International

SP Member of Parliament Ewout Irrgang has expressed concern that the IMF executive is about to take a decision, at a meeting scheduled for next Wednesday, to defer the G8's agreed debt forgiveness for six of the eighteen countries affected by the deal. Debts would not be cancelled until the countries in question – Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Rwanda and Senegal – had taken poorly-specified “remedial actions”.

That Mohammed El-Baradei has today received the Nobel Prize for Peace can, according to SP Member of Parliament Krista van Velzen, at the very least be called curious. "It is certainly to be welcomed that he, as head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Authority, repeatedly called for a complete ban on nuclear weapons. Yet the same organisation has, in addition to opposing nuclear armaments, another central task, the promotion of nuclear energy, which creates its own problems," Ms Van Velzen commented.