Venezuelans got the first glimpse in more than two months of their ailing president Friday in a series of photos the government released in a televised announcement. In the photos, Hugo Chavez is lying on a blue pillow, flanked by his two daughters, while he reads the Cuban official newspaper Granma. He is smiling, and his face looks a little swollen.
By John Fowler - According to the Argentine view of things, the Falkland Islands are Las Islas Malvinas and the capital city is not Stanley, which was founded in 1844, but Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, which did not really begin to be a town till 1881 with the establishment of a penal colony there.
A collection of stamps to commemorate the Falkland Islands Referendum, due to take place on March 10 - 11, was released on Friday in Stanley. The four stamps have values of 3p, 40p, 75p and £1.76p. The colourful stamps show an image of a hand inserting a vote into a ballot box which carries a design displaying an outline of the Falkland Islands.
Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, one of Latin America's most outspoken leaders is almost certain to win re-election on Sunday by an ample margin catapulting him as the most probable successor of Venezuela’s ailing Hugo Chavez and the populist movement in Latinamerica.
The heads of the AMIA and DAIA Jewish umbrella organizations, Guillermo Borger and Julio Schlosser, strongly rejected the memorandum of understanding signed between Argentina and Iran in order to create a truth commission looking to investigate the 1994 terrorist attack that left over 80 people dead and dozens injured.
China surpassed the US to become the world's biggest trading nation last year as measured by the sum of exports and imports of goods, a milestone in the Asian nation's challenge to the US dominance in global commerce.
The Euro zone slipped deeper into recession in the last three months of 2012 after its largest economies, Germany and France, shrank markedly at the end of the year. It marked the bloc's first full year in which no quarter produced growth, extending back to 1995.
The finance ministers of the G20 group of nations are meeting in Moscow amid concerns that major trading powers may be heading towards a currency war. Japan's monetary stance has seen a big decline in the Yen, while the Euro has risen against a basket of currencies.
The International Monetary Fund, IMF, praised Venezuela for the recent devaluation of its currency saying it is a positive attempt to reduce macroeconomic misbalances but also called on the government of President Hugo Chavez to continue eliminating the exchange rate distortions.
The good news for the Chinese leadership is that their fiscal policies have paid off, producing both the world's second largest economy and the globe's leading creditor nation in less than a generation.