On Tuesday, three bills that would gut the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill passed the House Financial Services Committee (HFSC) in decisive fashion, with just six members of the 61-member committee voting against all of them.

The three bills passed over serious objections from the Obama administration. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew wrote a letter to Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), the chairman of the committee, urging “members to oppose these bills and others like …

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PARCHMAN, Miss. — The Mississippi Supreme Court has indefinitely delayed Tuesday evening’s planned execution of Willie Jerome Manning, who was scheduled to die for the 1992 slayings of two college students.

Manning was originally scheduled to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. CDT at the state prison in Parchman. But as the execution time loomed, the high court said the execution should be delayed until it rules further on the case.

The bodies of Mississippi …

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Vivienne Westwood was probably one of the only guests in attendance at this year’s Met Ball who actually played in role in punk the first time round. This year’s theme, Punk: Chaos to Couture, inspired spikey hairdos and the odd dash of over-applied eyeliner, but in the spirit of all this anarchic, Westwood, 72, ruffled a few feathers by donning a very large badge with a picture of Bradley Manning and the word Truth.
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Fears over the safety of women voting in next week’s elections in Pakistan are rising after letters have been circulated in regions of the country warning men not to allow their wives, sisters and daughters out to the polling stations.

In an increasingly fraught and violent runup to the 11 May vote, leaflets are appearing stating that it is “un-Islamic” for women to participate in democracy.

Now a group of young female activists are planning to challenge …

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Americans don’t want to eat horse meat and Congress is trying to forbid its sale and export. Yet for the first time since 2007, new horse slaughterhouses are set to open in the United States.

While Europe has been embroiled in a horse meat scandal since January, five new US slaughterhouses have filed requests for licensing at the Agriculture Department (USDA), a spokesman told AFP.

One of them, in the New Mexican city of Roswell in the …

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Back in 2004, when negotiations for the Washington-driven “Free Trade Area of the Americas” were heading for collapse, the Brazilian co-chair of the negotiations, Adhemar Bahadian, colourfully described the disillusionment that had set in. He compared the agreement to “a stripper in a cheap cabaret”.

“At night under the dim lights, she is a goddess,” he told the press. “But in the daytime she is something different. Maybe not even a woman.”

Many countries have …

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The World Trade Organisation is close to choosing its next leader in a final round pitting Brazil against Mexico, with the winner facing the tough task of restoring the clout of global commerce’s rule-setting body.

Brazil’s WTO ambassador Roberto Azevedo and his rival Herminio Blanco, Mexico’s former trade minister, are expected to learn as early as Tuesday whether they have won a contest that is seen as too close to call.

All concerned are keenly aware that …

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The reported use of chemical weapons by Syria’s embattled Assad regime has not made much difference in that devastated country. Tens of thousands have been killed in brutal fighting already, and the heart-rending violence continues with no end in sight.

The chemical weapons reports have had a dramatic effect in the United States, if not in Syria. The president had warned that their use would be a “gamechanger,” with “enormous consequences,” a proverbial “red line” that …

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(Reuters) – Investigators have confirmed that ammonium nitrate was the trigger for the explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant last month that left 14 people dead and some 200 injured, according to the Texas state fire marshal’s office.

The actual cause of the fire and subsequent blast at the West Fertilizer facility is still being determined, investigators said.

The fire marshal’s office has been leading the investigation of the April 17 blast, along with the federal …

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I WAS very excited to read, last week, about the “ghost money” that the C.I.A. is paying to the president of my country, Hamid Karzai. I’d like to know: would it be possible for the C.I.A. to give me some, too?

We do not know what President Karzai has done with this cash that arrives each month in suitcases and plastic shopping bags. Not even the C.I.A. — which every Afghan believes knows everything — …

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