Tag: InternationalNews

{The US justice department has defended President Donald Trump’s travel ban and urged an appeals court to reinstate it in the interests of national security.}

A 15-page brief argued it was a “lawful exercise of the president’s authority” and not a ban on Muslims.

The executive order temporarily banned entry for all refugees and visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries.

A hearing has been set for Tuesday on whether to allow or reject the ban.

The filing was made to the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in response to the halting of Mr Trump’s order on Friday by a federal judge in Washington state.

The judge had ruled the ban was unconstitutional and harmful to the state’s interests.
As a result, people from the seven countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – with valid visas were able to travel to the US again.

{{What did the department of justice argue?}}

The brief filed on Monday evening said the Washington court had “erred in entering an injunction barring enforcement of the order”.

“But even if some relief were appropriate, the court’s sweeping nationwide injunction is vastly overbroad,” the department of justice added.

The key arguments in the brief are:

the president is best placed to make decisions about national security
it is “incorrect” to call it a ban on Muslims because the seven countries were identified for their terror risk the executive order is therefore “neutral with respect to religion” aliens outside the US have no rights to due process

{{Confusion at airports}}

The executive order issued by President Trump on 25 January fulfilled his campaign promise to tighten restrictions on arrivals to the US.

{{Its main components were:}} nationals from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen – even those with visas – banned from entering the US;
a temporary ban on all refugee admissions; the reprioritisation of minority religion (interpreted to mean Christian) refugee claims; a ban on all Syrian refugees; a cap on total annual refugee admissions to the US of 50,000.

It caused confusion at US and foreign airports when it came into force, and was widely condemned, although polls suggest that US public opinion is sharply divided on the policy.

{{Who has spoken out against the ban?}}

The states of Washington and Minnesota have argued that as well as being unconstitutional, the travel ban is harmful to their residents, businesses and universities.

Attorneys general in 16 states have signed a letter condemning the ban, and lawsuits have been launched in 14 states.

Former secretaries of state John Kerry and Madeleine Albright and former CIA director Leon Panetta have joined others in drafting a letter which describes the travel ban as ineffective, dangerous and counterproductive.

And lawyers for tech firms including Apple and Google have also lodged arguments with the court, saying that the travel ban would harm their companies by making it more difficult to recruit employees.

{{Supreme Court battle looms}}

Mr Trump’s tweets are in line with the arguments from the Department of Justice – that national security is at risk.

The president has attacked the “so-called” judge behind the Washington ruling, and said: “If something happens blame him and court system.”

Whatever the decision of the appeals court on Tuesday, the case could end up in the highest court in the US, the Supreme Court.

The last immigration case that reached the justices there ended in a 4-4 tie.

But if Mr Trump’s nominee to fill the ninth berth, Neil Gorsuch, is confirmed in time, it could tip the balance in the president’s favour.

Source:BBC

{Israel has passed a controversial law retroactively legalising 3,800 settler homes built on private Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank.}

Under the law the original Palestinian landowners will be financially compensated or given alternative land.

New US President Donald Trump has taken a softer stance on Israeli settlement activity than his predecessor, Barack Obama, who was a vocal critic.

The new law comes amid an escalation in settlement activity in recent weeks.

Emboldened by what it sees as a more sympathetic US administration, Israel has advanced plans for thousands of new homes in settlements.

More than 600,000 Jews live in about 140 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem – land the Palestinians claim for a future state. The settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

Palestinians say the new legislation negates peace and their chances of creating a state. However, its passage could be largely symbolic. Already Israel’s attorney general has said the law is unconstitutional and that he will not defend it in the Supreme Court.

The law, which passed by 60 votes to 52, legalises the homes in both settlements and some 53 outposts – settlements built without official authorisation, according to Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now.

The group says there are 97 outposts across the West Bank, though the largest, Amona, was evacuated by police last week after the Supreme Court ordered it to be dismantled because it was built on private Palestinian land.

However, the new legalisation has proved divisive within Israel and is likely to face legal challenges.

Opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog denounced the measure as “an acute danger to Israel” which could lead to prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague.

The ICC is currently examining whether Israeli settlements should be subject to a full investigation.

A minister from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party championed the vote as a demonstration of “the connection between the Jewish people and its land. This whole land is ours. All of it.”

Palestinians condemned the law.

“This is an escalation that would only lead to more instability and chaos,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

He added: “It is unacceptable. It is denounced and the international community should act immediately,”

The UN Middle East envoy, Nickolay Mladenov, said the law would “greatly diminish the prospects for Arab-Israeli peace”.

Last week, the White House said it did not see settlements as an impediment to peace, though new settlements or expanding existing settlements beyond their borders “might not be helpful”. However, it said it had not yet formed an official position on the settlements issue.

Mr Trump is due to meet Mr Netanyahu in Washington next week for the first time since Mr Trump took office last month.

Source:BBC

{As many as 13,000 people, most of them civilian opposition supporters, have been executed in secret at a prison in Syria, Amnesty International says.}

A new report by the human rights group alleges that mass hangings took place every week at Saydnaya prison between September 2011 and December 2015.

Amnesty says the alleged executions were authorised at the highest levels of the Syrian government.

The government has previously denied killing or mistreating detainees.

However, UN human rights experts said a year ago that witness accounts and documentary evidence strongly suggested that tens of thousands of people were being detained and that “deaths on a massive scale” were occurring in custody.

Amnesty interviewed 84 people, including former guards, detainees and officials at Saydnaya prison for its report.

It alleges that every week, and often twice a week, groups of between 20 and 50 people were executed in total secrecy at the facility, just north of Damascus.

Before their execution, detainees were brought before a “military field court” in the capital’s Qaboun district for “trials” lasting between one and three minutes, the report says.

A former military court judge quoted by Amnesty said detainees would be asked if they had committed crimes alleged to have taken place. “Whether the answer is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, he will be convicted… This court has no relation with the rule of law,” he said.

According to the report, detainees were told on the day of the hangings that they would be transferred to a civilian prison then taken to a basement cell and beaten over the course of two or three hours.

Then in the middle of the night they were blindfolded and moved to another part of the prison, where they were taken into a room in the basement and told they had been sentenced to death just minutes before nooses were placed around their necks, the report adds.

The bodies of those killed were allegedly then loaded onto lorries, and transferred to Tishreen military hospital in Damascus for registration and burial in mass graves located on military land.

On the basis of evidence of the testimony of its witnesses, Amnesty estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were executed at Saydnaya over five years.

{{Witness accounts}}

{{A former judge who saw the hangings:}}

“They kept them [hanging] there for 10 to 15 minutes. Some didn’t die because they are light. For the young ones, their weight wouldn’t kill them. The officers’ assistants would pull them down and break their necks.”

{{‘Hamid’, a former military officer who was detained at Saydnaya:}}

“If you put your ears on the floor, you could hear the sound of a kind of gurgling. This would last around 10 minutes… We were sleeping on top of the sound of people choking to death. This was normal for me then.”

{{Former detainee ‘Sameer’ describes alleged abuse:}}

“The beating was so intense. It was as if you had a nail, and you were trying again and again to beat it into a rock. It was impossible, but they just kept going. I was wishing they would just cut off my legs instead of beating them any more.”

{{Source: Amnesty International}}

Although it does not have evidence of executions taking place since December 2015, the group says it has no reason to believe they have stopped and that thousands more were likely to have died.

Amnesty says these practices amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It also notes that death sentences have to be approved by the grand mufti and by either the defence minister or the army’s chief of staff, who are deputised to act on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad.

The human rights group says it contacted the Syrian authorities about the allegations in early January but has received no response.

Last August, Amnesty reported that an estimated 17,723 people had died in custody as a result of torture and the deprivation of food, water and medical care between March 2011 – when the uprising against President Assad began – and December 2015. That figure did not include those allegedly hanged at Saydnaya.

Source:BBC

{Around 460 detained in nationwide operations, according to state media, in Turkey’s biggest roundup targeting the group.}

Turkish police have detained hundreds of suspected ISIL members in nationwide raids, according to state media, in the largest operations in the country to target the armed group.

Around 460 suspects, most of them foreign nationals, were arrested in at least 18 provinces, state-run Anadolu news agency reported on Sunday.

At least 60 people were held in the capital, Ankara, while 150 were arrested in Sanliurfa in the southeast and a further 47 in the nearby city of Gaziantep close to the Syrian border.

In the Aegean province of Izmir, security forces held at least nine suspected ISIL members who were allegedly preparing for an attack.

Another 18 people were arrested in Istanbul and the neighbouring province of Kocaeli on suspicion of planning attacks. Fourteen foreigners, including 10 children, were due to be deported.

“This is the largest coordinated and simultaneous raids that Turkey has taken out on what it says are ‘suspected members of ISIL’ across the country,” Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Gaziantep, said.

“From what we understand, all of these raids took place around the same time at dawn on Sunday,” she continued, adding that the operation signalled Turkey’s clear intentions to give a “message that it is clamping down” on the armed group.

“Turkey has suffered multiple attacks either claimed by ISIL or inspired by it,” Dekker said.

The Turkish government holds ISIL, which stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and is also known as ISIS, responsible for several attacks in Turkey.

Most recently, ISIL claimed responsibility for a New Year’s Eve attack on the Reina nightclub in Istanbul in which 39 people were killed.

Police arrested the suspected attacker, Abdulgadir Masharipov, an Uzbek national, on January 16 and authorities say he has confessed to the massacre.

Turkish troops are also engaged in battles against ISIL fighters in the Syrian town of al-Bab, in the fiercest fighting yet of Ankara’s military’s campaign inside Syria that started in August.

At least 48 Turkish soldiers have been killed in the incursion so far, according to an AFP news agency tally.

{Houses collapse and roads close as massive avalanches hit eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan.}

Scores of people have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by heavy snow and avalanches that hit mountainous areas in the region, officials said.

More than 100 people have been killed across Afghanistan, including 50 in Nuristan province, officials said Sunday, warning the death toll could rise still further.

At least 54 people were killed in northern and central Afghan provinces, officials told AFP news agency, with massive avalanches destroying 168 houses and killing hundreds of cattle.

Dozens more remain missing, the provincial governor, Hafiz Abdul Qayum, told Al Jazeera on Sunday.

“Most affected are women and children,” he said, adding that many houses collapsed, killing at least five people and leaving many families without shelter.

“The area is completely blocked because of snow so it is very difficult for us to send support, but we are trying our best.”

Qayum said local rescue operations continued at the site, adding the death toll might increase.

The government declared Sunday, a normal working day in Afghanistan, to be a public holiday to deter non-essential travel and ensure schools were closed.

Avalanches in Pakistan’s Chitral

In neighbouring Pakistan, at least 13 people, including three children, were killed early on Sunday morning when an avalanche in the northwestern Chitral district destroyed 22 houses, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said in a statement.

“Rescue operations at the site have finished for now,” Gul Hammad Farooqi, a local journalist in Chitral, told Al Jazeera.

“They were carried out by the local population, because no one was able to reach the site, even by helicopter.”

Roads to the remote Shershal village, where the avalanche occurred, remained blocked due to the snowfall, and rescue crews were forced to rush to the surrounding areas by helicopter, the NDMA said.

In a separate incident in the Chitral region, a paramilitary soldier was killed and six others were injured when their post collapsed under an avalanche in the Pisotan area, Pakistan’s military said in a statement.

The surviving soldiers had been rescued, it added.

Parts of the Chitral valley received more than five feet of snow in the previous 24 hours, the Pakistan Meteorological Department said in a statement on Sunday, with scattered snowfall forecast for Monday.

{{Transport networks affected}}

The snow also wreaked havoc on major roads in Afghanistan, including the main Kabul-Kandahar highway, where police and soldiers rescued passengers in about 250 vehicles trapped by the storm, said Jawed Salangi, a spokesman for Ghazni province.

The Salang pass, north of Kabul, was also closed under as much as two and a half metres of snow, officials said.

In Pakistan, all inter-district roads in Chitral were closed, while a major highway linking Chitral to the Dir district and another linking parts of the upper Swat valley were only open to traffic under restrictions, NDMA said.

{President’s office slams criticism by Catholic Church, which says killing people is not the answer to drug trafficking.}

The Philippines’ Catholic Church has blasted President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs” for creating a “reign of terror”.

In its most strongly worded attack yet on the crackdown on drug pushers and users, the powerful Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines said killing people was not the answer to trafficking of illegal drugs.

The Church said, in a pastoral letter that will be read out in sermons on Sunday, it was disturbing that many did not care about the bloodshed, or even approved of it.

“An even greater cause of concern is the indifference of many to this kind of wrong. It is considered as normal, and, even worse, something that [according to them] needs to be done,” the bishops said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Reuters news agency.

“An additional cause of concern is the reign of terror in many places of the poor. Many are killed not because of drugs. Those who kill them are not brought to account,” they said.

{{Duterte’s office strikes back}}

The presidential palace on Sunday lashed back at the Church for the letter, blaming it for being “apparently out of touch” with the wishes of those who back the changes introduced by Duterte.

“The efforts of these church leaders might be put to better use in practical catechetics that build strong moral character among the faithful, and so contribute more to the reign of peace felt by ordinary citizens everywhere, especially those who are innocent of illegal activities,” Ernesto Abella, presidential spokesman, was quoted as saying by Philippine media.

The Catholic Church, to which more than 80 percent of Filipinos belong, has earned the ire of Duterte after bishops criticised the spate of killings linked to the president’s narcotics crackdown.

More than 7,600 people have been killed since Duterte launched his anti-drugs campaign seven months ago, more than 2,500 in what police say were armed clashes during raids and sting operations.

Both the government and police have strenuously denied that extrajudicial killings have taken place.

{Many take to social media to criticise Kellyane Conway after she falsely cited ‘massacre’ by Iraqi refugees in Kentucky.}

Kellyane Conway, a key adviser to US President Donald Trump, has come under fire after defending an order barring entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries by blaming two Iraqi refugees for a “massacre” that never occurred.

Conway on Thursday night told the US news channel MSNBC that the media had failed to cover the “Bowling Green Massacre”, which she claimed was the reason that former president Barack Obama’s administration stopped accepting refugees for six months in 2011.

“I bet it’s brand new information to people that president Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee programme after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalised and they were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre. It didn’t get covered,” Conway, who served as a manager for Trump’s presidential campaign and is currently a White House counselor, said in the interview.

Obama’s temporary ban came after two Iraqi refugees living in Bowling Green, Kentucky were imprisoned for their involvement in attacks on US troops when the two were in Iraq and for allegedly sending funds and weapons from the US to al-Qaeda members fighting US forces in their home country.

However, the two men were never accused of carrying out or plotting any attacks on US soil.

Conway had previously coined the phrase “alternative facts” when justifying the White House’s unsubstantiated claim that Trump’s inauguration ceremony had the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe”.

Later on Friday, Conway tweeted that she meant to say “Bowling Green terrorists”, but Twitter users were quick to point out that those words would not fit properly in her statement.