Peak of Erudition

Burma’s detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is suffering from low blood pressure and dehydration and is barely eating, her party spokesman says. The party men are extremely worried about the 63-year-old Nobel Laureate’s health.

A medical assistant has placed Ms Suu Kyi on an intravenous drip. Her own doctor was reportedly detained after visiting her earlier this week.

Ms Suu Kyi She has been under almost permanent house arrest since 1990.

It followed the victory of her National League for Democracy (NLD) in a general election in 1990. The junta has refused to allow the party to assume power.

Ms Suu Kyi’s latest period of detention is due to expire at the end of May but the authorities have not yet said if it will be extended.

Mexican officials lashed out against the China’s decision to quarantine more than 70 Mexicans over swine flu fears. Mexico sent a plane on Monday to the communist country to bring its citizens back home. China sent its own plane to retrieve Chinese nationals stranded in Mexico.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon complained of a backlash against Mexicans abroad, and sent the chartered plane on Monday morning to fly to several cities and pick up Mexicans who wanted to leave China. In one case, the Mexican ambassador said, a family with three small children were rousted from their hotel before dawn and taken to a hospital.

“I think it’s unfair that because we have been honest and transparent with the world some countries and places are taking repressive and discriminatory measures because of ignorance and disinformation,” Calderon said.

China’s Foreign Ministry denied Mexicans were singled out.

The Democratic majority proved that the budget gets passed. On Wednesday the senate voted to approve the $3.4 trillion fiscal 2010 budget compromise, which wrapped up a big political victory for President Barack Obama. It was incidentally his 100th day in office.

With no Republican support, the Senate voted 53-43 for the budget which sets parameters for spending and tax legislation for the upcoming fiscal year that begins October 1. The House of Representatives earlier on Wednesday approved the budget also on a party-line vote.

This is a question I am sure even the Pakistan government would like to know the answer for. There is complete breakdown of democracy and absolute breakdown of security for the comman man. There are suicide bomb attacks. There are killings of innocent women. There are punishments given to women completely devoid of any legal proceeding.

Pakistan is becoming the fortress of Taliban forces slowly but very very surely.

We need to arrest this. Otherwise, it will not only hurt India but the entire world.

The taliban is becoming a threat to pakistan now. The country is very clearly in the grip of the Taliban forces. Pakistan is witnessing one bomb blast or the other every week. It has become a regular happening. Flogging a girl just because she was seen talking to a boy is the height of religious fundamentalism. Now, it is not just Pakistan which is getting affected. This is going to affect the entire world. These militant groups should eradicated from the face of the earth.

By Friday, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford should decide one way or the other : to take it or to leave it. He must decide whether the $700 million of federal stimulus money is after all a good thing for his state or not. He may consider is as wasteful but his constituents don’t think so, given the fact that South Carolina has the second-highest unemployment rate in the country at 11%.

South Carolina’s unemployment rate was at 11% in February. This was second only to Michigan.

Mr. Sanford, however, can deny the $700 million and has the right authority to do so. This is since it is classified as fiscal stabilization funds. Under the stimulus law, a state legislature can’t apply for those funds on its own, according to the White House’s budget office.

President Obama’s review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan revealed widespread failures in development aid programs, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said before a United Nations conference today in The Hague.

There’s been “very little credibility for what’s already been invested,” Clinton told reporters yesterday en route to the Netherlands. “A lot of these aid programs don’t work.” The new U.S. approach involves “looking at every single dollar as to how it’s spent, and where it’s going, and trying to track the outcome,” she said.

The one-day summit on Afghanistan will be an opportunity to share those findings with 72 other nations and more than a dozen international organizations, and discuss how each can contribute more effectively to development and anti-terrorism efforts, Clinton said.

Obama wants to push back against the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan that threatens to undermine efforts to create a stabile government able to secure its territory and improve the economy and living standards.

It is expected that North Korea may launch a rocket over the Pacific Ocean by the end of the week. Anticipating this, Anticipating this, two U.S. Navy destroyers, including one that is capable of intercepting missiles, were moved out of a South Korean port Monday. This, although U.S. officials have said there is no plan to strike the North Korean rocket, is as clear a signal on thwarting any move by North Korea as it could be.

While the Obama administration hopes to restart talks with North Korea to convince them on abandoning its nuclear weapons program, North Korea is seemingly launching a missile launcher into space.

North Korea insists that the launch is intended only to put a civilian satellite into space. But U.S. officials say Pyongyang’s real goal is to test intercontinental ballistic missile technology that could someday be used to carry a warhead and possibly reach the U.S. coastline.

The Arab leaders have been urged to reject an international arrest warrant against the President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan who has been issued the warrant for the war crimes in Darfur.

According to the Arab nations, the warrant was completely non warranted.

The warrant was “another stage on the road to dividing Sudan”, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad said. He was speaking at the Arab League’s annual summit on heads of state in Qatar. This was attended by Mr Bashir as well.

The summit is also expected to discuss Iran’s influence in the Middle East, and Israel’s new government. A number of countries are concerned about Iran’s influence in the region, particularly its support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and for Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

A number of these countires have expressed utter dismay at the international warrant against Mr.Bashir.

The treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has come up with his second grand proposal. The first was his “toxic assets proposal” which has taken the wall street by storm and brought some life into the market. The second proposal is to overhaul regulation of the whole of the financial sector.
Investors don’t seem to worry about this huge government control. Instead, the stocks cheered this and rose.
But the plan has not offered much of the specific points in the areas it addressed. Be it tougher regulation of the derivatives or be it about the new rules for money-market funds.
“It’s like with all these programs—the devil’s in the details,” said Kevyn Orr, a Jones Day attorney
“Who’s going to stand up and say, ‘I don’t like baseball, mom, and apple pie’?” Orr said. “But you go to Boston and New York, there’s a whole lot of differences between Yankees and Sox.”