Cuban leader Raul Castro is scheduled to visit Moscow later this month. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin callled the Cuban leader’s upcoming visit as “historic” and said the exact details of the schedule were still being worked out.Russia and Cuba are considering joint projects in fields like fishing and transportation, Sechin said, adding that the two countries “have a serious basis for stepping up their cooperation.”
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, met a senior Chinese Communist party official in Pyongyang on Friday in his first known meeting with a foreign visitor since reports that he suffered a stroke in August, Xinhua reported.
A China motivated by fear is sparing no effort to spend money to boost the ecopomy.
An NYTimes article reports that China is furiously pouring concrete and laying rails. A $17.6 billion passenger rail line across the deserts of northwest China, a $22 billion web of freight rail lines in Shanxi province in north-central China and a $24 billion high-speed passenger rail line from Beijing to Guangzhou in southeastern China. Extra spending is also slated for practically every town, city and county across the country.
The combined national, provincial and local spending for economic stimulus promises to change the face of China, giving the country a world-class infrastructure for moving goods and people quickly, cheaply and reliably across great distances.
Policy makers “are already in a mode of panic,” said Qu Hongbin, the chief China economist at HSBC, even before the new numbers were released. “They’re going to spend like there’s no tomorrow.”
Fidel Castro said he doubts he’ll make it to the end of Barack Obama’s four-year term and told Cuban officials to start making their decisions without taking him into account reported China Daily. In an online column titled “Reflections of Comrade Fidel,” the 82-year-old Cuban leader suggested his days are numbered, saying Cuban officials “shouldn’t feel bound by my occasional Reflections, my state of health or my death.”
The poverty rate among ethnic minority groups reduced sharply, from 60.7 percent in 2004 to about 43 percent by the end of 2008. The Vietnam News Agency reported that the average per-capita income of ethnic people is about VND500,000 per month, almost 30 percent up against 2006.
The U.S. military will add to its supply lines in Pakistan by opening new routes that will give troops in Afghanistan access through Russia and other countries in Central Asia.
“It is very important as we increase the effort in Afghanistan that we have multiple routes that go into the country,” said US General David Petraeus. “We have sought additional logistical routes into Afghanistan from the north. There have been agreements reached, and there are transit lines now and transit agreements for commercial goods and services in particular that include several of the countries in the Central Asian states and also Russia.”
its getting hot in here. North Korean officials told a visiting U.S. expert last week that they had prepared more than 30 kilograms of plutonium for nuclear warheads, the AP reported. Selig Harrison, head of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, said “All of those I met said the North has already weaponized the 30.8 kilograms (67.8 pounds) of plutonium listed in its formal declaration and that the weapons cannot be inspected.”
Civil unrest is spreading in eastern Europe as the economic crisis hits the region harder than western states, with anti-government riots kicking off in Lithuania and Bulgaria in recent days and with Estonia and Hungary at risk, reports EUObserver.
The riots are not isolated events but a wave of predictable reactions to the economic crisis, Dorothee Bohle, a political scientist at the Central European University in Budapest told the EUObserver. “After a few years of relatively high growth and social advancement, it’s all come to an abrupt end and they’ve been slapped with a very harsh austerity package,” she said. “This is essentially a return of the ‘IMF riots’ we were used to from Latin America in the eighties and nineties.”
Chao Soymala Inieum na Jampasak, 67, is selling her collection of royal jewelry and antique silks to pay for the tuition fees of more than 200 monks from Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Bhutan, Nepal and Chiang Tung City studying at the the Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She fled Laos to Thailand after the Laotian revolution of 1975.
Tanks and other military equipment will once again flow south from Russia towards Afghanistan. The difference this time is that it will be American-made armor rather than Soviet ones that will make the trip.
Hampered by Taliban attacks on convoys heading over the Khyber Pass from Pakistan, NATO asked for and was granted permission to ship military supplies via Russia to the country’s northern border. After crossing the frontier, the supplies will follow the same route that the 40th Army took when they invaded in 1979.