The royal pair will be visiting the country as part of a regional tour designed to promote cooperation in economic, education, environmental and innovative spheres.

Charles and Camilla, who are currently in Qatar, are enjoying a nine day tour across the Middle East, seeing them take in the sights of Jordan, Oman and Saudi.

The controversial executions in Saudi Arabia took place yesterday with human rights activists saying the men – who were convicted of robbery and …

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SOFIA, Bulgaria — Disgusted by corruption in his provincial hometown, a 36-year-old Bulgarian quietly doused himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze. This week, another man — the fourth in less than a month — carried out the same act of desperation in front of the presidential headquarters in the capital.

The dramatic self-immolations, three of which were fatal, bear a striking resemblance to events half a century ago in Eastern Europe when mostly young intellectuals …

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is failing to keep up with a torrent of benefits claims, and the backlog leaves many service members high and dry for well over a year after first filing their forms, a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting finds.

From the CIR report:

The agency tracks and widely reports the average wait time: 273 days. But the internal data indicates that veterans filing their first claim, …

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There are train wrecks, and there are train wrecks. Then there’s San Onofre.

You probably know San Onofre as the full-figured fiasco overlooking the Pacific Ocean near the Orange/San Diego county line. Beginning in 2004, Southern California Edison, the nuclear power plant’s principal owner, oversaw a $770-million project to replace its two aging steam generators with new models. The new units, which were supposed to last 20 years, lasted scarcely 20 months before showing alarmingly severe …

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As Mayor Nutter prepares to unveil a new budget to City Council, the city’s top union leaders on Wednesday excoriated Nutter’s handling of municipal labor issues and called on Council members to take their side.

“He’s trying to take away our right to collective bargaining,” said Patrick Eiding, president of the Philadelphia AFL-CIO, at a lunchtime rally that drew about 300 union supporters to the north side of City Hall.

Eiding said the union movement would be …

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The migratory population of the monarch butterfly has reached an “ominous” low, researchers in Mexico announced Wednesday.

Scientists are attributing the decline of this essential pollinating population to the ongoing drought and the “explosive” increase in the use of genetically modified crops in the American corn belt.

“Because farmers have planted over 120 million acres of crops resistant to the milkweed-killing herbicide glyphosate, the monarchs’ essential food supply has been all but destroyed.”

Released by the Mexican government …

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China uses 20 million trees each year to feed the country’s disposable chopstick habit, Bo Guangxin, the head of a major forestry group, told Chinese parliamentarians on Friday according to Chinese state media. At 4,000 chopsticks per tree, that’s roughly 80 billion chopsticks per year — far more than the 57 billion estimated by the country’s national forest bureau.

While this is hardly the first time that the chopstick issue has come up in China, the …

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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Thom Hartmann: Last week Forbes came out with its annual list of the world’s richest folks and once again the guy at the top of the list was Carlos Slim. He’s worth $73 billion dollars. Now, who the heck is Carlos Slim and how did he get all that money? He got it by controlling the majority of Mexico’s telecom industry. The richest guy …

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The USDA is considering buying 400,000 tons of sugar in an aim to limit supply and boost prices so that sugar producers can pay back government loans that they’re in danger of defaulting on, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move would be an exercise of an untested provision inserted in the 2008 farm bill called the Feedstock Flexibility Program, which allows the USDA to intervene in the market to raise prices.

While the artificial price …

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In an era when buyers of all backgrounds have found buying or refinancing a home difficult, women have had a particularly tough time, a new study by a Chicago nonprofit found.

Chicago women who applied for a new home mortgage in 2010 were 24 percent less likely to obtain a loan than men, the study by the Woodstock Institute found. Lenders were 39 percent less likely to refinance a woman’s existing mortgage, the study says.

The study …

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