Tag: InternationalNews

{Suicide bombing struck soldiers waiting to collect their salaries in port city.}

ISIL has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that left up to 49 Yemeni soldiers dead at a military base in Aden, a week after a similar attack that also killed dozens of troops in the southern port city.

Military officials and medics told the AFP news agency early on Sunday that the suicide bomber detonated his explosives as a group of soldiers were gathering to collect their salaries at the al-Solban base in the city’s northeast.

Aden al-Ghad, a local news website, said several people were wounded in the blast as thousands of men queued up at the entrance of the base.

The attack happened just eight days after a bombing claimed by ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, killed 48 soldiers and wounded 29 others.

The port city, the temporary base of Yemen’s government, has seen a wave of bombings and shootings targeting officials and security forces in recent months.

Armed groups have gained ground in the south of the country since forces loyal to President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi – backed by an Arab coalition assembled by Saudi Arabia – drove the Houthi fighters out of Aden in July last year.

Since then, the government and the Arab coalition have struggled to enforce their control as ISIL and al-Qaeda use the security vacuum to carry out attacks.

At least 10,000 people have been killed in the 20-month conflict, which has prompted a humanitarian crisis in the impoverished country, according to the UN.

{Palestinian officials say Ahmed Hazem Atta was killed by Israeli security forces in Beit Rima, near Ramallah.}

Israeli forces have shot dead a Palestinian teenager during a confrontation in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian officials said.

Security officials said troops entered the village of Beit Rima, near Ramallah, after midnight on Sunday and were confronted by stone-throwing youths.

The Palestinian health ministry said Ahmed Hazem Atta, 19, was killed in the ensuing army fire.

An Israeli army spokeswoman said that there was a “violent riot” at Beit Rima, but could not confirm the death.

“Dozens of rioters hurled rocks at security forces injuring a border police soldier,” she said.

“In order to prevent an escalation of violence forces responded with riot dispersal means, and fired toward main instigators,” she added.

The spokeswoman told the AFP news agency there were “reports of a rioter killed and another injured and they’re being looked into”.

Since October 2015, 244 Palestinians, including attackers, unarmed protesters, and bystanders have been killed in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Thirty-six Israelis, two Americans, a Jordanian, an Eritrean and a Sudanese have also been killed.

Most of the Palestinians killed were accused by Israel of carrying out a knife, gun or car-ramming attack.

Others were shot dead during protests or clashes, while some died in Israeli air strikes on Gaza.

Many analysts say Palestinian frustration with the Israeli occupation and settlement-building in the West Bank, stalled peace efforts and their own fractured leadership have helped feed the unrest.

Israel says incitement by Palestinian leaders and media is a leading cause.

{President Nicolas Maduro delays withdrawal of 100 bolivar banknote amid protests and looting.}

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has suspended the elimination of the country’s largest denomination bill, which had sparked cash shortages and nationwide unrest.

Venezuelans were given 10 days to exchange the 100 bolivar bills at the central bank, but the government on Saturday postponed the decision for two weeks.

The 100 bolivar bills, officially out of use since Thursday and worth just 4 US cents at the black market currency rate, can now be used until January 2, Maduro said.

The surprise pulling of the 100 bolivar note from circulation on Thursday – before new larger bills were available – led to vast lines at banks, looting at scores of shops, anti-government protests and at least one death.

Maduro, speaking from the presidential palace, blamed a “sabotage” campaign by enemies abroad for the delayed arrival of three planes carrying the new 500, 2,000 and 20,000 bolivar notes.

“One plane, contracted and paid for by Venezuela, was told in flight to change direction and go to another country,” he said, without specifying who had given the orders. “There’s another which was not given flyover permission.”

Many Venezuelans had found themselves without the means to pay for food, gasoline or Christmas preparations in a country already reeling from a profound economic crisis.

About 40 percent of Venezuelans do not have bank accounts, and so cannot use electronic transactions as an alternative to cash.

Adding to the chaos, Venezuela has the world’s highest rate of inflation, meaning large bags of cash must be humped around to pay for basic items.

‘Stupid and destructive’

In the southern mining town of El Callao, a 14-year-old boy was shot dead during looting on Friday, authorities confirmed. An opposition legislator reported three fatalities.

The Democratic Unity opposition coalition said the socialist leader should resign for incompetence and for inflicting yet more suffering on Venezuelans.

“We have a government utterly stupid and destructive in economic management, whose only goal is to keep power at whatever price,” said opposition leader Julio Borges.

Maduro had justified the 100 bolivar note’s elimination as a way of strangling mafia and smugglers on the frontier with Colombia.

He has also closed border crossings with Colombia and Brazil until January 2.

Earlier on Saturday, about 400 people in western Tachira state jumped fences and defied security personnel to surge into Colombia in search of food and medicines, which are scarce in Venezuela, witnesses said.

In southern Bolivar state, people broke into dozens of shops and warehouses in various towns, witnesses and business leaders said. Authorities declared a curfew in Ciudad Bolivar and the state governor said 135 people had been arrested.

Security forces fired tear gas in Venezuela’s largest second city, Maracaibo, to stop looters, witnesses said. Some protesters burned 100 bolivar bills.

Addressing thousands of supporters at a rally in Caracas, Maduro blamed the opposition for stirring violence and said some members of the Justice First and Popular Will parties were arrested for colluding with mafias.

The 54-year-old successor to Hugo Chavez, whose popularity has plunged during three years of recession, says domestic political foes supported by the United States are sabotaging the economy to undermine his government.

{Deal reached to resume evacuations of tens of thousands of trapped people, Syrian rebel official tells Al Jazeera.}

A new ceasefire deal to evacuate tens of thousands of Syrian opposition fighters and civilians from the remaining rebel-held pockets of eastern Aleppo has been reached, according to a rebel group official.

The rebel official told Al Jazeera on Saturday that the deal would allow for the complete evacuation of the embattled enclaves still held by rebel groups.

Speaking to the Reuters news agency, a Syrian government source confirmed the agreement.

Saturday’s announcement came after previous agreements brokered by Turkey and Russia fell apart, with the Syrian government and opposition groups exchanging blame.

A day earlier, Syrian state media said more than 8,000 people had been evacuated from the besieged territory when the agreement was suspended.

The deal would have allowed for the remaining population of rebel-held neighbourhoods to be transferred through government-controlled territory to the city of Idlib, where Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly known as the al-Nusra Front,w hich was linked to al-Qaeda) and rebel groups control most of the territory.

The Syrian government accused rebel groups of breaching the terms of the agreement, saying they tried to smuggle out fighters and heavy weapons.

The rebels were also accused of failing to honour a condition that stipulated they should allow for the evacuation of thousands of civilians from Kafraya and Al-Fua, which are Shia Muslim towns besieged by rebel groups.

Journalist Zouhir Al Shimale was among about a thousand civilians detained by pro-government militias on Friday night when their convoy was stopped as the ceasefire collapsed.

Witnesses told Al Jazeera that government forces had killed at least four people who were part of the convoy.

Tens of thousands of people were still trapped inside opposition-controlled areas and were too scared to leave their besieged districts, Al Jazeera’s Amro Halabi reported from eastern Aleppo.

“Now, the people are afraid and they are running away from the meeting point where they were supposed to gather in order to take the buses out of the besieged east Aleppo districts, they are in a state of horror and shock,” he said.

Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city and once a key cultural and economic hub, has been divided between government forces and rebels since 2012.

The evacuation agreements came a month after the Syrian government and allied militias launched a military offensive to retake the entire city. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has hailed the operation as a victory.

The Syrian conflict started as a largely unarmed uprising against Assad’s rule in March 2011. It has since morphed into a full-scale civil war that has left millions dead and more than half of the country’s prewar population displaced inside and outside of Syria.

{Philippines’ leader threatens to terminate a deal that allows American troops into country after US scraps aid package.}

President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to terminate a pact that allows US troops to visit the Philippines, reacting angrily to what he thought was a US decision to scrap a major aid package over human rights abuses.

A US government aid agency said this week that its board deferred a vote on a renewal of the development assistance package for the Philippines “subject to a further review of concerns around rule of law and civil liberties”.

Duterte, whose administration has been criticised by Washington over a bloody crackdown on illegal drugs, unleashed a barrage of expletives in response.

He said the Philippines can do without US aid, called Americans “sons of bitches” and “hypocrites,” while praising China for offering what he said was huge financial assistance.

According to a toll kept by Al Jazeera and other news sources, Duterte’s drug war has killed more than 6,100 people, including a handful of teenagers.

On Monday, Duterte declared that “fewer people are being killed” and “they are almost finished off anyway”.

Based on analysis of an official police report, 36 people on average have been killed every day during the 168 days of Duterte’s presidency.

{{Impeachment risk}}

The government insisted that those killed by police – more than 2,000 – died during legitimate anti-drug operations. The police also said that they were investigating other killings, which were carried out by unknown gunmen.

Duterte risks impeachment after admitting on Monday to “personally” killing criminals when he was the mayor of Davao City, two Philippine senators said on Friday.

The president boasted to business leaders that as Davao City mayor he used to prowl the streets on a motorcycle looking for “an encounter to kill”, just to show to local law enforcers he was able to do so.

“I used to do it personally,” Duterte said. “If I can do it, why can’t you?”

Justice minister Vitaliano Aguirre dismissed Duterte’s statement as an exaggeration.

“It’s like a hyperbole, that’s the president, he is used to exaggerating just to put his message across,” Aguirre was quoted in radio reports as saying on Thursday.

Even if that were true, Aguirre said it did not necessarily mean that he violated the law.

“It could be done with a justifiable cause and justified circumstances as a public officer in order to arrest, but if they resisted. He must have been forced,” Aguirre said, referring to Duterte.

{US officials demand return of the drone they say was testing salinity and temperature in international waters.}

A Chinese Navy warship has seized an underwater drone deployed by an American oceanographic vessel in international waters in the South China Sea, triggering a formal diplomatic protest from the US and a demand for its return, a US defence official said.

The “naval glider” was used to test water salinity and temperatures to help in the mapping of underwater channels, the official said, before adding “it was taken” by China in international waters about 50 miles off Subic Bay.

The incident took place on Thursday just as the USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey ship, was about to retrieve the unmanned, underwater vehicle, the official said.

Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from Washington DC, said the Chinese vessel put a smaller boat in the water and picked up one of the two drones just as the American vessel prepared to retrieve them.

“The Americans apparently sent a message to their Chinese counterparts, asking for the drone to be returned but the radio transmission was reportedly ignored,” she said.

“It’s not unusual for Chinese ships to be following American vessels under the assumption they are spying. Now the Americans are saying they are going through diplomatic channels to try and retrieve the drone.”

The Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam have competing claims in the South China Sea, which is laced with the world’s most heavily travelled international trade routes.

The vessel’s seizure comes amid rising tensions in the South China Sea, where China has moved to fortify its claims to the region by building out tiny reefs into artificial islands.

New satellite imagery made public on Wednesday by a US-based think-tank showed that China apparently has installed what appeared to be large anti-aircraft guns and close-in weapons systems on seven islets in the Spratly chain.

The US military has conducted several “freedom of navigation” operations in which ships and planes have passed close to the sites Beijing claims.

Such missions have drawn howls of fury from China, which accuses Washington of provocation and increasing the risk of a military mishap.

Adding to the tension, Beijing is facing a new US president in Donald Trump, who has questioned long-standing US policy on Taiwan, called Beijing a currency manipulator and threatened Chinese imports with punitive tariffs.

{Angry Warsaw residents block parliament as they rally against measures that would limit journalist access.}

Thousands of Warsaw residents joined a spontaneous demonstration in front of Poland’s parliament to protest against a plan by the conservative ruling party to limit journalists’ access to legislators.

The march, which began on Friday, continued into the early hours of Saturday, with crowds blocking the parliament for hours. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the ruling party, finally left the building after police forcibly removed protesters blocking the exit.

Protesters had blocked politicians’ cars, preventing them from leaving the parliament area. Opposition politician Jerzy Meysztowicz said police used tear gas to disperse them.

A new protest was called for Saturday at noon in front of the Presidential Palace.

Rules proposed by the head office of the Sejm, the lower house, would ban all recording of parliamentary sessions except by five selected television stations and limit the number of journalists allowed in the building. They are due to take effect next year.

Mobilised by the civic movement, the Committee for the Defence of Democracy, or KOD, the crowd began gathering on Friday and waved white-and-red national flags and chanted “Free media!” in cold winter weather.

Radek Sikorski, a former foreign minister, was among government critics who addressed the protest, harshly denouncing Poland’s political direction under Kaczynski, the most powerful politician in Poland and chairman of the ruling Law and Justice party that is introducing many sweeping changes.

Earlier on Friday, inside the parliament’s session hall, a large group of liberal opposition MPs protested against the new media rules by standing on and around the speaker’s podium for several hours. They blocked a vote on the 2017 state budget.

The budget vote was eventually taken by ruling party lawmakers in another hall, but the opposition questioned its legality. It was the most serious crisis in Poland’s parliament for many years.

“The political crisis has grown more aggravated,” Law and Justice MP Tadeusz Cymanski said.

In the 27 years of Poland’s democracy, journalists have been a constant presence in the parliament’s halls. Though banned from the main assembly room, they can grab politicians for interviews in the halls.

The ruling party, which is under European Union scrutiny for policies deemed anti-democratic by opponents, is planning new rules starting on January 1 that would drastically limit reporters’ access to parliament.

{{‘No democracy without media’}}

Agnieszka Wisniewska, editor of Krytyka Polityczna, told Al Jazeera that the proposed measure was “the easiest way to cut media freedom”.

“You cannot have democracy without media,” Wisniewska said, adding that she expected further protests. “This is a way to cut media from information.”

Ruling party leader Kaczynski denounced the obstruction of parliament as “hooliganism” and threatened protesters with consequences.

“We will not allow ourselves to be terrorised,” he said.

He said the proposed changes to media access are no different from those in many other European nations. Respected journalist Seweryn Blumsztajn, a dissident under communism, called the plan a “return to communist-era practices”.

Monika Olejnik of TVN said that journalists had gone too far sometimes, such as trying to accost politicians heading to the toilet. But she, too, denounced the planned new rules, saying ruling party MPs wanted “to protect themselves from uncomfortable questions by journalists.”

“But this is in violation of the constitution and of parliament rules,” Olejnik said.

{Tens of thousands of Syrians still waiting to leave from east Aleppo as part of rebels’ deal with government.}

Thousands of civilians and rebels are still waiting to leave the last remaining rebel-held pockets of eastern Aleppo under an evacuation deal that will allow Syria’s government to take full control of the city after years of fighting.

The operation launched on Thursday and is expected to take several days.

Inside Story – Evacuation of rebel-held areas under way
Zouhir Al Shimale, a journalist in eastern Aleppo, said the evacuation was moving at a snail’s pace.

“It’s supposed to finish today or tomorrow, but it’s moving very slow,” he told Al Jazeera on Friday morning.

“People were outside in the street overnight,” he said, adding that the temperature had dipped below zero degrees celsius in the city.

“Thousands are still waiting out here.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned that action is needed to prevent a potential massacre.

The first convoys left Aleppo carrying wounded civilians, fighters and their families, with civilians mostly leaving on buses and ambulances.

The Russian defence ministry said on Friday morning that more than 6,000 people, including 3,000 rebels, had left east Aleppo in the last 24 hours.

The withdrawal began a month to the day after Syrian government forces launched a major offensive to retake all of Aleppo, and will hand the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad his biggest victory in more than five years of civil war.

The city, Syria’s second largest city and once a key cultural and economic hub, has been divided between government forces and rebels since 2012.

In a video message to Syrians, Assad said the “liberation” of Aleppo was “history in the making”.

{{Still trapped}}

Kerry said what had already happened in the city was “unconscionable” but warned over the fate of “tens of thousands of lives that are now concentrated into a very small area of Aleppo”.

“And the last thing anybody wants to see … is that that small area turns into another Srebrenica,” he said, referring to the 1995 Bosnian war massacre.

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Thursday that around 50,000 people were still trapped, including 40,000 civilians.

The evacuations were announced on Thursday, after an initial plan for civilians and fighters to leave rebel-held parts of the city collapsed the previous day amid renewed clashes.

They began with a convoy of ambulances and buses crossing into a government-held district in southern Aleppo in the afternoon.

A first evacuation attempt on Wednesday fell apart, with artillery exchanges and resumed air strikes rocking the city until the early hours of Thursday.

But the agreement, brokered by Assad’s ally Russia and opposition supporter Turkey, was revived following fresh talks.

{{‘Mass depopulation’}}

The defence ministry in Moscow said Syrian authorities had guaranteed the safety of the rebels leaving the city.

The head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, said in Geneva that most of those evacuated from Aleppo would head to opposition stronghold Idlib, in Syria’s northwest.

De Mistura however warned that “Idlib will become the next Aleppo” if a ceasefire and political agreement for Syria is not found.

AlHakam Shaar, a research fellow at the Budapest-based Aleppo Project, an initiative that tracks the destruction in the historic city, described the deal as the final phase of a “mass depopulation”.

“Any sustainable peace agreement in Syria will have to guarantee free return for the displaced, females and males, along with their civil society formations,” he told Al Jazeera.

“A return to centralised, authoritarian governance under the Syrian government is likely to again sideline the population that was very marginalised before 2011.”

{Facebook is making it easier for users to report fake news when they see it, with fact-checkers ready to jump in.}

Facebook is taking new measures to curb the spread of fake news on its huge and influential social network, focusing on the “worst of the worst” offenders.

The online behemoth is going into partnership with outside fact-checkers to sort honest news reports from made-up stories that play to people’s passions and preconceived notions.

Fake news stories touch on a broad range of subjects, from unproven cancer cures to celebrity hoaxes and backyard Bigfoot sightings. But fake political stories have drawn attention because of the possibility they influenced public perceptions and could have swayed the US presidential election.

There have been other dangerous real-world consequences.

A fake story about a child sex ring at a Washington DC pizza joint prompted a man to fire an assault rifle inside the restaurant, Comet Ping Pong.

“We do believe that we have an obligation to combat the spread of fake news,” said John Hegeman, Facebook’s vice president of product management on news feed, in an interview.

But he added Facebook also takes its role to provide people with an open platform seriously, and it is not the company’s place to decide what is true or false.

To start, Facebook is making it easier for users to report fake news when they see it, which they can now do in two steps. If enough people report a story as fake, Facebook will pass it to third-party, fact-checking organisations that are part of the nonprofit Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.

The five fact-checking organisations Facebook is currently working with are ABC News, The Associated Press, FactCheck.org, Politifact and Snopes. Facebook says this group is likely to expand.

Stories that fail the fact check won’t be removed from Facebook but they will be publicly flagged as “disputed”, which will force them to appear lower down in people’s news feed. Users can click on a link to learn why that is. And if people decide they want to share the story with friends anyway, they can – but they’ll get another warning.

By going into partnership with respected outside organisations and flagging, rather than removing, fake stories, Facebook is sidestepping some of the biggest concerns experts have raised about it exercising its considerable power in this area.

For instance, some are worried that Facebook might act as a censor – and not a skillful one, either, being an engineer-led company with little experience making complex media ethics decisions.

“They definitely don’t have the expertise,” said Robyn Caplan, researcher at Data & Society, a nonprofit research institute funded in part by Microsoft and the National Science Foundation.

In an interview before Facebook’s announcement, she urged the company to “engage media professionals and organisations that are working on these issues”.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has said that fake news constitutes less than 1 percent of what is on Facebook , but critics say that is wildly misleading. For a site with nearly two billion users tapping out posts by the millisecond, even 1 percent is a huge number, especially since the total includes everything that is posted on Facebook – photos, videos, and daily updates in addition to news articles.

In a study released on Thursday, the Pew Research Center found nearly one in four Americans says they have shared a made-up news story, either knowingly or unknowingly. Some 45 percent said that the government, politicians and elected officials bear responsibility for preventing made-up stories from gaining attention.

Forty-two percent put this responsibility on social networking sites and search engines, and a similar percentage on the public itself.

Fake news stories can be quicker to go viral than news stories from traditional sources. That is because they were created for sharing – they are clickable, often inflammatory, and pander to emotional responses.

Mike Caulfield, director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver, tracked whether real or fake news is more likely to be shared on Facebook.

He compared a made-up story from a fake outlet with articles in local newspapers. The fake story, headlined “FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide” from the nonexistent Denver Guardian, was shared 1,000 times more than material from the real newspapers.

“To put this in perspective, if you combined the top stories from the Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and LA Times, they still had only 5 percent the viewership of an article from a fake news,” he wrote in a blog post.

Facebook is emphasising that it is only going after the most egregious fake news creators and sites, “the clear hoaxes spread by spammers for their own gain”, wrote Adam Mosseri, vice president of product for Facebook’s news feed, in a blog post Thursday.

Depriving scammers of money could be effective.

“Google and Facebook are the single two biggest engines for monetization,” said Susan Bidel, a senior analyst at Forrester Research focusing on digital publishers. “I don’t think you are ever going to completely eradicate it. But it could get down to a manageable level.”

{Fear of violence rises as residents of illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank reject relocation offer.}

The Jewish settlers of the illegal Amona outpost in the occupied West Bank have rejected a proposal to leave voluntarily, defying a court order and raising fears of violence.

A High Court ordered the Amona outpost to be evacuated by December 25 since it was found to have been built on private Palestinian land in a case that has taken on international importance.

Dozens of Israeli youths streamed into the hilltop outpost of about 40 families in windy and bitterly cold weather in the middle of the night on Thursday, as they feared the army would move in imminently to clear them out.

Many of them, alerted to the decision on social media, crowded into a small synagogue and dozed in sleeping bags on the floor, while others stayed in their cars or simply walked the streets.

After sunrise, some of the youths, wearing knitted Jewish skullcaps with sidelocks dangling, spread nails on roads along with stones and wooden poles.

Several took up position on top of a water tower while waving an Israeli flag. They also hauled an empty dumpster with them for unclear reasons.

A spokesman for Amona residents, who has lived in the outpost for 14 years, said they had not been given any notice of when an evacuation could happen.

Asked whether he was concerned that the youths’ presence at the outpost would lead to violence, he said: “I’m worried about the government inflicting pain on people – needless pain.”

“There is no difference between Amona and Tel Aviv,” said Eli Greenberg, a 43-year-old father of eight.

“There’s no reason to take us out of here,” he said as he sat on the front deck of his mobile home near a hillside planted with rows of olive trees.

The dispute over whether to demolish the outpost northeast of Ramallah has taken on international importance because of concern over settlement expansion in the West Bank, occupied by Israel since 1967.

Israeli nationalist politicians, settlement advocates, and Amona residents have resisted the move, and the international community is watching closely over whether the court order will be obeyed.

All Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including annexed east Jerusalem, are illegal under international law, but Israel differentiates between those it has approved and those it has not.

Settlements such as Amona are called outposts because Israel has not approved them.

There are concerns over how any evacuation will play out.

In 2006, the demolition of nine permanent houses in the outpost led to clashes between settlers and Israeli security forces.

Settlements are seen as major stumbling blocks to peace efforts as they are built on land the Palestinians see as part of their future state.

But the settlement movement wields significant power in Israeli politics.

Key members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, seen as the most right-wing in the country’s history, openly oppose a Palestinian state and advocate annexing most of the West Bank.

Kalmen Barkin, a 20-year-old from Jerusalem with a long red beard, was among those gathered in the Amona synagogue before dawn.

He said he did not advocate violence and would passively resist.

“When they come to take you, grab on to something.”