MANILA — Promising to end the Philippines’ intractable corruption, Benigno S. Aquino III took office as the nation’s 15th president on Wednesday to face a welter of urgent challenges, from a swelling budget deficit to the iron grip of regional clans that have not hesitated to resort to brutality. “You are the reason why, today, [...]
JERUSALEM—The Israeli commission of inquiry into last month’s deadly naval raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla will summon the country’s prime minister to testify, the chief investigator announced Monday as the five-member panel officially began work. Alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s defence minister and military chief of staff will also face the commission investigating the [...]
By Richard Herman and Robert L. Smith Raymond Spencer, an Australian?born entrepreneur based in Chicago, has a window on the future–and a gusto for investing after founding a high?technology consulting company that sold for more than $1 billion in 2006. “I have investments in maybe 10 start?ups, all of which fall within a broad umbrella [...]
As thousands protested in the streets of Toronto, inside the G20 summit world leaders agreed to a controversial goal of cutting government deficits in half by 2013. We speak with journalist Naomi Klein. “What actually happened at the summit is that the global elites just stuck the bill for their drunken binge with the world’s [...]
June 28, 2010, marked the one-year anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. A year later, the coup’s repressive legacy continues, with ongoing reports of killings, disappearances, torture and impunity. We speak with Gerardo Torres, a member of the National Front of Popular Resistance in Honduras. One Year After [...]
Washington (CNN) — President Obama met Tuesday with a bipartisan group of senators at the White House to discuss passing an energy and climate change bill this year. “The president said that there was a strong foundation and consensus on some key policies and the president urged the senators to come together based on that [...]
Rangoon, Burma – Inside a humid room, rows of neatly dressed Burmese students are quizzing their guest lecturer. The class is Social Entrepreneurship and the topic is the European Union, where the lecturer comes from. Why is Switzerland not in the EU? Why is marijuana legal in some countries but not in others? “Good questions,” [...]
About 50,000 sea turtle eggs from beaches in the Florida Panhandle and Alabama will be dug up and moved to Florida’s Atlantic Coast in hopes of keeping the hatchlings alive in the face of the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Without the unprecedented intervention, federal scientists say, most, if not all, the hatchlings this [...]
As Gen. David Petraeus prepares for his next command, his supporters are hoping he can rescue a failing war for the second time in just a few years. But both the dire state of the war effort in Afghanistan and his approach to taking command in Iraq in early 2007 suggest that Petraeus will not [...]
More than 300,000 lbs. of contaminated soil from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant is on its way to Utah, WCAX reported. Tritium was discovered in the groundwater at Vermont Yankee earlier this year. Now the contaminated soil from the leak will now be disposed of at a radioactive waste facility in Utah. Along with the [...]
