International Glance
The Nigerian authorities have dropped criminal bribery charges against Halliburton and Dick Cheney, the former vice president, following the oil services giant’s agreement to a $35 million settlement, the company said in statement this week. Nigerian officials said last week that the settlement would amount to $250 million.
Mr. Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. The Nigerian charges, filed in early December, were just the latest fallout from a $180 million bribery scheme that Kellogg Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary, has admitted carrying out with three other companies in a joint venture to develop a liquid natural gas facility in the Niger Delta.
Israel says one of its fighter planes has shot down what appeared to be an unmanned balloon which had flown over a top-secret nuclear facility.
Halliburton is planning to make a plea bargain in former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's corruption case, Nigerian officials told GlobalPost. Nigeria's anti-corruption agency charged Cheney as the head of Halliburton when its engineering subsidiary, KBR, allegedly paid bribes totaling $180 million to secure contracts worth $6 billion.
Jonathan Pollard’s ex-wife Anne and her father were settled in Israel by the government there this week, the latest chapter in a renewed campaign to free the confessed spy. Israel has angled periodically for Pollard’s release since 1998, when it admitted, after 13 years of denials, that the former naval intelligence analyst was not a rogue agent but an officially sanctioned spy.
Tony Blair has been recalled to give extra evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war. The former prime minister will answer further questions about Britain's involvement in the conflict at a public session early next year, the inquiry team said in a statement.
With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam. American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.
