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A 52-year-old Norwegian citizen is being held in the high security prison Belmarsh outside of London, accused by British police of securing radioactive material for terrorist purposes. British media imply the Somalian-born Norwegian may have connections to terrorist group al-Qaida, newspaper VG reports. The 52-year-old was arrested in London last September, charged with procuring a kilo of radioactive red mercury, used in creating so-called 'dirty bombs', a combination of explosive and radioactive material.

Much to Treasure from Royal Norwegian Visit A Royal visit brings with it much to cherish and to treasure. The visit by His Majesty King Harald V and Her Majesty Queen Sonja to Singapore brings with it much rewards for both countries and their peoples. Singapore and Norway share much similar interests and concerns, especially in the maritime field and in oil and gas. With the recent visit of Their Majesties, the areas of joint interests and concerns will no doubt be expanded broadly into other fields such as tourism and possibly even renewable energy.

It’s so easy to say you support the troops, regardless of which side you come down on in the issue of the War in Iraq itself. Yeah, you can send care packages and put yellow ribbon magnets on your car to make you feel all warm and fuzzy that you’re doing your own small part. You can do as I do and use forums such as this one to expound the viewpoint of the folks we send in harm’s way, hoping that someway, somehow, someone who can make a difference may read your rant and actually do that something that...

UNITED NATIONS, JANUARY 18: An international team of experts sponsored by the United Nations on Monday proposed a detailed, ambitious plan it says could halve extreme poverty and save the lives of millions of children and hundreds of thousands of mothers each year by 2015. The report says drastically reducing poverty in its many guises — hunger, illiteracy, disease — is ‘‘utterly affordable’’. To fulfill this goal, industrialised nations would need to roughly double aid to poor countries from a quarter to a half of one per cent of their national incomes. ‘‘We’re talking about rich countries committing 50 cents...

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) - Wealthy nations are not making good on their pledge to deliver the money needed to halve extreme poverty worldwide by 2015, a panel of UN-appointed experts said in a new report. Nations around the world have committed themselves to an ambitious programme of UN "millennium development goals" to improve the lot of the world's poor and suffering. But with more than one billion people worldwide living on less than a dollar a day -- and 2.7 billion more surviving on less than two dollars -- the experts said time is running short to living up to...

1/14/05 We are updating this article, the original of which appeared on Jan. 2, 2005. The list contains new donors, bringing the total listed here to over $50 million not including in kind contributions. A few days ago we pointed out the stupidity of those critics who said we were stingy and that we were spending more on the Bush Inaugural than we were on disaster relief. As we said in the piece, the Inaugural is being privately funded, so it is not as if the US were picking the party over foreign aid. Further Inaugural donations were made prior...

UN demands swift cash from donors The UN wants $1bn in immediate aid for regions like Aceh The UN official co-ordinating aid for tsunami survivors has urged donor countries to release cash more quickly for the relief effort. Speaking at the start of an international meeting in Geneva, Jan Egeland said only one-tenth of aid pledged had so far been received. The response so far had shown "humanity at its very best", he said. But he also warned that donor countries must not neglect other humanitarian crises around the world. The Geneva meeting comes five days after UN Secretary General...

Jan Egeland, the United Nations' undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, sure did get clobbered over his use of the word "stingy" in reference to the initial outpouring of millions of dollars in US and Western aid for those countries affected by the tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. But statements like his aren't formed in a vacuum, not even when emanating from the vacuous UN. Seems it was former President Jimmy Carter who, back in 1999 at a lecture at Principia College, said, "We are the stingiest nation of all." The good news is that, regardless of who gets to claim first...

The United Nations fritters away money while the American military steps in to help the hopeless in southeast Asia.IF YOU'RE GETTING OVER being steamed at Norwegian U.N. apparatchik Jan Egeland, who a week ago thought the U.S. response to the tsunami "stingy," then you need to check in at The Diplomad, a tremendous blog run by a State Department careerist serving abroad and which has done more for the reputation of State among conservatives in the past few months than 20 years of Council of Foreign Relations meets and greets. Short summary: Your worst fears about the United Nations are...

Nobles: The American people, for offering their money and their prayers to the tsunami victims. Some world diplomats and pundits just couldn't help but turn the disaster in Southeast Asia and Africa into a moment to criticize the United States. /snip The Chronicle of Philanthropy has reported that by the end of the week private donations to American charities have totaled more than $300 million, or just $50 million less than the U.S. government and many times more than what individual European governments have pledged. /snip Charles Krauthammer: "We are six percent or less of the world's population, yet we...

Greedy hypocrites January 7th, 2005 The recent disparagement of American aid efforts to help tsunami victims as “stingy” by Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the United Nations, is merely the latest in a series of anti-American words and actions by Norway and Norwegians. While one might generously characterize some of these actions as merely the typical left-wing carping of self-styled “humanitarians,” or as the by-product of good intentions gone awry, a closer analysis reveals that a prime motivation of this disproportionate hostility might be based on that oldest of human failings: greed. Recent history indicates that the...

We are six percent or less of the world's population, yet we give almost half. We are a very small number of people, relatively speaking, and we carry the weight of a dozen countries. Secondly, we maintain a military structure that keeps the peace of the world...Who is in the Indian Ocean with the aircraft carriers, helicopters, skilled personal? No one has the infrastructure in the world, we spend almost half a trillion dollars a year on our military structure, which is essentially the fire department of the planet and it is always at the disposal of people hit in...

  Liberals Love America Like O.J. Loved NicoleBy Ann Coulter January 6, 2005 Even the United Nations sponge who called the United States "stingy" immediately retracted the insult, saying he had been misinterpreted and that the U.S. was "most generous." But the New York Times was sticking with "stingy." In an editorial subtly titled "Are We Stingy? Yes," the Times said the U.N. sponge "was right on target." This followed up a patriotic editorial a few days earlier titled "America, the Indifferent." America's stinginess is a long-standing leitmotif for liberals – which is getting hard to square with their love...

GUEST OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR ALTHOUGH the Bush administration has now pledged $350 million for the Asian tsunami catastrophe, claims that America is "stingy" are still in the air. The criticism stems from the much-touted fact that our government's foreign aid ranks last among developed countries as a percentage of gross national income. This rankles, as Americans tend to think of themselves as a generous people. How can we, the richest nation in the world, not be more caring? The answer is simple: we actually are. For one thing, our government gives the highest absolute amount in foreign aid - more than...

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it depends on your definition of "charity." To the United Nations, and The New York Times, charity apparently is defined by how much a government offers to those in need from the money its citizens have coughed up to stay out of jail. To most Americans, charitable giving involves willfully directing cash from their own pockets and giving it to causes they favor - in this case helping the millions who survived the Asian tsunamis. The widely different mentality comes to the fore in the wake of the comments by U.N. emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland...

The establishment press has been dutifully chronicling the disaster relief contributions of Western nations in the wake of the South Asia tsunami disaster, where victims were overwhelmingly Muslim. But almost nobody seems concerned about how Muslim nations themselves are doing in the tsunami aid competition. Top radio talker Rush Limbaugh stepped into the breach on Tuesday, detailing for his audience the relatively stingy response from brother nations.• Saudi Arabia - $10 million. "That's like an afternoon shopping spree in Paris for a member of the Saudi royal family," noted Limbaugh.• Iran pledged a puny $627,000 - a small fraction of...

Columnist Charles Krauthammer blasted U.N. officials and other America-bashers Sunday morning for trying to paint the U.S.'s foreign aid contribution as "stingy" in the wake of the Asia tsunami disaster - especially since the facts prove exactly the opposite. "We are six percent, or less, of the world's population," Krauthammer told his fellow "Fox News Sunday" panelists. "We give almost half [of the global foreign aid]. ... We give 60 percent of all the food aid on the planet." And that's not all: "We maintain a military infrastructure that keeps the peace in the world," he noted. "We are the...

Americans: A greedy, selfish, stingy and uncaring people who couldn't care less about the plight of others, engage in decadent behavior, and are so self-absorbed that they pleasure themselves while looking at satellite photos of the United States.At least, that's the approximate definition given by the United Nations and the New York Times editorial board. Yes, the Times is at it again. This, from an editorial last week: He [President Bush] took issue with an earlier statement by the United Nations' emergency relief coordinator, Jan Egeland, who had called the overall aid efforts by rich Western nations "stingy." "The person...

UN's Jan Egeland quickly backpedaled from his assertion Monday that wealthy nations -- which pay his salary and fund his work -- are "stingy" when it comes to aiding the relief effort following Asia's deadly tsunami. No lie. As President Bush noted Wednesday, the United States contributed 40 percent of aid relief for the world's emergencies in 2004. To be fair, Egeland didn't single out the United States as "stingy." What he said was: "(I)t is remarkable that we have no country up to the 1 percent line of foreign assistance in general and we have, I think, three Scandinavians...

For some people, and some countries, the US can do no right. In the wake of the tsunami and earthquakes in South Asia, critics wasted no time in referring to US aid as "stingy" and "delayed." Even though the US began with an initial aid package of about $35 million, while still trying to assess the need and organize for a much greater commitment, the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.