WAUKESHA, Wisconsin (AFP) ― Republican candidate Mitt Romney vowed to restore American strength and avert “fiscal calamity” Sunday, as his re-energized presidential campaign drew a furious Democratic response.With campaign battle lines re-forming, surrogates for President Barack Obama took to Sunday talk shows to cast Romney and his new running mate, Paul Ryan, as bent on dismantling cherished entitlements like public health insurance and pensions for seniors.But Romney and Ryan sought to portra

After reading a news report on how rogue operators in China marinated pork in banned chemicals to pass off as beef, which costs more, Wu Heng felt sick.It dawned on the IT marketing executive that the cheap and good 10 yuan ($1.60) beef rice he had been eating almost every day for half a year was in fact contaminated pork.“My roommate had warned me it didn’t taste like beef. And that beef couldn’t be that cheap. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know there could be such a thing as fake beef,” said t

Group sees unfettered urbanization and political gridlock as main factorsThere was no storm over Metro Manila last week. But why was there so much rain? Why was the flooding so severe?Those were the questions asked by Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan, CEO of the environmental group Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Philippines.Filipinos, not the monsoon rains, are to blame for the deluge that paralyzed the metropolitan area of 14 million residents last week, according to Tan.In an analysis, Tan said the late

NEW YORK (AP) ― Time editor-at-large and CNN host Fareed Zakaria has been suspended by both the magazine and the network for lifting several paragraphs by another writer for his use in a recent Time column. Zakaria apologized Friday, declaring in a statement he made “a terrible mistake,” adding, “It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault.”In a separate statement, Time spokesman Ali Zelenko said the magazine accepts Zakaria’s apology, but would suspend his column for one month, “pen

Increased rhinoceros poaching in South Africa has authorities scrambling to combat the often-deadly practice, officials said.So far this year in South Africa, 281 rhinos were killed for their horns, up from the 13 dead rhinos found in 2007, SpiegelONLINE reported Sunday.After poachers obtain the horns, they smuggle them out of South Africa and into countries such as Vietnam, Laos and China, where they are made into a powder some believe can cure illnesses from cancer to malaria.Authorities in So

Egytpian President Mohamed Morsi (AFP-Yonhap News)Egypt's Islamist president ordered the retirement of the defense minister and chief of staff on Sunday and made the boldest move so far to seize back powers that the military stripped from his office right before he took over. Mohammed Morsi has been locked in a power struggle with the military since he took office on June 30. But after militants k

KARACHI (AFP) ― When South Asia’s nuclear rivals celebrate 65 years of independence this week, a deaf and mute Indian woman stranded in Pakistan will be thinking of only one thing: how to get home to see her family.Geeta, now 21, was found by police 13 years ago, sitting alone and disorientated on a train that had come across the border into Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore.As no one claimed her, officers took Geeta to the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s largest and best-known charity, in whose car

HAVANA (AFP) ― Fidel Castro, who led Cuba for a half century and became known worldwide for decades of Cold War-era clashing with the United States, will celebrate his 86th birthday Monday far from the limelight.Officially, there are no plans to publicly honor the communist country’s one-time “commander-in-chief,” who tightly orchestrated public life there from January 1959 until he suffered a health crisis in 2006 and delegated his duties to his brother Raul Castro.On Monday, youth organization