Bo Xilai officials 'wiretapped call to President Hu Jintao'
New claims may shed light on why Bo – previously accused of unspecified disciplinary violations – was ejected from post
The spotlight on the Bo Xilai affair has turned back on to political tensions in China following reports that officials in Chongqing wiretapped a call to the country's president, Hu Jintao – helping to trigger the scandal that unseated Bo.
Official accounts of the case have portrayed it as being unrelated to the political struggle for power in the country. Bo is instead accused of unspecified disciplinary violations while his wife, Gu Kailai, is accused of murdering the British businessman Neil Heywood.
Robert Fisk: The Children of Fallujah - the hospital of horrors
Special Report day two: Stillbirths, disabilities, deformities too distressing to describe - what lies behind the torments in Fallujah General Hospital?
The pictures flash up on a screen on an upper floor of the Fallujah
General Hospital. And all at once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi's
administration office becomes a little chamber of horrors. A baby with a
hugely deformed mouth. A child with a defect of the spinal cord,
material from the spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast
Cyclopean eye. Another baby with only half a head, stillborn like the
rest, date of birth 17 June, 2009. Yet another picture flicks onto the
screen: date of birth 6 July 2009, it shows a tiny child with half a
right arm, no left leg, no genitalia.
"We see this all the time now," Al-Hadidi says, and a female doctor
walks into the room and glances at the screen. She has delivered some of
these still-born children. "I've never seen anything as bad as this in
all my service," she says quietly.
Thursday, April 26, 2012, 11:12
Hollande wants European Union fiscal treaty reopened
RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC in Paris, MARY MINIHAN and HARRY McGEE
The leading candidate for the French presidency, François Hollande, has laid out plans to add new elements to the European Union fiscal treaty but left the door open to a compromise if he wins the election.
Mr Hollande, who leads president Nicolas Sarkozy in opinion polls 10 days before the run-off, said if elected he would not ratify the treaty unless a deal was agreed on measures to promote jobs and economic growth.
He also indicated that the result of Ireland’s referendum should not be taken for granted.
Nigeria bought massive corruption for cheap fuel: report
For the price of cheap gasoline, Nigeria paid billions of dollars into a corrupt government system of fuel subsidies that saw huge contracts awarded to shady companies without any oversight, according to a lawmakers' report.
The report, debated in Nigeria's House of Representatives, is breathtaking in its scope, even for a country where many grudgingly accept graft as a way of life in the OPEC nation's oil industry, government and private sector.
But some fear it may not change much, especially as it implicates some of the same elite class that dominate politics and business in Nigeria.
"We are fighting against entrenched interests whose infectious greed has (hurt) our people," House Speaker Aminu Waziri Tambuwal said. "Therefore, be mindful they will fight back and they normally do fight dirty."
Aid to Pakistan: $2.6 billion spent, little ability to show it
Anti-US sentiments and foreign policy squabbles are thwarting good US public relations from reaching turbulent, poor border regions of Pakistan.
By Taha Siddiqui, Contributor / April 25, 2012Khalil Afridi recently survived a fatal attack by militants when a hand grenade was hurled at him. “They want me to quit development work, because of my association with Western donors,”
He has been a social worker in Khyber Agency, an area bordering Afghanistan through which supply routes run, for the past eight years and is currently working on water projects with the US Agency for International Development (USAID). But he says it’s too dangerous to tell this to locals. Instead, he says, “We tell people it’s the Pakistani government funding these projects.”
Anti-US sentiments and foreign policy squabbles are thwarting good US public relations from reaching turbulent, poor border regions of Pakistan. They are also putting the lives of aid workers there at risk.
he says.
Ex-Liberia President Charles Taylor guilty in 'watershed' war-crimes case
By msnbc.com staff and news servicesTHE HAGUE -- In a historic ruling, a U.N.-backed court on Thursday convicted ex-Liberian President Charles Taylor of war crimes during a conflict that left 50,000 dead.
Taylor, 64, was charged with murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. However, the court found him guilty of only some of the charges.
Taylor is the first head of state convicted by an international court since the post-World War II Nuremberg military tribunal.
The tribunal found Taylor guilty of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity by supporting notoriously brutal rebels in return for "blood diamonds."
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