Calderon names Cabinet members
President-elect Felipe Calderon on Tuesday named a University of Chicago-trained economist as finance minister and announced five additional Cabinet members, the core of an economic team endorsing free-market policies as the solution to Mexico’s ills.
In a widely anticipated move, Calderon selected Agustin Carstens, a former official with the International Monetary Fund, to become Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. Treasury secretary. Carstens has pledged to keep government spending in check and endorses job creation as the way to reduce Mexico’s grinding poverty.
“This is exactly what Wall Street was asking for,” said Alberto Bernal-Leon, an emerging-markets economist with Bear Stearns in New York.
Bernal-Leon and other analysts praised Calderon’s team as technically skilled and more politically savvy than that of Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox.
Gaza City, Gaza Strip
Kidnapped aid workers released
Two Italian Red Cross workers kidnapped at gunpoint in Gaza Tuesday afternoon were released shortly after midnight, Palestinian security officials said.
The kidnappings prompted the aid group to suspend all of its operations in Gaza as a security precaution.
The was no immediate word on the identity of the kidnappers, whose actions were the latest in a string of abductions of foreigners in the lawless area. The security officials said the releases came without meeting any demands of the abductors.
Over the past two years, there has been a rash of kidnappings of foreign aid workers and journalists in Gaza, usually by groups or families pressing the government for money or job guarantees. In most cases, the hostages were quickly released. None have been seriously harmed.
Warsaw
Mine explosion kills 8, traps 15
Eight coal miners were killed after a suspected gas explosion in a mine in southern Poland on Tuesday, and fears were growing as rescuers tried to reach 15 others trapped more than 3,000 underground.
The accident occurred as the men were demolishing a wall in an underground corridor at the Halemba coal mine in the city of Ruda Slaska, said Southern Mining Co., which operates the mine.
“Eight are dead,” said Jan Sienkiewicz, spokesman for the Halemba mine.
The men were among a group of 31 miners who had been removing equipment from a shaft that had been closed for mining because it had been deemed too dangerous, said Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who flew to the mine and met with rescuers. He said eight miners had managed to escape.
Zbigniew Madej, a spokesman for Southern Mining Co., said rescue workers were digging their way through 500 yards of rubble in the hope of finding survivors.