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British and European foreign ministers are preparing to defy Washington at talks over an arms trade treaty, amid fears the US will use its diplomatic clout to water down proposals for the first comprehensive laws governing weapons sales.

Sometimes, money really should come with strings attached. JUBA, SOUTH SUDAN -- There are two main views of what kind of nation the world's newest country is becoming. The divide reveals much both about the place in question, South Sudan, and about the way the world relates to Africa in general.

The European debt crisis has led to cuts in government development aid to poor countries, says a new report by the aid watchdog Data. It is the first significant reduction in Europe-wide aid budgets for a decade. The biggest percentage cuts in the year 2010/11 were made by two of the states worst affected by the debt crisis - Spain and Greece.

Victims of forced sterilisation in the US state of North Carolina will not get compensation, after a payout plan failed in the state Senate. A plan to give $50,000 (£31,800) to each victim passed the House but was rejected in the Senate. Republicans said the state did not have the funds.

"Once again we are meeting against a backdrop of crises around the globe. Economic strife continues, political upheaval persists, and humanitarian disasters present obstacles to peoples' exercise of their human rights in far too many places," said UN Human Rights Chief, Navi Pillay, at the opening of the 20th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Most of its major provisions haven't been implemented yet, but that hasn't stopped Republicans from attacking the Affordable Care Act as a job killer. Most broadly, they claim without evidence that coming rules that will apply to employers are creating regulatory uncertainty and dissuading businesses from hiring.

Kenyan Internal Security Minister George Saitoti has been killed in a helicopter crash, Kenyan media report. They say Mr Saitoti and his deputy were among six people who died when the aircraft crashed outside Nairobi. There is no official confirmation, or details about the cause of the crash.

After meeting organisers of a Gay Pride parade to be held in Split on June 9, President Ivo Josipovic said on Saturday that the parade would be a test of Croatia's democracy and that he did not believe the organisers would have to change the route of the procession, as demanded by a group of opponents of the Gay Pride parade, noting that the right to peaceful assembly is a constitutional right.

Jon Cohn makes an obvious point: the current dysfunctional and stratospherically inefficient US healthcare system impedes economic freedom. It does so because people stay in jobs they may not be suited for, because they fear losing health insurance.

Speech Prompts Outpouring Of Political Reaction President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech on Tuesday night prompted an outpouring of reaction from both sides of the aisle in the political community. Click here to view a slideshow of reactions from politicians to Obama's speech.

The Russian prime minister prescribes his top 100 books for the nation Vladimir Putin has laid out his plans to compile a canon of 100 Russian books "that every Russian school leaver will be required to read" in an attempt to preserve the "dominance of Russian culture".

While the media has focused on the Republican presidential primaries, offstage the greatest revolution in American foreign policy in a generation has occurred, with little discussion or debate surrounding its announcement last week by President Obama. The relative lack of controversy marks a contrast with the last great transformation of American foreign policy, which took place at the end of the Cold War.

The International Space Station is a co-operative programme between Europe, the United States, Russia, Canada, and Japan for the joint development, operation and utilisation of a permanently inhabited Space Station in low Earth orbit. The legal framework defines the rights and obligations of each of the countries and their jurisdiction and control with respect to their Space Station elements.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A newt is an aquatic amphibian of the family Salamandridae, although not all aquatic salamanders are considered newts. Newts are classified in the subfamily Pleurodelinae of the family Salamandridae, and are found in North America, Europe and Asia.

Dec 13th 2011, 21:34 by R.L.G. | NEW YORK I HAVE exercised Chinese commenters with a few posts that were seen as either simplistic or biased. So let me offer two competing visions of Chinese that help explain what the two sides disagree on. These are archetypes which few partisans may agree with every word of.

In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack.

Nine films out of 63 qualified submissions are moving on in the race for the Oscar for Foreign Language Film. The Phase I foreign language committee of several hundred L.A.-based Academy voters screened the films between mid-October and January 13.

It's not quite right to say that the hundreds of millions of dollars Mitt Romney amassed as a private equity baron were the cause of his South Carolina drubbing. But they didn't exactly help, either. Newt Gingrich trounced the former Massachusetts governor among just about every demographic group that might nurse a grudge against a slick quarter-billionaire.