A growing roster of central bankers and politicians are opposed to the idea of an IMF bailout for Greece. They argue it would violate European Union law and that the bloc is big enough to solve the problem on its own.

What Haiti needs Haiti was stuck by an earthquake measuring "7.0-magnitude quake, Haiti's worst in two centuries, struck at 1653 local time (2153 GMT) on Tuesday, just 15km (10 miles) south-west of Port-au-Prince and close to the surface." More than 100,000 people are estimate …

We did not get an agreement on 50% reductions in global emissions by 2050 or on 80% reductions by developed countries. Both were vetoed by China, despite the support of a coalition of developed and the vast majority of developing countries.

The world's political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial.

India's approach should have been to push for what it considered to be a "fairer, juster deal" on climate change that all parties can agree to -- and if that means mandatory cuts, then so be it.

In a development that took almost all observers by surprise, India, China, and Brazil walked out the plenary session of the climate summit at Copenhagen, making it certain that the summit will end in abject failure.

[caption id="attachment_3815" align="aligncenter" width="581" caption="For the rich, by the rich, to the rich"][/caption]

on the global role of the dollar, Zhu told an academic audience that it was inevitable that the dollar would continue to fall in value because Washington continued to issue more Treasuries to finance its deficit spending. He then addressed where demand for that debt would come …

nine Latin American nations said Saturday they plan to use a new currency dubbed the ''sucre'' for trade among themselves starting in January. No sucres will be printed or coined, but the virtual currency will be used to manage debts between governments while reducing reliance o …

Dubai - the modern El dorado? In the last 40 years, Dubai and Middle East oil had interesting effects in India. After the 1973 Oil Embargo, the oil riches, the glitzy infrastructure boom of the Middle East, new found power had a profound effect in India.

Maldivian officials said the idea to hold the attention-grabbing underwater cabinet meeting came from President Mohamed Nasheed when he was asked by an activist group to support its "environmental day" action on October 24. "The 350.org group asked if the Maldives can hold an  …

Chief of Army Staff Gen Deepak Kapoor has said that there are still 42 terror camps operating across the border in Pakistan in which 2000 to 2500 terrorists are still waiting to infiltrate into Indian side.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the U.K.'s University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit said he stands by the science produced at the center but while the investigation takes place it was important that the CRU "continues its world leading research with as little interrup …

Each time the music stops. there are fewer players

In theory Switzerland is a secular state, whose constitution guarantees freedom of religious expression to all.

The greatest level of sympathy towards Israel can be found in India, according to international study on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Friday. According to the study, which was unprecedented in scope and was undertaken by an international market res …

The Glitter Dome by Joseph Wambaugh

More than three-quarters of young black men aged between 18 and 35 are on the system, the report said.

Before the western model brought by the British or the Church, there were ezhuthu pallis, or writing schools, run by ezhuthu ashans, or writing masters.

Lovely cartoon. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a ... apology Monday to ... British children shipped to Australia with the promise of a better life, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. At a ceremony ...

Law has finally caught up with a ring of picky burglars who had been targeting South Asian families in a Washington DC neighbourhood for their gold. Indian American residents of Fairfax, a suburb of the national capital in neighbouring Virginia, expressed relief as the police  …

The Danish People's Party (DF) has strengthened its immigration stance by securing an agreement to pay 'anti-social' foreigners 100,000 kroner to leave Denmark.

If Google Book Search was to come into our homes every week and demand to see our reading lists, as well as instal security cameras to monitor exactly what we read, we would protest. But this is an online, invisible invasion.

RBI's decision to shore up its gold reserves needs to be seen in the context of other central banks across the globe increasing their gold reserves.

Citing a congressional study released on Friday, the Times said the United States was involved in 68.4 percent of the global sales of arms. U.S.

The interim government of 1946-47 included Congress and the Muslim League.

Some time in the future The Obama administration is increasingly signalling that the US will not continue to be the world's consumer and importer of last resort.

The first requisite of a good servant is that he should conspicuously know his place. It is not enough that he knows how to effect certain desired mechanical results; he must, above all, know how to effect these results in due form.

New Evidence for Silk in the Indus Valley Archaeometry (reprint) 2009 Silk is an important economic fiber, and is generally considered to have been the exclusive cultural heritage of China. Silk weaving is evident from the Shang period c.

India's Hindu nationalist party has expelled one of its senior leaders for writing a book sympathetic to the founder of neighbouring Pakistan, a move that analysts say reflects the ascendance of the most hardline elements since the party's recent parliamentary election defeat.

I don't agree with this Af-Pak solution at all because we are being bracketed with Afghanistan. Afghanistan hardly has any governance, it is out of control.

a call has been given by Al Gore that there should be an immediate moratorium on coal fired power plants. Look at how this will impact India. More than half of the 8,00,000 mega watts of power India plans to produce by 2030 are to come from coal fired plants.

"The government needs to look at this," Crowden said. "Budgets are being cut. If they don't do something, it's going to be a serious public-health risk." (via Coming to a bin near you: rat pack takes Britain by storm).

With a number of states reporting huge seizures of fake Indian currency notes (FICNs), India will soon take up the issue at global fora, like Interpol, in a big way and will also ask some European countries to keep a watch on importers of currency-standard printing paper and i …

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained.

The Indian Community Centre in Belfast has received a threat letter from Protestant extremists asking immigrants to leave Northern ireland or face bomb attacks. Besides the Indian centre, the threat letter has been sent to the Belfast Islamic Centre and the Polish Association, …

Malaysia will revert to using its national language, Bahasa Malaysia, to teach science and math starting in 2012, abandoning a six-year English policy that the government said had failed to improve student grades. The long-awaited decision, announced Wednesday, came after mont …

Leaders of five developing countries — India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa — who also met for summit level talks here had separately, called for expediting a global trade agreement that would stimulate the world economy. But for this to happen, they wanted develo …

Two years ago, a historian, while researching traditional Indian methods of water harvesting, stumbled upon a series of ancient Buddhist caves in Borivli, which its custodians scarcely knew or cared about. Initially, she was scared that the historical caves would crumble under t …

Malaysia will revert to using its national language, Bahasa Malaysia, to teach science and math starting in 2012, abandoning a six-year English policy that the government said had failed to improve student grades.

The West, most notably the United States, has been all too willing to dance with dictators in pursuit of perceived short-term goals.

First, the frequency of meetings should be increased, especially in times of crisis, and the level of a few of these meetings enhanced.

Out of the around 93,000 students in Australia, over 40 chose to fly back in the wake of the racially motivated attacks.

Indian entrepreneurs are capable and talented — the best in the world — and have emerged from the pains of competition and globalisation with confidence and competence. They are the envy of most countries and are the pride of India.

Clearly, it would be extremely difficult for the largely urban and Western-educated ruling class—the current UPA government has the largest number of MPs who studied in American and British universities — who are also among the richest in the country (300 crorepatis in the  …

"The summit of the so-called BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China ended with a short statement by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and a communique that demanded more power for developing nations in international financial institutions and the United Nations. 'We are …

Police said the racist attacks started last week, with gangs smashing house windows and attacking cars.

Manmohan Inc's team would be any multinational corporation's dream. Resume for resume, its key members are in a league of their own.

As brother Stalin and mother Dayalu Ammal looked on, DMK's M K Azhagiri took oath of office in English. It sounded neither halting nor practised.

Blackwill, who has co-authored the report titled "Terrorism against India — Lessons from Mumbai", was delivering a lecture on the report at a meeting organised here by industry body CII.

Reputation Institute collected survey data on 600 companies globally. Only people in a company's home country and familiar with the company could rate it. So Americans could only rate American companies they knew about.

A senior diplomat at the High Commission told ET that in the last six months, there have been 500 cases of assault on Indian students, registered by the police authorities across Australia.

The reason we've driven all the way to Neemrana ...

Take swine flu — now renamed. We know it started in La Gloria, a little town in Mexico. We know a young boy suffering from fever in March became the first confirmed victim of the current outbreak, which, even as I write, has reached India.

it is fair to say that our policy toward Pakistan over the last 30 years has been incoherent. I don't know any other word to use. We came in in the '80s and helped to build up the Mujahideen to take on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis were our partners in that.

Opinion Polls and India The 2004 elections in India was a watershed - for opinion poll industry. After 20 years of work, the opinion poll industry thought that they had the models, the tricks, questionnaires and had the Indian Voter all figured out.

The Agnellis were more than Fiat's controlling shareholders. They have been the de facto royal family of Italian capitalism.

All this puts the SEC and the rest of the government in a horrible spot. It is a matter of public record that the law wasn't followed, thanks to Cuomo's disclosures last week.

post-reform the US will retain its de facto veto power with a 17 per cent share and the US, EU and Japan will together still control 53 per cent of IMF shares. Individually, the shares of US, Japan, UK and France will still be larger than China's share of under 4 per cent.

The Gong'an county government in Hubei province has ordered its staff to puff their way through 230,000 packs of Hubei-produced cigarette brands a year, the 'Global Times' said. Departments that fail to meet their targets will be fined, according to the report. "The regulat …

An influential Islamic group branded an online video game depicting religious figures fighting each other as offensive to Muslims and Christians and successfully demanded Tuesday that it be taken offline.

In these days of easy communication and the existence of a clear chain of authority, ignorance cannot be an excuse.

For the opportunity to make a mark is more at state level, where the administrative unit is small enough for a strong-willed and focused chief minister to be able to make a difference.

I had asked this of a former high-ranking defence official in the Clinton administration at a conference at Harvard in late 2001.

"The net is tightening around the perpetrators," says Hungarian Police Chief Jozsef Bencze.

Bhave resigned from the IAS in 1996, to take up what was then seen as a rather low-profile job — to create India's first share depository, even though he had the option of going there on deputation.

we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.

The U.S. Treasury and financial regulators are clashing with each other over how to disclose results from the stress tests of 19 U.S. banks, with some officials concerned at potential damage to weaker institutions.

"The greatest achievements of Communism are health care, sports, and education. The greatest failures of Communism are breakfast, lunch, and dinner." (via Cuba in a Time Warp - The Atlantic Food Channel).

why economic models always fail us in crisis. That's a big question, so fortunately the professor has a really great historical analogy to start us off. A group of Swiss soldiers get lost in the Alps and the weather take a bad turn.

The British, by contrast, brought tangible development, ports and railways, that created the basis for a modern state.

What you measure is what you manage. (Japanese management maxim).

Akamai Releases Fourth Quarterly "State of the Internet -- India ranked #17 globally in terms of attack traffic, with 1.16% of observed attack traffic During the fourth quarter of 2008, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 193 unique countries around the world, u …

"I have told the PM several times that it would be so nice that like in foreign countries (US presidential debate), we should also have a debate.

Having a central currency – let's call it the Zhou-Triffin Doubloon (ZTD) – managed by a supra-national organisation would make it more difficult for any one country to get into too much debt to another.

The powerful Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) headquartered in New Delhi and the Archbishop's house in Mumbai are both going ahead with clarifications on the issue. Cardinal Vithayathil's controversial remarks came at a ceremony recently to mark the publication of his …

On Saturday, residents of five communities in cane toad-plagued northern Queensland state will grab their flashlights and fan out into the night to hunt down the hated animals as part of the inaugural "Toad Day Out" celebration.

The biggest bankruptcy in history might have been avoided if Wall Street had been prevented from practicing one of its darkest arts. As Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc struggled to survive last year, as many as 32.8 million shares in the company were sold and not delivered to buy …

Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket. Persaud, chairman of consultants Intel …

The All India average of wages, salaries and pensions for Sate Governments is 32.8% of revenues. Gujarat at 16% is at half the national average.

As Bal Thackeray once said, Indians don't just cast their vote. As Indians prepare not to cast their vote but "vote their caste", as Bal Thackeray once said, our sadhus and sanyasis, mahants and maulvis, pundits and preachers must be rubbing their hands in glee. Folk fait …

Experts are, therefore, advising caution on importing US regulations wholesale.

Embellished with an estimated two million natural seed pearls as well as diamonds, the carpet sure has the razzle dazzle to attract buyers. Crafted in 1865, the Pearl Carpet has a tumultuous story behind it.

However, in my opinion there are four systemic issues involved behind this crisis. (i) The entire financial risk analysis was mainly based on an unrealistic assumption that property prices will not fall drastically, rather it would continue to rise.

There is another aspect of the deep dive that most Asian economies took in the last quarter of 2008 that is interesting. Over the years there has evolved an arrangement: Japan exports machinery and high-tech stuff to China; S-E Asia ships intermediates to China.

As I noted on this page in December 2007, the presumptive cause of the world-wide decline in long-term rates was the tectonic shift in the early 1990s by much of the developing world from heavy emphasis on central planning to increasingly dynamic, export-led market competition.

Mary Doria Russell's fiction has always dealt with power and the search for elusive lands as a means to further it. ...

In a famous speech exactly four years ago, Fed Chairman Bernanke represented the US as responding passively and benignly to the global "savings glut" which had developed following the East Asian crisis of 1997-98. Even though most closely associated with Chairman Bernanke, t …

ONGC Videsh (OVL), the foreign investment arm of Oil & Natural Gas Corp (ONGC), has found two significant hydrocarbon leads in a Cuban deepwater exploration block where it has a 30% stake.

"Unless the developed world puts together a well-regulated financial system and revives its financial institutions, the shadow of failure of the western world's financial system will fall upon all developing countries,'' Chidambaram said. The economic crisis in the developed wor …

The division of Pakistan has unfortunately legitimised the rule and role of two institutions in the politics of Pakistan; its religious extremists and its army and can be seen as a consequence of the US engagement with Pakistan post 9/11. To understand this situation and the ini …

It is also true that there was huge demobilisation of soldiers during the first half of the 19th century. Mughal rule was on its last legs and small rulers did not have the resources to maintain a regular army.

Badagara, Malabar, 13 January 1934 ... I had just finished my speech at Badagara ...

Till you change the mindset of the people where one of us is willing to send children to a Hindi medium school, the stigma attached to the language will continue and there'll be few Hindi readers and writers.

India is actually very well-positioned for the new post-US consumption world. We are a large economy with very little dependence on exports. Consumption is about 65 per cent of the economy, our demographics suggest it will remain strong. Our banking system is solvent.

she is one of 1.2 million. That's the number of elected women representatives in rural India, the largest anywhere in the world. It's not just about numbers. Village women appear to be genuinely empowered by election to panchayats.

Traditionally, Japanese firms outsource such contracts to companies within the country, and the rest to China and Korea.

India's higher education sector is failing.

The World Bank and the German government said Thursday that they hoped to inject as much as $600 million into microcredit banks, fledgling institutions in developing countries that are being starved of financing as the credit markets have tightened. The effort highlights how e …