International human rights organizations Human Rights Watch (HRW)  and Avaaz have launched a campaign to pressure the EU to ban imports of Syrian oil, the sake of which they say directly funds the regime’s brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protestors.

HRW sent a letter to the EU High Representative and foreign ministers of the 27 member states on August 13 urging the EU to freeze the assets of the Syrian National Oil Company, Syrian National Gas Company and the Central Bank of Syria “until the Syrian government ends gross human rights abuses against its citizens”.

While most of Syria’s oil production is used for its own consumption, 95 percent of oil exported goes to Europe, mainly Germany, Holland, France and Italy, all of whom have denounced the violence in Syria, but have yet to leverage their trade with Syria in order to end the crackdown.

HRW said local human rights activists reported at least 231 anti-government protesters and other civilians have been killed in August so far. The confirmed death toll of civilians is now over 2,000, while several hundred members of the security forces have also been killed since the uprising began six months ago.

“Syria’s authorities are still killing their own people despite multiple efforts by other countries, including former allies, to make them stop,” Lotte Leicht, EU director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement Tuesday “It’s time to show the government that Europeans won’t help to fund its repression.”

Unrest across the Middle East. Surging oil prices. Persistenly high U.S. unemployment.

What else could derail the global economy?

How about a banking crisis in China?

Fitch Ratings says there's a 60 percent chance of that happening by mid-2013.

The toxic financial combination in China, according to Fitch: surging property prices (see, in particular, Shanghai), and a record amount of lending over the past two years ($2.7 trillion) fuled in part by the Chinese government's stimulus program Beijing enacted during the global economic crisis.

Fitch sees the risk of “holes in bank balance sheets” should a property bubble burst, Richard Fox, a London-based senior director, told Bloomberg on Mar. 4. “We’re talking about systemic crises here, affecting most of the major banks,” Fox added. “A crisis is something which technically de-capitalizes the banking system.”

This isn't the first time Fitch has warned of trouble ahead in China.

As reported by GlobalPost's David Case, Fitch first pointed to the problem in December: