STORY: British retail banks should be stopped from paying big cash bonuses and use the money instead to support new lending, the opposition Conservatives’ finance spokesman insisted on Monday (October 26).
“What about the government’s banking package and the Prime Minister’s promise that the era of the big bonus was over?” George Osborne said in a speech at a Reuters Newsmaker event in London.
“We supported the bank bailouts to get the banks lending again, not to support the bank accounts of bankers. Yet here we are a year later and the taxpayer subsidised profits are being used, not to get lending going, but to pay out massive bonuses again,” he added.
“Businesses can’t get the working capital they need to operate or to take people on. Credit is being rationed and margins are still too high. This is sapping demand from our economy and fixing it should be our immediate priority.”
The Conservatives, well ahead of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party in the polls with a national election due by next June, know a crackdown on bankers’ bonuses would be popular with many voters.
Bonuses are seen to have contributed to the financial crisis by encouraging excessive risk but some banks are preparing to step up bonus payments just months after governments were forced to inject trillions of dollars into distressed banks and the global economy.
Brown says stimulus programmes must be kept in place to lift Britain out of recession, but the Conservatives say spending cuts are needed now to rein in a ballooning budget deficit.
STORY: The trial of a man accused of killing a pregnant Egyptian woman in a German courtroom opened on Monday (October 26) amid tight security, in a case that has incensed many in the Islamic world.</p><p> The stabbing in July of 31-year-old Marwa El-Sherbiny, pregnant and a mother to a 3-year-old, prompted accusations that Germany tolerated xenophobia and anti-Islamic views and caused protests in Egypt and Iran.</p><p> The trial of Sherbiny’s attacker, a German of Russian origin identified by media only as “Axel W.”, started amid fears that there could be an eruption of violence similar to that following Denmark’s publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad.</p><p> Some 200 police officers secured the court in the eastern city of Dresden and the hooded accused sat behind bulletproof glass.</p><p> The killing happened in a court in Dresden where the attacker was appealing a conviction for insulting Sherbiny by calling her an “Islamist”, “terrorist” and “slut” when she asked him to make room for her son to play on swings in a playground.</p><p> The killer also stabbed Sherbiny’s husband and to make matters worse, German police then shot the husband in the leg, having mistaken him for the attacker.</p><p> Germany, which has the second-biggest Muslim population in western Europe after France, was criticised for taking days to condemn the murder.</p><p> Ayyub Axel Koehler, the 71-year-old had of Germany’s Muslim Council who converted to Islam in 1963, told reporters on the sidelines that “we are looking at this trial with great anticipation because our women and girls are obviously scared.”</p><p> “They are already being discriminated against in public and looked down on,” Koehler said.</p><p>#
STORY: Two helicopter crashes in Afghanistan killed 11 U.S. soldiers and three U.S. civilians on Monday (October 26), NATO-led forces said. 27 were injured including 14 Afghan service personnel. </p><p> Neither crash was caused by hostile fire, NATO said. </p><p> This year has seen a surge of violence in Afghanistan as an increasingly fierce Taliban step up operations against U.S. and NATO forces operating in the country. </p><p> “We had two separate helicopter incidents today, one in southern Afghanistan where we believe we had two helicopters collide with each other. In that particular incident we had four U.S. service members who were killed and two others were injured. In a separate incident in western Afghanistan we had one helicopter crash and we had seven U.S. service members, three U.S. civilian killed in that crash and we also had fourteen Afghan service members and another eleven U.S. service members were injured in that particular one,” NATO spokesman, Colonel Wayne Shank said. </p><p> On Saturday (October 24) in eastern Afghanistan, one U.S. soldier was killed in a roadside bomb attack and another died of wounds from an insurgent attack, NATO said in a statement on Monday. </p><p> A spokeswoman for ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, could not give any further information on the casualties or the exact location of the crashes.
