The British and Dutch governments are taking steps to sue Iceland
to claw back the billions of euros they paid to depositors in their countries
after Icelandic banks collapsed in 2008.
The prospect of legal action, likely to take more than a year to resolve in an international court, arose this weekend
after Iceland’s voters rejected a deal for the country to repay Britain and the Netherlands over 30 years starting in 2016.
Iceland voters rejected for a second time a plan to repay $5 billion to Britain and the Netherlands from a bank crash.
The proposed deal at issue in Saturday’s vote set a clear timetable for repaying the Dutch and the British, including interest.
But voters rejected the idea that taxpayers should foot the bill for what they see as bankers’ irresponsibility.
“I know this will probably hurt us internationally, but it is worth taking a stance,”
The Chinese military said last month that while the security situation in Asia and the Pacific was generally stable,
it was becoming “more intricate and volatile,”
with no clear solutions for tension points like the divided Korean Peninsula
and the United States increasing its involvement in regional issues.
The military’s vision was laid out in a national defense white paper, a document published every two years since 1998.
The uneven nature of the European recovery was underlined by data released last month,
which showed prices rising and weak consumption across the euro zone.
For the entire euro area, the European Union’s statistics agency reported that
annual inflation rose to 2.6 percent in March from 2.4 percent in February, according to an initial estimate.
Analysts said higher oil and food prices remained the main factors behind the rise.
But they added that the tightening labor market in countries such as Germany,
Higher oil prices are usually good news for clean energy
because they make costly technologies like solar and wind less daunting to investors.
But for one of the world’s most ambitious clean-energy projects, Desertec,
the instability in North Africa behind the price increases signals a less certain outlook.
Desertec aims to tap the vast solar and wind resources across the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa
and, over coming decades, deliver as much as 15 percent of the electricity needed by the European Union
It was a Saturday night at Tony’s Bar in Nanjing, China, and as in any good university town, packs of rowdy students were making quick work of their pints.
A long-haired guitarist in a black leather jacket crooned Chinese love songs from a small stage.
Young men bent low over tables playing boisterous dice games
while their girlfriends, hair dyed various shades of red and brown,
smoked disinterestedly and texted, their faces illuminated by the glow of their phones.
Vodafone, the British mobile phone giant, said last week that
The world may have no more than half a century of oil left at current rates of consumption,
while surging demand from emerging markets threatens to create “very significant price rises”
before substitutes like biofuels can serve as viable alternatives, the British bank HSBC warns in a report.
“We’re confident that there are around 50 years of oil left,” said Karen Ward, the bank’s senior global economist.
The bank, the world’s second largest in assets, further cautioned that
“While many banks have made changes in line with new global compensation standards and more are expected,
in the long term we expect to see erosion in pay discipline,” Christian Plath, the author of the Moody’s report, said in a statement.
If the industry returns to its freewheeling ways, Moody’s warned that it might consider downgrading bank credit ratings.
Wall Street firms and their European rivals have recently tweaked compensation practices to appease shareholders and regulators.
