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DETROIT, United States (AFP) - General Motors on Wednesday posted a five percent drop in global sales in the second quarter as a sharp drop in its home market offset strong gains overseas. GM's sales slipped to 2.29 million vehicles in the April through June period after North American sales fell 20 percent to 963,929, while sales outside the region grew by 10 percent to 1,322,765. < > Sales in the Asia-Pacific region grew 15 percent to 386,980 vehicles, GM said. Sales in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East rose 18 percent to 346,085 vehicles, powered by Chevrolet, which...

Commodity Online ABUDHABI : It seems that oil rich Middle East nations finally began to face the realities of core issues such as food shortages that continued to affect common man around the world. Faced with a scarcity of fertile land, water shortages and surging world food prices, wealthy Arab states in the Gulf are seeking to secure their food supplies by investing in agriculture abroad. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the top food importers among Arab countries in the Gulf, are now looking to Asia and Africa as opportunities for agricultural investments. UAE, which imports around 85...

(Reactions outside U.S. having an impact back home) If the clamor over Democrat Barack Obama's foreign trip illustrates anything beyond his sheer celebrity abroad, it is the degree to which this American election is being "internationalized." It's not simply that interest in the race outside the United States is off the charts. Or that both presumptive nominees, Obama and Republican John McCain, have interrupted their campaigning this year to boost their leadership credentials overseas. It's also the intense and unpredictable interplay between politics here and abroad - how the contest is shaping political debate in other countries, how the candidates...

Piracy is a bad thing. But sometimes companies can turn it to their advantage “MERCHANT and pirate were for a long period one and the same person,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. “Even today mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.” Companies, of course, would strongly disagree with this suggestion. Piracy is generally bad for business. It can undermine sales of legitimate products, deprive a company of its valuable intellectual property and tarnish its brand. Commercial piracy may not be as horrific as the seaborne version off the Horn of Africa (see article). But stealing other people’s R&D,...

There is a crisis that no one is talking about. It’s not the energy dependence crisis, the spending crisis in our federal government, the imaginary-though-fragile economic crisis nor the mainstream media’s it’s-not-a-crisis-but-we-are-going-to-make-it-look-like-one banking crisis. America is being sold off to foreigners at a discount. That’s a crisis. The latest incident of this dismantling of America was the hostile takeover of Anheuser-Busch (AB) by the Belgium beer company InBev. Most corporate merger observers saw this as just another premium payday for the stockholders of AB. But my memory of what used to be The Pillsbury Company caused me to see this...

On June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in his own right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterly offensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known as the Dark Continent. 'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote Galton. 'I should expect that...

may not be surprising that, as befits any mad dictator, President Mugabe is now the proud owner of a palatial £4.5 million mansion in Harare and a similarly lavish country hideaway, each fitted with the latest electronic security systems, including anti-aircraft missiles. But why should all this have been provided for him by the People's Republic of China? The explanation lies in a deal struck in 2005 whereby Mr Mugabe handed over to China his country's mineral rights, including the world's second largest reserves of platinum, worth £250 billion.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Reminiscent of the West's imperial push in the 18th and 19th centuries - but on a much more dramatic, determined scale - China's rulers believe Africa can become a 'satellite' state, solving its own problems of over-population and shortage of natural resources at a stroke. With little fanfare, a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade. More are on the way. The strategy has been carefully devised by officials in Beijing, where one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa to solve the problems of over-population and...

New Delhi – Anecdotal reports by health-care workers in Africa and Southeast Asia reveal a worrying new trend: Drugs successfully used for years to combat malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV are failing more and more often. Misdiagnosis of disease, coupled with the (related) misuse and overuse of drugs, likely plays a role, especially in resource-constrained countries where scientific diagnostic tests are unavailable or too expensive to be practical. But many doctors suspect another culprit: counterfeit drugs. Nothing is more dangerous for a poor patient with a potentially fatal disease than taking drugs that do not work. Not only can faulty drugs...

China's breathtaking transformation of their own country over the past couple of decades is accompanied by robust new Chinese enterprises all over the world. In this report on China's activities in Africa, the Chinese are seen to be involved in infrastructure projects across this vast continent. Everything about Africa is writ large - during the past twenty years, as China's economy exploded, Africa's population doubled. There are now over 900 million people living in Africa, and collectively the Africans have lower per capita wealth than the peoples of any other continent. But the potential in this vast land mass of...

The entire world may not have sat up and taken notice in the last week, and that is probably just fine with China, which has just made a major move into central Africa. With its agreement to lend $5 billion to Congo, what might have often looked like a grab-bag approach to the African continent by a country with only sporadic involvement there has finally taken on a distinct outline. .............................................. It must be said that China has chosen a daunting proving ground for its long-held ideas about engagement with the developing world, which could be summed up as "it's...

BEIJING, May 14 -- China announced Monday that it had launched a Chinese-manufactured communications satellite into orbit on behalf of Nigeria, marking the first time China has built a commercial satellite and put it into orbit on contract for another country. The launch, in Monday's pre-dawn hours from the Xichang space center in southwestern Sichuan province, was viewed as another sign of China's increasing prowess in space and its determination to be among the world's great powers seeking to utilize the reaches of outer space for benefits on Earth. The country's space agency, which is managed by the military, sent...

HONG KONG - China Development Bank may be turning its attention from taking a piece of troubled Citigroup to investing in Nigeria, seizing an opportunity to channel its monumental resources toward the oil-rich West African country. China Development Bank is one of the three policy banks created by Beijing, placed under direct jurisdiction of China’s State Council and charged with funding major infrastructure projects. It is in talks to buy a $5 billion stake in Nigeria's United Bank for Africa, the biggest financial institution in West Africa by asset value. The Chinese lender is bargaining for some management control of...

FROM MATHIAS OKWE, ABUJA REPRIEVE may not be long in coming to the nation's pitiable infrastructure as China has promised to help out with about $50b (six trillion naira). The fund according to the Finance Minister, Dr. Shamsudeen Usman is to help rehabilitate the nation's contemptibly poor infrastructure. Already, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been signed between the Africa Finance Company (AFC) on the one hand; and the Managing Directors of Zenith Bank, Oceanic Bank and First Bank on the other on behalf of other Nigerian financial institutions with the Chinese Export Credit Guarantee Agency called SINOSURE for the...

By Lesley Wroughton WASHINGTON, July 10 (Reuters) - China is ramping up financing for power and transport projects in Africa, with the majority in four countries endowed with natural resources, according to a report by the World Bank on Thursday. The report, which looks at the growing role of the Chinese government as a financier of infrastructure projects in Africa, estimates China's funding for roads, railways and power projects peaked at $7 billion in 2006 from just $1 billion a year between 2001-03. The bulk of those commitments were to Nigeria, Angola, Sudan and Ethiopia and is welcome in a...

Ahead of the summer Olympics, Apple on Saturday will open the doors to its first retail store in China, a glass-enclosed high-profile shop situated in Beijing's newest retail development: the Village at Sanlitun. Keeping with his tradition of attending Apple's gala international retail launches, our friend Gary Allen from ifoAppleStore has made the grueling journey across the Pacific to be on hand for tomorrow's grand opening at 10:00 a.m. Allen reports that Apple's space within the Sanlitun complex "is nearly invisible from the street," because it sits within the center's inner courtyard. "But once you see it, it’s impressive --...

The price of European emission permits is rising so rapidly that German companies are threatening to leave the country.... And the environment may, in the end, be no better off. They sat silently through two lectures, but then they couldn't control their anger any longer. The civil servants from the Environment Ministry, the Environment Agency and the German Emissions Trading Authority made it sound easy for industry to take up carbon trading. It was just too much for the managers to tolerate. "If that's the shape the trading will take, we will simply move our cement operation to Ukraine," a...

Abdurrahman Ahmed, spokesperson from Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation, says that ETC has signed a contract worth about US$2.4 billion with three Chinese companies to help upgrade and expand the African nation's telecom services. Eight companies, including Siemens, Nokia, Alcatel and Ericsson, participated in the bidding, but ultimately three Chinese companies, ZTE, Huawei and China International Telecommunication Construction Corporation, won the deal. According to their contract, these three will help ETC extend its fiber cable from current 4000 kilometers to 10000 kilometers before 2010. Among other strategic plans, according to Abdurrahman, are increasing the number of mobile subscribers from 1.5 million to...

On June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in his own right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterly offensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known as the Dark Continent. 'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote Galton. 'I should expect that...

China's gross domestic product (GDP) grew 10.4 percent to 13.06 trillion yuan (1.9 trillion U.S. dollars) in the first half over the same period last year, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Thursday. The growth rate was 1.8 percentage points lower than the first half last year, or 0.2 percentage points lower than the first quarter of this year. The GDP included 1.18 trillion yuan generated by the primary sector, up 3.5 percent, 6.74 trillion yuan by the secondary sector, up 11.3 percent, and 5.14 trillion yuan by the tertiary sector, up10.5 percent. The growth rates were 0.5...

Excerpt - Acting on a claim by Mexico’s government that the U.S. government has not done enough to assure the treaty rights of Mexican nationals facing execution for murders in the U.S., the World Court on Wednesday ordered the U.S. — by a 7-5 vote — to stop five imminent executions in Texas. Leaving it up to the U.S. to choose the way to carry out the order, the international tribunal — formally, the International Court of Justice that sits in The Hague, Netherlands — told the U.S. only to “take all measures necessary to ensure” that Texas does not...

China's devastating pollution problems aren't just taking a toll on China -- they're also affecting the rest of the world, says New Republic. For example: Acid rain partly caused by Chinese sulfur emissions, pours down on Japan and South Korea. On some days, one-third of California's background air pollution -- consisting of dust, sulfur and trace metals -- can be traced back to China. Some 80 percent of the East China Sea, one of the world's largest fisheries, has become toxic, due to sewage dumps from the mainland. Even if the Chinese government does spruce up Beijing in time for...

Fears surrounding the global financial sector and a U.S.-led economic downturn continued to set the tone in foreign-exchange markets Wednesday, leaving the dollar under pressure but above recent lows against major counterparts. The euro is slightly higher against the dollar, changing hands at $1.5928 a gain of 0.1%. The euro notched another all-time high against the greenback Tuesday near $1.6036 then trimmed gains. The dollar is down 0.8% against a broadly stronger Japanese yen at 103.84 yen and is off 0.4% against the Swiss currency to 1.0044 francs. The dollar's decline was slowed by a sharp fall in crude oil...

Merrill Lynch has warned that the United States could face a foreign "financing crisis" within months as the full consequences of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage debacle spread through the world. The country depends on Asian, Russian and Middle Eastern investors to fund much of its $700bn (£350bn) current account deficit, leaving it far more vulnerable to a collapse of confidence than Japan in the early 1990s after the Nikkei bubble burst. Britain and other Anglo-Saxon deficit states could face a similar retreat by foreign investors. "Japan was able to cut its interest rates to zero," said Alex...

Trade Facilitation by: Ben Giles, July 15, 2008 The Cato Institute’s Daniel Ikenson and World Bank’s Simeon Djankov presented the findings of a new Cato trade policy analysis at the Rayburn House Office Building on July 11. Ikenson’s paper, entitled Protection without Protectionism: Reconciling Trade and Homeland Security, highlights the disconnect between Americans’ perception of the economy and the realities of international trade. “The polls tell us that Americans have soured on trade…” said Ikenson. “It’s because Americans are barraged nightly by reports on the news that they’re losing their jobs and that the economy is imperiled by globalization and...

Chattanooga Chosen For $1 Billion Volkswagen Plant Plant At Enterprise South To Have 2,000 Jobs posted July 15, 2008 Volkswagen AG has chosen Chattanooga for its new $1 billion U.S. plant, the European carmaker announced today.

While the U.S. oil industry want access to more federal lands to help reduce reliance on foreign suppliers, American-based companies are shipping record amounts of gasoline and diesel fuel to other countries. A record 1.6 million barrels a day in U.S. refined petroleum products were exported during the first four months of this year, up 33 percent from 1.2 million barrels a day over the same period in 2007.

Anheuser-Busch's board has accepted a $52 million takeover offer from Belgian brewer InBev, creating the world's largest brewer, the two companies announced late Sunday evening. The company will be called Anheuser-Busch InBev, and InBev CEO Carlos Brito will be the CEO of the combined company. "Together, Anheuser-Busch and InBev will accomplish much more than each can on its own," Brito told reporters in a conference call Monday morning. The announcement ends a month of hostility between the brewer of Budweiser and InBev, which traded lawsuits when InBev tried to oust A-B's board. "We always tried to engage with the Anheuser-Busch...

FARNBOROUGH (Reuters) - Boeing Co (BA.N) struck first in its biennial battle with archrival Airbus by securing an order for 50 single-aisle 737 airliners as the world's biggest air show opened on Monday in Farnborough near London. The deal from upstart FlyDubai is worth $4 billion including an additional four aircraft to be sourced from lessor Babcock & Brown (BNB.AX). < > In a reminder of tensions overshadowing this year's event, a business jet in Israeli Air Force colors maneuvered onto the tarmac on Sunday packed with eavesdropping equipment in long, bulbous side panels. The converted Gulfstream jet is only...

Bridgewater Associates has issued an apocalyptic warning to clients that bank losses from the worldwide credit crisis may reach $1,600bn (£800bn), four times official estimates and enough to pose a grave risk to the financial system. The giant US hedge fund said that it doubted whether lenders would be able to shoulder the full losses, disguised until now by "mark-to-model" methods of valuing structured credit. "We are facing an avalanche of bad assets. We have big doubts as to whether financial institutions will be able to obtain enough new capital to cover their losses. The credit crisis is going to...

Anheuser-Busch's (BUD) stock closed up over $5 at $66.50 on Friday and is trading at $67.00 after-hours. This price suggests the market is nearly certain that InBev will buy BUD at the rumored $70/share, and it may even incorporate the expectation of an additional price increase: given the political scrutiny this deal will receive, a 5% gap between the trading price and deal price is small. In other news, InBev's potential purchase of BUD is reverberating through St. Louis and the country...and folks aren't happy about it: Jordan Moore took the news that his beloved Budweiser could soon fall into...

Nielsen gets tax breaks to hire local workers, then outsources some jobs Nielsen Co., the media company known for audience measurement, has given up tens of thousands of dollars in local tax breaks this year after signing an outsourcing deal with an India-based offshore provider. The move, which has drawn negative reviews from local officials, came after the company announced it would lay off 117 workers at its global technology center Oldsmar, Fla. Although companies that hire outsourcing firms often try to limit the release of information about layoffs through employee nondisclosure agreements tied to severance and public statements, Nielsen...

Economy: Barack Obama is making hay out of McCain adviser Phil Gramm's unpolitic claim that "we've sort of become a nation of whiners." But Gramm is right that America's economic stature is underappreciated.Gramm, a former senator from Texas, is a Democrat-turned-Republican who was a pivotal figure in making Ronald Reagan's economic policies a reality. The Gramm-Rudman automatic budget-cutting mechanism worked beautifully in the 1980s until Congress dismantled it. When Gramm gave a videotaped Q&A to the Washington Times last week, his sophisticated insights on America's economic role in the world were just what you would expect. Unfortunately, Gramm, for the...

Federal prosecutors are investigating Indian generic drugmaker Ranbaxy for allegedly falsifying records that resulted in the production and sale of generic medicines that did not meet federal standards. The government alleges officials at Ranbaxy's northern India plant used raw pharmaceutical chemicals from unapproved sources, fabricated in-house test data to meet FDA standards and attempted to conceal the ruse. The "pattern of systemic fradulent conduct," left an untold portion of the tablets and capsules too weak, too potent or lacking the advertised shelf life, said government papers filed in US District Court, Maryland.

Former Syrian Minister: We Have Forfeited the Wisdom of the Desert Nomads – But Have Failed to Adopt Modern Western Ways In an article in the Syrian government daily Teshreen, [1] former Syrian information minister Dr. Mahdi Dakhlallah pondered the fact that the "small" Gulf states had developed and modernized, while the countries that had been in the forefront of the Arab world in the 1960s, such as Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, had stayed behind.The following are excerpts from the article: "In the early 60s, if a person took a taxi in Kuwait or in one of the tiny...

NEW YORK – An Abu Dhabi investment fund has bought a 75 percent stake in the Chrysler Building, one of the best-known landmarks on the city skyline. The Abu Dhabi Investment Council, one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, closed the sale with Prudential Financial Inc. on Tuesday, Prudential spokeswoman Theresa Miller said Wednesday. Miller wouldn't disclose the sale price, which many published reports placed at $800 million. Prudential held its stake in the building on behalf of a fund of primarily German investors that had closed in the past couple of years, she said. A telephone message left...

China's economy will overtake that of the United States by 2035 and be twice its size by midcentury, a study released Tuesday by a US research organization concluded. The report by economist Albert Keidel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said China's rapid growth is driven by domestic demand more than exports, and will sustain high single-digit growth rates well into the 21st century. "China's economic performance clearly is no flash in the pan," Keidel writes. "Its growth this decade has averaged more than 10 percent a year and is still going strong in the first half of 2008....

Borderline Insecurity by: Melinda Zosh, July 08, 2008 Mark Krikorian, author of The New Case Against Immigration argues that today’s society is vastly different, and low-skilled immigrants actually harm America. “[Today’s] immigrants aren’t that different from the past but we’ve changed,” said Krikorian. “High levels of immigration on incompatible with the goals of modern society.” And one of the goals of modern society, Krikorian argued, is the creation of even wages and a fair labor market. Immigration actually threatens the jobs of teens and blacks. “Certain groups of American workers most directly in competition [with immigrants] are in fact seeing...

Another National Security Threat by: Melinda Zosh, July 08, 2008 With the Olympics quickly approaching, the world’s eyes are on China and its rising power as a world influence. Experts at the Heritage Foundation recently said that China now has the third largest economy in the world; it is the second largest after the U.S. In addition, 2003 marked the first year China’s GDP reached over one trillion dollars; it hit 1.4 trillion dollars, to be exact. China is a top steel, aluminum and fine copper producer. It has the world’s second largest auto market. But even more importantly, China...

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Tuesday the U.S. central bank may keep an emergency lending facility for big Wall Street firms open past year-end while it seeks to restore financial market stability. In remarks to a mortgage lending forum sponsored by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bernanke said credit costs have been driven higher and the pace of U.S. economic growth also has been hurt by market turmoil. "We are currently monitoring developments in financial markets closely and considering several options, including extending the duration of our facilities for primary dealers beyond year-end, should the current unusual and...

The great oil shock of 2008 is bad enough for us. It poses a mortal threat to the whole economic strategy of emerging Asia. The manufacturing revolution of China and her satellites has been built on cheap transport over the past decade. At a stroke, the trade model looks obsolete.

China's top offshore oil firm is diving into the global oilfield-services industry by launching a $2.5 billion friendly takeover of a Norwegian rival. The deal is bold move by China to capture a larger share of the profits from a global boom in new exploration as oil prices soar. China's double-digit growth and the voracious appetite for natural resources to fuel its future expansion are key factors pushing oil prices higher and driving much of the demand to tap new reserves. The tender offer by the oil-services arm of China National Offshore Oil Corp., known as Cnooc, for Norway's Awilco...

After two years of hunting the oilsands for acquisitions, India plans to pull the trigger on a multibillion-dollar deal this year, government officials told the World Petroleum Congress on Thursday. "Indeed, we are going to get more actively engaged in the Canadian tar sands in the next six months, we are looking at opportunities," said M. S. Srinivasan, India's Petroleum Secretary. He said India would prefer to acquire assets over producing companies on a magnitude of at least $2 billion to $2.5 billion. "Size does matter," he continued. "We would like to be going for an economically viable size; too...

A senior Ministry of Agriculture official on Thursday dismissed foreign media reports about China hoarding overseas farmland, saying the country is fully capable of ensuring its own food security. "Such reports are groundless and not factual we have not hoarded any farmland overseas and have taken no steps to introduce any such policy," Li Zhengdong, director of the ministry's international cooperation department, told a press conference held by the Foreign Ministry on the agenda of President Hu Jintao's visit to the outreach session of the G8 summit in Japan next week. Li was responding to a report in the Financial Times on...

"We know that reunification with China is inevitable," a Taiwanese friend told me recently. "The economy in Taiwan is not so good and many of our jobs are being transferred to China," he explained. "Taiwan will have to cooperate with the mainland in order to maintain a healthy economy." My friend told me these things with little conviction in his voice. While the Chinese government has consistently claimed that most Taiwanese people are in favor of reunification with the mainland, my friend, like many others I have talked to around the world, has stated that the vast majority of Taiwanese...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush reiterated on Wednesday that his administration believed in a strong dollar, and said the currency would reflect the relative strength of the economy. "We're strong dollar people in this administration, and have always been for a strong dollar, and believe that the relative strengths of our economy will reflect that," Bush told reporters at a news conference ahead of his trip to Japan for a meeting of the Group of Eight rich nations. Inflation is expected to be high on the G8 agenda next week. Some countries have blamed the weak dollar...

China's premier urges US to stabilise dollar AFP - Tuesday, July 1 BEIJING (AFP) - - Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has again called on the United States to stabilise the dollar, warning the greenback's decline was posing threats to the global economy. "China is taking measures to safeguard its stable economic development," Wen said during a meeting with visiting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday, according to a statement posted on the foreign ministry's website. "(We) hope the US will overcome its subprime crisis soon and stabilise the exchange rate of the US dollar, which is significant to...

Considering the many jubilant boasts by "flat world" devotees in recent years, you might have been tempted to regard economic globalization as a juggernaut, powered by inexorable forces of technology and history. Big mistake. There's no preordained direction for the world economy--only an undetermined future that will take the shape of whatever ideas and policies we choose to uphold. The lack of an intellectual defense of capitalism has left free markets vulnerable. "The power of the state is reasserting itself," said Daniel Yergin, co-author of The Commanding Heights and a free-market optimist , in The Wall Street Journal recently. In...

There are fewer than a million people in the tiny Gulf state of Qatar and fewer than 200,000 of them are ethnic Qataris. Yet this week a state fund that invests on behalf of the Qatari people and a private fund owned by the country's prime minister and his family agreed to buy nearly 8pc of Barclays, a bank with a market cap of almost £20bn. And for the state fund, a billion or so on Barclays is small change. The Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) already has $60bn (£29bn) of assets and expects to spend billions of pounds more overseas...

Izhak David Nakar served in the Israel Air Force and developed the intelligence system for the Israeli Defense Force. Ido Schechter is a captain in the Israeli Air Force. They are both behind PDRM’s computerisation program. THE CORRIDORS OF POWER Malaysia Today The Royal Malaysian Police (PDRM) is in the process of computerising its operations so that it is better-equipped to solve and reduce serious crimes such as Bloggers slandering the Deputy Prime Minister’s wife and whatnot. The computerisation program entails various phases as the two-page chart below shows. Three companies have been short-listed to undertake this work -- Master...