthy political dynasties, among which the premiership was almost a filial rite of passage. Mr Kan is a self-made man, ascending into politics after years toiling in citizen movements.
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June 04, 2010
German politics: Köhler quits
Germany's president resigns after ill-chosen remarks about the war in Afghanistan
THE powers of the German president are more symbolic than real, but Horst Kohler’s sudden resignation from the job on Monday May 31st was nonetheless a bombshell. He quit days after critics accused him of violating the spirit of the constitution in remarks he made about German military operations abroad. His accusers “flouted the necessary respect for my office,” said a tearful Mr Kohler. His premature departure, the first by a post-war president well before the end of his term, piles additional pressure on the coalition government led by Angela Merkel, which is already beleaguered by sagging popular support and the crisis in the euro area. How she proceeds in the search for a successor will say much about how she means to manage Germany during the coalition’s three remaining years in office.
Mr Kohler, a former director of the International Monetary Fund, had been floundering for some time. As a non-politician he lacked influence in Berlin’s backrooms. Earlier presidents had made their mark by rising to historical occasions with ringing oratory. Despite his financial expertise Mr Kohler struggled to find his voice during the economic crisis. The markets had become a “monster,” he told a magazine in May. Hurled sporadically his thunderbolts fizzled. Recently, the press has been giving more coverage to infighting and resignations among his aides than to anything Mr Kohler has had to say. He remained popular but his prestige was ebbing. ...
May 31, 2010
Deepwater Horizon: Top spill
BP thinks again about how to stanch the flow of oil after “top kill” fails
AFTER three days of trying, on May 29th BP gave up on its attempts to stanch the flow of oil from its leaking well in the Gulf of Mexico with a procedure known as "top kill". The following day, a White House adviser described the spill as the worst in America's history.
“Top kill” depended on the company pumping large amounts of drilling mud into the blowout preventer, a set of valves which sits on the sea floor at the top of the company's MC252 well, which was drilled by the ill-fated rig, Deepwater Horizon. The idea was to push the mud down the well faster than the pressure of the rising oil and gas could push it back out of the top of the blowout preventer, eventually filling the well with a great enough weight of mud to keep the oil pressed down. To help with this the company fired various sorts of detritus into the blowout preventer, in the hope that the bits of wire and rubber thus introduced would plug the leaks at the top of the preventer and thus help to make sure the mud went down, not up. But even with these "junk shots" the company could not get the procedure to work. ...
May 31, 2010