BEIJING – North Korea will shift to collective rule from a strongman dictatorship after last week’s death of Kim Jong-il, although his untested young son will be at the head of the ruling coterie, a source with close ties to Pyongyang and Beijing said.
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CAIRO – Egyptians returned to the polls yesterday in a phased parliamentary election after five days of violence in Cairo that has cast a pall over the transition to democracy and drawn a U.S. rebuke of Egypt’s security forces.
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BAGHDAD – When the last American soldiers left Iraq this week almost nine years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials were keen to portray it as a stable, democratic, if still troubled nation.
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PRAGUE – Vaclav Havel’s actress wife led thousands of mourners through Prague’s cobblestone streets yesterday, following the playwright-president’s body on its last public journey, to the castle where it will lie in state until a funeral on Friday.
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VIENNA – Senior U.N. nuclear watchdog officials could visit Iran for talks, the agency said yesterday, a day after an Iranian envoy suggested Tehran would be ready to discuss international concerns and remove “ambiguities” about its atomic activities.
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WUKAN, China – A Chinese village protest that tested the ruling Communist Party for over a week ended yesterday after officials offered concessions over seized farmland and the death of a village leader, in a rare spectacle of the government backing down to mobilised citizens.
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WASHINGTON – In a bid to end a worsening standoff over extending a tax break for Americans, President Barack Obama urged Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner yesterday to pass a short-term extension and return to talks on a year-long deal in the New Year.
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MADRID – New Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy named yesterday a cabinet of mostly close advisers charged with reviving the sluggish economy while slashing spending to reassure investors the euro zone’s No. 4 economy can stay solvent.
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WASHINGTON – U.S. home sales rose in November, adding to hints of recovery, but updated data showed the housing crash was much deeper than previously thought.
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MOSCOW – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called for sweeping tax reforms to spur investment-led growth yesterday and promised to keep the rouble stable without imposing capital controls.
