19 December 2013 Last updated at 08:45 GMT
Global stock markets rise on Federal Reserve move
Stock markets in Europe and Asia have risen after the US Federal Reserve's commitment to keep interest rates low cushioned the impact of its decision to scale back its stimulus programme.
The UK's FTSE 100 and Germany's Daxindex rose 1% in early trade, while Japan'sNikkei 225 closed up 1.7%.
The US central bank said it planned to scale back its $85bn (£51.8bn) a month bond-buying programme by $10bn a month.
Analysts said the taper was less than markets had expected.
Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist for Brown Brothers Harriman Wealth Management, said the move indicated the central bank was in no rush to remove the stimulus.
"The Fed is using a very careful language that they are going to continue to support the economy," he said. "That's part of the reason why the stock market is rallying."
South Sudan rebels control Jonglei state capital, says military
Officials in Bor, capital of Jonglei state, believed to have defected as violence spreads after alleged coup attempt
South Sudan's military says it no longer controls a key town in a rural state where fighting has spread in the aftermath of what the government says was an attempted coup mounted by soldiers loyal to a former deputy president.
The authorities in Bor, the state capital of Jonglei, were not answering their phones, leading the central government to believe they had defected, said Philip Aguer, the South Sudanese military spokesman.
"We lost control of Bor to the rebellion," Aguer said. He said there were reported gunfights in Bor overnight as renegade officers tried to wrest control of the town from loyalist forces.
Ukraine divided over impact of opaque Russian bailout deal
EU says deal with Ukraine is still on table
Daniel McLaughlin
Ukraine’s government says the country has been saved from economic and social collapse by a Russian bailout, which opposition leaders call a poisonous Kremlin reward for Kiev’s rejection of a pact with the European Union.
Moscow pledged on Tuesday to lend $15 billion (€10.9 billion) to Ukraine and slash the price it pays for Russian gas, but the opacity of the deal prompted critics to suspect that Kiev may have made long-term pledges and swapped key national interests for cash from the Kremlin.
The deal was signed as large numbers of protesters continued to demand the resignation of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich and his government, whom they accuse of scrapping plans for EU integration in favour of closer ties with Russia and possible membership of a Moscow-led customs union of ex-Soviet states.
Masked Army: Shadowy Jihadist Group Expands Rapidly in Syria
A murderous Islamist group called ISIS is obstructing Syrian rebels in their battle against President Bashar Assad's regime. The Free Syrian Army seems barely able to put up a fight in the face of their brutal tactics.
The sender was unidentified, but the young engineer knew who the email was from as soon as he opened the attachment. Beneath a picture of the brutally mutilated corpse of Muhannad Halaibna, a civil rights activist known throughout the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, was a single sentence: "Are you sad now about your friend?"
Behind Japan's new military plans: China, nationalism, or both?
China's aggressive moves figure largely in Japan's new defense strategy. Some worry about nationalism, too.
Japan's approval of new national defense guidelines and its first-ever national security strategy are raising questions whether, after a year of focusing on the economy, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is finally baring his nationalist teeth.
The announcement this week of a significant increase in military spending over the next five years to counterChina’s growing military influence in the region was not unexpected. Mr. Abe insisted it did not signal a departure from the country's longstanding postwar pacifism or the strictly defensive role of its armed forces. Japan's annual defense budget rose for the first time in 11 years this year, albeit by a meager 0.8 percent.
Jun Okumura, a visiting scholar at the Meiji Institute for Global Affairs in Tokyo, described Japan’s hike in military spending as “a real turnaround, but still way behind what we can expect from China in the foreseeable future.
“Is Japan becoming a ‘normal’ country? Well, it still won’t have nuclear weapons, ballistic or cruise missiles, strategic bombers, aircraft carriers, and the other normal trappings of a superstate … so [China's] People’s Liberation Army can sleep easy,” he says.
Middle East
Dec 19, '13
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In the wake of the Geneva interim agreement of late November, which marked the first formal agreement between Iran and the United States since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, there are increasing hopes and fears of an Iranian-US rapprochement. Whilst much of the international community views Iranian-US rapprochement in positive terms, the conservative Arab states of the Persian Gulf led by Saudi Arabia and Israel are stridently opposed to this putative rapprochement on political and ideological grounds.
Formidable regional opposition to a rapprochement notwithstanding, and assuming that last month's interim agreement leads to a lasting settlement on the nuclear issue, an Iranian-American detente is unlikely to unfold foremost due to the
nature and ambitions of the Iranian political establishment.
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