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The Economist | News Analysis

This week's top stories [19 March 2010]
20 03 2010 Our top articles ranked by reader popularity.

China and Rio Tinto: Let bygones be bygones?
20 03 2010 A big African deal signals a partial thaw in Rio Tinto's relations with China IN ONE respect Rio Tinto’s relationship with China is clear. That country accounted for a quarter of the mining giant’s revenues in 2009, mainly because of China’s voracious appetite for iron ore. In other respects their relationship is harder to fathom. China was said to be furious last year when Rio first accepted and then spurned its offer to make a $19.5 billion investment in the Anglo-Australian firm. Four Rio employees were subsequently arrested in China for alleged bribery and commercial spying, and this week a date was set for their trial. But on March 19th, just three days before the courts were to begin hearing the cases, Rio announced it had signed a huge joint venture in Africa with none other than Chinalco, the Chinese state-backed metals firm which it had wooed and then jilted last year. If the deal, to develop a huge iron-ore mine at Simandou in Guinea, suggests a warming in relations between Rio and the Chinese authorities, the signals from the continuing judicial proceedings against Rio’s four employees imply quite the opposite. The arrests of the four men—three are Chinese and one, Stern Hu, is an Australian of Chinese descent—were related to the annual negotiations that set the price China’s steelmakers must pay for iron ore from the world’s three big suppliers: Rio, BHP Billiton and Vale. It was widely assumed outside China that the arrests were motivated by the Chinese authorities’ pique at the way Rio had treated Chinalco. ...

American health-care reform: Presenting the bill
19 03 2010 The stage is set for crucial vote on America’s health-care reform bill IT’S official, or as official as these things get. The health-care package destined for a vote in America’s House of Representatives on Sunday will cost $940 billion over the next ten years. Though the Congressional Budget Office score (as the estimate is known), along with the bill's final details, seems to clear the air on what the House will vote on, the package and the process remain complicated. The House is facing a two-part vote to pass the Senate bill and also tweaks through a process called “reconciliation”. The former may be done through a rule that Republicans are saying is unconstitutional (though they have used it themselves). Procedural trickery or not, everyone in the House will cast a vote on the Senate bill plus reconciliation. Whether it passes or not is far more important than quibbles about the House rules. The CBO also reckon that the health-care package, through savings and new revenue, will cut the total deficit over those years by $138 billion against a baseline scenario. After that, the savings get even bigger, totalling (a much more speculative) $1.2 trillion by 2029, according to some Democrats. But the sums are questionable. The CBO process has been so thoroughly gamed that the true figures could be quite different. The Republicans claim that it will cost far more and totally reject the idea that it will cut the deficit by such a sum over the second decade. ...

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