Tag: InternationalNews

{A team of 10 refugees who will compete at the games in Brazil say they are ready to represent refugees around the world.}

A team of 10 refugees athletes, set to march behind the white Olympic flag when the games open on Friday, have spoken about what they hope to achieve in Brazil.

From Yusra Mardini, a teenage swimmer from Syria who braved a Mediterranean crossing in a leaky dinghy, to Popole Misenga, who spent eight days hiding in a forest as a terrified child to flee bloody fighting, each of the refugee athletes have overcome daunting odds to maintain their Olympic dreams.

Speaking at a press conference on Saturday, Mardini said the team had a mission to represent “the biggest flag – which is all countries”.

“We’re going to represent you guys in a really good way,” she said.

Mardini, who has now settled in Germany with her family, says she will proudly represent Syria, the Olympic movement and her recently adopted homeland when she competes in Brazil.

“I hope you’re going to learn from our story: That you have to move on, because life will never stop for your problems,” she said at the press conference.

READ MORE: Refugees to have own team at Rio Olympics

For Congelese Judoka Misenga, recalling the devastating toll that conflict has had on his family was too much.

The 24-year-old broke down in tears when he was asked to comment on what message he hoped to send through his Olympic participation.

Misenga was nine years old when he fled fighting in Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Separated from his family, he hid in the jungle for eight days before being rescued and taken to a centre for displaced children in Kinshasa.

He later settled in Brazil, staying in the country after the 2013 World Championships.

“I have two brothers that I haven’t seen for years. I don’t remember their faces,” Misenga said tearfully on Saturday.

“I want to send them hugs and kisses. I’m here in Brazil participating so that one day I can bring them to live with me here in Brazil.”

‘Iron will’

Mardini is joined in the refugee ranks by another Syrian swimmer, Rami Anis.

Anis fled Syria in 2011 to avoid being enlisted into the army, relocating to Belgium from Istanbul in October last year.

“I’m very proud to be here,” Rami said. “But I feel a bit of sadness that I’m not participating as a Syrian. We are representing people who have lost their human rights and are facing injustices.”

READ MORE: Pressure mounts for Olympic refugee team

Coach Geraldo Bernardes said the question of whether any of the refugee team could win a medal was immaterial.

“People ask if they can win a medal. I say they have already won their medals just by getting to Rio,” he said.

The International Olympic Committee announced the selection of 10 refugees last month forming the first-ever Refugee Olympic Athletes team.

The refugee team have no way of representing their countries, from which they were forced to flee.

This will mark the first time in history that an all-refugee team has competed at the Games. Refugee athletes who have participated in past Olympics have either done so as part of the delegations of their new countries, or under a special “independent” category.

{Republican presidential nominee suggests Khizr Khan may not have written his speech at the Democratic convention.}

Responding to accusations by the father of an American Muslim soldier killed in Iraq that Donald Trump has “sacrificed nothing”, the billionaire said he had made many sacrifices, such as employing thousands of people.

Khizr Khan – whose son Humayun was killed at the age of 28 – accused the Republican presidential nominee of vilifying US Muslims, in a steely rebuke that electrified the Democratic party convention on Thursday.

“Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America,” Khan said, directly addressing Trump. “You will see all faiths, genders and ethnicities. You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

Trump, a property mogul and former reality TV star, brushed off Khan’s words in an interview on Saturday with ABC News, stating that he thinks he has made “a lot of sacrifices”.

“I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures. I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot,” the 70-year-old said.

Humayun Khan was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq as he approached a car packed with explosives. Before enlisting in the army, he had planned to study law at university.

Trump suggested that Clinton’s speechwriters penned Khan’s emotional address.

“Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s script writers write it?” Trump said.

“If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say,” Trump said, adding that “maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.”

Khan, though, said he wrote the speech with his wife Ghazala, who was standing beside him on stage in Philadelphia.

Among some of Trump’s more controversial policy positions has been a call to ban Muslims from entering the United States.

Commenting on this, Khan said in his speech: “If it was up to Donald Trump, he [Humayun] never would have been in America,” before challenging the nominee on whether he had read the constitution.

In his response, Trump did not say whether he had.

According to the US Department of Defense, more than 5,800 self-identified Muslims serve in the military.

After Trump’s critique, Khan told ABC News: “Running for president is not an entitlement to disrespect Gold Star families and [a] Gold Star mother not realising her pain. Shame on him! Shame on his family! … He is not worthy of our comments. He has no decency. He is void of decency, he has a dark heart.”

His wife Ghazala Khan said: “I am very upset when I heard when he [Trump] said that I didn’t say anything. I was in pain. If you were in pain you fight or you don’t say anything, I’m not a fighter, I can’t fight. So the best thing I do was quiet.”

{Authorities say the hot air balloon was carrying at least 16 people when it caught fire and crashed.}

There were no survivors after a hot air balloon carrying at least 16 people caught fire and crashed in the the US state of Texas, according to local authorities.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) also confirmed Saturday’s crash, which occurred outside the city of Austin on a clear day.

Emergency responders in Texas said the fire had hit the hot air balloon’s basket portion.

“Right now, we have a number of fatalities,” a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) spokesman said from the scene, adding that an FBI team was being dispatched to help in evidence-gathering.

The NTSB offered no details on what may had caused the accident. It said it believed the balloon belonged to a tour company.

Potential fatalities

The crash of the balloon is the deadliest on record in the western hemisphere, according to Jeff Chatterton, a spokesman for the Balloon Federation of North America.

“There are thousands of balloons that go up every year,” he said. “This is unspeakably tragic but it is rather unique.”

More than 150 commercial hot air balloon companies are in operation in North America, he said.

The sheriff’s office said it was working to determine the identities of those aboard.

The accident occurred about three years after 19 people, mostly Asian and European tourists, were killed in a hot air balloon crash in Luxor, Egypt.

A year before that incident, a hot air balloon burst into flames and crashed in New Zealand, killing all 11 people on board in the country’s worst air accident in more than three decades.

{At least 52 dead in the Indian states of Assam and Bihar following monsoon rains that also hit Nepal and Bangladesh.}

At least 52 people have been killed and tens of thousands evacuated as floods driven by torrential monsoon rains ravaged India’s eastern states, according to officials and news reports.

Federal Home Minister Rajnath Singh, who toured the worst-hit areas in the north-eastern state of Assam, said on Saturday that 26 rain-related deaths had been reported over the past week.

“The situation is grim. No efforts are being spared to help people, but we need an action plan to deal with such a serious flood situation,” Singh told reporters in the state capital of Guwahati.

State disaster management authorities said an estimated two million people had been affected, including being displaced, stranded in their homes, or suffering damage to their crops, land or livelihood.

Soldiers were rescuing villagers from low-lying and inundated areas.

Floods also hit the eastern state of Bihar, killing 26 people and affecting 2.2 million, with many rivers flowing above the danger mark, broadcaster CNN-IBN reported.

Tens of thousands of flood victims were moved to more than 350 relief camps.

More rain has been forecast in the flood-hit regions over the next few days, and authorities said they had requested help from the army.

Scores of people die every year from flooding and landslides during the monsoon rains in India and the neighbouring countries of Nepal and Bangladesh.

In Nepal, floods and landslides have killed more than 90 people at a time when millions of people are still living in makeshift huts, after a devastating earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people in 2015.

In neighbouring Bangladesh, the Dhaka Tribune reported four people had died in recent days due to the flooding.

The country’s disaster agency reported that close to 1.5 million people had been affected by the flooding, according to another news website, The Daily Star.

{Officials say air operation targeted PKK members after attempt to storm military base in southeastern Hakkari province.}

Turkish military officials say the army has killed 35 Kurdish fighters after they attempted to storm a military base in the southeastern province of Hakkari.

The early morning attack on Saturday came just hours after clashes in Hakkari’s Cukurca district between Turkish troops and fighters from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the officials said.

They said the fighters attempted to take the base in three different groups, but were spotted by aerial reconnaissance.

An air operation was subsequently launched, killing 23 fighters, the Turkish officials said.

Four more were then killed in a ground operation, they said, adding that the other eight Kurdish fighters were killed in Friday’s gun battle in Cukurca.

Those clashes also left 25 soldiers wounded, the officials said.

Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Istanbul, said the PKK is taking its fight back out to the country side since the peace process ended this time last year.

“A lot of the fighting was in the urban areas before and that resulted in extraordinary destruction of property and civilians death. The PKK seems to have withdrawn from that area now and fighting the Turkish military out in the country side where they had traditional fought before.”

Last week, Turkey’s military launched air strikes against PKK members in northern Iraq, killing 20 fighters.

In the southeast, the military has frequently carried out air strikes after a two-and-a-half-year ceasefire and peace process between the government and the PKK broke down last summer.

More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the PKK – designated a “terrorist group” by Turkey, the US and the European Union – began its armed campaign in 1984.

Turkey carries out frequent attacks against PKK targets in Iraq’s Kurdish-dominated regions near the Turkish border, where the PKK leadership has camps.

Turkey’s military, NATO’s second-largest, has continued to grapple with the low-intensity conflict in the mainly Kurdish southeast as its senior ranks undergo a major shake-up following a July 15-16 failed coup attempt.

{Officer shot dead in Yerevan during a stand-off with an armed group holding hostages in a police station.}

A police officer has been shot dead by armed men locked in a protracted siege with security forces in the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, hours after authorities issued an ultimatum to resolve a weeks-long hostage drama.

“A sniper opened fire from inside the police station and killed a police officer … who was sitting in a car parked 350-400 metres (yards) away,” police spokesman Ashot Aharonyan wrote on Facebook on Saturday.

The gunmen – supporters of fringe jailed opposition leader Zhirair Sefilyan – stormed the police building on July 17, killing one officer, taking several more hostage and seizing a store of weapons.

They have since freed all the police, but on Wednesday seized four medical staff who had entered the compound to treat some of their wounds. Two medics were later released.

Earlier on Saturday, Armenia’s security services had given the gunmen a deadline to surrender after dozens were hurt and arrested in overnight clashes.

“We are giving members of the armed group until 5pm (13:00 GMT) to lay down their arms and surrender,” the Armenian national security services said in a statement.

“Otherwise special forces law enforcement have the right to open fire,” it said. “After the events of July 29, any opportunities to resolve the situation with the terrorists peacefully have been exhausted.”

At least 26 people were arrested in the early hours of Saturday after authorities broke up a rally near the police station, where the armed pro-opposition group has been holed up.

More than 70 people were taken to various hospitals around the capital to be treated for wounds, including burns and broken limbs.

“Out of 73 injured people, 26 are still in hospital, including six policemen,” health ministry spokeswoman Anahit Haytayan wrote on Facebook.

Police used truncheons, stun grenades and smoke bombs to break up the demonstration in support of the gunmen.

Journalists were among those hurt and a house caught on fire in the neighbourhood, a residential area.

Armenian police told the AFP news agency that 165 people were detained in total during the overnight unrest, of whom 26 were later arrested.

The rest were released.

Earlier on Friday, police had exchanged fire with the gunmen, wounding two of them, who were then taken to hospital under armed guard.

The group has demanded the resignation of President Serzh Sarkisian and Sefilyan’s release and protesters have regularly gathered in the neighbourhood, voicing similar calls.

Sefilyan and six of his supporters were arrested in June, accused of preparing to seize government buildings and telecoms facilities.

The hostage crisis and violence has shaken the small landlocked ex-Soviet nation, just months after a surge in conflict with Azerbaijan over separatist ethnic-Armenian region of Nagorny-Karabakh left 110 people dead in April.

The US embassy in Yerevan said in a statement it was “deeply concerned by the shocking images and credible reports of violence and excessive use of force by the police to disperse protestors.”

“We urge the Armenian government to take immediate steps to prevent a repeat of last night’s actions,” the embassy added.

The European Union also called for an end to the stand-off.

“Use of force and violence to achieve political change are not acceptable,” an EU spokesman said in a statement.

“Conflicts need to be resolved through political dialogue with a respect for democracy, rule of law and fundamental freedoms.”

{US president tells Democratic convention party’s nominee has experience and skills for the “demands of the Oval Office”.}

There has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as the next US president.

That was the message US President Barack Obama had for the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on Wednesday night.

Delivering the keynote speech at the convention, which elected Clinton as the party’s presidential nominee on Tuesday , Obama said he had “come to admire” Clinton as someone who never quits, no matter “how much people try to knock her down”.

“I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.”

He described Clinton as a person who listens, keeps her cool and treats everybody with respect.

{{Demands of Oval Office
}}

As a politician and former secretary of state, Clinton had been part of the biggest decisions facing the US, Obama said, noting that “nothing truly prepares you for the demands of the Oval Office”.

“You can read about it. You can study it. But until you’ve sat at that desk, you don’t know what it’s like to manage a global crisis or send young people to war,” Obama said.

“But Hillary’s been in the room; she’s been part of those decisions.”

Obama speech anchored a night of celebrity speakers, not only from the Democratic Party, but also from the worlds of business and entertainment, who spoke in support of Clinton.

US Vice President Joe Biden was one of several speakers to take aim at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, branding him an opportunist who had no clue about how to make America great.

Biden took Trump to task for his trademark reality TV slogan: “You’re fired.”

“Think about that,” Biden said, calling the billionaire businessman’s “cynicism” unbounded.

“How can there be pleasure in ‘you’re fired’?”

“He has no clue about what makes America great. Actually, he has no clue – period.”

Trump ‘unfit to be elected’

Biden said Trump was unfit to be elected to the White House on November 8.

“The threats are too great, the times are too uncertain, to elect Donald Trump as president of the United States,” he said.

Hollywood actress Sigourney Weaver said: “Hillary Clinton, she gets it. She cares. She is committed.”

I’ve seen Hillary in the Senate & the Situation Room. Clear-eyed. Steady. Understands working people. Exactly the leadership we need. –Joe

Former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who survived being shot in the head during an assassination attempt, received a standing ovation at the convention, telling the audience that she was looking forward to saying two words: “Madam President”.

“In the White House she will stand up to the gun lobby, that is why I am voting for Hillary,” Giffords said.

Obama also hit an optimistic tone on the direction the country is taking, saying the “America I know is full of courage, and optimism, and ingenuity”.

And while their are real anxieties about racial divisions, jobs and healthcare, Obama said that his travels around the country had shown him “more than anything, is what is right with America”.

Delegates cheer as Obama addresses the Democratic National Convention

Obama’s image of the US contrasts starkly with the Republicans presidential nominee Donald Trump’s dystopian view of contemporary America as a place where security threats abound and law and order has broken down.

Grabbing the spotlight at a news conference in Miami earlier in the day, Trump urged Russia to find and release tens of thousands of emails that Clinton did not hand over to US officials as part of a probe into her use of a private email system while she was secretary of state.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said.

Clinton’s campaign quickly responded to Trump’s statement, calling it the “first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against a political opponent.

“This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue,” Clinton’s campaign said in a statement.

{{‘Sided with Russia’}}

Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defence secretary, told the convention that Trump had sided with Russia by asking their services in hacking Clinton’s emails, which should be enough to disqualify him from ever becoming commander in chief.

“It’s inconceivable to me that any presidential candidate would be this irresponsible,” he said.

In his speech to the convention, businessman and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said people needed to unite to defeat Trump, who he called a “dangerous demagogue”.

“I’m a New Yorker and I know a con when I see one,” Bloomberg said of Trump.

“The richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy.”

The Clinton campaign has sought to portray Trump, who has no experience in public office, as temperamentally unfit for the White House.

They have contrasted Clinton’s long experience and foreign policy skills with Trump’s maverick position on international relations, which Clinton campaign chair John Podesta has described as. “unsteady, unfit and dangerous”.

Trump has proposed temporarily banning Muslims from entering the country and building a wall on the border with Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants.

Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from the convention, said the Democratic Party was able “to pivot” and attack Trump on his request for Russia to hack Clinton’s emails.

“But at the same time, Donald Trump is also benefitting from this,” she said.

“Once again he’s stolen the show. We are talking about Donald Trump again. And when we are talking about Donald Trump we are not talking about the Democratic convention.

“The Democrats just can’t seem to win … they want to be talking about issues. They want to distance themselves from the Republican convention of a week ago and show how they are different. The problems is this email controversy, that seems to cloud Clinton’s campaign, just won’t go away.”

The convention will end with Hillary accepting the nomination.

{Death toll from two explosions feared to rise as ISIL claims attack targeting Kurdish area Qamishli.}

Two explosions have struck a predominantly Kurdish town in northern Syria, killing at least 50 people and wounding dozens.

Syrian state TV said a truck loaded with explosives blew up on the western edge of the town of Qamishli, near the Turkish border, on Wednesday. Minutes later, a motorcycle also packed with explosives blew up in the same area.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the explosion targeted a centre of the local Kurdish police and a nearby government building.

Amid the wreckage, people searched for survivors even as fire still burned around them.

“Oh my son, what did they do to you?,” a grieving mother said at the scene. “They burned you, and they burned the country.”

Those wounded were rushed to hospitals where doctors raced to save their lives.

“I saw a terrible thing,” a wounded young man said. “I was next to the security headquarters when the explosion happened.”

A man walks at a damaged site after two bomb blasts claimed by ISIL hit Qamishli

ISIL has carried out several bombings in Kurdish areas in Syria in the past.

The predominantly Kurdish US-backed Syria Democratic Forces have been the main force fighting ISIL in northern Syria and have captured wide areas from the hardline fighters.

“This was a large attack,” said Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom, reporting from Gaziantep in Turkey, which is close to the Syrian border. “The death toll could significantly rise throughout the day.”

The latest attack comes amid intense fighting in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, where more than 50 people have been killed in recent days.

As the war drags on towards its sixth year, there is a renewed international push to restart the stalled Syria political talks next month.

People look for survivors under debris at a damaged site in Qamishli on Wednesday

Speaking in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday, following a closed-door meeting with US and Russian officials, Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy to Syria, said Washington and Moscow had been discussing ways to work towards the reintroduction of a ceasefire.

De Mistura said that a third round of intra-Syrian peace talks is set for August.

“In the context of the bilateral meeting today, it was also agreed that we, the UN – the facilitator, the mediator – should continue preparing proposals for addressing difficult issues that are related to the [talks],” he said.

The Syrian Observatory estimates that more than 280,000 people have been killed throughout the five years of bloodshed. Efforts to negotiate a lasting ceasefire have collapsed time and again.

More than 4.8 million Syrians have become refugees displaced from their homeland, while more than 6.5 million people are internally displaced within the country’s borders.

{Republican candidate has “actively encouraged” a foreign power to spy on a political rival, Hillary Clinton’s camp says.}

US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has urged Russia to find the missing emails of Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, drawing condemnation from his Democratic rival.

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump told reporters in Miami on Wednesday. “I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by our press!”

Trump was referring to emails on Clinton’s private email server that she deleted because she said they were private before she turned other messages over to the State Department. The FBI declined to prosecute Clinton over her email practices but its director said she had been “extremely careless” handling classified materials.

Clinton’s campaign quickly responded to Trump’s latest statement, calling it the “first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against a political opponent.

“This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue,” Clinton’s campaign said in a statement.

But shortly after Trump’s comments, his running mate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence, took a different stance and warned of “serious consequences” if Russia interfered in the election.

“If it is Russia and they are interfering in our elections, I can assure you both parties and the United States government will ensure there are serious consequences,” Pence said in a statement.

Russia has brushed aside suggestions it was involved. “I don’t want to use four-letter words,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters on Tuesday.

WikiLeaks emails

In the same news conference on Wednesday, Trump dismissed suggestions that Russia had sought to influence the US election by engineering the theft of Democratic Party emails released by WikiLeaks last week.

The Democratic Party chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned on Sunday after the leaked emails showed party leaders favouring Clinton over her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, for the presidential nomination.

Clinton made history on Tuesday, becoming the first female nominee for president of a major party during the Democratic convention in Philadelphia [EPA]
Al Jazeera’s Kimberly Halkett, reporting from Philadelphia, where the Democrats are holding their presidential convention, said Trump’s latest statement could help Clinton’s party deflect the criticism and internal dissent they had been facing following the leaks.

“This seems to be a welcome gift for the Democratic Party, given the fact that they are trying to distance themselves from the content, which shows that they colluded in favour of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy” over Sanders, Halkett said.

Representatives from Clinton’s campaign have previously claimed that Russians hacked computers belonging to their party, and released those emails on the eve of the party’s convention to benefit Trump’s candidacy.

{{‘Serious consequences’}}

But Trump dismissed the claims of his role in the leak, saying it was not clear who hacked those emails, and describing the incident a sign that foreign countries no longer respected the US.

Trump, whom Democrats have accused of having cozy ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, repeatedly declined to condemn the actions of Russia or any other foreign power of trying to intervene in the a US election.

He also has downplayed his affection for Putin and said he would treat the Russian leader “firmly”, though he said he wanted to improve relations with Moscow.

Elie Jacobs, a cyber-security expert from the Truman National Security Project, said it was likely that Russia was involved with the hacking – but doubted links to Trump.

“I think this was purely an act of cyber warfare, and that’s really the larger story, and less about what it has to do with the political cycle right now,” Jacobs told Al Jazeera.

US President Barack Obama, meanwhile, said “anything’s possible” when asked during an interview whether the Russians could be working to sway the election toward Trump.

“Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin,” Obama said during the sit-down with NBC News that aired on Tuesday.

“And I think that Trump’s gotten pretty favourable coverage back in Russia.”