A round-up of today's other stories in brief
Slovak government gets go-ahead
BRATISLAVA – Slovakia’s new centre-right government won a parliamentary confidence vote yesterday, giving it a mandate to tighten fiscal policy and fight corruption.
Prime minister Iveta Radicova’s government received 79 votes in the 150-seat chamber, where the four-party coalition – her Christian Democrats, a second Christian Democrat party, a party of economic liberals and an ethnic Hungarian party – holds a majority. Sixty-six deputies voted against the motion.
The euro zone’s newest and poorest member pledged to cut its fiscal gap by 2.5 percentage points next year from 7-8 per cent of GDP expected in 2010. Reducing deficits has become a theme in the euro zone, which Bratislava joined in January last year. – (Reuters)
Palestinians may talk to Israelis
JERUSALEM – US envoy George Mitchell resumed his push for direct Middle East peace talks yesterday with signs from Palestinian leaders that they might bow to pressure and agree to meet the Israelis face-to-face.
Mr Mitchell was due to meet Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to address questions from both before returning home today.
The stalled peace process resumed in May after an 18-month hiatus, but only with indirect “proximity talks”, in which Mr Mitchell acts as a shuttling, third-party diplomat. President Barack Obama has said he wants direct talks to resume by September before a partial moratorium on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank expires. – (Reuters)
Fire breaks out at Nazi death camp
WARSAW – A fire has swept through a barrack at the former Nazi death camp of Majdanek in Poland, destroying more than half the building and possibly 10,000 shoes of Holocaust victims.
Officials at the Majdanek museum said the fire in the barrack housing a camp kitchen was discovered shortly before midnight on Monday by a guard.
The cause of the fire is not yet known and authorities are investigating.
In Israel, the director of the Yad Vashem museum, Avner Shalev, expressed sorrow that the historic site and valuable artefacts had been damaged or destroyed.
An estimated 80,000 people, including some 60,000 Jews, were killed at the SS-run Majdanek camp in occupied Poland between October 1941 and July 1944. – (Reuters)