NEWS Security forces in Myanmar mounted a violent raid Thursday against Buddhist monks and villagers protesting the expansion of a copper mine, using incendiary devices to set fire to protesters' encampments, according to witnesses. The crackdown was the largest since President Thein Sein's government came to power 20 months ago, and analysts said its brutality - online photos showed monks with badly seared skin - could hamper the president's efforts to convince the country he has made a clean break from the military governments of the past. Thomas Fuller reports from Bangkok.
After President François Hollande and his industry minister raised the possibility that the French state would take over an ArcelorMittal steel factory in a dispute over the foreign company's plans to close two blast furnaces, union workers in another industry - shipbuilding - are calling for the government to seize their South Korean employer's property. The French corporate establishment i s bracing for a global backlash, if the nationalization impulse takes hold. David Jolly reports from Paris.
A long-awaited report on the behavior of British newspapers embroiled in the phone hacking scandal recommended on Thursday a new system of press regulation that would be backed by parliamentary statute, setting up what threatened to become an acrimonious debate about curbs on Britain's 300-year-old tradition of broad press freedom. Weighing in at 1,987 pages, the report reprised nine months of testimony at the inquiry led by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, who was appointed at the height of the scandal that erupted around the now-shuttered News of the World tabloid. John F. Burns and Alan Cowell report from London.
Jasmine Lee, who was born Jasmine Bacurnay in the Philippines, made South Korean history in April when she became the first naturalized citizen - and the first non-ethnic Korean - to win a seat in the country's National Assembly. Her election re flected one of the most significant demographic shifts in South Korea's modern history, as a country that once took pride in being of “one blood†faces the prospect of becoming a multiethnic society, with one marriage in 10 now involving a foreign spouse. Choe Sang-Hun reports from Seoul.
British banks need more capital to protect them against fallout from the crisis in the euro zone, the Libor rate-manipulation litigation and other potential costs, the Bank of England warned in a report Thursday. The central bank said that current capital ratios at major British banks were probably insufficient because possible future losses and costs of bad loans or other past business decisions might be bigger than expected. Julia Werdigier reports from London.
ARTS In his latest film, “Hyde Park on the Hudson,†Bill Murray plays President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he manages an affair with a distant cousin, a visit from George VI of Britain and the crippling effects o f his polio. It is a part that almost no one, least of all Mr. Murray, expected him to play, and it again raises the question: Why does he do what he does? Dave Itzkoff asked him.
SPORTS The latest symbol of the college football arms race is not the coaches' salaries themselves, but rather the money that university officials are spending to buy out those contracts when a coach falters. Jeré Longman reports.
