Protesters have marched to the headquarters of Brazil’s state-run petroleum company Petrobras after it won the right to develop an offshore field that could contain 12 billion barrels of oil.
A consortium that includes Petrobras, Shell, Total and two Chinese firms successfully bid for the rights at an auction, Brazil’s government announced on Monday.
Five people were reported hurt as union workers opposed to the auctioning off of national assets to foreign companies clashed with police in Rio de Janeiro.
More than 1,000 police were called in and responded with tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets after about 200 protesters converged on the hotel hosting the action.
The five firms won 35-year concessions, with Petrobras taking a 40 percent stake, more than the minimum required by the terms of Brazil’s offer, which has been controversial at home.
Shell and Total both earned a 20 percent stake with CNOOC and CNPC securing 10 percent each.
Their consortium was the only bid to offer the Brazilian state the minimum 41.65 percent of oil to be extracted from the Libra oil field, which holds an estimated eight to 12 billion barrels of oil.
To put that into context, Brazil currently has 15.3 billion barrels of proven reserves and is already the second-largest in South America after Venezuela.
Rights groups have demanded that the US launch an impartial investigation into its use of drone warfare and that the country publicly disclose any evidence of civilian casualties.
In independent reports published on Tuesday, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said that the US must hold to account those responsible for civilian deaths and be more transparent about its drone programme.
“As evidence emerges of civilian casualties in these strikes, it’s time for the US to stop covering its ears and starting taking action to ensure the programme is legal,” Letta Taylor, senior counterterrorism researcher at HRW told media.
Two recently published UN reports are to be presented to the General Assembly on Friday. Taylor said that the release of the four reports in a brief period “underscores the mounting questions about the legality” of drones.
All four reports demand that the US should provide a full legal rationale for targeted killings.
Polly Truscott, Amnesty International’s deputy Asia-Pacific director, said that while its report focuses on Pakistan, and HRW’s on Yemen, the drones programme “raises the same questions about human rights violations all over the world”.
“Both organisations are calling on the US Congress to fully investigate the cases the we have documented in our reports and other potentially unlawful deaths,” she told Al Jazeera, adding that the group hoped that the US would act immediately on their recommendations.
HRW said that the Yemeni government, which is engaged in a conflict with al-Qaeda, had been “almost as silent” as the US on the death toll caused by air raids.
Caitlin Hayden, a spokesman for the US National Security Council, said that President Barack Obama had outlined the US rational for drone strikes in a May 23 speech.
“The president spoke at length about the policy and legal rationale for how the US takes action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces. As the president emphasised, the use of lethal force, including from remotely piloted aircraft, commands the highest level of attention and care.
“Of particular note, before we take any counterterrorism strike, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.”
She said the US was aware that this report had been released and were reviewing it carefully.
{{Choking smog all but shut down one of northeastern China’s largest cities on Monday, forcing schools to suspended classes, snarling traffic and closing the airport, in the country’s first major air pollution crisis of the winter.}}
An index measuring PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), reached a reading of 1,000 in some parts of Harbin, the gritty capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and home to some 11 million people.
A level above 300 is considered hazardous, while the World Health Organisation recommends a daily level of no more than 20.
The smog not only forced all primary and middle schools to suspend classes, but shut the airport and some public bus routes, the official Xinhua news agency reported, blaming the emergency on the first day of the heating being turned on in the city for winter. Visibility was reportedly reduced to 10 meters.
The smog is expected to continue for the next 24 hours.
Air quality in Chinese cities is of increasing concern to China’s stability-obsessed leadership because it plays into popular resentment over political privilege and rising inequality in the world’s second-largest economy.
Domestic media have run stories describing the expensive air purifiers government officials enjoy in their homes and offices, alongside reports of special organic farms so cadres need not risk suffering from recurring food safety scandals.
The government has announced plans over the years to tackle the pollution problem but has made little apparent progress.
Users of China’s popular Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging site reacted with both anger and bitter sarcasm over Harbin’s air pollution.
In the latest step by authorities to fight unlawful immigration following an anti-migrant riot earlier this month, the city’s police chief said that Moscow police will raid apartments reportedly occupied by illegal migrants every Friday until the end of the year.
The initiative, announced by top cop Anatoly Yakunin on the order of Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, was promptly condemned by the head of Russia’s top migrant organization, who said it would instigate “immigrant phobia” in society. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny also ridiculed it, saying it would breed corruption — and allow illegal migrants to hide.
As the government rolls out more anti-migrant measures in reaction to the riot in Moscow’s Biryulyovo district, nationalists have stepped up their activities as well, with police preventing more than 120 activists, some armed with baseball bats, from raiding residences of migrants outside Moscow over the weekend.
Yakunin told a City Hall meeting Friday that police will “hold a massive crime-prevention operation code-named ‘Signal’ on Fridays,” RIA Novosti reported.
As part of the operation, city police working jointly with vigilantes, private security guards and other law enforcement organizations will raid apartments where migrants are reported to be living and patrol the streets in search for migrants, Yakunin said.
About 130,000 apartments in Moscow are leased illegally, Sobyanin told the meeting, RIA Novosti reported. All of them will be examined by the year’s end, Yakunin said.
Sobyanin asked Yakunin to “reinforce this work.”
“Until we know who lives in our houses, until the major part of them are registered, there will always be serious problems with public order,” the mayor said.
The new police measures were triggered by a riot of more than a thousand local residents and nationalists last weekend in Biryulyovo to protest the stabbing death of 25-year-old Yegor Shcherbakov on Oct. 10. The rioters blamed the killing on a migrant who worked at a local vegetable warehouse.
Police later detained Azeri national Orkhan Zeinalov for the crime, and initially he admitted his guilt but Thursday rescinded the confession. On Saturday, Azerabaijan sent Russia the second of two notes of protest over Russian authorities’ failure to organize a meeting of Azeri diplomats with Zeinalov, Interfax reported.
Muhammad Amin Madzhumder, head of the Russian Migrants Federation, told The Moscow Times on Sunday that he was “disappointed with the initiative” of police to carry out raids on migrants.
“Recently, our authorities have set a course for immigrant phobia,” Madzhumder said.
“Not only the police hold raids, but they take nationalists on them, which is a very dangerous trend,” he said, in an apparent reference to the numerous vigilante groups that participate in raids on residences where illegal migrants supposedly live and report them to police and migration officials.
In one example of cooperation between the authorities and civilians in finding illegal migrants, top Moscow region migration official Oleg Molodiyevsky on Saturday offered to let residents of the local town of Dolgoprudny take part in anti-migrant raids, Interfax reported.
{{European Union foreign ministers have arrived in Luxembourg for talks that will have the Syria conflict high on its agenda.}}
Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, said on Monday that the delegates will discuss how the bloc should act on the issue of Syria’s chemical weapons, political developments and humanitarian crisis.
Western and Arab diplomats have been trying to build support for long-delayed peace talks aimed at bringing together President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and Syria’s opposition.
Nabil el-Araby, the Arab League chief, said in Cairo on Sunday the talks would convene on November 23.
However, Lakhdar Brahimi, the joint UN-Arab League envoy for Syria, said the peace talks were in doubt unless a “credible opposition” agreed to take part.
“There is an agreement to attempt to hold Geneva 2 in November, but the date has not been officially set,” Brahimi said.
“The final date of the conference will be announced at a later time.”
The opposition’s Western and Arab backers are facing resistance from some among the opposition to attending the Geneva talks as long as Assad remains in power.
France summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to protest allegations in Le Monde newspaper about large-scale spying on French citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency.
The allegations that the agency was collecting tens of thousands of French telephone records risked turning into a diplomatic row just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Paris for the start of a European tour over Syria.
“I have immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador and he will be received this morning at the Quai d’Orsay (the French Foreign Ministry),” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters on the sidelines of an EU meeting in Luxembourg.
Earlier, France’s interior minister, Manuel Valls, said Le Monde’s revelations that 70.3 million pieces of French telephone data were recorded by the NSA between Dec 10, 2012 and Jan 8, 2013 were “shocking.”
“If an allied country spies on France or spies on other European countries, that’s totally unacceptable,” Valls told Europe 1 radio.
U.S. Ambassador to France Charles Rivkin declined immediate comment on reports that he had been called in by the French foreign ministry but stressed that U.S.-French ties were close.
“This relationship on a military, intelligence, special forces … level is the best it’s been in a generation,” Rivkin told Reuters as Kerry arrived in Paris.
In July, Paris prosecutors opened a preliminary inquiries into the NSA’s program, known as Prism, after Germany’s Der Spiegel and Britain’s The Guardian revealed wide-scale spying by the agency leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
“We were warned in June (about the program) and we reacted strongly but obviously we need to go further,” Fabius said. “We must quickly assure that these practices aren’t repeated.”
The NSA’s targets appeared to be individuals suspected of links to terrorism, as well as those tied to French business or politics, Le Monde wrote.
The Mexican auto industry is about to go on a $10 billion factory building spree, illustrating the nation’s rising economic challenge to rivals from the United States to China.
Japanese and German auto manufacturers are spearheading the drive, say parts suppliers and researchers who see more auto factories built south of the border than in the United States between now and the end of the decade.
The United States will consume the vast majority of the new cars, but Mexico’s domestic market has rebounded from a long slump, and in a sign of Mexico’s growing global role, auto exports outside of North America will rise faster than those to the United States.
BMW AG, Toyota Motor Corp and Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz are expected to announce at least $2 billion of deals in the next year or two, according to supplier and other industry sources. That’s on top of nearly $6 billion in announced plants by Nissan Motor Co, Honda Motor Co, Mazda Motor Corp and Volkswagen AG.
U.S. automakers, all of whom have been building cars in Mexico since before World War II, will spend another $1 billion or more to upgrade Mexican plants. And Nissan and VW also are considering expansions at existing factories that could total $1 billion or more, according to sources familiar with their plans.
Mexico “is quickly turning into the China of the West,” said Joseph Langley, a senior analyst at Michigan-based research firm IHS Automotive, pointing to Mexico’s low wages, a strong supply base and a global web of free-trade agreements.
Mexican auto exports beyond North America are growing even faster than those within, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. They accounted for nearly 30 percent of the 2.4 million exported last year. Altogether Mexico built 3.0 million cars and trucks, according to Automotive News, compared with 10.4 million in the United States and 2.5 million in Canada.
By 2020, Mexico will have the capacity to build one in every four vehicles in North America, up from one in six in 2012, according to IHS.
The investment shift has implications for auto jobs and labor unions north of the border, particularly in Canada, which will see a 20 percent decline in production, IHS projects. Output will soar 62 percent in Mexico.
U.S. auto production will rise 12 percent, and Detroit-based automakers are expanding domestic production by ramping up the pace at existing factories to as many as three shifts running six days a week, said IHS. By those calculations, Mexico is building more auto plants than in the United States or Canada through 2020.
“It’s all about lower production costs and lower export costs,” said Michael Tracy, principal at the Agile Group, a Michigan-based auto consultancy. “That’s what Canada used to be — the place for low-cost manufacturing and shipping. Now, everybody is targeting Mexico.”
Mexico’s economy is seen growing faster than Brazil’s next year, underscoring the success of Mexico’s export-driven model versus regional economic powerhouse Brazil’s more protectionist policies. The promised auto investment could help Mexico challenge regional dominance by Brazil. Analysts are warning of excess Brazilian auto production capacity within five years.
Suppliers say the Detroit auto makers, with more than half the production capacity in Mexico, have not signaled any plans to expand vehicle output there. But General Motors and Chrysler this year have said they will install additional engine and transmission production capacity in Mexico.
Francois Hollande, France’s president, has said a Roma schoolgirl deported after being forced off a bus full of her classmates may be allowed to come back, but without her family.
Hollande’s comments on Saturday came amid protests by thousands of high school students against Leonarda Dibrani’s deportation which has sparked an outcry in France.
Manuel Valls, the interior minister, has also come under a barrage of criticism over the deportation.
“If she makes a request, and if she wants to continue her studies, she will be given a welcome, but only her,” Hollande said live on television, in his first remarks on the affair that burst into the limelight on Wednesday.
Much of the anger surrounding the 15-year-old has focused on how she was taken off a bus during a school outing earlier this month, before she was deported with her family to Kosovo.
A probe into the deportation published on Saturday found that it was lawful, but that police could have used better judgment in the way they handled it.
Dibrani herself turned down Hollande’s offer, speaking from the town of Mitrovica in Kosovo where she has been living with her family since their deportation on October 9 from the eastern French town of Levier.
“I will not go alone to France, I will not abandon my family. I’m not the only one who has to go to school, there are also my brothers and sisters,” she said.
Her father Resat, 47, added that the family would not be divided and would return to France by any means.
“My children were integrated in France, we continue to fight as my children are strangers here (Kosovo)”, he said.
Dibrani, her parents and five brothers and sisters had lived in France for four years while their asylum bid was processed. It was eventually rejected in the summer.
The Roma, also known as Gypsies, face discrimination across Europe and are widely believed to be the continent’s stateless people.
The premier of Australia’s New South Wales has declared a state of emergency for the next 30 days to give emergency services the authority to force evacuations in areas hit by the worst bushfires in several decades.
Premier Barry O’Farrell told local media that the measure would be implemented across the state on Sunday, as hotter and drier than expected weather conditions fanned huge fires in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
Australian fire crews stepped up containment efforts around several major bushfires with the weather forecast to deteriorate and officials warning of “unparallelled” danger from the worst conditions in 40 years.
More than 200 homes have already been destroyed and another 120 damaged by the fires which broke out across New South Wales state earlier this week, fanned by extremely high winds.
The worst of the fires, in the Blue Mountains, plunged Sydney into an eerie midday darkness as plumes of smoke and ash filled the sky.
One man has died so far trying to protect his property.
Firefighters had a reprieve on Friday and Saturday with an easing in the weather, but containment and property protection efforts were ramped up on Sunday ahead of a forecast deterioration in conditions set to include warmer temperatures and 100kph winds.
‘Unprecedented conditions’
NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said there would be several extremely difficult days ahead for fire crews, with conditions unprecedented in their danger to property and life.
“We’ve got what would be unparallelled in terms of risk and exposure for the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury communities throughout this week,” Fitzsimmons told reporters.
“If you are to draw a parallel, and it’s always dangerous to draw a parallel, at best you’d be going back to time periods in the late 60s.”
“The reality is, however, these conditions that we’re looking at are a whole new ball-game and in a league of their own.
An emergency warning was issued for the Blue Mountains village of Bell on Sunday morning, with residents urged to evacuate if they were able or “take shelter in a solid structure when the fire front arrives”.
A total fire ban was in place in the Greater Sydney and three other regions across the state until further notice.
Assistant police commissioner Alan Clarke said mandatory evacuation orders would be enforced in some areas, describing the risk as “far more extreme” than in past fires.
{{At least 43 people have been killed after a suicide bomber blew up a truck laden with explosives at an army checkpoint in Syria’s central city of Hama, according to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.}}
The man blew himself up inside the vehicle on Sunday on a busy road on the outskirts of the government-held city, the Syrian state news agency SANA said.
It blamed the attack on “terrorists”, the term it uses to describe rebel forces trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian Observatory said the attack targeted an army checkpoint.
“At least 31 people, including regime troops, were killed when a man detonated a truck laden with explosives at a checkpoint near an agricultural vehicles company on the road linking Hama to Salamiyeh,” the Observatory said.
The Britain-based group said the death toll was likely to rise, as “there are dozens of wounded, some of them in critical condition”.
