Because Economics is Sexy...

A shipment of weapons from North Korea seized by Thai authorities last month was headed for Iran, according to a confidential report the Thai government sent to a UN Security Council committee.
The report to the North Korea sanctions committee was released on Saturday.
Thai authorities seized more than 35 tonnes of arms including rockets, fuses, rocket [...]

The president of Malawi has been chosen to assume the rotating presidency of the African Union, Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader and the body’s outgoing chairman, has said.
Gaddafi told an AU summit in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on Sunday that Bingu wa Mutharika would replace him, ending speculation that the Libyan leader would seek [...]

Haitian police have detained 10 US nationals for trying to bus 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic.
Yves Christallin, the Haitian social affairs minister, said on Sunday that police arrested five men and five women with US passports, along with two Haitians, as they tried to cross the border on Friday night.
“This is [...]

The Pakistani Taliban has dismissed reports on state television suggesting that
Hakimullah Mehsud, the head of the group, had been killed and subsequently buried.
Pakistani televsion said on Sunday that Mehsud died in an attack by a US drone some time in the past two weeks, but the Tehrik-e-Taliban were quick to respond.
“There has been a [...]

SLO (Reuters) – Nations accounting for most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions have restated their promises to fight climate change, meeting a Sunday deadline in a low-key endorsement of December’s “Copenhagen Accord.”
Experts say their promised curbs on greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 are too small so far to meet the accord’s key goal of [...]

Italian magistrates have walked out of courts across the country in protest against changes to the legal system proposed by Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, and the language he has used to describe members of the legal profession.
Gioacchino Natoli, a leader of the National Magistrates Association union, said on Saturday that he had organised the [...]

Nigeria’s main armed group has called off a three-month-old ceasefire in the Niger delta and threatened to unleash “an all-out assault” on Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry.
The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend), responsible for years of attacks on oil facilities, said on Saturday it could no longer trust the government [...]

BEIJING (Reuters) – China threatened to impose sanctions on U.S. arms firms and cut cooperation with Washington unless it cancels a $6.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, in an unprecedented move signaling Beijing’s growing global power.
China on Saturday bitterly denounced the Obama administration’s announcement a day earlier that it planned to sell the package of [...]

KABUL (Reuters) – An interpreter in Afghanistan shot dead two U.S. soldiers, a U.S. military official said on Saturday, adding that the attacker appeared to be a disgruntled employee rather than a militant.
The NATO-led force in Afghanistan said earlier that two U.S. service members and one “U.S. employee” had been killed in an incident in [...]

Toyota says it is recalling up to 1.8 million cars across Europe, including about 200,000 in the UK, following an accelerator problem.
The carmaker says it will recall eight models including the Yaris, the Corolla and the RAV4 sports utility vehicle.
On Thursday, Toyota announced it was recalling 1.1 million more cars in the US, a day [...]