USA - Big banks get away with massive fraud, laundering money for drug cartels and terrorist organizations, while average citizens are guilty of financial crimes until proven innocent. The land of the free no longer. Yesterday the White House released plans that would give all US spy agencies access to the financial records of all American citizens in order to better "track down terrorist threats", which administration legal experts say is "permissible under US law". What happened to "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated"? That's the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights in case Obama's legal team needed a reminder of actual US law.
CAIRO, EGYPT - President George W Bush kept it simple in his short television address the evening of March 19, 2003: US forces had begun their campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein, he said. The goals, he outlined in his first sentence, were straightforward: “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”
GERMANY - A new party led by economists, jurists, and Christian Democrat rebels will kick off this week, calling for the break-up of monetary union before it can do any more damage. "An end to this euro," is the first line on the webpage of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
GERMANY - The Jesuit priest kidnapped in 1976 by Argentina's military junta when the new pope was the leader of that country's Jesuits says he has reconciled with him. Pope Francis was criticized at the time for the kidnapping of two priests Francisco Jalics and Orlando Yorio, who were working in the slums. Yorio accused the new pope, then called the Reverend Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of effectively delivering them to the country's death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work. Yorio is dead but Jalics said in a statement Friday March 15, 2013 that he met Bergoglio years later and talked about the matter before celebrating Mass together with a hug. Jalics says he is reconciled with the events and considers the matter closed. He now lives in a monastery in Germany.
ARGENTINA - “For us, his election is a backwards step in the fight for human rights,” said Carlos Pisoni of the HIJOS lobby group representing children of the 30,000 leftist sympathisers who died or disappeared during the Argentine military dictatorship’s “Dirty War” in 1976-83. “There is sufficient proof that Bergoglio was complicit during the dictatorship.”
VATICAN - Comment by David Willey BBC News, Rome. Pope Francis will deal with the problems of his Church first of all prayerfully rather than as a CEO coming in with a new broom.
BRUSSELS, EUROPE - Until recently, Brussels has supported primarily front-load austerity measures. When President Hoover tried similar policies in 1930s America, a severe recession morphed into a devastating Great Depression. Is Europe following in the footprints? On Monday (11 March), the President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso, urged the EU leaders to stay the course on debt reduction and economic overhauls. Ireland and Portugal have benefited from tough turnaround programs, he noted. However, it is the major economies - Spain, Italy, even France - that continue to struggle with fiscal consolidation, with soaring unemployment and multi-year contraction.
CHINA - China is building one of the world's largest drone fleets aimed at expanding its military reach in the Pacific and swarming US Navy carriers in the unlikely event of a war, according to a new report. The Chinese military — known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA) — envisions its drone swarms scouting out battlefields, guiding missile strikes and overwhelming opponents through sheer numbers. China's military-industrial complex has created a wide array of homegrown drones to accomplish those goals over the past decade, according to the report released by the Project 2049 Institute on March 11.
ATHENS, GREECE - Unemployment in debt-crippled Greece rose to a record of 26 percent in the last quarter of 2012, as austerity measures combined with a deep recession took a harsh toll on the workforce. The figures were worse than the previous quarter's 24.8 percent, and 20.7 percent a year earlier. The national statistical authority said Thursday that 1.29 million people were out of a job in October-December 2012. In the under 25 age group, unemployment was 57.8 percent.
ARGENTINA - The election of Pope Francis, previously Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, has resurfaced a decades-old controversy surrounding the kidnappings of two Jesuit priests.
ARGENTINA - Pope Francis I today faced his first controversy as leader of the Roman Catholic Church after it emerged he described Britain as 'usurpers' for ruling the Falkland Islands. Buenos Aires-born Jorge Mario Bergoglio has previously urged the Argentinian people 'not to forget those who had fallen during the war' as they had 'shed their blood on Argentine soil'. In April last year, at a memorial mass in Buenos Aires 30 years on from the Falklands conflict, he said: 'We come to pray for all who have fallen, sons of the homeland who went out to defend their mother, the homeland, and to reclaim what is theirs, that is of the homeland, and it was usurped.'
VATICAN - Roman Catholic cardinals have been urged to overcome divisions at a special mass ahead of the papal conclave, just hours after anti-mafia investigators carried out a string of raids in the diocese of the leading candidate.
UK - The laws on Royal succession should be changed to deal with the children of a lesbian Queen in a gay marriage who conceives using donor sperm, the House of Lords has heard.
UK - Half a million more British children will soon be pushed 'below the breadline' because of welfare reforms, tax rises and wage freezes, a report has warned. The troubling report revealed that within two years the majority of children in the UK will be living below the minimum income judged necessary for a decent standard of living. Almost 7.1 million of the nation’s 13 million youngsters will be living in substandard homes by 2015, following tax and welfare changes, the report said. Contributing factors include tax credit cuts, and the VAT rise to 20 per cent – which could have the biggest impact – compounded by wage freezes in the public sector, said the report.
BRUSSELS - MEPs have rejected cuts to European Union budgets agreed at an all-night summit last month and have demanded that national governments pay an extra £14 billion in spending for this year.