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Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, President of Iceland, refused to sign a bill to pay US$5 billion (£3.1 billion) to Holland and the UK. Savers in those countries lost out when Icesave's parent bank Landsbanki collapsed and was nationalised alongside Glitnir and Kaupthing. The governments of those nations paid out the money individuals had lost and the bill is designed to compensate them. However, the bill is unpopular with the public as 70% of them are said to oppose the measure, which critics have claimed will slow recovery for the Icelandic economy.

Nearly a quarter of Iceland's voters have signed a petition calling for President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to veto the bill passed last week to pay €3.8 billion to the United Kingdom and The Netherlands to compensate depositors impacted when the Icesave online bank collapsed in 2008. "I consider it to be a reasonable demand that the economic burden placed on the current and future generations of Icelanders, in the form of a state guarantee for Icesave payments to the UK and Dutch governments, be subject to a national referendum," says the petiti

The Chinese economy is likely to overtop the Japanese economy and become the second largest in the world. Li Daokui, Director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE) at the Tsinghua University, states that there is no doubt about what the numbers or the statistics show. China's GDP growth was 9.6% in 2008. Despite predictions about China's GDP being at around 8.6% to 9%, it rose to 9.6%, as stated by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected previously that China will overtake Japan s

__NOEDITSECTION__ The Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir and her coalition government narrowly escaped a commitment to resign as a €3.8 billion bill to repay British and Dutch savers following the collapse of Icesave online banking passed. The vote margin was only three votes. Only a matter of hours before the anticipated final vote, Wikileaks announced the disclosure of one of 23 documents suppressed by the Icelandic Minister of Finance: an apparent legal summary of meetings between Icelandic and EU representatives held in Bruss

A duck named Edwina, believed to be the oldest recorded living duck in the United Kingdom, has died at the age of 22. The mallard was first discovered by Ian Knight and Christine Christopher in a lake near their residence in the market town of Ringwood in Hampshire, England. Edwina, as she was later called, had been attacked by her family and abandoned by her own mother. Ian helped the duck to recover its health and, after a failed attempt to release the creature back into the wild, the duck was adopted as a family pet. She was originally giv

Russian liberal economist and politician Yegor Gaidar died on Wednesday at the age of 53. He was the son of the famous Russian journalist Timur Gaidar. Born in Moscow in 1956, he graduated in economics from Moscow State University in 1978. In January 1992 in the position of Russia's first finance minister he dropped state control over prices, making Russia a capitalist country with a market economy. While working as an acting Prime Minister of Russia, Gaidar provided the so-called "shock therapy" treatment of the Russian economy, a set of libe

The European Commission and Microsoft have finalised the proposal for a 'browser ballot' in Windows, following the Commission's concern that Microsoft was unfairly using its operating system monopoly to gain control of the browser market. The browser ballot will give Windows users an option of switching to one of twelve competing browsers when it is made available in an update to the new Windows 7, as well as Vista and XP. Microsoft said in a statement that "today's resolution follows years of intensive examination by the European Commissio

Local officials in the town of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan said on Tuesday that at least twenty people were killed after a suicide car bomber attacked the house of a provincial governor. The Al Jazeera news agency reports that seventy people were injured from the blast. According to Siddiq-ul-Farooq, a spokesman for the Pakistan Muslim League, the bomber drove his car into the wall of Dost Muhammad Khosa's home, damaging it. Khosa and his relatives, however, were not at home, Farooq added. The house was reportedly close to a market, which also

A car bomb has killed at least 22 people and injured 70 injured in Dera Ghazi Khan, Pakistan according to local officials. The bomb exploded in a market in the town in the central Punjab province. "The whole market has collapsed," said local resident Raza Khan to the Associated Press news agency. "There is smoke and people running here and there." According to district health officer Dr Pervez Haider Altaf, rescuers were searching for survivors. Officials have declared a state of emergency. "The hospital in the town has been crowded by the pe

Several thousand people marched earlier today in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, to protest corruption in the country. Most of them were students protesting the latest corruption scandal in the country. It involves allegations that a US$600 million government bailout was given to Century Bank on condition that some of the money be used to fund the president's re-election campaign. "Today's aim is not to attack politically any party. We just want to send a message to our fellow countrymen [...] that justice cannot be served while corruption

Bombings in two Pakistani cities killed about 50 people and wounded more than 140 others on Monday, according to authorities. Authorities in the northeastern city of Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province, stated that twin bombings devastated a busy market crowded with women and children, killing some 40 people. They say more than 100 people were wounded in the two explosions that occurred about 30 seconds apart. The detonation started a fire, which spread quickly due to the many wooden stalls in the market. Hours earlier, a suicide bombe

Iraqi police say a series of car bombings across the capital, Baghdad, killed at least 127 people, wounding hundreds of others. Reports say three of today's blasts were coordinated. The first occurred at 10:25 local time (07:25 GMT), the others following within minutes. One of the bombs targeted the busy Shourja Market in central Baghdad, near to the Iraqi health ministry. The others were detonated near the Interior Ministry in eastern Baghdad and the Labor Ministry. Police say that earlier, a suicide car bomber struck a police patrol in Dora