Category: People

{{U.S. magazine Time has named Russian President Vladimir Putin on its annual list of the world’s “100 most influential people.}}

Other politicians who made the Time list published this week included U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who provided the write-up on Putin, said Russia’s recent interference in Ukraine has shown that “Putin’s worldview is colored by toxic fictions.”

Putin’s domestic approval ratings have soared after the annexation of Crimea — reaching 80 percent according to a recent survey by independent pollster Levada Center — but “his increased influence will be temporary,” Albright said.

“To some, Putin has ‘won’ Crimea,” she said. “Will he recognize his ‘victory’ is Pyrrhic — or try to repeat it? History is filled with aggressors who triumphed for a moment. Then failed.”

Former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, speaking Thursday in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, suggested that Moscow’s supposed victory in Crimea may end up eroding Russia’s global influence, and that Putin’s actions in Ukraine aimed to “avenge a personal grudge.”

Last year, both Forbes magazine and British newspaper The Times named Putin “the most influential person of the year.”

Neither Putin nor Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev made Time magazine’s 2013 list, with Rosneft chief executive Igor Sechin the only Russian on the list.

{{A planned visit by the Dalai Lama has Oslo torn between its will to warm up frozen ties with China and warnings from the public not to compromise its stance on human rights.}}

Rather than rolling out the red carpet, the Norwegian authorities seem more inclined to make the Tibetan spiritual leader enter through the back door when he arrives on 7 May for the 25th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize.

“We must be aware that, if the Norwegian authorities receive the Dalai Lama, it will be more complicated to normalise our relations,” Foreign Minister Boerge Brende said in parliament this week.

The attribution of the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010 revived the long-forgotten anger that Beijing expressed when the Tibetan leader received it, bringing bilateral relations to a new low and prompting Chinese leaders to freeze high-level contacts with their Norwegian counterparts.

Oslo’s attempts to normalise relations with the world’s second largest economy have since proven fruitless, as China wants to set an example to deter other countries.

{{On Wednesday, China issued a new warning.}}

“We are firmly opposed to other countries providing a platform for the Dalai Lama’s activities that aim at dividing China, and we oppose foreign leaders meeting him,” foreign ministry spokesperson Qin Gang said.

In order to prevent any escalation, the president of the Norwegian parliament Olemic Thommessen – second only to the king in Norway’s protocol – said he would not meet the Tibetan leader, who was received by Barack Obama last month in the White House.

“Our possibilities to promote these values that are so dear to us don’t benefit from maintaining such a hopeless situation as the one we find ourselves in now,” Thommessen told public broadcaster NRK on Tuesday.

Brende said that no decision had been made regarding a possible meeting between a member of the government and the Dalai Lama, with the ministry stressing that the visit is “private”.

{{‘Empty words’}}

The fact that Brende and Thommessen are former leaders of the parliamentary committee for Tibet, the latter as recently as last year, added to the controversy.

As Norway prepares to celebrate the bicentennial of its constitution on 17 May, several commentators accused its leaders of betraying Norwegian values and letting China dictate their policy.

“The contrast is huge with all the beautiful words the president of the Parliament and others use in this jubilee year,” said Harald Stanghelle, editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, the most respected Norwegian daily, who criticised the authorities’ “cowardice”.

“Words like democracy and independence, freedom of speech and human rights. The announced visit of the Tibetan [leader] proves that these are but empty words.”

According to a survey published by the Verdens Gang tabloid, 60% of Norwegians think that the government should meet the Dalai Lama and 50% said it would be “cowardly” not to do it out of consideration for Beijing.

Only 20% Thommessen’s stand.

“I don’t feel guilty of being cowardly or pathetic,” Thommessen said.

“It is just about assuming one’s responsibilities to … actually improve the chances to work for the values, especially human rights, that we hold dear.”

The current chairperson of the parliamentary committee for Tibet, Ketil Kjenseth, lamented the authorities’ efforts to soothe Beijing.

“In Tibet, the situation in terms of human rights hasn’t changed an inch, but our economic dependence on China got in the way,” he told media, adding that he was determined to receive the Dalai Lama in parliament.

Despite the freeze in diplomatic relations, bilateral trade climbed to a record high last year.

Highlighting the importance of symbols in diplomatic protocol, Kjenseth has not been authorised to hold the meeting in the room he initially suggested.

Among the solutions suggested by the presidency was a room in the basement.

It has also been suggested that the Dalai Lama not use the main entrance to the building, an idea that has brewed up a storm among critics.

– AFP

{{The Sri Lankan authorities have ordered the deportation of a British tourist because of a Buddha tattoo on her arm.}}

Named as Naomi Michelle Coleman, she arrived on a flight from India on Monday and was arrested at the airport after the tattoo of the Buddha and a lotus flower on her right arm was seen.

She is being held at an immigration detention camp until her deportation.

The authorities are tough on perceived insults to Buddhism, the religion of the island’s majority ethnic Sinhalese.

Sri Lanka is particularly sensitive about images of Buddha. The authorities regularly take strict action with regard to the treatment of the image.

Last March another British tourist was denied entry at Colombo’s international airport because immigration officials said he had spoken “disrespectfully” when asked about a tattoo of the Buddha on his arm.

He later spoke of his “shock” at the incident, insisting that he himself followed Buddhist teachings and thought a tattoo was an apt tribute.

Two years ago, three French tourists were given suspended prison sentences for kissing a Buddha statue.

The UK travel advice on Sri Lanka warns of the sensitivity of the issue and tells visitors not to pose for photos in front of statues of Buddha.

Over the past year monks belonging to certain hardline Buddhist groups have led violent attacks against Muslims and Christians, a trend which has given rise to considerable concern among religious minorities in Sri Lanka.

{wirestory}

{{Garcia Marquez a Colombian author died at his home in Mexico City, where he had returned from hospital last week after a bout of pneumonia.}}

Marquez was a prolific writer who started out as a newspaper reporter, Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece was “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a dream-like, dynastic epic that helped him win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Known affectionately to friends and fans as “Gabo,” Garcia Marquez was Latin America’s best-known and most beloved author and his books have sold in the tens of millions.

Although he produced stories, essays and several short novels such as “Leaf Storm” and “No One Writes to the Colonel” early in his career, he struggled for years to find his voice as a novelist.

He then found it in dramatic fashion with “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” an instant success on publication in 1967. Mexican author Carlos Fuentes dubbed it “Latin America’s Don Quixote” and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda also compared it to Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th century tour de force.

Garcia Marquez’s novel tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo, based on the languid town of Aracataca close to Colombia’s Caribbean coast where he was born on March 6, 1927, and raised by his maternal grandparents.

In it, Garcia Marquez combines miraculous and supernatural events with the details of everyday life and the political realities of Latin America. The characters are visited by ghosts, a plague of insomnia envelops Macondo, swarms of yellow butterflies mark the arrival of a woman’s lover, a child is born with a pig’s tail and a priest levitates above the ground.

At times comical and bawdy, and at others tragic, it sold over 30 million copies, was published in dozens of languages and helped fuel a boom in Latin American fiction.

A stocky man with a quick smile, thick mustache and curly hair, Garcia Marquez said he found inspiration for the novel by drawing on childhood memories of his grandmother’s stories – laced with folklore and superstition but delivered with the straightest of faces.

“She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness,” he said in a 1981 interview. “I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself, and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”

Although “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was his most popular creation, other classics from Garcia Marquez included “Autumn of the Patriarch”, “Love in the Time of Cholera” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”.

Tributes poured in following his death.

“The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers – and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” said U.S. President Barack Obama.

“Your life, dear Gabo, will be remembered by all of us as a unique and singular gift, and as the most original story of all,” Colombian pop star Shakira wrote on her website alongside a photograph of her hugging Garcia Marquez.

In Aracataca, a lone trumpet played on Thursday night as residents held a candlelight vigil for the man who made the town famous.

additional reporting Reuters

{{Police in Argentina say they have rescued a 15-year-old girl who had been starved, beaten and kept in a garage for nine years by her foster parents.}}

The girl weighed only 20 kilos (44 pounds), and said she had been fed only bread and water in her captivity.

Her only company had been that of a dog and a monkey, and she said she was beaten with a belt if she tried to eat the leftover food thrown to the pets.

Her carers have been arrested and charged with slavery and abuse.

The teenager was found in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, by one of her biological sisters, who had lost track of her.

The girl, who has been hospitalised, said she had been out of the garage only twice in nine years.

According to officials, her foster parents took the girl into care provisionally in 2001 after a court found that her biological parents, who had seven more children, were financially unable to look after her.

At first, the two families kept in contact, but it is unclear what happened after 2005 and why her biological family reportedly lost track of the girl.

Her foster parents were waiting for the girl’s adoption papers to be finalised.