Wednesday, Dec 17th
Last update09:36:22 AM GMT
International Glance
Trust business, Cameron tells us, self-regulation is a force for social good. Silly me – I thought it was an invitation to disaster
This column is a plea for distrust. Distrust is the resource on which democracy relies. Distrust inspires the scrutiny and accountability without which representation becomes a lie. Distrust is all that stands between us and bamboozlement by people who, like Reece, Cowie and Brogan, channel the instincts of the billionaire owners of newspapers and broadcasters.
An Italian cruise ship with more than 1,000 people on board is without power in the Indian Ocean following a fire. No one has been injured.
The cruise operator has stressed that the ship is steady and conditions are safe.
The liner sent out a distress signal, Costa Cruises said, and all passengers and crew not involved in fighting the fire assembled at the muster stations.
Israeli defense officials on Sunday confirmed $1.6 billion in deals to sell drones as well as anti-aircraft and missile defense systems to Azerbaijan, bringing sophisticated Israeli technology to the doorstep of archenemy Iran.
The sales by state-run Israel Aerospace Industries come at a delicate time. Israel has been laboring hard to form diplomatic alliances in a region that seems to be growing increasingly hostile to Israel.
Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.
The disgraced former head of the International Monetary Fund – who lost his job amid claims he tried to rape a New York chambermaid – could face jail over the ‘sex parties’ he has admitted attending around the world.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, whose wife Anne Sinclair is standing by him, has made the extraordinary claim that he was unaware the women at the orgies were prostitutes because ‘they were naked at the time’.
Green Zone. International Zone. The Bubble. To the foreigners still living there, the Iraqi capital’s fortified center has a new name: Ghost Town.
The Iraqi government has taken full control of the former heart of the American occupation. It decides who gets past the 17-foot-tall concrete blast walls encircling the zone.
Israel’s Mossad trained and financed a terrorist group that carried out a series of Hollywood-style assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, unnamed US officials have revealed. Iran, however, believes the CIA was also sponsoring the killings.
Two senior US officials confirmed to NBC that People’s Mujahideen of Iran dissident group (MEK) was to blame for the killing of Iranian scientists. “All your inclinations are correct,” said one of the officials in an interview, while speaking about MEK’s involvement in the assassinations and Israel’s support for the group.
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