Below the street, in their dressing rooms, the Housewives breathed through the tension. They had lived their reality on camera and watched the results. They had heard their Housewife colleagues talk about their behavior in on-air interviews. And they had built within themselves a caldron of anger, resentment and oh, yeah?s to what they had seen. So as not to dilute their fury, so as not to […]
By Ingrid Melander | PARIS PARIS Every week, a small group of Marine Le Pen’s aides brainstorm on how to achieve what many say is impossible: change how most French people view her to get her elected president in May. The “Idea-Image” committee of Le Pen’s far-right National Front (FN) consists of about 10 party officials and supporters. It held its first meeting in October as the […]
These investigations hardly change public opinion in Israel. Mr. Sharon was widely supported even while his investigation made daily headlines. Mr. Barak and Mr. Olmert’s popularity suffered for entirely different reasons (Mr. Barak’s failure to hold his governing coalition together; Mr. Olmert’s execution of the 2006 war in Lebanon). Mr. Netanyahu, too, remains reasonably popular: Surveys indicate that if elections were held today, he would get another […]
KUCHING: Sarawak has never before seen a leader who made such a great impact on the state and its people like Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem who died yesterday just two weeks shy of his 73rd birthday. He had succumbed to a heart ailment that left him with having to use a pace-maker to stabilise his heartbeat after hardly three years in office and six months […]
Bjarni Benediktsson, leader of the conservative Independence Party, is Iceland’s new prime minister. (Halldor Kolbeins/Agence France-Presse) The Panama Papers — a huge leak of documents detailing the alleged secret offshore holdings of a global elite — were released in April 2016. The leak made headlines all over the world, but its impact was probably most keenly felt in Iceland. Just two days after the leak appeared, Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson […]
By Christine Kim and Se Young Lee | SEOUL SEOUL A U.S. bribery case against two relatives has cast a pall over former United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon’s planned return this week to South Korea, where he is expected to launch a bid to run for president. Ban, 72, has not declared his candidacy but has had a team of people laying groundwork in Seoul ahead of […]
Jan 11, 2017 10:15 am IST A senior Indian government minister predicted upcoming state elections would be a “complete sweep” for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, which is hoping that a strong mandate will help it push through more policy changes in the second half of Mr. Modi’s term. Piyush Goyal, the power minister and a influential leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party, said he was comfortable using the […]
TOKYO Japan’s government is planning legal steps that would allow Emperor Akihito to abdicate and his son to ascend the throne in two years, media reported on Wednesday, potentially setting the stage for the first abdication in two centuries. Japanese Emperor Akihito, 83, hinted in August that he wanted to abdicate, saying he worried that age might make it difficult for him to carry out his duties […]
PARIS French conservative presidential candidate Francois Fillon said on Tuesday he would meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the coming days to outline his plans for Europe. “The election of Donald Trump and the Berlin tragedy change things in Europe,” Fillon said, referring both to the U.S. election and the Berlin truck attack claimed by Islamic State. “For the United States, our continent will likely not be […]
Submitted by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute, Sharia courts administering Islamic justice in Britain are run by clerics who believe some offenders should have their hands chopped off, according to Muslim scholar Elham Manea. She described the prevailing attitude as “totalitarian” and as more backward than some parts of Pakistan. Teaching children fundamental British values is an act of “cultural supremacism,” according to the National Union […]
PARIS Far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said on Tuesday she would seek to repatriate production of French motor vehicles and other industrial goods – just as President-elect Donald Trump hopes to do in the United States. Trump has threatened to slap tariffs on cars made abroad, saying the practice costs American jobs. He has praised Ford Motor Co’s decision last week to scrap a plan […]
Reykjavik (AFP) – The Panama Papers came back to haunt Iceland’s right-wing parties Monday as they prepare to form a new government, after the candidate for prime minister admitted hiding a report on offshore accounts. Iceland was rocked in April when the Panama Papers revealed a global tax evasion scandal that ensnared several senior politicians and triggered the resignation of former prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, with […]
DAKAR Gambia’s communication minister, Sheriff Bojang, said on Monday he had left his post in the first high-profile Cabinet defection since President Yahya Jammeh refused to accept losing a December election. Opposition leader Adama Barrow won the polls by a thin margin, sparking nationwide celebrations in the riverine nation wedged within its larger and freer neighbour, Senegal. But after initially conceding defeat, Jammeh changed his mind a […]
Most Popular 1 Donald Trump Is Not Too Big to Fail 2 Courageous House Progressives Raise ‘Justice and Fairness’ Objections to Certifying Trump 3 Sherrod Brown Is the First Senator to Say ‘No’ to Jeff Sessions 4 This Monday, Join Protests Across the Country to Block Trump’s Climate-Denying Cabinet Picks 5 Why Workers Everywhere Should Be Scared by Kentucky’s Assault on Unions A Fascist Original Having said […]
A round-up of major happenings in Pakistan in the last week. Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Credit: PTI Panama Papers investigation After weeks of acrimony, the first day in office for new Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar was an unusually harmonious one, with all parties hailing the constitution of a new bench for the Panama Papers hearings that will resume on January 4. Nisar excluded himself from […]
By Richard Balmforth | PARIS PARIS France’s far-right leader fired broadsides at the European Union and the euro currency on Friday, marking out Europe as a major plank in her programme as the battle lines took shape in the campaign for the presidential election in spring. Marine Le Pen, head of the anti-EU, anti-immigrant National Front (FN) and seen by pollsters as highly likely to make a […]
India is headed for a long and critical election season that will span five states, just as many weeks and 160 million voters. The polls will be seen as a test of whether the appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi–who won a landslide election in 2014–endures after his move to remove 86% of bank notes from circulation led to a severe cash shortage. The first ballot will […]
BANGKOK Thai Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan said on Wednesday a general election will be held this year after doubts were raised by a member of the national legislative assembly. Thailand’s next polls will restore civilian rule following a 2014 coup, and will be the first under a new constitution, approved in a referendum last year, that critics say will ensure military oversight of elected governments. “We […]
|By Matein Khalid|“Few individuals alter the course of history. Fewer still change the map of the world. Hardly anyone creates a nation state. Mohammed Ali Jinnah did all three”. Dr. Stanley Wolpert’s words still give me goose pimples two decades after I first read his book. Mr. Jinnah founded Pakistan and was also my ancestral kinsman. I too was born in Karachi, the city by the sea, […]
But Trump has also ventured beyond mere name-calling, turning the 2016 election into a competition between knowledge systems: the tell-it-like-it-is “people” versus the know-it-all “elites.” His campaign insisted for months that pollsters and technocrats and media would be proven wrong by his electoral success. The fact that he did win dealt a blow to an entire worldview, one in which empirical inquiry and truth-telling were supposed to […]
Marine Le Pen will borrow €6m from a company owned by her father to fund her campaign for the French presidency this year, after the leader of the far-right National Front failed to secure financing from traditional banks. Florian Philippot, the deputy head of the party, told Europe 1 radio on Sunday that the money would come from a group called Cotelec, which is owned by Jean-Marie […]
Welcomes naming of new SC bench KARACHI: Chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Imran Khan has welcomed the constitution of a new bench by the Supreme Court of Pakistan to resume the hearing in the case of Panama Papers, saying that he would accept the decision by the new bench. Speaking at a press conference here at the Insaf House on Saturday, the PTI chief appealed to the […]
It has been a bad year for numbers. At the start of 2016, Howard Wainer, a much revered Princeton-educated statistician, eulogised that “prediction models combined with exit polls let us go to sleep early with little doubt about election outcomes”. By the end of a year in which data — in the shape of facts, polls and forecasts — struggled to deal with an uncertain world, Mr […]
Globalization, the path that the world economy has largely followed for decades, took some hefty blows in 2016. The election of Donald Trump as U.S. president and Britain’s decision to leave the European Union have raised questions over the future of tariff-free trade and companies’ freedom to move production to lower-cost countries. Borders are back in vogue. Economic nationalism is paying political dividends. “We […]
