China reacted angrily to America’s plan to sell $6 billion-worth of weapons to Taiwan. It suspended military contacts, threatened sanctions against American companies involved in the arms sales and said it would review co-operation on international issues. [06/02]
As talks in Beijing between China and representatives of the Dalai Lama ended with little sign of progress, Chinese officials warned Barack Obama against proceeding with a planned meeting with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. Mr Obama insisted that it would go ahead, probably later this month. [06/02]
Three American soldiers were killed, along with three children and a Pakistani soldier, in a bomb attack outside a girls’ school in the north-west of Pakistan. The Americans were said to be counter-insurgency trainers working with Pakistan’s Frontier Corps. [06/02]
As the relief effort following Haiti’s huge earthquake continued, members of a Baptist group from Idaho were arrested and accused of trying to smuggle 33 Haitian children out of the country. Haiti said the death toll now exceeded 200,000, the first estimate. [06/02]
Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, won her battle to remove Martín Redrado as head of the Central Bank for opposing her plan to use some of the country’s dollar reserves to repay debt. His replacement is an economist said to be closer to the president. [06/02]
The two candidates in Ukraine’s presidential election run-off, Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovich, traded insults as the country prepared to vote. Tension rose when the Ukrainian secret service announced that it had detained five Russians last month for spying. [06/02]
Tony Blair testified at the Iraq war inquiry in Britain. The former prime minister gave a stout defence of his decision to send British troops into Iraq, said he would do it again, and asked what the situation would be like now if Saddam Hussein had been left in power to develop WMD. One of his former ministers said Mr Blair was being “ludicrous”. [06/02]
The White House unveiled a $3.8 trillion budget for the next fiscal year, starting in October. Many of its highlights, such as a new tax on banks, had been previously trailed, but the document also outlined spending on jobs. NASA’s $100 billion plan to return men to the moon was scrapped. [06/02]
Iraq’s electoral commission reversed a ban on more than 500 candidates who had been told they could not run in next month’s election because of past ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath party. Prominent Sunni politicians, who had threatened to boycott the poll because they said the original decision discriminated against them, welcomed the move. Meanwhile, suicide-bombs in Baghdad and Karbala, one of Shia Islam’s holiest Iraqi towns, killed more than 60 Shia pilgrims. [06/02]
An agreement on a truce between Yemen’s government and Shia rebels of the Houthi clan broke down over an extra condition that the Houthis stop attacking Saudi forces across Yemen’s border. Yemeni government forces later said they had killed 16 Houthi rebels, including several leaders, in their stronghold, Saada. [06/02]
Israel’s secret service, Mossad, was widely suspected of the recent assassination in Dubai of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a military commander of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist move. Mr Mabhouh was said to have been close to Hamas’s political leader, Khaled Meshaal. [06/02]
The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague won his appeal against a ruling that he could not charge Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, with genocide in Darfur. Mr Bashir was indicted in March 2009. A warrant for his arrest will now be reconsidered. Mr Bashir, with the backing of some African governments but not others, still insists he will not appear before the court. [06/02]
Barack Obama gave his first state-of-the-union speech to Congress amid growing voter disquiet about his agenda. The president admitted he had not communicated the case for health-care reform very well, but said Democrats must govern and not “run for the hills” and away from his policies. After the stunning loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts, senior Democratic leaders were reticent about revisiting a health bill any time soon. [29/01]
Mr Obama said that job creation would now become his top priority. He also called for a three-year spending freeze on many domestic programmes, such as education and national parks. But defence, national security and entitlements, such as Social Security and Medicare, were exempted. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan agency, forecast that the budget deficit for this fiscal year would be $1.349 trillion, or 9.2% of GDP. [29/01]
The Supreme Court’s shift, in a 5-4 vote, to allow companies and unions to spend freely in support of candidates in elections sent shock waves through the American political system. The decision, in United Citizens v Federal Election Commission, overturns decades of restrictions on corporations’ campaign spending. [29/01]
Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin and confidant of Saddam Hussein often known as “Chemical Ali”, was hanged in Baghdad after an Iraqi special tribunal found him guilty of ordering poison-gas attacks against Kurds in 1988, in particular in Halabja, where some 5,600 people, mostly civilians, were killed in a day. [29/01]
Describing the burqa as “a challenge to our republic”, a parliamentary committee in France called for the Muslim face-covering veil to be banned in hospitals, schools and on public transport. The committee fell short of recommending a ban in all public spaces, a measure some of its members had sought. [29/01]
Two weeks after an earthquake hit Haiti, followed by massive aftershocks and killing up to 300,000 people, international help began to reach substantial numbers of survivors. UN peacekeepers fired tear-gas at a crowd who mobbed aid workers distributing food supplies. [29/01]
As foreign ministers from some 70 countries gathered in London for a conference on Afghanistan’s future, the UN removed five former Taliban officials from a blacklist of people with supposed links to al-Qaeda. The conference was expected to hear commitments to provide money for reintegrating former Taliban fighters and to announce an expansion of Afghan security forces. [29/01]
Representatives of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader, travelled to Beijing for the first talks with the Chinese government for 15 months. [29/01]
North and South Korea exchanged gunfire near their disputed maritime border. The North said its firing was part of a military exercise, which the South called “provocative”. The next day the North fired more rounds of artillery. [29/01]
Beset by difficulties of co-ordination and transport, a massive relief operation to help victims of Haiti’s earthquake moved with excruciating slowness. A week after the quake, only 200,000 people had received food aid; perhaps 1m need it. But medical care was improving, and the United Nations, American troops and aid agencies were working to set up a supply chain. Some 200,000 people are feared to have been killed in the disaster. [22/01]
Viktor Yushchenko, the winner of Ukraine’s “orange” revolution five years ago, was resoundingly voted out in the first round of the Ukrainian presidential election. A second round will be held on February 7th between Viktor Yanukovich, the front-runner, and Yulia Tymoshenko, the current prime minister. [22/01]
Tens of thousands of people were feared to have died after an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 devastated Haiti. Schools, hospitals and homes in Port-au-Prince collapsed, as did the parliament building and the headquarters of the United Nations mission. The Red Cross said a third of Haiti’s 9m people would probably need emergency help. [15/01]
Google announced that it may withdraw from China after what it called a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber-attack originating from the country. The primary goal of the attack, it said, was to gain access to the e-mail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists. A spokesman for Baidu, its main Chinese competitor, which dominates the internet-search market in China, said Google’s announcement was hypocritical, and its decision was financially motivated. [15/01]
China became the second country after America successfully to test technology to intercept a missile in space. The test was seen as a response to America’s decision to sell advanced missile-defence systems to Taiwan. [15/01]
A Dutch committee of inquiry concluded that the Iraq war, which the government supported, was illegal in international law. Separately, the Iraq inquiry in Britain questioned Alastair Campbell, former press secretary to Tony Blair, who strongly defended the decision to go to war and the evidence that supported it. [15/01]
America said it was pondering new sanctions to press Iran to curb its nuclear programme, in particular by targeting the powerful Revolutionary Guard. But China said it was still too soon to take such measures. [08/01]
The Basel committee on banking supervision, which sets capital standards for banks around the world, published a consultation document on December 17th that was more stringent than many bankers had expected. Among other things, the committee is calling for a shake-up in the way banks’ capital is measured. [02/01/2010]
Thanks for posting the words to the hymn, “How Great Thou Art.” Today is a special day: the 150th anniversary of the birth of Carl Boberg, author of the original Swedish version of the hymn. To find out more, you can check my blog for today, at Wordwise Hymns. God bless.