{{Serbia and its former province of Kosovo struck an historic deal on Friday to settle their fraught relations, opening the door to European Union membership talks for Belgrade in a milestone for the region’s recovery from the collapse of Yugoslavia.}}
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the prime ministers of both sides had initialled an agreement during talks in Brussels, capping six months of delicate negotiations after over a decade of deep animosity since Kosovo broke away in war.
« It’s very important that now what we are seeing is a step away from the past and for both of them a step closer to Europe, » Ashton told reporters.
Kosovo’s EU’s integration minister, Vlora Citaku, tweeted: « And the white smoke is out! Habemus pactum! Happy:))) »
Serbian officials said the deal remained subject to approval by « state bodies » back in Belgrade. « We will inform the EU by letter on Monday whether we accept the deal or not, » Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic told reporters. EU diplomats said there was very little chance of Serbia reversing course.
The pact tackles the ethnic partition of Kosovo between its Albanian majority and a small Belgrade-backed pocket of some 50,000 Serbs in the north, a schism that has dogged regional stability since Kosovo seceded from Serbia in 2008.
It will also likely open the door to greater international integration of the young state, the last to emerge from the ashes of federal Yugoslavia but which Belgrade considers the cradle of the Serb nation.
Serbia hopes it will be enough to win the green light on Monday from the EU’s 27 members for the start of talks on Serbian accession to the bloc.
That process could unlock Serbia’s potential as the largest market in the former Yugoslavia and lure much-needed foreign investment to its struggling economy.
Syrian troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad stormed a flashpoint town near Damascus on Sunday, said a watchdog, adding that scores of bodies, some of them disfigured, were found there.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 80 people have been killed in the town of Jdaidet al-Fadl in five days of violence.
“Regime troops have taken complete control over the town of Jdaidet al-Fadl and its surroundings,” said the Observatory which has documented the names of at least 80 people killed.
“We call on the International Committee of the Red Cross to send a delegation to Jdaidet al-Fadl in order to investigate,” Abdel Rahman Observatory director said.
Three of those killed were children and six others were women, the Observatory said, adding that the rest were men, among them many rebel fighters.
The Observatory distributed amateur video filmed in the town showing the bodies of men laid out on the ground, some with mutilated faces and covered in blood.
Jdaidet al-Fadl is located in an area southwest of Damascus that is home to several communities, including Sunnis, Druze and Christians.
After the outbreak of Syria’s conflict, which the United Nations says has forced millions to flee their homes, many of those living in the area were internally displaced people.
An activist in Damascus said via the Internet that all communication, water and electricity have been cut off in Jdaidet al-Fadl, adding that some of the corpses were “found in one of the hospitals” in the town.
Identifying herself as Enas, the activist said some of the bodies “were severely beaten on the head, causing it to crack open. Others had bruises all over their face”. She added that other bodies had been “burnt”.
Since last year, the army has tried to root out rebels positioned southwest and east of Damascus, in a bid to secure the capital.
Sunday’s violence comes a day after at least 121 people were killed across Syria, the Observatory reported.
{{China will refuse to grant new licenses to iron ore importers unless they participate in a domestic trading platform, in a fresh move by the world’s biggest iron ore consumer to wrestle pricing power away from global miners.}}
China, which buys around two-thirds of the world’s 1-billion-tonne plus sea-borne iron ore, has been attempting to regain the upper hand in pricing the steel making raw material since grudgingly accepting an industry-wide shift to spot pricing after four decades of a yearly-set price ending in 2010.
Under new rules, traders and steel mills seeking a new license to import will now have to trade at least 551,155 tons of iron ore on the platform set up by the China Beijing International Mining Exchange (CBMX), a document on the regulations obtained by Reuters showed. Only Chinese firms are eligible for import licenses.
China’s first physical iron ore trading platform competes with the globalORE platform in Singapore, but the new rules, in a country with tens of thousands of iron ore traders, could give CBMX more business and boost liquidity.
Global miners BHP (BHP.AX), Vale (VALE5.SA) and Rio Tinto (RIO.AX) and Chinese steelmakers including Baoshan Iron and Steel (600019.SS) are members of both platforms.
China has long suspected that iron ore pricing is manipulated by some miners and traders and wanted a platform that it deems more transparent, although miners may be wary of Beijing gaining control if more business flows to the exchange, particularly after Chinese pressure over ore price levels.
Last month, China’s top economic planning agency accused the world’s top three miners and some traders of manipulating the market to push up prices that soared more than 80 percent to near $160 a 1.1 ton .IO62-CNI=SI in February from three-year lows in September.
{{Britons’ finances deteriorated in April at a faster pace than in March as incomes fell and living costs rose, and households expected the squeeze to continue, reducing their ability to spend and support the economy.}}
Survey compiler Markit said on Monday that its headline Household Finance Index fell to 37.7 from 39.3 in March, sinking further below the 50 level that would mark no change compared with a month ago. That is the first drop in the index since December.
The index is not adjusted for seasonal influences due to a limited history of data.
Thirty-two percent of households said their finances worsened this month, while only 8 percent reported an improvement.
On future prospects, almost 42 percent expected to be worse off in 12 months’ time versus the 27 percent who thought they would have more money to spend.
“April’s survey highlights a deepening downturn in financial well-being, driven by renewed pressures on household income and another strong rise in living costs,” said Tim Moore, the author of the report, saying this was likely to undermine consumer spending in coming months.
The threat from high inflation was particularly striking: the index measuring inflation expectations for the year ahead rose to its highest level since the survey was first compiled more than four years ago, reaching 94.6.
Consumer spending, which generates about two thirds of Britain’s gross domestic product, is vital to the economy’s chances of meaningful growth after more than a year of stagnation.
The survey of 1,500 people was conducted between April 10 and April 15.
{{A powerful earthquake struck the steep hills of China’s southwestern Sichuan province on Saturday, leaving at least 156 people dead and more than 5,500 injured, nearly five years after a devastating quake wreaked widespread damage across the region.}}
Saturday’s quake, while not as destructive as the one in 2008, toppled buildings, triggered landslides and disrupted phone and power connections in mountainous Lushan county.
The village of Longmen was hit particularly hard, with authorities saying nearly all the buildings there had been destroyed in a frightening minute-long shaking by the quake.
“It was such a big quake that everyone was scared,” said a woman who answered the phone at a kindergarten hours later and declined to give her name. “We all fled for our lives.”
Rescuers turned the square outside the Lushan County Hospital into a triage center, where medical personnel bandaged bleeding victims, according to footage on China Central Television.
Rescuers dynamited boulders that had fallen across roads to reach Longmen and other damaged areas lying farther up the mountain valleys, state media reported.
CCTV reported that at least 156 people had died. The government of Ya’an city, which administers Lushan, said in a statement that more than 2,600 people were injured, 330 of them severely.
The quake — measured by the China Earthquake Administration at magnitude-7.0 and by the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 — struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m., when many people were at home, sleeping or having breakfast.
People in their underwear and wrapped in blankets ran into the streets of Ya’an and even the provincial capital of Chengdu, 115 kilometers (70 miles) east of Lushan, according to photos, video and accounts posted online.
The quake’s shallow depth, less than 13 kilometers (8 miles), likely magnified the impact.
Chengdu’s airport shut down for about an hour before reopening, though many flights were canceled or delayed, and its railway station halted dozens of scheduled train rides Saturday, state media said.
Lushan reported the most deaths, 76, but there was concern that casualties in neighboring Baoxing county might have been under-reported because of inaccessibility after roads were blocked and power and phone services cut off.
As the region went into the first night after the quake, rain started to fall, slowing rescue work. Forecasts called for more rain in the next several days, and the China Meteorological Administration warned of possible landslides and other geological disasters.
One trail in the search for clues about why two ethnic Chechen brothers may have carried out the Boston Marathon bombings leads to a sleepy town in Kyrgyzstan where former neighbors recalled a quiet family that was never in trouble.
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are remembered as decent and obedient boys from their time in the 1990s in the small community of Chechens in Tokmok, a leafy town under the snow-capped Tien Shan mountains outside the capital, Bishkek.
Tamerlan, the elder of the two, studied well. His father, Anzor, made a living selling used cars and was welcomed with open arms when he visited the town again two years ago, 10 years after the family left for Russia and then the U.S.
The news that Tamerlan had been shot dead by police and Dzhokhar captured after a daylong manhunt on suspicion of carrying out the April 15 bombing, in which three people were killed, was greeted with shock and disbelief.
“The Tsarnaevs were such a good family. They yearned to be well-educated. None of them were rowdy. It was a very cultured family,” said former neighbor Raisa Kaayeva, a middle-aged housewife who is also an ethnic Chechen.
“I feel it with my heart — these boys were framed. Why did they go to this America? They should have stayed in Russia to lead a quiet life. Now they have been made scapegoats. I pity these boys. I was weeping when I saw it on TV — their lives were broken, as well as the lives of their mother and father.”
Badrudi Tsokayev, a friend of the father, waved his hands repeatedly as he described his shock at hearing the news. Like others who recalled the family, he saw no signs of radicalism.
“I wouldn’t imagine seeing this even in a nightmare,” Tsokayev, 60, said on a quiet street in Tokmok, 60 kilometers from Bishkek. “As a child, Tamerlan was such a quiet boy. Today everyone is calling me with just one question — is this true?”
He said Anzor Tsarnaev, who was born in Kyrgyzstan, had been fiercely proud of Tamerlan’s prowess in the boxing ring and said his son had been looking forward to going to Sochi to watch the 2014 Winter Olympics next February.
It is in this town of 53,000 that the boys would have become aware of their Chechen roots.
They would have learned about the difficult fate suffered by their predecessors in Soviet times that has fostered a sense of injustice among some Chechens and helped fuel an independence drive in Chechnya that led to two wars with Moscow in the 1990s.
Kyrgyzstan, a mainly Muslim nation of 5.5 million which hosts U.S. and Russian military air bases, had a huge influx of ethnic Chechens in 1944. Hundreds of thousands of Chechens and ethnically close Ingush were evicted from their homes in the North Caucasus and moved to Central Asia in cattle wagons after being accused by dictator Josef Stalin of collaborating with Nazi Germany.
About 99,000 of the Chechens and Ingush ended up in what was then the Kyrgyz Soviet Republic.
In Tokmok, the Tsarnaev clan alone inhabited a whole street before most of them moved back to their native village of Chiri-Yurt in Chechnya in the 1960s, residents said. About 20 Chechen families still live in a district popularly known as the Glass Factory, after the building that dominates it.
The brothers would have become more familiar with Islamist militancy when they moved in 2001 to Dagestan, the southern Russian province that lies at the heart of an Islamist insurgency and sees daily violence, and where their parents still live.
In Tokmok, they lived in a modest brick house before moving to a more spacious, two-story house opposite School No. 1 in the town center, where Tamerlan and his two sisters studied.
A school register shows Tamerlan’s date of birth — Oct. 21, 1986 — and the date when he entered the fifth grade, Jan. 18, 1999. He studied here for a year. Dzhokhar, born in 1993, was too young to go to school at the time.
“Yes, the Tsarnaevs studied here. I wouldn’t say they were anti-social or anything like that. No, I can’t say so,” said school director Lyubov Shulzhenko.
“The Chechen community here is so closely-knit and decent. We have never had problems with their children,” said Natalya Ryabovol, a physics teacher.
In the Soviet era, Tokmok hosted a busy base which trained military pilots for pro-Soviet countries stretching from eastern Europe to Africa. A Soviet-made jet fighter is perched on a pedestal at the town’s entrance.
Many of the townspeople today make a living by growing fruit and vegetables and tending cattle. The attack in Boston seems part of another world.
Kyrgyzstan, which borders China, is politically fragile after the toppling of two presidents since 2005. It says it cannot be held responsible for the brothers’ actions.
{A house in Tokmok where the Tsarnaev brothers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan, lived before leaving for Dagestan.}
{Schoolchildren marching on Friday in front of a school where Tamerlan Tsarnaev studied in Tokmok.}
{{Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) plans to assemble the Lexus ES 350 sedan at its Kentucky plant in 2015, marking the first time the Japanese automaker has built a vehicle from its luxury lineup in the United States.}}
Toyota said on Friday it will invest $360 million at the Georgetown factory, which makes the Toyota Camry and other models. The move will create 750 new jobs and boost the plant’s production capacity by 10 percent to 550,000 vehicles.
Expanding U.S. production fits in with Toyota’s strategy to make cars in the markets where its customers live. The move also counters the effect of the strong yen, which has made exporting from Japan expensive.
“This decision is in line with two key goals,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at a news conference in New York. “First, to serve our U.S. customers. And second, reduce the effect of the exchange rate on our customers.”
The U.S. market is the world’s largest for luxury vehicles.
{{Italy’s Parliament on Saturday re-elected Giorgio Napolitano to an unprecedented second term as president, after party leaders persuaded the 87-year-old to serve again in hopes of easing the hostility that has thwarted formation of a new government.}}
Napolitano easily surpassed the simple majority required to be elected Saturday afternoon. He garnered 738 votes, far more than the 504 needed for victory for another seven-year mandate.
Parliament had a much harder time. It took it three days of balloting to choose a president, reflecting the legislature’s deep polarization following inconclusive nationwide elections in February.
After the weeks of stalemate, Napolitano can formally begin one of the head of state’s most important tasks once he takes a new oath of office. He must figure out who has the best prospects of putting together a new government, with enough support to successfully work with Parliament and survive a mandatory vote of confidence.
That won’t be easy. Italy’s main political parties — essentially three distinct ideological blocs in Parliament and their often shifting allies — are heavily polarized, and antagonism only grew sharper during the gridlock.
Napolitano, a former Communist, will have to quickly start sounding out parties about a potential premier. The next government faces pressure to bring urgently needed economic and electoral reforms to the recession-mired nation.
Italy has had a caretaker government for months, led by economist Mario Monti, a Napolitano appointee whose harsh austerity measures of higher taxes, pension reform and slashed spending helped keep Italy from succumbing to the debt crisis.
Napolitano, citing his advanced age, had repeatedly refused to be a candidate for another term that would see him turn nearly 95 when it runs out. But he yielded to the appeals out of a sense of responsibility toward the nation, he said.
{{China slammed the human rights record of the United States in response to Washington’s report on rights around the world, saying that U.S. military operations have infringed on rights abroad and that political donations at home have thwarted the country’s democracy.}}
The report released Sunday in China — which defines human rights primarily in terms of improving living conditions for its 1.3 billion people— also cited gun violence in the U.S. among its examples of human rights violations, saying it was a serious threat to the lives and safety of America’s citizens.
The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012 said the U.S. government continues to strengthen the monitoring of its people and that political donations to election campaigns have undue influence on U.S. policy.
“American citizens do not enjoy a genuinely equal right to vote,” the report said, citing a decreased turnout in the 2012 presidential election and a voting rate of 57.5 percent.
The report from the information office of the State Council, or China’s Cabinet, which mostly cited media reports, said there was serious sex, racial and religious discrimination in the U.S. and that the country had seriously infringed on the human rights of other nations through its military operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
The U.S.’s annual global human rights report issued Friday by the State Department said China had imposed new registration requirements to prevent groups from emerging that might challenge government authority.
It said Chinese government efforts to silence and intimidate political activists and public interest lawyers continued to increase, and that authorities use extralegal measures such as enforced disappearance to prevent the public voicing of independent opinions.
It also said there was discrimination against women, minorities and people with disabilities, and people trafficking, the use of forced labor, forced sterilization and widespread corruption.
China’s authoritarian government maintains strict controls over free speech, religion and political activity — restrictions that the U.S. considers human rights violations.
{{Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Thursday painted a dim picture of the world’s environmental progress, two decades after he founded the environmental group Green Cross International.}}
Laying much of the blame on a lack of leadership and vision, he railed against governments for falling short on nuclear disarmament, waste, development and climate change.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate launched the Geneva-based organization in 1993 as a kind of Red Cross that could help countries in environmental trouble.
Reflecting on the 20 years since then, the 82-year-old Gorbachev acknowledged deep frustrations as an environmental crusader.
“The current economic crisis is being aggravated by the growing pressure on the environment, by poverty, by persisting international conflicts and by the worsening state of the global environment,” a bespectacled Gorbachev said in Russian to reporters in Geneva by video link.
“The gap between the poor and the rich is unacceptably wide. The response to climate change has been weak and disunited,” he said.
“The possibility of building a more secure, more just and more united world has been largely missed.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says that among his top hopes for 2013 is reaching a new agreement on climate change.
Two-decade-old U.N. climate talks have so far failed in their goal of reducing the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that a vast majority of scientists says are warming the planet.
Green Cross, an international organization with affiliates in Switzerland, the United States and two dozen other nations, has helped facilitate destruction of some 57,000 tons of chemical weapons and promoted nuclear disarmament.
Alexander Likhotal, the Green Cross president, said leaders must be honest about the size of the real challenges facing them and recognize that “incremental gestures will no longer suffice.”
Gorbachev, whose democratic changes led against his will to the collapse of the Soviet Union, urged governments to step up their efforts and use his policies of “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness) to address global climate change and overconsumption of resources.
