ECUADOR
Clinton calls for more taxes on rich
QUITO | Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Latin American nations Tuesday to impose heavier tax burdens on the wealthy, saying the region’s economic growth and competitiveness depend on it.
Mrs. Clinton said in a speech in the Ecuadorean capital that tax evasion among the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere is unacceptably high and hurts efforts to build badly needed infrastructure like roads, bridges and power plants. She said it also is keeping countries in the Americas from reducing poverty and improving health care.
“Despite progress in some places, tax and budget systems are ineffective and inefficient in much of the hemisphere,” she said, noting that in many countries the burden falls too heavily on lower classes.
“But, in many places, it is also a simple fact that the wealthy do not pay their fair share. We can’t mince words about this. Levels of tax evasion are unacceptably high — as much or more than 50 percent in some of the region’s economies when it comes to personal income tax,” she said.
Mrs. Clinton has made tax equity a theme in recent speeches in Washington and overseas. She made her latest comments on the second leg of a four-nation tour of Latin America and the Caribbean. She has been to Peru and will visit Colombia on Wednesday and Barbados on Thursday.
PERU
Dutchman confesses to killing woman
LIMA | Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, long the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of a U.S. teen in Aruba, has confessed to killing a young Peruvian woman in his Lima hotel room last week, a police spokesman said.
Peru’s chief police spokesman, Col. Abel Gamarra, told the Associated Press that Mr. van der Sloot admitted under police questioning Monday that he killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores on May 30.
The broadcaster America Television reported that Mr. van der Sloot killed Miss Flores in a rage after learning that she had looked up information about his past on his laptop. It said it had access to details of the confession but did not cite its source.
Col. Gamarra would not provide details of the confession.
SWITZERLAND
Lawmakers reject UBS-taxes deal
GENEVA | Switzerland’s efforts to calm a banking furor hit a major setback Tuesday as nationalist and left-wing lawmakers blocked a treaty with the United States that would have allowed UBS to hand over thousands more files on its American clients to U.S. tax authorities.
The Swiss government and Washington had painstakingly crafted the treaty in August to resolve a long-standing dispute over the bank’s role in aiding tax evasion, but 104 lawmakers in Switzerland’s lower house voted against the deal Tuesday, compared with 76 in favor. Sixteen lawmakers abstained.
The government had urged lawmakers to approve the deal to avert harm to the Swiss economy, which is heavily dependent on the country’s banking industry.
The deal is crucial to UBS — the country’s largest bank — which has faced intense pressure from U.S. authorities since 2007.
CROATIA
Croatia, Serbia sign defense deal
ZAGREB | Croatia and Serbia on Tuesday signed a landmark deal on defense cooperation, another sign of improvement in ties between the former foes since the 1991-95 war.
“The agreement will encourage not only better cooperation between our armies and defense ministries but also further normalization of ties between Croatia and Serbia,” Croat Defense Minister Branko Vukelic told journalists.
“It is a step forward towards stabilization — of the whole region — a precondition for progress and better life for all people,” he said after signing the deal with his Serbian counterpart, Dragan Sutanovac.
CHINA
Government to keep censoring Internet
BEIJING | China vowed Tuesday to keep a tight grip on the Internet, saying it would continue to block anything considered subversive or threatening to “national unity.”
The “white paper” statement of government policy was released three months after a public dispute over censorship prompted Google Inc. to shut its mainland-based search engine.
It said there were 384 million Internet users in China at the end of 2009, about 29 percent of the population. The government aims to boost that to 45 percent in the next five years by pushing into rural areas where the white paper said there was a “digital gap.”
It said the Internet had taken an “irreplaceable role in accelerating the development of the national economy” and would continue to impact daily work, education and lifestyles.
• From wire dispatches and staff reports
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