Here is the Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 edition of what’s making news and interesting reads from around the world. Also please note that off to the left there are two widgets with updates on news from Asia and the world in a separate page: Around Asia & Around the World New Feeds.
Sarkozy Calls for Global Crisis Summit
Europe’s leading policymakers will convene in Paris next week to prepare the ground for a possible global summit on the financial crisis, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, said on Monday. He said the Paris talks would bring together officials from France, Germany, Italy and the UK – the four European Union powers represented in the G8 group of industrialised nations – as well as Jean-Claude Trichet, the European Central Bank president, José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, and Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the eurozone’s finance ministers’ group. More from the Financial Times.
Murder Capitals of the World
Number one is Caracas, Venezuela. The capital of Chávez country, Caracas has become far more dangerous in recent years than any South American city, even beating out the once notorious Bogotá. What’s worse, the city’s official homicide statistics likely fall short of the mark because they omit prison-related murders as well as deaths that the state never gets around to properly “categorizing.” The numbers also don’t count those who died while “resisting arrest,” suggesting that Caracas’s cops—already known for their brutality against student protesters—might be cooking the books. Many have pointed the finger at El Presidente, whose government has failed to tackle the country’s rising rates of violent crime. In fact, since Chávez took over in 1998, Venezuela’s official homicide rate has climbed 67 percent—mostly due to increased drug and gang violence. Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, who recently resigned as interior minister, claimed in July that homicide has dropped 27 percent since January—but experts say he’s just playing with numbers. As for Caracas, some speculate that its murder rate is closer to 160 per 100,000. The complete list at Foreign Policy.
Global Markets Plummet
Japan’s benchmark Nikkei trading index has fallen almost five percent in early trading hours after the financial bail-out plan was thrown out by Congress. US markets plummeted earlier in the day with the Dow Jones sliding 778 points in its biggest ever one-day points fall, wiping six billion euros in market value from American equities. In Europe, the fall on the FTSE 100 – which closed at 4,818.8 – was its biggest one day drop since January, with some bank shares losing more than ten percent of their value. Germany’s DAX and France’s CAC 40 plunged by five percent and 4.2 percent respectively. But the partial nationalisation of banking and insurance giant Fortis meant Belgium’s Bel20 was worst hit, closing down eight percent. More from Euro News.
Ehud Olmert Says Israel Should Pull Out of West Bank
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.
The story from the New York Times.
Elections in Belarus
Fistful of Euros comments on this past weekend’s elections in Belarus where the opposition failed to win a single seat in the 110-seat parliament.
Chalmers Johnson on the Financial Cost of the US Military
The full article is in the Asia Times.
The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is only a down payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
It also fully funds the Pentagon’s request for a radar site in the Czech republic, a hare-brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the senate, where a similar bill has already been approved. And no one will even think to mention it in the same breath with the discussion of bailout funds for dying investment banks and the like.
This is pure waste. Our annual spending on “national security” – meaning the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and numerous other places in the executive branch – already exceeds a trillion dollars, an amount larger than that of all other national defense budgets combined.