Buddhist monks and others armed with swords and machetes Friday stalked the streets of a city in central Myanmar, where sectarian violence that has left about 20 people dead has begun to spread to other areas, according to local officials.

Members of the Buddhist and Muslim communities in Meiktila township have clashed this week after a dispute between a Muslim gold shop owner and two Buddhist

Forget Cyprus. A much bigger story in the coming weeks and months will be in Japan, where one of the greatest economic experiments in the modern era is about to begin. A country where government debt even dwarfs those of Europe's crisis-ridden nations, Japan will attempt to inflate its way out of a 23-year deflationary spiral.

The overwhelming consensus among the world's economists is that qua

“Just got a call from London. Boris [Abramovich] Berezovsky committed suicide. He was a difficult man. A move of disparity? Impossible to live poor? A strike of blows? I am afraid no one will get to know now,” the lawyer said on his social network page.

According to lawyer, Berezovsky had lost much of his fortune, tabloid LifeNews reports. In August, Berezovsky lost a $5.6-billion co

A Plan for Australian Jobs sets out three core strategies to create more jobs today and to create skilled and rewarding jobs for the future.
.....
Backing Australian firms to win more work at home

The Government will introduce measures to assist our businesses in winning work on major projects.

Find out how we are backing Australian firms.

On Tuesday, March 19, the national legislature of Cyprus overwhelmingly rejected a proposed levy on bank deposits as a condition for a European bailout. Reuters called it “a stunning setback for the 17-nation currency bloc,” but it was a stunning victory for democracy. As Reuters quoted one 65-year-old pensioner, “The voice of the people was heard.”
The EU had warned that it would withhold €10 b

Citing the essay “Argentina, the Church, and Debt” by Thomas Trebat, Mathews argues that, at the height of the debt crisis in 2002, Bergoglio was a leading voice in calling for a debt restructuring in which social programs would be considered more important than repaying and servicing existing financial debt. Statements by the Argentine bishops at that time diagnosed the main problems of the Arge

The total collapse of Cyprus’s financial system is being avoided only by the continued closure of the banks, which will now be kept shut until next Tuesday. The stock market also announced on Tuesday it would close for two days, amid fears that investors would withdraw large quantities of capital.

Negotiations with the EU are on-going, but EU officials insist that Cyprus raise €5.8 billion as

Never has there been a more incompetent and unreliable leader, people say, including many of her own colleagues. Yet this week marked Gillard's 1000 days as Prime Minister. She will soon have served longer than Whitlam.

Gillard has been unlucky enough to have stepped up to the job under two unprecedented circumstances: the hung parliament and the 24-hour news cycle.

The

Hollywood director James Cameron found little evidence of life when he descended nearly 11,000 metres to the deepest point in the world's oceans last year. If only he had taken a microscope and looked just a few centimetres deeper.

Ronnie Glud at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and his colleagues, have discovered unusually high levels of microbial activity in the sediments at the

Here in Thayet, a township caked in dust about seven hours north of Rangoon, the oil rush began in 1989 after a farmer found crude near his land. Soon thousands of people had flooded the village, including students whose classes were cut short after the 1988 uprising. Those who have remained here since – along with a handful of wives and a fair few children – clamber under wooden derricks fashion

Cardinal Bergoglio, 76, is probably the ninth oldest of the 266 popes at the time of his election, accounting for some uncertainty because the age of many early popes remains unknown.

As a matter of actuarial science, Francis is not likely to have an especially long tenure. The nine previous men who were known to be 75 or older at the time of their election to the papacy served for an average

The eurozone debt and economic crisis has seen joblessness among youths approach 60 per cent in Greece, top 55 per cent in Spain, and reach nearly 39 per cent in Italy.
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Andor said that youth unemployment and its related social problems now cost the European Union about 1.2 per cent of gross domestic product, or 150 billion euros.

"It‘s an enormous sum, it‘s an enormous waste," the com

“Paedophilia, homosexuality and violations of celibacy... will be an immense challenge for the new pope,” Father Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski declared in an interview with business news source money.pl.
The priest argued that such scandals represent “not just one of the problems, but the main and the greatest issue.
“It will be extremely difficult for him,” Isakowicz-Zaleski reflected.
“Only when

.. cancers that have struck other Latin American leaders, including Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, afflicted with thyroid cancer, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, struck with lymphoma. After beginning peace talks with the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Colombia’s conservative president Juan Manuel Santos was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Professor Chomsky wrote to me: “Very few are aware of the war the US waged against the Church after the heresy of Vatican II, seeking to return the Church to the Gospels for the first time since Emperor Constantine. You probably know that I’ve been writing about it for a long time. To closed ears, mostly.” Alas, it was a video of a lecture which Chomsky gave in 2009 which really awakened me