Russia has agreed to mark off 70 percent of the debt that Cambodia owed in the past years. “I would like to inform you that Russia has canceled 70 percent of the debt that the kingdom owed,” said the chairman of the National Assembly’s committee of finance, banking and audition. Cambodia borrowed about US$1.5 billion from Russia through its previous governments.
Month: December 2008
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Carribbean nations urge Obama to end embargo
Carribbean leaders urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to end the American trade embargo on Cuba.
Mr. Obama has pledged to ease restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling to Cuba and sending money there, but has said he wants to maintain the embargo to press for changes in the Communist-run country.
The Laotian government has allowed an independent contracting firm to conduct a feasibility study for a new international airport to replace Vientiane’s Wattay airport as flights into the small Asia nation increase.
“That is why the government is seriously thinking of building a new one in a more suitable location. We studied all the options and concluded that Wattay cannot cater adequately to the long term economic growth of Vientiane,” he was quoted by the Lao news agency (KPL) as saying.
US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill this week is making what may be the final effort of his search for a lasting deal on North Korea’s nuclear program in the latest round of six-party talks in Beijing.No one, including Mr. Hill, predicts success as he attempts to get North Korea to agree in writing to what North Korean diplomats have said they will never do: permit inspectors to take material from the North’s nuclear site at Yongbyon for scrutiny outside the country.
China and Russia have signed a treaty resolving a 40 year territorial dispute along their border. The border between the two is 4,300 km long, and the latest treaty resolves a dispute over the eastern part of the border.
According to Chinese reports, Russia will return all of Yinlong island (known in Russian as Tarabarov) and half of Heixiazi island (Bolshoi Ussuriyasky) to China.
according to the csmonitor:
A global credit meltdown and a slowing domestic economy conspired to ruin the coming-out party for this and other newly built skyscrapers, part of a Chinese real-estate boom that has lost its allure. New homes lack buyers and high-rise offices lack renters, depressing prices and forcing developers in Shanghai and other cities to mothball projects as financing dries up.
Representatives from five regional powers converged in Beijing on Sunday to join the Bush administration’s last efforts to revive a nuclear disarmament deal with North Korea, while the Communist North vowed to ignore Japan at the talks, says the New York Times.
Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, has long maintained that Russia made a colossal error in the 1990s by allowing its enormous reserves of oil, gas and other natural resources to fall into private hands, reports the New York Times.
He has acted uncompromisingly to get them back. Now, the Kremlin seems to be capitalizing on the economic crisis, exploiting the opportunity to establish more control over financially weakened industries that it has long coveted, particularly those in natural resources.
from the guardian
The Khmer Rouge leaders were obsessed with canals, embankments and dams. They presided over hundreds of irrigation projects to revive the country’s glorious but perhaps mythical past of an agrarian wonderland.
The Khmer Rouge built around 70 percent of Cambodia’s more than 800 canal networks according to a survey commissioned by the United Nations in the 1990s.
Now, across this impoverished nation of 14 million people, the canals are being rebuilt by a government hoping to take advantage of the world’s increasing demand for rice.
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Russian navy in Panama Canal
from the AP:
A Russian warship will sail through the Panama Canal this week for the first time since the second world war, a voyage seen as a symbolic projection of power in what has been considered an American zone of influence.
The destroyer Admiral Chabanenko arrives tomorrow at a former US naval base in Panama’s Pacific port of Balboa for a six-day visit, after manoeuvres with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean Sea, said a Russian navy spokesman, Captain Igor Dygalo, by phone.