San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom today announced that he is indeed a candidate for Governor of California in 2010. He faces a stiff primary challenge from California Attorney General and former Governor Jerry Brown among others.
Environmentalists predict that climate change will affect more than 375 million people every year by 2015, due to natural disasters and rising sea levels.
Thousands of people in Bangladesh are thought to be the world’s first “climate refugees” due to severe flooding.
Nicholas Haque reports from Kutubdia island in southern Bangladesh.
Apart from Bangladesh, other countries at risk from catastrophic climate change as a result of global warming include the Maldives and Kiribati. The Maldives has taken the extraordinary step of setting up a one billion dollar fund to buy land elsewhere.
A corrupt politician to some and an honorable leader to others, Jacob Zuma, the head of South Africa’s governing African National Congress, is on the verge of being elected president of South Africa, arguably Africa’s most powerful country.
Al Jazeera’s Jane Dutton, reporting from Johannesburg, says Zuma has proven himself to be an ambitious and strategic politician whose road to the presidency was never in doubt.
That he will be elected seems clear but whether he will succeed is another question. Still Zuma is further to left than either Mandela or Mbeki. My own question is whether he is sincerely a leftist or if it is all for show and personal gain?
The failure of major investment and commercial banks that helped trigger the global recession has led some experts to look for other ways of doing banking.
Al Jazeera’s Owen Fay looks at whether Islamic finance could offer some answers. More from Reuters:
Global financial turmoil could pressure the Gulf region’s Islamic finance industry to improve its product suite and spur the creation of a secondary market. Islamic finance has taken off in the oil-exporting region, including in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, as banks complying with sharia law expanded retail lending and companies sold sukuk and took Islamic loans to raise funds for expansion.
But unlike some countries in Asia, the Gulf lacks liquid local markets in short-term Islamic instruments such as sukuk, the Islamic alternative to conventional bonds.
The global financial crisis could act as a catalyst to change this, much as the Asian crisis of the late 1990s did for Malaysia, said Giambattista Atzeni, Bank of New York Mellon’s regional head of corporate trust.
“Malaysia developed the market for Islamic products straight after the Asian crisis, coming out with a sukuk market, a secondary market,” Atzeni told the Reuters Islamic Finance Summit in Dubai.
“That was mostly a reaction to the crisis … The Gulf is a very active market, and could develop on the same lines as Malaysia.”
One key aspect that has hindered the development of liquid regional sukuk markets has been that Islamic debt being issued has tended to carry very long maturities, he said.
“If you want to develop a secondary market for sukuk you need to also consider developing sukuk that do not have a long maturity, but matures in three, four or six months,” Atzeni said.
He said setting up a Gulf Arab central bank as part of plans to establish a regional monetary union and single currency could help the Islamic finance sector develop the adequate market infrastructure.