Japan’s Upper House of Parliament voted down legislation to split up and sell the country’s postal service on Monday, prompting Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to follow through on a threat to call snap elections that could shake the ruling party’s grip on power.
Crude futures rose to a new high of ,69 in Asian trading on Monday as the United States government announced the closure of its embassy and consulates in Saudi Arabia due to security threats and on continued concerns that earlier shutdowns of US oil refineries would reduce supply.
The former chief of the Iraq oil-for-food programme resigned on Sunday, a day before investigators release a report that is expected to accuse him of taking kickbacks. Benon Sevan accused United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan of failing to stand by him and blasted the independent inquiry committee investigating allegations of corruption.
On the eve of the anniversary on Tuesday of Nagasaki’s devastation 60 years ago by the ”Fat Man” atomic bomb, a steady stream of tourists flowed past the horrific exhibits at the city’s memorial museum. There is a clock, its glass smashed and bent hands frozen at exactly 11:02, the moment of the blast.
A new German book of popular legal errors seeks to end years of Anglo-German holiday bickering over the rights and wrongs of bagging the best sun loungers with the strategic deployment of towels. British tourists have gained an unlikely ally in the form of German lawyer Ralf Höcker, who said that his research had revealed that leaving towels on loungers was not legally binding.
Downloads at Apple’s iTunes Music Store have reached a million tunes in Japan in just four days, the company said on Monday. Apple Computer, which has scored a hit in Japan with its iPod portable music player, started its music download service in Japan last Thursday with one million songs.
The landing of the beleaguered Discovery space shuttle has been delayed due to low clouds over Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, Nasa announced this morning. The seven astronauts were originally preparing to land on Monday morning, but the bad weather put the landing back to later in the day.
United States generals hope to withdraw up to 30 000 troops from Iraq by next spring, signalling increasingly firm plans for a phased US pull-out. In a classified briefing to senior Pentagon officials last month General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East, reportedly said the equivalent of more than 20 brigades would leave if conditions were right.
Doctors fear that the identity of a mysterious mute pianist found wandering on an English beach in April might never be known, a British newspaper reported on Monday. ”We have discounted a lot of the names and continue to look at those which remain. But there is no obvious lead,” said an official at the Little Brook Hospital in Dartford, Kent.
Scores of the United States’s richest people have pledged -million or more towards a new attempt to reinvigorate the American left and counter the powerful Republican political machine. The money will be funnelled through an organisation called the Democracy Alliance which will help fund a network of thinktanks and advocacy groups