The Whole Delivery

The top international news today has clearly been the little old dictator getting ready to give his son that same position : North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has apparently named his third son, Kim Jong-un, believed to be 27, as a four-star general in the military ahead of the country's biggest political convention in three decades, making his hereditary succession plan official for the first time, Yonhap news reported. The announcement was made in the dispatch of Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the state news agency of North Korea, on the opening day of the biggest Workers' Party convention since 1980. The announcement is the first mention by name in the state's official media of Kim Jong-il's third son. Picture President Obama firing Mike Bloomberg in NYC, Menino in Boston, or Daley in Chicago. Well, that's what has transpired today in Moscow, as President Medvedev has fired the city's long time mayor Yury Luzhkov . And he appears to do it without P...

Photo from AfricanNews.com The tensions are arising in Somalian again, as the government looks set to take on the Islamic forces in the South with the aid of Kenya and Ethiopia (through Germany's money) training them : The second front against Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam rebels in south and central Somalia will take place before the end of the year. Foreign-trained Somali forces will try to take over towns including the port of Kismayo which is the "key to handicap all the financial resources of the war they conducted," Sharmarke told reporters. Now the news is breaking on a suicide bomber striking the Presidential compound in the capital of Mogadishu. The Atlas will certainly keep its eye on that story. The right leaning government in power in almost half-impoverished Columbia and its rival leftist militants continue to add in their boiling tension . Conflict is also going down between Japan and China, as the Japanese continue to hold a Chinese trawler capta...

What a surprise, a corrupt election seems to be a foot in Afghanistan yet again . The sale of thousands of fake voter registration cards threatens the credibility of Afghanistan's forthcoming parliamentary elections. Al Jazeera correspondent Sue Turton, reporting from Afghanistan, said sources told her the fake cards were printed in Pakistan and were being sold in Afghanistan for just over three US dollars apiece. One of the agents selling the professionally made cards told Al Jazeera that his network has sold 1.5 million cards over the past three month, and his is just one network of many selling the fraudulent cards. About five million people are expected to vote in Saturday's elections. Stage 2 of France raising their retirement age pension plan is complete , and it really is not a happy sight at all for the proletariat. Somalia's top government officials are bickering over ratifying a new Constitution . About time UN : UNITED NATIONS: UN Secretary-Genera...