Recently nationalised British bank Northern Rock will post its annual results Monday, with reports predicting plunging profits and a large pay-off for its former chief executive. A spokesman for the bank confirmed that the 2007 results would be published Monday morning, months later than originally planned. The Sunday Times reported, without citing its source, that Northern Rock would reveal that it had dived into the red last year on the back of huge subprime-related writedowns and interest payments made to the Bank of England.

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While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama propose government help for homeowners facing foreclosure, John McCain offered some small-government tough love yesterday in his first major speech on the economy after returning from a tour abroad. The presumptive Republican nominee, in a speech in Santa Ana, Calif., attributed the housing and credit crisis to a "bubble" caused by "rampant speculation" and created by lenders who lowered their standards, by Americans who bought homes they couldn't afford, and by financial players who invested in complex securities that were not transparent.

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A wheel jam strike is being observed here today on the call of the Transporters Alliance, as all the public transport including the buses, coaches and mini-buses etc. stayed away from the roads and streets, while the people this morning waited for hours in vain to get a transport to reach their place of work and those impelled by the emergency going somewhere had to cough up the demand fares of the taxi drivers.
The hikes in petrol prices though affected the transporters all across the country, yet the so-called transporters alliance, which leaves no opportunity of punishing the Karachiites, preferred giving a call for the observance of strike in Karachi alone, as if the people of this city had any hand in the petrol prices hikes.Read the rest of this entry »

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The Senate rejected calls from both parties' presidential candidates to take an election-year break from pork-barrel spending as a Democratic-run Congress passed budget plans that would torpedo hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts won by President Bush. John McCain, the GOP nominee-to-be, couldn't attract even a majority of Senate Republicans to vote with him Thursday night behind the earmark moratorium touted by party conservatives as a way to restore the GOP's credibility with voters. It failed on a 71-29 vote. Only three Democrats joined with Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama in voting for it.

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Aircraft orders are expected to decline by about 50 percent to 700 planes this year in tandem with a slowing global economy, European manufacturer Airbus said Wednesday. Airbus executives said on the sidelines of the Singapore Airshow the order book this year is expected to include 30 A380 double-decker aircraft and more than 100 A350s long-range planes. "We expect fewer orders this year," said John Leahy, chief operating officer for customers at Airbus. "The size of the order intake this year will be more in the category of 700 aircraft rather than 1,400 (in 2007)," he said at a news briefing, adding that this was a conservative estimate.

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The European Union made "enormous progress" in its latest round of free trade talks with South Korea but some sticky issues are still unresolved, the chief EU negotiator said Friday."We have achieved enormous progress in this round of negotiations, although there are still some issues outstanding," Ignacio Garcia Bercero told reporters on the fifth and last day of the talks, the sixth since May last year.Garcia Bercero reported progress in areas such as trade subsidies and intellectual property rights and said the two sides are close to an agreement on roughly 70 percent of the issues."We expect the difficult issues to see progress in the next negotiation session," Yonhap news agency quoted him as saying. No date for this has yet been set.

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The world's largest miner BHP Billiton is under increasing pressure to sweeten its three-for-one share offer for Rio Tinto, a report said Wednesday.
Rio's advisors Macquarie Bank have suggested BHP could afford to increase its proposal to as much as five-for-one given the benefits of creating a mining "super major", The Australian newspaper said. The Australian, citing analysis drawn up by Macquarie Bank and seen by the newspaper, said BHP could afford to raise its offer to 4.25 BHP shares for every Rio share based on Rio's 2008 forecast earnings, declared merger synergies and a planned share buyback.

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Kenya, once a leader in the region, is following neighbors like Somalia down a path of disintegration, with no solution in sight as burning slums and thousands fleeing in fear alter the nation's ethnic map — perhaps forever.Police in helicopters on Tuesday fired to turn back mobs. Gunmen killed opposition legislator Mugabe Were, and slums where a tense peace had held for days exploded with machete-wielding gangs setting fire to homes and businesses owned by President Mwai Kibaki's Kikuyu people. Sabat Abdullah, a slum resident, said a gang dragged a Kikuyu doctor from his clinic "and then cut and cut until his head was off."

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Australia will issue its first formal apology to the country's indigenous people next month, a senior minister said Wednesday, a milestone that could ease tensions with a minority once subjected to policies including the removal of mixed-blood children from families on the premise that their race was doomed. The Feb. 13 apology to the so-called "stolen generation" of Aborigines will be the first item of business for the new Parliament, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose Labor Party won November elections, had promised to push for an apology, which has been debated in Australia for years.

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A US diplomat was found dead at his home in the jurisdiction of Kohisar Police Station, Islamabad on Monday after allegedly committing a suicide.According to sources the US diplomat's body was found from bathroom with a bullet wound in his head.A letter has also been found with the body, suggesting that he committed a suicide.Police has shifted the body for autopsy and investigation into incident has been initiated.
The US diplomat is said to be associated with the department of US internal security.

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Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen's visa has been extended for six months by the Goverment with effect from February 17. There were speculations that the Government may give in to the demands of radical Muslim groups not to extend the exiled author's stay in India.While there has been no official word on the issue yet, Taslima was quoted as saying, "I have come to know that my visa has been extended,” by news agency PTI on Wednesday evening.

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Singapore arrested more than 5,000 foreign prostitutes last year but it is unrealistic to expect vice to be eliminated, the Home Affairs Minister has told parliament.Wong Kan Seng was responding to a question from an MP about efforts to curb "rampant gambling and prostitution" in Singapore's red-light Geylang district."The vice situation in Singapore is under control," Wong said in a written response released Tuesday.Read the rest of this entry »

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Two years ago, a knock on Fatima and Mansour al-Timani's door shattered the life they had built together.
It was the police, delivering news that a judge had annulled their marriage in absentia after some of Fatima's relatives sought the divorce on grounds she had married beneath her.That was just the beginning of an ordeal for a couple who — under Saudi Arabia's strict segregation rules — can no longer live together. They sued to reverse the ruling, publicized their story and sought help from a Saudi human rights group.

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Peter Mohan traces the path from the Iraqi battlefield to this lifeless conference room, where he sits in a kilt and a Camp Kill Yourself T-shirt and calmly describes how he became a sad cliche: a homeless veteran.
There was a happy homecoming, but then an accident — car crash, broken collarbone. And then a move east, close to his wife's new job but away from his best friends.

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The parents of missing British girl Madeleine McCann released a new artist's impression today of a man they claim could be involved in their daughter's disappearance.The sketches are based on a description given by a British vacationer of a man acting suspiciously in the Praia da Luz holiday resort in Portugal, about two weeks before the girl disappeared.
Madeleine vanished May 3rd, a few days before her 4th birthday, during a family vacation in Praia da Luz.

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