AUSTRALIA - Food products, manufacturing and tourism are sectors that Australians will benefit from this treaty, according to the Australia China Business Council. Australia and China signed a free trade agreement after more than ten years of negotiations. Its aim is to boost growth and job creation by reducing tariffs in various sectors.
USA - The United States of America now has more Spanish speakers than Spain. America is the second largest Spanish-speaking country. A study by Instituto Cervantes revealed that America has more than 40 million native Spanish speakers, and 11.6 million who are bilingual, mainly kids of Spanish-speaking immigrants. This means that the US is ahead of Colombia (48 million) and Spain (46 million), and comes in second to Mexico, which has 121 million Spanish speakers. The report also revealed that the Spanish speaking population is big enough in America to influence the media agenda.
GERMANY - A robot has killed a contractor at one of Volkswagen’s production plants in Germany, the automaker said Wednesday. The man died Monday at the plant in Baunatal, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Frankfurt, VW spokesman Heiko Hillwig said. The 22-year-old was part of a team that was setting up the stationary robot when it grabbed and crushed him against a metal plate, Hillwig said.
UK - The likelihood of a Greek exit from the eurozone wiped £34 billion off Britain’s leading companies on Monday, after the country shuttered its banks’ doors and imposed capital controls. The FTSE 100 opened almost 2 percent in the red as investors fled to the sidelines and attempted to digest the actions of the Greek government over the weekend.
GERMANY - This little fact changes everything. In 1943, Germany forced the Bank of Greece to lend it two loans worth 11 billion euros in today’s money. And Germany has still not paid back the debt. This money is not war reparations, which are a separate and much more complex issue. The debt is a straightforward loan from Greece to Germany – albeit a forced one – which the Germans have not bothered to repay. Which – considering the Germans have been bleating on and on …about how the Greeks should honour their present debts – is a case of breathtaking hypocrisy writ large, I’d say.
GREECE - In April 2015, the President of the Parliament of the newly-elected government of Greece set up a Committee on the Truth about the Public Debt. This was composed of Greek and foreign experts, economists, lawyers and others, as well as members of grassroots organisations. All members offered their services pro bono. The object of the Committee was to investigate how Greek foreign debt had accumulated from 1980 to 2014.
FRANCE - Earlier today Wikileaks released a new batch of NSA intercepts among which one in particular stands out: an intercepted communication which reveals that then French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici believes the French economic situation was far worse, as of mid-2012, than perceived. Specifically, Moscovici who served as French finance minister until 2014 and then became European commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs, used some very colorful language, ie the French economic situation was "worse than anyone [could] imagine and drastic measures [would] have to be taken in the next two years”. Needless to say, no drastic measures were taken.
ISRAEL - The religious sites on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City could be reopened to Jewish and Christian visitors more than 15 years after they were shut out. For months, Israel and Jordan have been secretly discussing the possibility of readmitting non-Muslim visitors to the Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque and Islamic Museum on the mount, according to Haaretz.
UK - In the recent media stories about the first world war, the two sides in conflict were the British and their allies, fighting the Germans. Increasingly, in stories about the second world war, however, the word “German” is disappearing, and “the Nazis” are the people Britain and its allies were fighting. This is a worrying political correctness.
USA - Depending on the disease, getting tested could do more harm than good. Medicine has long focused on early detection of diseases as part of a move toward preventive care. But imperfect tests, false positives, and over diagnosis mean that sometimes the tests do more harm than good, and in recent years, there have been more recommendations to reduce some kinds of screening, including pap smears, colonoscopies, mammograms, and even annual pelvic exams.
EUROPE - Every third person in the United Kingdom, France and Germany believes the European Union should have its own army instead of relying on the US-led NATO military bloc, a poll conducted by ICM Research exclusively for Sputnik revealed on Tuesday. In early March, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said that the European Union needed to create a unified army of its own to be able to respond to threats posed to both EU member states and neighboring countries. On average, 28 percent of all respondents from the survey expressed a preference for creating an army to protect EU interests. This opinion was shared by 37 percent of those polled in France, and a slightly smaller share of people in Germany (36 percent), while in Britain only 19 percent spoke in favor of an EU army, according to the survey.
VATICAN - An historic meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church is "getting closer every day," a senior Orthodox prelate said in an interview published on 28 June. The unprecedented meeting would be a significant step towards healing the 1,000-year-old rift between the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity, which split in the Great Schism of 1054.
CANADA - Americans need to understand that the endgame of the LGBT rights movement involves centralized state power — and the end of First Amendment freedoms. I am one of six adult children of gay parents who recently filed amicus briefs with the US Supreme Court, asking the Court to respect the authority of citizens to keep the original definition of marriage: a union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, so that children may know and may be raised by their biological parents. I also live in Canada, where same-sex marriage was federally mandated in 2005.
USA - The United States no longer has, as the Constitution designed, a government composed of executive, legislative and judicial branches, separate, but equal in power. The federal government is now an alliance of branches, devoted to the preservation of government itself, separate, not from each other, but from the American people and dedicated to tyranny.
EUROPE - While the eyes of the world are on Greece and its potential default on its debt, there are several other countries in the EU that have debts to rival the struggling nation. Altogether there are six European nations whose debts are larger than their economic output, and 16 that have debts larger than the 60%-of-GDP limit set out in the Maastricht Treaty.