After making history by capturing the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama turns on Wednesday to the task of unifying a fractured party for a five-month battle for the White House with Republican John McCain. The Illinois senator on Tuesday locked up the 2Â 118 delegates he needs for victory at the August convention.
Wall Street is putting its money behind Democrat Barack Obama for president, despite worries that his administration would raise taxes and take a tougher line on trade and regulation. The signs Wall Street reads point to Democrats prevailing in the November presidential and general election as voters punish the incumbent Republican party.
China’s state media on Tuesday hailed Premier Wen Jiabao as the world’s sixth-most-popular politician on the social networking site Facebook — well ahead of United States President George Bush. Wen Jiabao’s profile was set up two days after he rushed to the scene of the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan province to oversee rescue efforts.
Britain criticised as obscene the presence of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe at this week’s global food summit in Rome, saying he had inflicted shortages on millions of his own people by his ”profound misrule”. Mugabe flew into Rome late on Sunday, making his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western leaders as fraudulent.
Plans to include an Adolf Hitler figure in the new Berlin branch of Madame Tussauds wax museum are being condemned by critics, who say displaying the dictator is tasteless and could attract neo-Nazis. Madame Tussauds argues Hitler is part of German history and deserves a place in the exhibition near the Brandenburg Gate.
The United States is operating ”floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. The US government was on Sunday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe flew into Rome for a global food summit on Sunday, his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western and opposition leaders as fraudulent. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”It is a matter of concern to us and we would prefer that he did not attend.”
The Zimbabwean opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, has told President Thabo Mbeki that he is no longer fit to serve as the region’s mediator in Zimbabwe’s political crisis owing to a ”lack of neutrality”, and that ”there will be no country left” if Mbeki continues to side with President Robert Mugabe.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
President Thabo Mbeki must release the letter he allegedly wrote to George Bush asking the American president to ”butt out” of Zimbabwe, the Democratic Alliance said on Thursday. Mbeki’s four-page letter to Bush apparently criticised the United States for taking sides against Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe said on Thursday his government had bought 600 000 tonnes of maize to ease food shortages ahead of a June 27 presidential election run-off. Zimbabwe, once home to a prosperous agricultural sector, is suffering chronic food shortages.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak called on Wednesday for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to step aside over corruption allegations or face a collapse of his coalition that would disrupt peace talks with the Palestinians. This came a day after an American businessman told a court how he handed Olmert envelopes stuffed with thousands of dollars in cash.
Western governments lashed out at the extension of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest, but the outrage at Burma’s generals was tempered by concern over disrupting aid flows to desperate cyclone victims. Burma has been promised millions of dollars in Western aid after Cyclone Nargis, but this cut no ice with the junta regarding the opposition leader.
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan says in a new book that United States President George Bush ”veered terribly off course” and was not ”open and forthright on Iraq,” a media report said on Tuesday. In the memoir due out next week, McClellan also says Bush relied on ”propaganda” to sell the war.
Former United States president Jimmy Carter has said Israel holds at least 150 nuclear weapons, the first time a US president has publicly acknowledged the state’s atomic arsenal. Asked how a future US president should deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, Carter put the risk in context by listing atomic weapons held globally.
Australian soldiers are ashamed of their low-risk missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and are scorned by troops of other nations, two officers charged in comments published on Tuesday. ”The restrictions and policies enforced on infantrymen in Iraq have resulted in the widespread perception that our army is plagued by institutional cowardice,” Major Jim Hammett said.
Britain and other European governments should break from the United States over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter said on Sunday. Carter described the current European Union position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as ”supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as ”embarrassing”.
We all saw it. Indeed, that was the whole point. In the United States, the networks stopped regular programming so we had little choice. The White House wanted to make sure we caught the full dramatic impact of the US president landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln in a navy jet.
If there were a Richter scale for measuring scandals, Chappaquiddick would score very high. A young woman drowned when, late in the evening on July 18 1969, Senator Edward Kennedy drove his car off a bridge into a pond on this little Massachusetts island.
Barack Obama sounded like the Democratic presidential nominee on a visit to the November election battleground of Florida on Wednesday, praising rival Hillary Clinton and targeting Republican foe John McCain. Clinton also visited Florida, where she pressed ahead with her uphill Democratic race.
Israel and Syria said in surprise announcements on Wednesday they were conducting indirect peace talks with Turkish mediation. Senior officials from both sides were currently in Turkey, an Israeli government official said. He would not confirm there had been direct contacts between the two delegations.
Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, the brother of assassinated president John F Kennedy and the elder statesman of American liberal politics, has a malignant brain tumour, his doctors said on Tuesday. Kennedy (76) who has been hospitalised in Boston since he had a seizure on Saturday, will likely need chemotherapy and radiation therapy to treat the glioma.
A fading photo tossed on an empty bed is all that remains of the interrupted lives in Spinkai, a desolate Pakistani village that has endured the wrath of the army’s ”collective punishment”. In the image, a laughing young man in a jet-black turban brandishes his rifle like a trophy. Beside him stand two little girls in bright frocks, giggling with glee.
Oil markets are well supplied and high prices are the result of speculation, a weak dollar and geopolitical problems, Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) president Chakib Khelil said on Monday. ”As for Opec, indications show that there is no shortage [of supply],” he told a public forum on energy.
A Democratic win in the solidly conservative Mississippi capped a week in which Senator Barack Obama finally turned his eyes to the coming November election and his opponent, John McCain. Now many Democrats believe the signs are good that the tide of American public opinion is firmly swinging their way.
The United States agreed on Friday to help Saudi Arabia protect its oil industry from terrorist attack, while offering to back conservative Arab countries resisting Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East — but King Abdullah was not persuaded to boost Saudi oil production to ease the effect of the -a-barrel price on the US.
The price of oil rocketed to a record high point of $127,43 per barrel on Friday, as United States President George Bush prepared to urge Saudi Arabia to pump more crude. New York’s main oil futures contract, light sweet crude for June delivery, beat the previous all-time peak of $126,98 set on Tuesday owing to worries about tight supplies.
United States President George Bush used a visit to Israel on Thursday to denounce Democratic party offers to negotiate with America’s enemies in the Middle East as comparable to appeasement of Hitler. Although Bush did not name any Democratic politician, the party’s presidential contender Barack Obama has offered to open negotiations with the Iranian leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
United States President George Bush offered a peace prophecy for the Middle East on Thursday in which the enemies of the United States faced a future of defeat. ”This is a bold vision, and some will say it can never be achieved,” Bush told Israel’s Parliament.
Talks between Somalia’s interim government and the opposition in Djibouti are a waste of time and no tangible outcome can be expected, Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said on Thursday. Speaking from Asmara, where he lives in exile, the former army colonel urged his allies attending the peace talks to walk out.
United States President George Bush arrived in the Middle East on Wednesday to celebrate Israel’s 60th birthday and try to energise peace efforts complicated by a corruption scandal that could topple Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. A smiling Olmert and his wife, Aliza, greeted the president and First Lady Laura Bush at a red-carpet ceremony at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport.
Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim leader Saad al-Hariri pledged on Tuesday there would be no political surrender to what he called a bid by Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers to impose their will on the nation by force. The Shi’ite Hezbollah group and its opposition allies have routed supporters of the Sunni-led government in Beirut.