After months of political wrangling over the appointment to the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker and his team officially replaced his predecessor, Jose Manuel Barroso, and his Commission on Saturday. The first vice president, former Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, is to serve as Juncker's right-hand man.
Argentina and Brazil were elected by the United Nations General Assembly as members of the UN Economic and Social Council, ESOCOC for a period of three years beginning next January first. Argentina received 182 out of 186 votes.
A majority of Scots would back independence if another referendum were held this Sunday, according to a public opinion poll, just six weeks after Scotland voted against leaving the United Kingdom.
United Kingdom Foreign Office Minister Hugo Swire has become the first UK Minister to visit Cuba in almost ten years. His three-day time in the country included meetings with senior government figures and others to discuss bilateral relations including trade and investment. He will also raise UK concerns about the human rights situation.
The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) has again failed to agree to protect key areas in the Ross Sea and East Antarctica at its annual meeting in Hobart due to blocking by China and Russia. The partners of the Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA) said that this failure to reach consensus for the fourth time calls into question CCAMLR’s ability to deliver on its conservation commitments.
The BBC has refused to apologize to Argentina over a Top Gear special filmed in the country. The show's stars and crew had to abandon filming last month amid angry protests over a car number-plate that appeared to refer to the Falkland Islands War.
In a harsh letter, released on Friday, Argentine President Cristina Fernandez urged US President Barack Obama to explain whether ”Nancy Soderberg, the person you have appointed as Chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), which reports directly to the Government of the United States of America, is also the Co-Chair of the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), an entity specifically created to attack and slander the Argentine Republic and its President.”
The central banks of Argentina and China on Thursday activated a bilateral currency-swap agreement, which meant that the Argentine central bank received an initial tranche of Yuan equivalent to 814 million dollars.
South Korea's Hyundai Heavy Industries Co Ltd, the world's biggest shipbuilder, slid to a record quarterly loss of 1.8 billion dollars and warned it's heading for its worst-ever year as cost overruns mount up in new business lines it developed to counter a global glut of low-margin ship orders.
Fifty one nations on Wednesday signed what was hailed as a milestone in the fight against tax evasion, an agreement that commits them all to automatic exchange of tax information starting in 2017. The accord capped a two-day meeting of officials from most of the 123 nations that have joined the Global Forum, which evolved from an agreement by Germany and Britain two years ago to crack down on tax evasion and tax fraud.