China has often tried to use high-profile purchases of overseas goods as a diplomatic tactic to overcome political opposition, especially in its dealings with the US. Chinese companies had already signed contracts totalling US$15 billion during wen Jiabao’s trip to Europe. China hopes initiatives of this kind will help shift attention away from questions about the level of its currency, which some governments believe to be undervalued.
in a nytimes report:
A protester threw an athletic shoe at the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, during his speech at Cambridge University’s concert hall, seven weeks after a similar incident involving President Bush in Iraq.
The shoe missed Mr. Wen by at least 30 feet, but security officials promptly escorted the protester from the hall. The police arrested the man on suspicion of a public order offense. Witnesses described him as a goateed European in his 20s or 30s speaking foreign-accented English.
They said he blew a whistle as Mr. Wen spoke, causing him to pause and look up. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” the man said, according to witnesses. “How can you listen to the lies he’s telling?” he shouted, in a video of the incident shown on Sky News television.
The Kazakhstani government announced that it would take controlling stakes in two private banks as a condition of keeping them from a possible bankruptcy filing.Banks in Kazakhstan had borrowed excessively from international lenders when terms were easy, and now those lines of credit have dried up in Kazakhstan quicker than elsewhere because of of the riskier investment environment in the country, reports the nytimes.
North Korea appears to be preparing to test-launch an intercontinental missile amid growing tensions on the peninsula, a South Korean intelligence source was quoted as saying.
All over the world, Chinese companies are sending home fewer of the billions of dollars they earn from exports, parking them in overseas bank and brokerage accounts instead reports the New York Times. And in Hong Kong, wealthy mainlanders are turning up at jewelry stores in growing numbers seeking diamonds, big ones.
Total outflows in the fourth quarter were as much as $240 billion, but this is using the broadest possible definition and includes everything from capital flight to a slowdown in repatriation of overseas profits by Chinese companies. There is no good data assessing the motives of those moving money out of China.
Most troubling for China would be if a sizable portion of these disparate streams represented capital flight — people taking their money out because they worry about the stability of the country.
The Cambodian government, critics say, is trying to limit the scope of the trials for its own political reasons, a limit that the critics say would compromise justice and could discredit the entire process.
A Cambodian prosecutor said additional indictments could be destabilizing. She said they would cost too much, take too long and violate the spirit of the tribunal, which she said envisioned “only a small number of trials.”
The Cambodian Prime Minister who bargained hard with the United Nations over the shape and scope of the tribunal, has said that trying “four or five people” would be enough, although there is no formal limit on the number.
“First, all the agreed points concerning the issue of putting an end to the political and military confrontation between the DPRK and the ROK will be nullified,” said a statement issued by the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, the Pyongyang organization in charge of ties with Seoul.
“Second, the Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, Cooperation and Exchange between the DPRK and the ROK and the points on the military boundary line in the West Sea stipulated in its appendix will be nullified.”
“There is neither a way to improve (relations) nor hope to bring them back on track,” DPRK’s KCNA news agency. “The confrontation between the DPRK and the ROK in the political and military fields has been put to such extremes that the inter-Korean relations have reached the brink of a war.”quoted the committee as having said.
The Lao government has planned to build a new airport and a Mekong River bridge in Khong district, Champassack province, local media reported.