SYDNEY, Nov 22 - After months of political haggling the Australian government will unveil its revised carbon trading laws this week, with a vote expected by the year’s final day of parliament on Thursday.
If the emissions trading scheme (ETS) is rejected by a hostile Senate for a second time, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would have a trigger for a snap election on climate change.
Rudd’s Labour government has a commanding lead in opinion polls over the Liberal Party. Elections are due in late 2010.
LONDON, Nov 22 — Britain’s Labour Party has slashed the main opposition Conservative Party’s opinion poll lead to six points, giving the government its best showing in almost a year as voter confidence in the economy recovers.
The Ipsos Mori survey in today’s Observer newspaper showed Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party on 31 per cent, the centre-right Conservatives on 37 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 17 per cent.
Labour’s recovery points to the narrowest gap between the two main parties in any survey since last December, and would result in a hung parliament if replicated in a parliamentary election ? the first since 1974.
HEGANG (China), Nov 22 — The death toll from China’s latest coal mine disaster reached 87 as hopes dimmed today that more survivors would be found a day after a gas blast at a colliery in the country’s far northeast.
Xinhua news agency reported 528 workers were in the mine, at Hegang in Heilongjiang province, at the time of the blast, and 420 had been rescued by today. Some 21 miners remained trapped or unaccounted for.
GAZA, Nov 22 — Israeli planes carried out air strikes against targets in the Gaza Strip today, injuring seven Palestinians, Palestinian medical workers said.
An army spokesman said the strikes, which occurred after a rocket fired from the Hamas-run enclave landed in Israel, had targeted two factories in the central and northern Gaza used to make weapons and a smuggling tunnel under the border with Egypt.
Palestinian witnesses and medical workers said the targets included a metal foundry in the central Gaza Strip, a caravan in the north and smuggling tunnels in the south.
CUCUTA, Colombia, Nov 22 — Colombian President Alvaro Uribe yesterday ruled out any military retaliation against Venezuela after Venezuelan troops dynamited two cross-border footbridges.
“The fellow republic of Venezuela will never hear any aggression from the people or the government of Colombia,” Uribe said at an event in the border town of Cucuta. “We will never restrict our frontier to our Venezuelan brothers.”
Venezuela says its troops this week blew up two illegal footbridges that cross over the border because they had been used by drug traffickers and smugglers.
Colombia criticised the action as an aggression and said it would denounce it before the United Nations and the Organization of American States.
