Month: December 2014

Israel today marked the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In a bid to draw attention to their plight, Israel formally marked the event with a state ceremony under a new law naming November 30 as the anniversary.

“Nearly 800,000 came here and the rest (around 56,000) went to the United States, France, Italy and elsewhere,” said Meir Kahlon, chairman of the Central Organisation for Jews from Arab Countries and Iran.

JSW Steel Ltd, the third largest Indian steel maker, today said it has deferred the proposed acquisition of Italy’s Lucchini SpV.

“For the time being, plans for India is much stronger and larger. We want to focus in India…. We have deferred our decision to invest in the Italian project,” JSW Steel chairman and managing director Sajjan Jindal said.

He was speaking on the sidelines of inauguration of Ispat Pragati Bhawan, the new office of Institute of Steel Development & Growth (Insdag) in the city.

Authorities say they’ve found five mutilated bodies in a region of southern Mexico where 11 decapitated corpses were found just a few days ago.

An official at the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office said the five were found last night in the back of a vehicle abandoned in the municipality of Chilapa. The official spoke today on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the news media. He said they have not yet been identified

Pope Francis today said he is ready to go anywhere, anytime to meet with the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, even while acknowledging that he doubts the day will ever come that Catholic and Orthodox theologians will agree to end the 1,000-year schism.

Francis spoke to reporters today en route home from Turkey, where he made a remarkable gesture of deference to the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians by bowing down to receive his blessing.

Israel’s fractious coalition government seems headed for a breakup that could spark new elections against a backdrop of security turmoil inside the country, disputes over nationalist legislation and a deep freeze in peace efforts with the Palestinians.

With little to gain from a vote that would come two years early, the country’s top politicians could still pull back from a brink that none seem to relish. But the vitriolic attacks of recent days suggest another angry campaign could soon be at hand.

Poland’s ruling Civic Platform (PO) was on course to pull off a victory in a runoff of local elections, taking the country’s main cities, according to an exit poll.

The centre-right party was yesterday predicted to hold the capital Warsaw as well as win Gdansk, Wroclaw and Poznan in the second round of a highly-contentious vote.

The PO mayor of Warsaw, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, was elected for a record third time taking 56.8 per cent of the vote against her conservative rival Jacek Sasin.

Partial results from elections show Moldovan voters divided between parties that want to move closer to Europe and those that want to move back into Moscow’s sphere of influence.

The parliamentary election has taken on wider significance with the unrest in neighboring Ukraine. Moldova, like Ukraine, has a pro-Russia separatist region in its east.

Early results yesterday showed pro-Russian parties with a strong lead. But as more votes were counted, the gap closed.

The pilot of a single-engine plane that made an emergency landing on a bus-only roadway says it’s the second air crash he has survived and he’s considering giving up flying.

Danny Hall, a 48-year-old roofing company owner from Torrington, Connecticut, walked away from the crash landing Saturday afternoon in West Hartford with only soreness in his back. In 2008, he landed his plane in a river after the engine failed.

Ex-president Tabare Vazquez has won Uruguay’s presidential runoff, extending the left’s decade-long hold on power — though not necessarily his predecessor’s ground-breaking marijuana laws, exit polls showed.

Vazquez, a 74-year-old cancer doctor who previously served as president from 2005 to 2010, won between 53 and 53.9 percent of the vote, and will succeed his Broad Front (FA) party colleague Jose Mujica, according to three different exit polls yesterday.

Nepal on Sunday rejected media reports that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s advice to Nepalese leaders to forge a consensus for drafting the Constitution amounted to interference in the country’s affairs.
“It was a friendly advise of India, we should not take it as an interference,” Nepalese Foreign Minister Mahendra Bahadur Pandey said.

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch says he cannot ever see himself quitting his role as Sherlock Holmes in ‘Sherlock’.

The 38-year-old British actor plays the titular role in the TV series and insists that while he has carved out a career in Hollywood, he isn’t ready to turn his back on the programme because he loves playing the detective so much, reported Contactmusic.

“If we can keep the quality up, I can’t imagine that I will ever get tired of being Sherlock. I’d love to play him as an old man,” Cumberbatch said.

Mexican actor Roberto Gomez Bolanos, who was the inspiration behind ‘The Simpsons’s Bumblebee Man, has died.

According to The Hollywood Reporter the actor – who was better known to Latin American audiences as Chespirito – died aged 85.

He passed away in Cancun on November 28 of heart failure.

Gomez Bolanos had a career over six decades and wrote and produced many of the sitcoms he starred in, including ‘El Chavo del Ocho’, ‘El Chapulin Colorado’ and ‘Chespirito’.