Author: Publisher

{{Pakistani Taliban have said they were behind an attack at the country’s largest airport that killed at least 28 people, including 10 militants.}}

The raid began late on Sunday at a terminal used for cargo and VIP flights at Karachi international airport.

Following reports of fresh violence early on Monday, airport officials said the siege was now over and flights were set to resume in the afternoon.

Karachi has been a target for many attacks by the Taliban.

A spokesman for the group, Shahidullah Shahid, said Monday’s assault was “a message to the Pakistan government that we are still alive to react over the killings of innocent people in bomb attacks on their villages”.

The dead terminal staff were said to be mostly security guards from the Airport Security Force (ASF) but also airline workers. At least 14 people were wounded.

Analysts say the attack further undermines Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s attempt at initiating peace talks with the Taliban.

The negotiations have made little headway since February. Critics have argued that they could allow the militants to regroup and gain strength.

{{The kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls and several recent horrific murders of women is expected to raise pressure on the world community to take concrete action to punish those responsible for sexual violence at a global summit in London this week.}}

Invited by Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie and British Foreign Secretary William Hague, government ministers, military and judicial leaders and aid workers from about 150 nations will join the first global summit to end sexual violence in conflict.

The June 10-13 summit follows a run of shocking cases of violence against women including the kidnap of schoolgirls by Islamist Boko Haram, the stoning to death of a pregnant woman in Pakistan in a so-called “honour killing”, and the gang-rape and murder of two Indian teenagers who were hanged from a tree.

Hague said too often those who committed these crimes never faced justice and the summit would agree the first international protocol on how to document and investigate sexual violence in conflicts.

“Often it is the lack of evidence that means that these things go unpunished,” Hague told Sky television on Sunday.

“Now this will lead to prosecutions. None of this will be achieved overnight but this is a problem which has been getting worse in recent decades and is utterly unacceptable in the 21st century.”

The conference, with 1,200 attendees including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, will be co-hosted by Hague and Jolie, special envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who joined forces in 2012 to tackle rape and sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Oscar-winner Jolie’s involvement in humanitarian issues dates back to 2001 when she travelled to Sierra Leone as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and was horrified to see the impact of years of civil war when an estimated 60,000 women were raped.

reuters

{{Pope Francis has told Israeli and Palestinian leaders they “must respond” to their people’s yearning for peace “undaunted in dialogue” during an unprecedented prayer meeting among Jews, Christians and Muslims at the Vatican on Sunday.}}

The pope made his vibrant appeal to Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas at the end of a two-hour evening service in the Vatican gardens, an encounter he hopes will relaunch the Middle East peace process.

“Peacemaking calls for courage, much more so than warfare. It calls for the courage to say yes to encounter and no to conflict; yes to dialogue and no to violence; yes to negotiations and no to hostilities,” he said.

The pope spoke after Jewish rabbis, Christian cardinals and Muslim Imams read and chanted from the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran in Italian, English, Hebrew and Arabic in the first such inter-religious event in the Vatican.

At times the chanting made it seem that participants were in a synagogue or outside a mosque in the Middle East rather than a primly manicured triangular lawn, a spot the Vatican chose as a “neutral” site with no religious symbols.

In his strong speech in Italian, Francis called for respect for agreements and rejection of acts of provocation. “All of this takes courage, it takes strength and tenacity,” he said.

Francis, who made the surprise invitation to the two leaders during his trip to the Holy Land last month, said that the search for peace was “an act of supreme responsibility before our consciences and before our peoples” and noted that millions around the world of all faiths were praying with them for peace.

reuters

{{Kosovo’s ruling party of Prime Minister Hashim Thaci claimed a third term on Sunday in an election marked by a low turnout among Kosovars frustrated with widespread poverty and corruption.}}

With votes from 70% of polling stations counted, Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) held 30%, ahead of its arch rival in the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) with 26%.

Thaci is likely to form a coalition government with smaller parties and ethnic Serbs to secure his third four-year term in power, but his reliance on others could hamper his ability to govern effectively.

Turnout of only 43%, down from the two previous parliamentary elections, reflected widespread frustration among the Balkan country’s 1.8 million people at the lack of progress made since Thaci presided over the territory’s secession from Serbia in 2008.

“Tonight, Kosovo has won. From tomorrow we will start work on our new mission,” Thaci told supporters in the capital, Pristina. “We will tell the world that Kosovo’s independence was just the beginning, not the end.”

Fifteen years since breaking away in war, Kosovo ranks among Europe’s poorest countries. A third of the workforce is unemployed and corruption is rife.

agencies