Category: Other

CARACAS, July 22, 2007 (AFP) – Venezuela’s fiery socialist President Hugo Chavez on Sunday vowed to kick out foreigners who brand him a “tyrant,” after a Mexican politician spoke at a forum here on sensitive democracy issues.“No foreigner can come here to attack us.Anyone who does must be removed from this country,” Chavez said on […]

DHAKA, July 22, 2007 (AFP) – A former Bangladeshi lawmaker was Sunday sentenced to two decades in jail by an anti-corruption court for illegally amassing more than a million dollars in cash and property, a government lawyer said.The court also ordered Abdul Wadud Bhuiyan’s property confiscated, public prosecutor Mosharraf Hossain Kazal said. “The judge in […]

DUBAI, July 21, 2007 (AFP) – Burj Dubai, a tower rising in the booming Gulf emirate, on Saturday became the tallest building in the world at 512.1 metres (1,680 feet), developers said.Burj Dubai, or Dubai Tower, now surpasses Taiwan’s Taipei 101 which is 508 metres (1,667 feet) tall, and has 141 storeys, more than any […]

CHICAGO, July 19, 2007 (AFP) – Asia is overtaking the United States as the largest market for auto sales, but the US will remain the more lucrative market for the next decade, a senior executive at General Motors said Thursday. Overall industry sales in the Asia Pacific region are expected to surpass North America for […]

WASHINGTON, July 19, 2007 (AFP) – The International Monetary Fund is revising its economic growth forecasts amid a “global boom,” the IMF chief economist said Thursday, suggesting a bump up in official estimates. “We were criticized for being optimistic at the time of our spring forecast,” Simon Johnson told reporters, referring to an IMF April […]

BANGKOK, July 20, 2007 (AFP) – The Thai prime minister on Friday agreed on new measures aimed at curbing the baht’s rise, while the central bank governor insisted the country would not return to a fixed exchange rate system.“My government has a clear stance that we want to stablise the currency,” army-installed Prime Minister Surayud […]

NEW DELHI, July 19, 2007 (AFP) – India’s unwanted baby girls have been drowned in milk, burned alive in sealed mud pots or fed milk laced with poisonous seeds, but these days it is much easier to kill them in the womb.These are some of the chilling anecdotes in a new book on how a […]

SHANGHAI, July 18, 2007 (AFP) – China’s East Star Airline said Wednesday it had won approval to fly overseas, the first private carrier to do so, as part of efforts to loosen the nation’s strictly controlled civil aviation sector.The airline based in central China said in a statement that it gained approval from aviation regulators […]

July 18, 2007 (AFP) – Maldives is seeking international investors to help build ten regional airports as part of a plan to develop nearly three dozen resort islands, a minister said on Wednesday. “We plan to build 10 domestic airports packaged with tourist resorts, to make it economically feasible to investors.The tenders will go out […]

HARARE, July 17, 2007 (AFP) – Zimbabwe’s government was set to intensify its pricing crackdown, despite being condemned by the White House on Tuesday as a reckless move that would further fuel inflation and exacerbate food shortages.Nathan Shamuyarira, ZANU-PF’s secretary for information and publicity, said a meeting of the party’s politburo on Monday, chaired by […]