Tag: InternationalNews

{Blasts at mosque and convention centre overshadow events marking the 10th anniversary of the German Islam Conference.}

“Although no one has so far claimed responsibility, we must assume that there was a xenophobic motive,” Horst Kretschmar, the Dresden police chief, said.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said the mosque attack was “all the more scandalous” because it happened on the eve of the 10th annual meeting of the German Islam Conference.

Police linked the explosion at the congress centre to celebrations due to take place next week in Dresden marking the 26th anniversary of German unification, which is to be attended by German President Joachim Gauck.

“We have now switched to crisis mode,” Kretschmar said, as police deployed to guard the city’s two mosques and an Islamic cultural centre.

About 300 worshippers regularly attend Friday prayers at the Fatih Camii mosque, which lies a short distance from Dresden’s historic centre.

The explosion at the mosque was detonated at 1953 GMT on Monday. The force of the blast pushed the front door of the building inwards and left the building covered with soot, police said.

The explosion at the convention centre – about 2 kilometres from the Fatih Camii mosque on the River Elbe, which runs through Dresden – occurred about half an hour later.

The heat caused by the explosion at the centre destroyed the side of a decorative glass cube in an open area in the congress building and resulted in parts of the building being evacuated.

Growing xenophobia

Dresden, a Baroque city in Germany’s ex-communist east, is also the birthplace of the anti-immigration Pegida street movement, short for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident.

Its members have angrily protested against the influx of refugees and migrants that last year brought one million asylum seekers to Europe’s biggest economy.

About a dozen demonstrations are planned over the weekend, by both Pegida and by anti-fascist groups.

Saxony state premier Stanislaw Tillich called the “cowardly” bombings an “attack on freedom of religion and on the values of an enlightened society” that could easily have claimed lives.

Far-right hate crimes targeting shelters for asylum seekers in Saxony rose to 106 in 2015, with another 50 recorded in the first half of this year.

In an annual report outlining progress since reunification, the government warned last week that growing xenophobia and right-wing “extremism” could threaten peace in eastern Germany.

De Maiziere said he understood that many Muslims in Germany did not wish to apologise for every act of “terrorism” that is carried out in the name of Islam.

But he said he expected more from the Muslim organisations in Germany.

“I think it would be advisable that the security debate becomes more intense and also more public in the future,” he said.

“Political influence from abroad in Germany through religion is something we cannot accept,” said de Maiziere.

However, Muslim leaders attending the 10th anniversary of the dialogue forum hit back.

It was wrong, “to brand Muslims as representatives of foreign powers and to speak of them as having a representive role”, said Bekir Alboga, the secretary-general of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs.

{Accord brings an end to Latin America’s longest-running conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.}

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Marxist rebel leader Timochenko used a pen made from a bullet on Monday to sign an agreement ending a half-century war that killed a quarter of a million people and made their nation a byword for violence.

After four years of negotiations in Havana, Santos, 65, and Timochenko – a nom de guerre for 57-year-old revolutionary Rodrigo Londono – shook hands on Monday on Colombian soil for the first time.

Some 2,500 foreign and local dignitaries attended the ceremony in the walled, colonial city of Cartagena.

The agreement to end Latin America’s longest-running conflict turns the FARC fighters into a political party fighting at the ballot box instead of the battlefield they have occupied since 1964.

The special pen was used “to illustrate the transition of bullets into education and future”, said Santos, who staked his reputation on achieving peace.

Guests included United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon, Cuban President Raul Castro, US Secretary of State John Kerry and victims of the conflict.

“The UN will assist in the implementation of the accord and offer Colombians our complete support at a time that sees a new destiny for the nation,” Ban said.

The European Union said on Monday it was removing the group from its “terror” list simultaneously with the peace signing.

Kerry lauded the deal during a visit to a training centre for war victims, ex-combatants and other young people.

“Anybody can pick up a gun, blow things up, hurt other people, but it doesn’t take you anywhere … Peace is hard work,” he said.

The US Department of State has pledged $390m for Colombia next year to support the peace process. Washington would also review whether to take the FARC off its list of “terrorist organizations”, Kerry said.

Despite widespread relief at an end to the bloodshed and kidnappings of past decades, the deal has caused divisions within Latin America’s fourth-largest economy.

Influential former president Alvaro Uribe and others are angry that the accord allows rebels to enter parliament without serving any jail time.

Colombians will vote on October 2 on whether to ratify the agreement, but polls show it should pass easily.

In Cartagena on Monday, huge billboards urged a “yes” vote, while Uribe led hundreds of supporters with umbrellas in the colours of the Colombian flag urging voters to back “no”.

FARC, which stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, began as a peasant revolt, became a big player in the cocaine trade, and at its strongest had 20,000 fighters. Now it must hand over weapons to the UN within 180 days.

Colombians are nervous over how the remaining 7,000 rebels will integrate into society, but most are optimistic peace will bring more benefits than problems.

“I can’t believe this day has finally come,” said an excited Juan Gamarra, 43, who sells jewelry in Cartagena.

Colombia has performed better economically than its neighbours in recent years, and peace should reduce the government’s security expenditures and open new areas of the country for mining and oil companies.

But criminal gangs may try to fill the void, land mines could hinder development, and rural poverty remains a huge challenge.

With peace achieved, Santos, a member of a wealthy Bogota family, will likely use his political capital to push an economic agenda, tax reforms in particular, to compensate for a drop in oil income caused by a fall in energy prices.

Big screens were erected around the nation of 49 million people to watch the ceremony.

“It’s such an important day,” said Duvier, a nom de guerre for a 25-year-old rebel attending a FARC congress last week in the southern Yari Plains that ratified the peace accord.

“Now we can fight politically, without blood, without war.”

{Russian-backed Syrian offensive pounds rebel-held Aleppo with hospitals running out of medicine and health workers.}

Rescue workers in Aleppo struggled to help hundreds of wounded Syrians trapped in a massive Russian-backed government air offensive as the bloody battle to recapture the key city entered its fifth day.

Dozens of air strikes hit rebel-held areas of the northern Syrian city on Monday with the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights saying at least 12 people, including three children, were killed.

More than 280 people have died in the city’s rebel-held east since the offensive began on Thursday after a ceasefire ended with at least 400 people wounded – including 61 children – on Sunday alone, a doctors’ group said.

The Syrian government offensive to recapture all of Aleppo – with Russian air support and Iranian help on the ground – has been accompanied by bombing that residents describe as unprecedented in its ferocity.

Only 30 doctors now remain in Aleppo’s east, where residents are in dire need of medical and surgical supplies to treat the wounded among a trapped population of 300,000.

“There are 30 doctors who are still inside the eastern Aleppo city,” Abd Arrahman Alomar, a pediatrician who works for the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) in opposition-controlled areas, told a news briefing in Geneva.

They lack equipment and emergency medicine to treat the many trauma cases, and there is only enough fuel to run hospital generators for 20 days. One obstetrician and two paediatricians remain to care for pregnant women and 85,000 children, he said.

“The sudden rise in wounded now means supplies are dangerously low or not available at all,” said Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Gaziantep along the Turkey-Syria border.

“Medics say they can’t transport people to other hospitals in safe areas because eastern Aleppo is surrounded by government forces.”

Dr Alomar said if the bombing continues, “we are going to the point of zero where there are no facilities to be protected, where there is no health staff to be protected”.

{{Diplomacy ‘not dead’}}

Moscow and Damascus launched their assault last week despite months of negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry that resulted in a short-lived ceasefire this month.

Kerry said the failed truce was not the cause of the fighting, and that diplomacy was the only way to stop the war.

“The cause of what is happening is Assad and Russia wanting to pursue a military victory,” Kerry told reporters during a trip to Colombia.

“Today there is no ceasefire and we’re not talking to them right now. And what’s happening? The place is being utterly destroyed. That’s not delusional. That’s a fact.”

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said on Monday the now-defunct truce could still be revived.

Speaking to pro-government Mayadeen TV from New York, he also said the government was prepared to take part in a unity government that incorporated elements from the opposition – an offer that had been rejected in the past.

Al-Moallem accused the US, Britain, and France of convening an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council a day earlier in order to support “terrorists” inside Syria.

But he said ongoing communication between Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov meant a truce brokered two weeks ago is “not dead”.

On Monday, dozens of rebels and their families quit the last opposition-held district of central Homs city, as part of a deal struck with the government last year.

A total of 131 fighters and 119 family members were bussed out of Waer, devastated after a three-year government siege, to rebel-held Dar al-Kubra further north, according to Reuters news agency.

An estimated 600,000 Syrians live under siege, according to the UN, with most encircled by government forces.

The UN’s World Food Programme said it delivered food aid on Sunday to civilians in four besieged towns in Syria for the first time since April.

A convoy of 53 trucks entered Madaya and Zabadani, with another 18 to Fuaa and Kafraya, according to the International Committee for the Red Cross.

At an emergency UN Security Council council meeting on Sunday, US envoy Samantha Power voiced some of the strongest criticism yet of Russia’s support for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counter-terrorism. It is barbarism,” she said. The UK’s envoy accused Moscow of committing war crimes.

The Kremlin hit back on Monday with Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov denouncing “the overall unacceptable tone and rhetoric of the representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States, which can damage and harm our relations”.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called on world powers to “work harder for an end to the nightmare” in Syria, which has killed an estimated 400,000 people and driven millions from their homes.

{As controversy over black American killings intensifies, group to revisit racism’s roots through “terror lynchings”.}

Southern US states have long welcomed tourists retracing the footsteps of the late Martin Luther King Jr and others who opposed racial segregation.

Now the Alabama city that was the first capital of the Confederacy is set to become home to a privately funded museum and monument that could make some visitors wince: a memorial to black lynching victims.

The nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has announced it is building a memorial in the state capital of Montgomery devoted to 4,075 blacks its research shows were killed by lynching in the United States from 1877 to 1950.

The nonprofit’s director, Bryan Stevenson, said the aim is to help “change the landscape” of American racial discourse by openly acknowledging a painful past, much as Germany has Holocaust memorials and South Africa a museum on its past state-sanctioned segregation – apartheid.

He said while hundreds of whites were lynched in roughly the same period of US history, the memorial’s focus will be on “terror lynchings” against blacks in a dozen Southern states – whether by hanging, gunshots, beatings, burnings or other forms of killing used in the past to terrorise black communities.

“I don’t think we can afford to continue pretending that there aren’t these really troubling chapters in our history,” Stevenson said. “I think we’ve got to deal with it.”

Set to open next year on the site of a former low-cost housing project, the monument is to be accompanied by a museum a few blocks away exploring the history of blacks in America from slavery to the present.

Work is already under way on both. How they will be received is an open question.

Pausing at a historical plaque while visiting Montgomery’s civil rights sites, North Carolina tourist Nancy Lange hesitated at the thought of a lynching memorial. “That is tough. I can’t even think beyond that word,” said Lange, 58, who is white.

But daughter Teresa Lange, 27, said a memorial could be valuable in teaching about America’s racial past and fostering conversation about today’s climate of Black Lives Matter , police violence against minorities and racial strife.

“How many people talk about lynching? How many people talk about the hate crimes that still go on today?” she said. “As a tourist I think it would be a good thing… I’d go see it.”

Equal Justice Initiative said the monument and museum also would help counter glorification, in some quarters, of the Confederacy across the South while telling the painful story of race in America. The law firm and its founder, Stevenson, represent death row inmates and advocates for racial justice.

The group already has erected bronze plaques around Montgomery to denote bygone slave markets; another group has built a memorial honouring civil rights martyrs, mostly African-Americans. Elsewhere in Montgomery, a marker explains the history of the church parsonage bombed while King lived there in 1956.

The monument set for a hill in view of Alabama’s Capitol – where the Confederacy was formed – is to include thousands of names of lynching victims etched on hundreds of concrete columns. Each column represents a US county where a lynching occurred. The names were gathered both in past research and new work by Equal Justice Initiative.

The nearby museum is to house what organisers describe as the nation’s largest collection of information on lynching. Located in the nonprofit’s headquarters, it also will include presentations about the domestic slave trade, racial segregation and the incarceration of large numbers of blacks today.

Stevenson said the final design of both the memorial and museum will depend on fundraising, though the Ford Foundation already has given $2m.

Alabama tourism director Lee Sentell said the project has the potential to be important. But he said his agency will need to find out more about the new project before deciding whether to promote it alongside civil rights attractions such as the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute or the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where marchers for voting rights were beaten by state police in 1965.

“It is a difficult subject for most all of us Southerners to contemplate because people who are alive today have never had to give this subject much thought,” Sentell said. He added of the memorial that “the execution of the details will either make people glad they visited the location or not”.

Not everyone is on board with a lynching memorial.

Marlin Taylor, an African-American visitor from Spokane, Washington, was surprised by it.

“With the climate in America right now, I don’t know that that’s a good idea,” Taylor said at the civil rights memorial outside the Southern Poverty Law Center, a public interest law firm. “I feel like that could be more divisive than anything.”

But the Alabama commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Jimmy Hill, supports it. He said telling the story of the lynchings will help people understand America’s tangled, painful past.

“Yes, it’s going to hurt some people. There are some people who are going to see that and say they wish the story wouldn’t be told. But we are on the opposite side of that. We just want the whole story to be told,” Hill said.

{Thousands gather in Mexico City to mark two years since 43 students disappeared on their way to a protest in Iguala.}

Two years after they went missing, the fate of 43 Mexican students who disappeared on their way to a protest in the town of Iguala remains unknown.

Thousands of supporters gathered in Mexico City this week to demand answers about exactly happened the night of September 26, 2014, when students at a teacher training college in Ayotzinapa disappeared.

The Mexican government says the case has been solved, but it’s assessment has been challenged by the students’ families, human rights organisations, and independent investigators.

In January 2015, Mexico’s attorney general at the time, Jesus Murillo Karam, alleged the government had solved the mystery behind the missing students.

Corrupt members of the local police, said Karam, had handed the students over to a drug cartel, who killed them, burned their bodies at a dump in Cocula, and dumped their remains in a river.

Forensic experts, independent journalists and human rights groups, however, say there is no evidence to support the government claims.

“We analysed the evidence approximately for a year bringing specialists from different disciplines and the conclusion was that there was no evidence of massive killing and burning on that particular site,” said Mercedes Moretti, a forensic investigator.

Prosecutors have detained more than 100 police, politicians and drug traffickers in connection with the case, but have convicted none.

Responding to pressure from international human rights groups, the attorney general’s office said recently it would use laser-scanning technology to look for clandestine graves in other locations near the Cocular dump, and investigate if police from other towns were involved in the mass disappearance.

“We can’t say that they were killed if we don’t have the irrefutable scientific proof, nor tell the parents, ‘accept it, they are dead, go back home to mourn your dead’,” Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer representing families of the missing students, told Al Jazeera.

Historian Lorenzo Meyer said the Ayotzinapa case, named after the location of the college in which the teachers-to-be were studying, is one of the darkest chapters in Mexico’s history.

“There is no logical explanation for that ending. It is brutality to the extreme of insanity, but that is not spontaneous, it is the product of decomposition of state structures in Mexico for a long time,” he told Al Jazeera.

The case brought Mexico to a standstill and called into question President Enrique Pena Neito’s credibility as well as the integrity of his government.

Families argue the government is covering up the truth to protect high-ranking officials allegedly involved in the disappearances.

“We don’t want any more lies,” said Cristina Bautista, a mother of one of the missing students.

“We want to know the truth. Where are our children?”

Families say the restless nights continue, but there is one motto that keeps them going: “They took them alive, we want them back alive.”

{Scores killed in intensifying Aleppo air strikes as UN Security Council members denounce Russia for role in Syria war.}

The United States called Russia’s action in Syria “barbarism” while Moscow’s UN envoy said ending the war was “almost an impossible task” as government forces relentlessly bombed the besieged city of Aleppo.

The United Nations Security Council met on Sunday at the request of the US, Britain and France to discuss the escalation of fighting in Aleppo following an announcement on Thursday of a fresh offensive by the Syrian army to retake the northern city, once the country’s most populous before the war.

“What Russia is sponsoring and doing is not counter-terrorism, it is barbarism,” the US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, told the 15-member council.

“Instead of pursuing peace, Russia and Assad make war. Instead of helping get life-saving aid to civilians, Russia and Assad are bombing the humanitarian convoys, hospitals, and first responders who are trying desperately to keep people alive,” Power said.

A September 9 ceasefire deal brokered by the US and Russia effectively collapsed on Monday when an aid convoy was bombed north of Aleppo.

“In Syria, hundreds of armed groups are being armed, the territory of the country is being bombed indiscriminately, and bringing a peace is almost an impossible task now because of this,” Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told the council.

Britain’s UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said the US-Russia track was “very, very near the end of its life and yes the Security Council needs to be ready to fulfill our responsibilities”.

“The regime and Russia have instead plunged to new depths and unleashed a new hell on Aleppo,” Rycroft told the council. “Russia is partnering with the Syrian regime to carry out war crimes.”

Russia is one five countries on the UN Security Council with veto powers, along with the US, France, Britain and China. Russia and China have protected Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government by blocking several attempts at council action.

“It is time to say who is carrying out those air strikes and who is killing civilians. Russia holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, this is a privilege and it is a responsibility. Yet in Syria and in Aleppo, Russia is abusing this historic privilege,” Power said.

As Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari began addressing the council, Power, Rycroft and French UN Ambassador Francois Delattre walked out of the chamber.

{{Jets pound Aleppo}}

The emergency UN meeting came as Syrian government and Russian air raids continued to pummel rebel-held areas of Aleppo in some of the heaviest bombardments since the war began in 2011.

More than 60 people were killed on Sunday in attacks on rebel-held neighbourhoods of the divided city, according to members of the Syrian Civil Defence, a volunteer search-and-rescue group also known as the White Helmets.

The group, which operates only in rebel-held parts of the country, lost several vehicles in Sunday’s bombardment and was struggling to reach many of those caught up in bombings across the city and its outskirts.

“We don’t have enough vehicles to cover the whole city. [Assad’s forces] bombed us directly and devastated most of our headquarters … but we’ll continue with our duty until the end,” Ahmad, an Aleppo-based volunteer with the rescue group, told Al Jazeera.

At least 231 civilians have been killed in violence in Aleppo and its outskirts since a truce collapsed last week in an intense air bombardment by the government and its ally Russia, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

{{‘Tiny window of opportunity’}}

At the Security Council meeting on Sunday, UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura urged members to come up with a way to enforce the failed cessation of hostilities.

The US and Russia still have a “tiny window of opportunity” to salvage the now broken-down truce, said de Mistura. But he noted mutual trust to solve the five-year crisis was “seriously broken”.

“I want to believe, because I am still a naive UN official, that they really meant what they said … and they really wanted it to work,” de Mistura added.

“I’m asking, indeed urging, both of them to go that extra mile to see if they can save their agreement … and do so at the 11th hour.”

Noting attacks of “unprecedented” frequency and intensity in eastern Aleppo, de Mistura called on the council to ensure a cessation of hostilities against civilians, the establishment of weekly 48-hour humanitarian pauses in fighting, and medical evacuations.

The surge in violence has worsened the situation inside eastern Aleppo, which has been besieged by government forces since July 17.

The siege has resulted in acute shortage of food and medical supplies as well as fuel, according to the Syrian Observatory, which relies on a network of activists inside Syria.

A UN official on Saturday noted nearly two million people had been cut off from running water.

{Account suspensions come on heels of agreement between social media giant and Israel to team up against “incitement”.}

Editors from two Palestinian news publications based in the occupied West Bank say their Facebook accounts were suspended last week and that no reason was provided, alleging their pages may have been censored because of a recent agreement between the US social media giant and the Israeli government aimed at tackling “incitement”.

Last week, four editors from the Shehab News Agency, which has more than 6.3 million likes on Facebook, and three executives from the Quds News Network, with about 5.1 million likes, reported they could not access their personal accounts.

Both agencies cover daily news in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Nisreen al-Khatib, a translator and journalist at the Quds News Network, told Al Jazeera that the publication believes the account suspensions were triggered by an agreement between Facebook and Israel earlier this month, in which they agreed to jointly combat what Israeli claims is “incitement” by Palestinians on social media.

Al-Khatib said that even Quds News Network’s non-political vertical that focuses on “entertainment” and “international news” had been suspended, although access was later restored.

“[Sharek-Quds News Agency] does not publish anything that violates Facebook standards or that could annoy governments. But still, we are targeted,” she said.

Al-Khatib said the news agency asked Facebook for an explanation on why the accounts had been suspended “for no reason”.

Facebook replied on Saturday with an apology, saying the suspension had been “accidental”.

The three suspended accounts of Quds News Newtork journalists were unblocked over the weekend by the networking site, she said.

Remah Mubarak, manager of Shehab News Agency, said one of four managers’ accounts that had been suspended “with no warning” by the California-based tech company had still not been reactivated as of late Sunday.

“One manager’s account is still suspended,” he told Al Jazeera, adding the other three accounts were unblocked on Saturday.

Al Jazeera contacted Facebook for comment, but it did not respond by the time of publication.

Mubarak of Shehab News said the “agency covers news in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and also inside Israel”.

“Maybe they don’t want this covered, especially in the West Bank, where executions have happened in recent days. Maybe that effects them on social media and they want to stop these pages to hide the proof,” he said.

Al-Khatib said the incident isn’t the first time Palestinian news sites have had issues with Facebook.

“Many other Palestinian network agencies have been shut down by Facebook for no reason actually. There are at least five Palestinian pages that have been shut down. Gaza 24 was [one of them],” she said.

{{‘Incitement’ crackdown
}}

The Israeli military said on Sunday it has indicted more than 145 Palestinians so far this year for incitement over social media.

Sunday’s announcement comes amid an Israeli campaign to put an end to online postings it says have fueled a near continuous wave of violence over the past year. Palestinians say the violence is the result of nearly 50 years of Israeli military occupation.

Since October, at least 230 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, one Jordanian, an Eritrean and a Sudanese have been killed, according to a count by the AFP news agency.

Shortly after news broke earlier this month of the agreement between the Israeli government and Facebook, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to the social media giant over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement”. She said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests.

Over the summer, an Israeli legal advocacy group – connected to the Israeli army and intelligence agencies -filed a $1bn lawsuit against Facebook claiming the company was violating the US Anti-Terrorism Act by providing services that assist groups in “recruiting, radicalising and instructing terrorists”.

But rights groups and monitors argue that activists and journalists, not “terrorists”, are often the target of incitement charges.