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Standard Bank has hit back at trade union Solidarity, saying its demands are unreasonable and it has ‘sensationalised’ the retrenchment process.

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Dublin, Ireland (AHN) – Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen on Monday said that he was waiting for the Parliament to pass the significant budget at a time when his country is facing a debt crisis, adding that he doesn’t expect general elections before March of next year.

The Irish leader said that the budgetary process might take weeks to be completed, then only he could formally dissolve parliament and announce an election date. The debt-ridden country is due to vote on the crucial $9 billion budget plant on December 7.

Speaking at a press conference, Cowen said that he was seeking the dissolution of parliament after the budgetary process with the enactment of the necessary legislation in the New Year.

“I’m saying that it is imperative for this country that the budget is passed. It’s very important for people to understand that any further delay in this matter in fact weakens this country’s position,” the Irish leader added.

Weeks after claiming that Ireland did not need help, the government finally bowed down on Sunday and called the IMF and EU to grant them financial assistance.

The PM’s decision about dissolution and elections came on Monday when Green Party leader John Gormley, with six seats in Parliament, urged him to announce election dates, claiming that Irish people had been misled and betrayed, hence, they now need to come out of political uncertainty.

However, Gromley vowed to back government in getting the budged approved through parliament.

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Washington, DC, United States (AHN) – The federal government has asked the Supreme Court to let “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” remain in force and reject a gay advocacy group’s request to reinstate an injunction on the ban against openly gay members in the military.

The Log Cabin Republican last week asked the Supreme Court to block DADT while an appeals court considers its lawsuit.

U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, however, argued in a filing on Wednesday that an “orderly” repeal of the law is underway, and can only take place in Congress. He also argued that the law should be considered constitutional until a final decision is reached on the suit.

District Court Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction against the law on Oct. 12, ending all investigations and pending discharges. A month before issuing her injunction, Phillips ruled in favor of the Log Cabin Republicans and struck down the law for violating First Amendment rights to free speech and Fifth Amendment rights to due process.

The Justice Department filed an appeal, arguing that President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all support ending the law but believe such a process requires more discussion and examination of military readiness, especially at a time of war.

Early this month, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to stay Phillip’s injunction until the lawsuit is settled.

“It is unfortunate the Obama Justice Department has forced the Log Cabin Republicans to go to the Supreme Court to halt this failed policy,” R. Clarke Cooper, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, said in a statement.

The group, which has been critical of Obama despite the commander-in-chief’s pledge to end the “unjust” law, said that government’s argument for an orderly repeal is “entirely speculative because Congress has not and very well may never repeal DADT.”

The White House has been working with Democratic lawmakers on a bill that would only begin the repeal process after a Pentagon review on the effects of a ending the law on morale and military readiness. The review is scheduled to be completed next month.

The bill is part of a defense authorization measure, and requires certifications before implementation from Obama, Gates and Mullen. The certifications will ensure the repeal process can be achieved according to military effectiveness, unit cohesion, recruiting and retention.

The bill was passed in the House earlier this year, but it failed over the summer in the Senate, where Republicans filibustered the larger defense legislation to which it was attached. Senate Democrats are scheduled to resume their efforts during a lame-duck session on Nov. 15.

The Log Cabin Republicans filed their suit in 2004 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The lawsuit is the only one among several efforts to repeal DADT that directly challenges the law; other groups such as the Human Rights Campaign and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force support a repeal through legislative means.

DADT was passed by Congress in 1993 through a defense authorization bill. About 13,000 service members have been discharged under the law.

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Tel Aviv, Israel (TML) – Fifteen years after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down at a Tel Aviv rally, the tug-of-war has yet to let up over the former prime minister’s legacy as the architect of a troubled peace process and a symbol of the dangers to democracy from extremism.

Officially, Rabin is mourned by all of Israel. His name appears on city squares and streets as well as schools and hospitals. As in years past, he was memorialized at official government ceremonies earlier this month on the date of his assassination on the Hebrew calendar.

But Rabin’s signal initiative, the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, remains a source of controversy to this day in Israel. The political left has sought to link Rabin’s memory to Israel’s current efforts at forging an agreement with the Palestinians. Israelis on the right remain suspicious of the peace process and Palestinian intentions, and shy away from Rabin commemorations.

“After Rabin was assassinated and the left turned the Rabin commemoration into a show of political force, I felt that I had no place there,” Yossi Klein Halevy, an author journalist and researcher on Israeli society and culture, told The Media Line. “They gave Israelis like me an untenable choice – either, swallow your politics and participate in the commemoration, or not honor the memory of Rabin.”

A mass memorial ceremony, scheduled for Saturday night, at the plaza where Rabin was assassinated Nov. 4, 1995 may be the last of its kind as Yitzhak Rabin Center, set up to commemorate the life and work of the former prime minister, mulls new ways to preserve the nation’s memory.

Rabin was killed a little more than years after he shook hands with Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, marking the onset of peace talks, and he never had the chance to show whether they would work. Repeated attempts to reach a final agreement have failed while the Palestinian intifada that broke out in 2000 cost 1,050 Israeli and 4,700 — Palestinian lives. The Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas, a Palestinian faction that opposes talks entirely, since 2007.

A 2009 survey conducted for the Walla! Internet site illustrated the division of opinion about Rabin in Israeli society. Among those identifying with Rabin’s political party, Labor, 63% said the missed his presence more than any other deceased leader. Among those who vote for Likud, Labor’s traditional opponent elections and the party of Israel’s current prime minster, Binyamin Netanyahu, only 9% said they missed Rabin the most.

The annual mass memorial in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square has grown smaller as the years go by, with just 25,000 people attending last year’s event and live broadcast of garnering low audience ratings. Israel’s state-controlled Channel 1 television network only agreed to broadcast it this year under public pressure.

Zvi “Shishko” Friedman, who has helped staged the memorial ceremonies, said organizers haven’t decided how Rabin’s death will be marked from next year on, but he said there would be less emphasis on speeches. He declined to say whether the mass memorial would be continued.

On Israel’s left, many want Rabin’s memory to be rooted in the aspirations for peace and put the onus for his death to right-wing extremism.

On the Israeli right, some leaders have sought to identify themselves with Rabin and his policies, arguing that the left has misrepresented Rabin’s views. At this year’s memorial, Netanyahu pointed out that Rabin never agreed to freeze construction of Israeli settlements or to divide Jerusalem. Ruby Rivlin, the speaker of Israel’s parliament and a Likud Party leader, said the political right shouldn’t be held responsible for the assassination.

“In the past there have been attempts to connect [Rabin's] murder to Oslo’s opponents, but just as the memory of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination doesn’t belong to the northern states, Rabin’s memory belongs to all,” Rivlin said at the Knesset ceremony.

But for many on the right, the Oslo process was a failure and holds the former prime minister accountable for it, Abraham Diskin, a professor of politics at the Hebrew University.

If Israelis can share anything about the Rabin legacy, said Diskin, it is an appreciation for Rabin as a personality. Among Israel’s best-known prime ministers he remains the one most missed by the public, according to Wallah! poll, with 20% naming him. Menahem Begin followed with 17% and Israel’s founder, David Ben-Gurion in the third with 14%.

“Because the way his life ended, he will be remembered,” Diskin told The Media Line. “A general, an honest person who wanted peace and was murdered because he wanted peace – and that is how he will be remembered.”

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The foreclosure freeze by the nation’s leading banks may help some New Mexicans in trouble on their home loans but will delay others in the process of buying foreclosed property.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – The White House on Tuesday lifted a moratorium on deep-water drilling, but peppered it with stricter rules to oversee the process but a regional Democrat refused to withdraw her hold on the nomination of a top Obama Administration economic nominee.

Addressing journalists, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs insisted that political considerations were not a factor in announcing the decision and it was “a natural policy process.”

“We came up with the right set of rules and the right set of safety mechanisms to ensure that something that will obviously always carry some risk also has within it a containment strategy that works for the American people,” Gibbs said.

The ban was to expire on November 30, but the new process, “puts in place some important safety steps to insure that when this is done again, it is done safely,” Gibbs said.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) was quick to respond with a statement, refusing to lift her hold on Jacob Lew, President Barack Obama’s nominee to run the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Landrieu, with deep ties with regional oil and gas industry, said in a statement, “When Congress reconvenes for the lame-duck session next month, I will have had several weeks to evaluate if today’s lifting of the moratorium is actually putting people back to work.”

Asked to comment on her statement, Gibbs told journalists, “I saw, I believe, a statement from her that said she was not dropping her hold on Jack Lew,” adding, “And our feeling on this is the nomination of Jack Lew is not in any way connected to and shouldn’t be in any way connected to any facet of the moratorium.”

Gibbs lambasted Landrieu’s stand saying, “We have said from the beginning that the hold was unwarranted and outrageous. And that continues to be our viewpoint, and we hope that as we work though the normal course of a policy that ensures that oil drilling is done in a safe way, certainly that Senator Landrieu would judge Jack Lew on the merits of being a budget director, not of playing politics and getting issues that are ancillary to what he does involved in that equation.”

There is a new set of safety regulations which the drilling companies must follow before they can resume operations.

The new rules make the chief executive officer of a company liable and responsible as the CEO has to certify that the company has complied with all regulations. Companies wanting to work in the sector also have to prove that they have procedures in place to contain a worst-case scenario spill, Gibbs noted.

Citing these new requirements, Gibbs ruled out immediate drilling saying, “It is probably going to take several weeks to ensure that everybody feels comfortable that we have the appropriate plans in place to ensure that we meet those worst-case scenarios.”

“This is a process that starts the permitting process again. And somebody can drill only when they satisfy the government that they have a process in place to deal with a worst-case scenario. Until that time, drilling can’t happen,” he added.

Gibbs reiterated, “But politics in the region, politics outside the region, none of that has played — none of it played a role in the President’s instituting the moratorium. None of it has played a role in the policy process that’s gone on to devise a way out of the moratorium,” adding, “It is — the President wanted to put in place a moratorium that paused deepwater drilling while we figured out what had happened and what needed to be in place.”

Moreover, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said new rules imposed after the BP Gulf of Mexico spill have strengthened safety measures saying that another catastrophic blowout was much less likely.

“I have decided that it is now appropriate to lift the suspension on deepwater drilling for those operators that are able to clear the higher bar we have set,” he said.


The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana caused the biggest offshore oil spill in history.

The explosion that took place on April 20 this year, killed 11 workers, and spilled a huge quantity of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

The leakage was finally plugged just a couple of weeks ago and BP is expected to pay billions in damages.

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Van Buren Township, MI, United States (AHN) – Visteon Corp., a leading global automotive supplier said it has finished its reorganization and exited the U.S. Chapter 11 process.

The company completed all conditions of its plan of reorganization which was confirmed by U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Aug. 31 after overwhelming approval by all creditor and shareholder classes.

Visteon emerged with a stronger balance sheet and about $2.1 billion less consolidated debt than when the company and its certain affiliates voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. on May 28, 2009.

The firm improved its capital and cost structure significantly by reducing consolidated debt from some $2.7 billion at the time of filing to about $600 million now – a level that allows Visteon to be “very competitive” in Tier 1 automotive supplier industry.

“This marks a new beginning for Visteon, an opportunity to truly capitalize on many operational and financial improvements achieved before and during the reorganization process,” said Donald J. Stebbins, chairman, CEO and president.

“I am extremely grateful to our customers, suppliers, secured lenders, bondholders and many others for their support throughout this difficult process,” he added.

The new Visteon is focused on four strong product lines – climate, electronics, interiors and lighting with outstanding global manufacturing and engineering footprint with particular strength in fast-growing markets in Asia, Eastern Europe and Brazil.

“We have an experienced and talented employee base, complemented by strong joint venture partners and strategic alliances that provide a competitive advantage in key automotive markets of the world,” said Stebbins.

Visteon Corp. designs, engineers and manufactures innovative climate, electronic, interior and lighting products for vehicle manufacturers. The company has facilities in 26 countries and employs some 26,000 people. It has corporate offices in Van Buren Township, Mich., U.S.; Shanghai, China; and Chelmsford, UK.

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A quick authorization of loans has a very special importance for unemployed people. With the help of a speedy fiscal aid in the form of fast loans for unemployed, you will be no longer with your cash troubles if you are an unemployed person who needs cash. Thus, a fast loan for unemployed becomes one of the prime the requirements for a jobless person. The quickness in approving loans cannot be seen in other regular loans as these are fast loans that are approved within a day sometimes within a few hours. This is because unemployed people do not have a steady source of income that often seems as a risky proposal by the moneylenders. Lenders would try to be sure by a series of screening tests whether the money would be safely recovered or not.

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Reports of short-cuts in GMAC’s foreclosure process raise ‘serious doubts’.

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