By Andrew E. Kramer, New York Times, December 11, 2010
MOSCOW....The leaders of Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan and India’s energy minister signed a preliminary agreement in Turkmenistan’s capital, Ashgabat, to proceed with plans for the American-backed pipeline, the Russian news agency Itar-Tass and other regional media reported.
United States officials hope that the line, called TAPI, will not only bolster Afghanistan’s economy by generating transit fees but will strengthen ties between the archrivals India and Pakistan....
By Christina Anderson and John F. Burns, New York Times, December 11, 2010
...The country’s foreign minister called the blasts a terrorist attack, and an e-mail to news organizations minutes before the blasts seemed to link them to anger over anti-Islamic cartoons and the war in Afghanistan....
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Vanity Fair, January 2011 issue
Prescription drugs kill some 200,000 Americans every year. Will that number go up, now that most clinical trials are conducted overseas—on sick Russians, homeless Poles, and slum-dwelling Chinese—in places where regulation is virtually nonexistent, the F.D.A. doesn’t reach, and “mistakes” can end up in pauper’s graves? The authors investigate the globalization of the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. Government’s failure to rein in a lethal profit machine.
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY, New York Times, December 10/11, 2010 an in-depth piece for their "Above the Law" Series about corruption in Russia
Efforts to suppress an opposition party in Siberia seem to underscore how laws intended to guarantee free and fair elections carry little weight in Russia.
Sample line:
“They say, if I don’t end my campaign, they will kill me,” she said.
By Ronald D. White, Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2010
Occidental Petroleum also says it will sell its operations in Argentina for $2.5 billion and increase its dividends to shareholders. It will also bring its ownership of the Elk Hills Power Plant in California to 100%.
....Venezuela has one of Latin America's highest murder rates and the government has stopped releasing complete annual figures, making arriving at an exact figure difficult.
In its annual report, the Provea human rights group said a total of 13,985 people were slain last year, but thousands more in this country of 28 million inhabitants were likely killed. The group accused government officials of using statistical loopholes to "hide the true dimension of the phenomenon."....
....Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, said its assessment of two detention centres and three border police stations in the Evros region near Greece's northeastern border with Turkey "documented the harsh and inhumane conditions in which detained migrants are being kept."....
By Daniel Bardsley, The National, December 10, 2010
The South Korean National Assembly's overwhelming approval for sending special forces troops to the UAE to provide military training is a "turning point" for the Asian nation, a political analyst says.
The proposal was passed on Wednesday by 149 votes to two, another indication of the strengthening ties between the two countries. Under the initiative, 150 troops will travel to the UAE to train Emirati soldiers in counterterrorism and counter-insurgency.....
By Erik Wasson and Michael O'Brien, The Hill, December 10, 2010
....President Obama is interested in exploring a broad overhaul of the tax code along the lines recommended by the chairmen of his debt commission.
In an interview broadcast Friday on NPR, Obama said he was not endorsing the commission's plan, which would lower individual and corporate tax rates while eliminating $1 trillion in annual tax breaks. But he said he wants to start a bipartisan conversation on the idea next year.....
By Raphael Minder, New York Times, December 9, 2010
MADRID — Spain’s attorney general said Thursday that he would recommend prison sentences of as long as eight years for air traffic controllers found guilty of staging an illegal strike that shut down airports around the country last weekend.....
By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post Foreign Service, December 8, 2010
TEHRAN - At least three editors of Iran's leading opposition newspaper, including its editor in chief, were arrested Tuesday in the daily' s newsroom by security forces, journalists working for the paper confirmed Wednesday.
The arrests of the editors and a fourth man associated with the paper followed campus anti-government protests Tuesday, when hundreds of students at several universities marked "Student Day" with demonstrations....
By David Barboza, New York Times, December 9, 2010
....By some industry estimates, as many as 10,000 people in China are doing speculative day trading of American stocks — mostly aggressive young men working the wee hours here, from 9:30 p.m. to 4 a.m., each often trading tens of thousands of shares a day....
By Steven Greenhouse, New York Times Business, December 8, 2010
An unusual split in the labor movement has developed over President Obama’s proposed free-trade pact with South Korea, with two powerful unions backing the deal — a development that experts say will make Congressional ratification far more likely....
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times Online, Dec. 9, 2010
A new book by several top al-Qaeda operators - the first of its kind - is critical of the group's leaders, accusing them of acting impetuously and refusing to take advice. The authors suggest al-Qaeda open itself to the Muslim intelligentsia and harmonize its strategy with mainstream Islamic movements. This does not yet indicate a split, but the repercussions could yet be felt along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
