Tag: Afternoon Edition

Brian Lenihan told a bad-tempered session of parliament that the state was buying 81 billion euros (109 billion dollars) of toxic assets from failing lenders and injecting an extra 8.3 billion euros into Anglo Irish Bank.

Although he gave no exact figures, he added the state will likely take a majority share in Allied Irish Bank — currently 25 percent state-owned — but remain a minority shareholder in Bank of Ireland, where it has a 16 percent stake.

The National League For Democracy (NLD) decided at a meeting to refuse to register for the first polls to be held in two decades, a move that would have forced it to oust its detained leader and recognise the junta’s constitution.

But the NLD now faces dissolution in less than six weeks for failing to register, according to legislation recently brought in for elections due to be held by the end of November.

The pope is at a “crossroads,” said Vatican expert Marco Politi the day after Benedict was implicated for a second time in the snowballing scandal, accused of helping to keep the lid on the case of an American serial abuser.

“Either he proceeds on the path of greater transparency” or he hunkers down with defenders who claim he is being unfairly targetted, said Politi of the left-wing Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano.

The Roman Catholic Church’s morals watchdog then headed by the future pope was reportedly alerted twice by the archbishop of Wisconsin of the accusations against Reverend Lawrence Murphy.

Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, did not respond to the letters, and a secret canonical trial authorised by his deputy was halted after Murphy wrote a pleading letter to the future pope, the New York Times said, citing documents provided by victims’ lawyers.

The final plenary session of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) validates decisions taken over the previous 12 days, but a motion to reopen debate supported by a third of delegates can lead to a new vote.

The United States had said it will seek a second chance for the distinctive scalloped hammerhead shark, denied so-called Appendix II status by a handful of votes earlier in the week.

Most makarapas are handmade, created by individual fans who carve shapes into the hats and adorn them with team colours, a process that can take four days to complete.

With the World Cup’s June 11 kick-off fast approaching, this cottage business has gone industrial, with workers in this factory using a machine to cut shapes into the hardhats in a matter of minutes.

Pressure initially mounted on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with the European Commission, the bloc’s current Spanish chair, France and Italy each urging her to nail down concrete aid plans.

Athens then accused Berlin of profiteering amid a euro currency slump.

Prepared by the government with the help of the international community, the Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment (PDNA) will provide the framework for discussions at a major donors conference in New York on March 31.

The plan, published online Tuesday, goes far beyond the immediate priorities of post-quake reconstruction and looks at the massive economic and governance challenges Haiti faces if it wants to become a fully functional state.

One by one an electronic tag — similar to bar codes used on consumer products — is attached to trees in the thick woodlands covering 45 percent of the West African nation, a painstaking process that will allow consumers to trace the end-product right back to the stump.

While the use of “blood diamonds” to fund wars in the region is better known, it was timber that propped up armed factions, notably those of former president Charles Taylor, during 14 years of Liberian conflict that left over 250,000 dead.

Final results showed the Socialists set to crush Sarkozy’s governing UMP party in Sunday’s second-round polls — the last major ballot before the 2012 presidential vote.

In a vote seen as a key test of Sarkozy’s popularity, the Socialists picked up 29.5 percent in the first round in the 22 regions, ahead of the UMP with 26.3 percent, the interior ministry said.

The bombers walked up to army vehicles in the crowded R A Bazaar area of Lahore, blowing themselves up as people sat down to eat before the main Muslim weekly prayers were to begin, a senior official said.

Lahore, a city of eight million near Pakistan’s border with India, has been increasingly subject to Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked attacks in a nationwide bombing campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people in three years.

Violence broke out around a union demonstration in the capital with riot police firing tear gas at hooded youths who hurled firebombs and vandalised stores near parliament and other areas of the city centre.

Police said they had detained 16 people, of whom nine were later arrested, and that 13 officers were hurt after being hit by objects thrown by protesters.