Author: admin

UN chief Ban Ki-moon will on Monday present a report on Syria’s chemical weapons, increasing pressure on the Assad regime, as support grows for a US-Russian initiative to avert war.

Ban will unveil the findings of a UN investigation team to the UN Security Council in New York at 11:15am (1515 GMT). He has already revealed that he expects the report to provide “overwhelming” confirmation that chemical arms were used in an attack near Damascus on August 21 in which hundreds died.

The Russia-US accord on the dismantling of Syria’s chemical stockpile will also weigh heavily on Security Council consultations expected to be called Monday.

International support for the initiative is growing, even as Washington and Paris warned that military action remains an option.

A Syrian minister insisted Sunday that the US-Russia deal represented a “victory” for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

“On one hand, it helps the Syrians emerge from the crisis and on the other it has allowed for averting war against Syria,” Minister of State for National Reconciliation Ali Haidar told Russian news agency Ria Novosti of the deal.

“It’s a victory for Syria that was achieved thanks to our Russian friends.”

His remarks came as US Secretary of State John Kerry met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to brief him on the plan and emerged with a word of warning for Damascus.

“The threat of force remains, the threat is real,” Kerry said at a joint news conference in Jerusalem with Netanyahu.

Washington is seeking to bolster international support for the agreement signed in Geneva on Saturday, which demands rapid action from Damascus.

The ambitious plan to dismantle and destroy Syria’s chemical arms stockpile – one of the largest in the world – by mid-2014 was thrashed out over three days in Geneva between Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov.

It gives Assad a week to hand over details of his regime’s arsenal of the internationally banned arms in order to avert unspecified sanctions and the threat of US-led military strikes.

{wirestory}

{{South Korean workers have returned to the Kaesong industrial park in North Korea, five months after work was halted amid high political tension.}}

Trucks and cars began crossing the border into North Korea at exactly 08:00 (23:00 GMT Sunday).

More than 800 South Koreans were due to cross to the jointly-run centre for what is being called a trial restart.

The zone, just inside North Korea, is home to 123 South Korean factories that employ more than 50,000 North Koreans.

It is the last functioning inter-Korean joint project and a key source of revenue for Pyongyang.

But the North withdrew all of its workers in April, as ties between the two Koreas deteriorated in the wake of Pyongyang’s 12 February nuclear test.

Reopening the complex has taken months of negotiation.

agencies

{{The Netherlands is slated to close eight prisons because of a lack of criminals, the Dutch justice ministry has announced.}}

Declining crime rates in the Netherlands mean that although the country has the capacity for 14,000 prisoners, there are only 12,000 detainees, reported the nrc.nl.

The decrease is expected to continue, the ministry said, with Deputy justice minister Nebahat Albayrak saying that natural redundancy and other measures should counter any forced lay-offs.

{{Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen met the country’s main opposition leader on Monday after violence broke out at a rally the previous day to protest July’s contested general election result and one man was shot dead.}}

At least 1,000 protesters were camped out in the rain in makeshift tents in Freedom Park in the capital Phnom Penh late on Sunday and many remained on Monday in a tense standoff.

The electoral authorities say Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which has been in power for 28 years, won the election, but the opposition claims the CPP rigged the vote and wants an independent inquiry.

Clashes broke out in several places in Phnom Penh on Sunday as supporters of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) tried to remove razor-wire barricades and refused to restrict their protest to a designated site in Freedom Park.

Chan Soveth, a worker for human rights group Adhoc, said a man was shot in the head and died when CNRP supporters tried to move razor-wire barricades set up by the authorities in the Kbal Thnal Bridge area near their party headquarters.

He said the man was not a political protester but someone who lived in the area and was among a group of local residents angry that they could not reach their homes.

Chan Soveth said he had visited five other people in hospital who had been hit by live rounds. “These bullets came from where the authorities were,” he told Reuters.

Kheng Tito, National Military Police spokesman, said police had used only teargas, batons and smoke grenades and he could not say how the man died.

“I don’t know how he was killed. We didn’t use live bullets,” he said.

The capital has been tense since the election on July 28 but protests were mostly calm until this weekend and the security forces, prone to cracking down on dissent in the past, had also been restrained.

King Norodom Sihamoni summoned Hun Sen and CNRP leader Sam Rainsy to a meeting on Saturday morning but it lasted just 30 minutes and apparently produced no results.

wirestory