Tag: InternationalNews

{The Turkish government issues a new decree shaking up security forces and media in wake of failed coup attempt.}

The Turkish government has issued a new decree ordering the closure of scores of media organisations as it widened its crackdown in the wake of a failed coup attempt earlier this month.

According to the government decree, which was published in the official gazette of the republic late on Wednesday, three news agencies, 16 television channels, 23 radio stations, 45 daily newspapers, 15 magazines and 29 publishing houses have been ordered to shut down.

Among them are Zaman Newspaper, Samanyolu News Channel and Cihan News Agency, which have previously been accused of supporting the movement of Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric and businessman blamed by the Turkish government for the failed coup bid on July 15.

A total of 1,684 members of the armed forces, including 127 generals and 32 admirals, were also being dismissed from the Turkish military as result of their alleged connections to the Gulen movement, according to the decree, the second to be issued under the powers of the state of emergency.

Interior ministry takes over key security force

In one of the most significant institutional changes since the coup attempt, the decree also announced that the gendarmerie and the coast guard would in future fall under the interior ministry and not the army.

The gendarmerie, which is responsible for public order in rural areas that fall outside the jurisdiction of police forces, as well as assuring internal security and general border control, had always been part of the military. Its removal is seen as a blow to the armed forces’ clout.

The decree will now move to parliament, which is dominated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The legislature has oversight powers on such decrees, adopted as part of the state of emergency which entered into force on Thursday.

The new decree will come in to affect on July 29, according to Turkey’s state owned Anadolu Agency.

Last week, Erdogan issued another decree to close 2,341 institutions – including schools, charities, unions and medical centres – which are suspected to have connections to Gulen’s movement.

Since the failed coup attempt, 15,846 people, including soldiers, judges, prosecutors and civil service workers, have been detained. Of them, a total of 8,133 have been charged, according to the latest interior ministry figures.

The rapid pace of arrests since the failed coup has worried many of Turkey’s allies, who say they see the country going down an increasingly authoritarian road.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday expressed deep concerns about the ongoing wave of arrests in Turkey following the attempted coup.

In a phone conversation, Ban told Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that “credible evidence” must be presented swiftly so that the detainees’ legal status could be determined by a court of law.

Ban has spoken out repeatedly on the need for Turkey to respect freedom of speech and assembly and to uphold due process.

The UN chief “trusts that the government and people of Turkey will transform this moment of uncertainty into a moment of unity, preserving Turkey’s democracy,” Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq said..

Turkey’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, on the other hand, warned the crackdown and purge unleashed after the coup attempt was not over.

“The investigation is continuing, there are people who are being searched for. There could be new apprehensions, arrests and detentions,” Yildirim told Sky News, according to the network’s translation of his remarks.

“The process is not completed yet,” he added.

A total of 8,651 soldiers took part in the failed coup attempt and 1,214 of these soldiers were “military students”, according to the Turkish military [Reuters]
Turkey to close all army high schools

The Turkish government is also set to issue another decree to close down military high schools and restructure war academies in the wake of the failed coup attempt.

After the publication of the new decree on Thursday, all military high schools will be shut, and all cadets will be transferred to regular state schools, Al Jazeera Turk reported on Wednesday citing government sources.

A total of 8,651 soldiers took part in the failed coup attempt and 1,214 of these soldiers were “military students”, according to the Turkish military.

Immediately after the failed coup attempt, a total of 62 students at Kuleli Military School, the oldest such establishment in Istanbul, were arrested by Turkish authorities.

The cadets, aged between 14-17, were accused of having connections to the movement of US-based cleric and businessman Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan blames for the failed coup bid.

Their relatives have since denied the youths were willing participants in the coup attempt, saying they were summoned to school from vacation by commanders who duped them into taking part in the rebellion and deployed them onto Istanbul’s streets.

But, Turkish authorities continue to believe that the military’s educational institutions are mostly controlled and occupied by Gulen supporters.

“Government officials told us that some military cadets may not be connected to the Gulen organisation, but, they said at this stage it would be impossible for them to determine who is connected and who is not,” said Al Jazeera Turk’s Didem Ozel Tumer.

“They believe the [Gulen] organisation has been distributing answer keys for the military schools’ entrance exam.”

Turkish war academies, which offer university level education to prospective military officials, will also be affected by the new decree, expected to be issued on Thursday.

After the shake-up, these academies will continue to exist, but they will fall under the defense ministry and not the army, according to the Turkish pro-government daily Star.

{Prosecutors in Baltimore drop remaining charges against police officers in the death of African American Freddie Gray.}

Prosecutors have dropped all remaining charges against the three Baltimore police officers awaiting trial in the case of Freddie Gray, an African American man whose death in police custody last year triggered riots across the US.

Wednesday’s decision means that no one will be held criminally responsible for the death of 25-year-old Gray, whose neck was broken while he was unrestrained in the back of a police van in April 2015.

But in a fiery defense of her case, prosecutor Marilyn Mosby said she stood by “the medical examiner’s determination that Freddie Gray’s death was a homicide”, adding that there was “a reluctance” and “an obvious bias” among some officers investigating the case.

“We’ve all been witness to an inherent bias that is a direct result of when police police themselves,” she said.

“Police investigating police, whether they are friends or merely their colleagues, was problematic.”

A spokeswoman for the Baltimore police had no immediate comment on Mosby’s remarks.

Gray’s mother, Gloria Darden, stood by Mosby, saying police lied. “I know they lied, and they killed him,” she said.

Activist Sharon Black, an organiser for the Peoples Power Assembly, which has been holding rallies and protests in Baltimore, told the Associated Press that she believed the anger will build in the community again because police were not being held accountable.

Earlier on Wednesday, Chief Deputy State’s Attorney Michael Schatzow told the judge on Wednesday that prosecutors were dropping the charges against officer Garrett Miller, as well as the two otherofficers.

Miller had faced assault, misconduct in office and reckless endangerment charges.

A judge had already acquitted three other officers, including the van driver who prosecutors considered the most responsible and another officer who was the highest-ranking of the group. A mistrial was declared for a fourth officer when a jury deadlocked.

{{‘High-energy injury’}}

Last week, the prosecutors failed for the fourth time to secure a conviction against a police officer in the case, and Baltimore’s police union called on prosecutors to drop the charges against three officers still awaiting trial.

In May, a US court cleared a police officer of assault and other charges relating to Gray’s death.

Gray suffered a severe neck injury after his arrest on April 2015, apparently while being transported in the back of a police van.

He complained about breathing difficulties, fell into a coma and died one week later. The 25-year-old had been taken into custody for carrying an illegal switchblade.

According to an autopsy, Gray suffered a “high-energy injury” that was most likely caused when the police van he was riding in suddenly slowed down.

Gray’s death was one of several recent killings of African American men by police officers that trigerred natiowide demonstrations and stoked a national debate about police brutality against minorities..

The incident also sparked the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement in the country.

Following the protests, the prosecutor had vowed to go after those involved in Gray’s death.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, DC, said: “Obviously right now, the country is in a very sensitive place when it comes to relations between communities of colour and police officers, after more police-involved shootings.”

Black Lives Matter protests

Baton Rouge, in the US state of Louisiana, recently became the scene of large protests against police brutality after officers shot dead 37-year-old Alton Sterling on July 5 outside a supermarket, claiming he had a gun.

The father of five had been selling CDs.

Footage of the moment Sterling was killed was captured on a mobile phone and circulated online, sparking outrage and then protests.

Sterling’s killing was followed the next day with another police shooting. An officer killed a 32-year-old black man, Philando Castile, at a traffic stop in the midwestern US state of Minnesota. The aftermath of the shooting was also captured on video and streamed live by Castile’s girlfriend on Facebook.

The deaths sparked outrage and protests in many cities across the US.

Just days later, five white police officers were shot dead at one such protest in Dallas, Texas.

{Second victim “fighting for life” after police shoot dead two ISIL-linked hostage-takers at church in Normandy.}

An 84-year-old priest has been killed with a knife, and another person seriously wounded, after two men with alleged links to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) took several people hostage in an attack on a church in northern France.

Father Jacques Hamel reportedly had his throat slit on Tuesday before French police entered and shot dead the attackers, a French police source told the Reuters news agency.

The Paris-based AFP news agency, citing the ministry, said a second hostage was “fighting for life” after the incident in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, Normandy, but indicated that the other three hostages had made it out unharmed.

Later on Tuesday, French prosecutor Francois Molins identified one of the attackers as 19-year-old Adel Kermiche, who was reportedly under surveillance after having tried to travel to Syria twice.

He was under house arrest and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet at the time of the attack.

Speaking outside the church, French President Francois Hollande called it a “dreadful terrorist attack” and told reporters the assailants had pledged allegiance to ISIL, also known as ISIS.

The ISIL-linked Amaq website said two of its “soldiers” had carried out the attack.

“We are put to the test yet again,” Hollande said. “The threat remains very high.”

In a separate televised national address on Tuesday evening, Hollande declared “our country is at war…this war will be long”.

Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said the two assailants entered the church during a morning service.

“There were worshippers there; there were nuns; and they took those people hostage, including that priest who was killed. One of the nuns managed to escape, French radio reported, and it was that person who raised the alarm and called the police,” Butler said.

“Special forces arrived shortly after and the hostage-takers were then killed when they tried to leave the church.”

The Paris prosecutor’s office said the case had been handed to “anti-terrorism” judges for investigation.

French police arrested one person in connection with the attack, a source close to the inquiry told Reuters on Tuesday afternoon.

The Vatican in a statement called the incident a “barbarous killing”, saying it was even more heinous because it happened in a sacred place.

String of attacks

The attack comes as France is on high alert after an attack in Nice that killed 84 people and a string of deadly attacks last year claimed by ISIL.

The country is in a state of emergency and boosted visible police presence in the wake of the attack in Nice this month.

The security measures have been extended four times since assailants, who pledged allegiance to ISIL, struck Paris in November, killing 130 people at restaurants, a concert hall and the national stadium.

The Nice massacre has triggered a bitter political spat over alleged security failings, with the government accused of not doing enough to protect the population.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls had warned earlier in the week that the country would face more attacks as it struggles to handle fighters returning from wars in the Middle East.

France has been concerned about the threat against churches ever since a foiled plot against one in the Paris suburb of Villejuif in April last year.

Sid Ahmed Ghlam, a 24-year-old Algerian IT student, was arrested in Paris on suspicion of killing a woman who was found shot dead in the passenger seat of her car, and of planning an attack on a church.

Prosecutors said they found documents about al-Qaeda and ISIL at his home, and that he had been in touch with suspected fighters in Syria about the plan to attack a church.

{Suspended president signals intent to stay away from event, after ruling out participation in a “secondary position”.}

Brazil’s suspended President Dilma Rousseff has announced through an aide she will not attend the torch ceremony opening the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.

Tuesday’s announcement came a day after Rousseff said in an interview she would not play second fiddle to Michel Temer, the interim president.

Rousseff, who is facing an impeachment trial that could confirm Temer as her successor one month from now, was invited to attend the ceremony in Rio’s Maracana stadium, where Temer will declare the Games open on August 5.

“She is not going,” the Rousseff aide told Reuters news agency.

Rousseff said in an interview with Radio France Internationale broadcast on Monday that she did not intend to take part in the Olympics in a “secondary position”.

A spokesperson for Temer, Rousseff’s former vice president who is now running Brazil, said she was welcome to attend the launch of the Games, but not at Temer’s side in the VIP balcony.

“She will be in the stands below him,” Marcio de Freitas, the spokesperson, said in a message to Reuters.

The presence of both leaders at the ceremony would have been awkward for foreign dignitaries, diplomats said.

Rousseff believes that, impeachment or no impeachment, she deserved to be there.

She told RFI that her government and that of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva , her mentor and Workers Party leader, had done most of the work to win the Olympics for Rio de Janeiro and build the infrastructure for the global sports event.

The faulty, unfinished apartments for athletes at the Olympic village were the responsibility of the Rio city government and private builders it contracted, not the federal government, she said in the interview.

Polls of senators show that Brazil’s first female president will be convicted of breaking budget laws and definitively removed from office at the end of August, confirming Temer as president for the remainder of her term through 2018.

Rousseff’s opponents blame her for leading Brazil into its worst recession since the 1930s and benefiting from the country’s biggest-ever corruption scandal at oil company Petrobras.

{UN’s Syria envoy targets August for restart of peace talks as intense air strikes kill at least 18 people in Aleppo.}

Air strikes in Syria’s divided city of Aleppo have killed dozens of people, according to a monitor, as fighting intensifies across the country despite UN appeals for greater humanitarian access and the resumption of peace talks.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Tuesday that Syrian government helicopters targeted the al-Mashhad neighbourhood in the rebel-held half of the city, killing at least 18 people.

The Observatory added that the number of casualties was likely to rise due to the high number of people critically wounded.

Zouhir Al Shimale, an Aleppo-based journalist, said air strikes, including on a residential building, have killed at least 32 people over the past two days.

“Residents say the building was full of families [internally displaced] from other areas,” he told Al Jazeera by telephone.

Separately, at least 42 civilians were killed on Monday in Syrian government air strikes on al-Atareb, a city in the Aleppo province.

{{‘Reconciliation’}}

Aleppo has been roughly divided between government control in the west and rebel control in the east since mid-2012.

In recent weeks, government forces’ advances around the city’s outskirts have severed the only remaining route into the rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods, effectively placing them under siege.

“There are around 400,000 civilians in the besieged city of Aleppo on the brink of starvation. Just last Sunday, two days ago, the Russian and the Syrian regime air forces bombarded the six remaining hospitals and medical facilities in [the city],” Farah al-Atassi, of the opposition’s High Negotiations Committee (HNC), told Al Jazeera on Tuesday.

Syrian government air strikes over the weekend put five medical clinics in Aleppo out of action, according to local rescue workers and the Observatory.

On Tuesday, the general command of the Syrian army called on opposition fighters in eastern Aleppo to lay down their weapons, the government-run SANA news agency reported.

In text messages to civilians and fighters, the army urged residents to “join the national reconciliations and expel the mercenary outsiders from the areas where the citizens reside”, SANA added.

Opposition groups associated to the Free Syrian Army, however, insisted that the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front and armed groups like it have only a minor presence within the city.

{{Diplomatic push}}

The latest attacks came amid a renewed international push to restart the stalled Syria political talks next month.

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

De Mistura told reporters 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].”

But the HNC’s Atassi told Al Jazeera that de Misutra had said “nothing new”, and that there was “no progress on the ground” to convince the opposition to return to the negotiating table.

The HNC, the opposition’s main negotiating bloc, has previously said progress must be made on the implementation of ceasefires, the lifting of sieges and access to humanitarian aid before it will return to Geneva.

Al Jazeera’s Paul Brennan, reporting from Geneva, said de Mistura used the word “homework” during Tuesday’s press conference, meaning the technical delegations from both the American and the Russian sides needed to figure out “how and if” they could somehow work together.

The Americans, added Brennan, would have to compromise on how to discern between groups like al-Nusra, which the UN describes as a “terrorist” group, and moderate opposition rebel groups, as the two often fight side-by-side.

The Syrian conflict started as a mostly unarmed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, but it quickly escalated into a full-blown civil war between the government, armed opposition fighters and hardline groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

The 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.

{Footage from youth detention centre shows Aboriginal teens tear-gassed, stripped naked and chained to chairs.}

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ordered an inquiry into the treatment of children in detention after the airing of videos showing prison guards tear-gassing teenage inmates and strapping a half-naked, hooded-boy to a chair.

Footage of the abuse of six aboriginal boys in a juvenile detention centre sparked renewed criticism of Australia’s treatment of Aborigines and their high imprisonment rate.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) aired CCTV footage late on Monday of boys in a Northern Territory juvenile detention centre being stripped naked and held for long periods in solitary confinement.

The CCTV video also showed guards mocking inmates, carrying a boy by the neck and throwing him onto a mattress in a cell, and covering a teenager’s head with a hood and shackling him to a chair with neck, arm, leg and foot restraints.

“Like all Australians, I’ve been deeply shocked – shocked and appalled by the images of mistreatment of children,” Turnbull said on ABC radio on Tuesday as he announced a Royal Commission, Australia’s most powerful state-sanctioned inquiry.

The CCTV footage from the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin was shot between 2010-2014.

A lawyer representing two of the boys told the Reuters news agency all six boys abused were of aboriginal descent – Aborigines make up the majority of the Northern Territory population and 94 percent of juvenile inmates in the territory.

Lawyer Peter O’Brien said he was suing the state on behalf of the two young aboriginal men, alleging assault, battery and false imprisonment.

“It seems as if this abuse is built into the very core of the system,” he said in a statement, calling for the immediate release of one of his clients, who is now in an adult prison, and all children imprisoned in the Northern Territory.

Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda described the video as “an absolute disgrace”.

“Our (indigenous) people have known about things like this … and to just see it laid bare in front of us last night must be a wake-up call to everyone in Australia – that something’s got to be done about the way we lock our people up in this country, and particularly the way we lock our kids up,” an emotional Gooda, who is an Aboriginal, told reporters.

A report into some of the incidents by the Northern Territory Children’s Commissioner in 2015 found fault with the guards’ behaviour, but the findings were disputed by the then head of prisons and not acted upon, said the ABC.

Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles sacked his corrections minister within hours of the broadcast and said that information about the abuse had been withheld from him, blaming a “culture of cover-up” within the Corrections system.

Some Aborigines in the territory called for Giles to be removed. A coalition of Northern Territory Aboriginal organisations called for the national government to dissolve the territory government, which it has the authority to do.

“Any government that enacts policies designed to harm children and enables a culture of brutalisation and cover-ups, surrenders its right to govern,” spokesman John Paterson told Reuters.

{{‘Excessive use of force’}}

Residents in Alice Springs staged a peaceful protest against the abuse of children in detention, while the ABC reported that at least eight people were protesting on the roof of a prison in the town. Al Jazeera could not independently confirm the prison protest.

“Excessive use of force, isolation and shackling of children is barbaric and inhumane,” Human Rights Watch Australia Director Elaine Pearson told Reuters.

The ABC reported that only two detention staff members identified in the footage remained within the youth justice system.

Indigenous young people aged 10-17 were 17 times as likely to be under Australia’s youth justice supervision, according to data gathered by Reuters. They were 28 times as likely to be detained.

Australia’s Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs, who backed the inquiry, said: “We have been reporting on this question of indigenous incarceration, particularly of juveniles, for many, many years and we have had many, many reports…on the appalling conditions in which they are held.”

Aborigines comprise just three percent of Australia’s population but make up 27 percent of those in prison.

{Reports say 42 dead in government attacks on al-Atareb as UN official urges humanitarian access to besieged areas.}

More than 42 civilians are reported to have been killed and dozens more wounded in air strikes launched by the Syrian government in al-Atareb, a city in Aleppo province of the country’s northwest.

With violence continuing to escalate in the area, a government news agency reported that the Syrian army carried out operations against opposition fighters in locations across the country on Monday.

More than 42 civilians are reported to have been killed and dozens more wounded in air strikes launched by the Syrian government in al-Atareb, a city in Aleppo province of the country’s northwest.

With violence continuing to escalate in the area, a government news agency reported that the Syrian army carried out operations against opposition fighters in locations across the country on Monday.

“It is well within the power of all parties and those who back them to minimise civilian casualties and avoid further crimes and atrocities,” he told the UN.

“They must do so. Civilians and civilian infrastructure are not pawns to be sacrificed but are especially protected under international law.”

The official state-run SANA news agency reported on Monday that a woman and her child were killed on Monday in Aleppo when fighters fired shells on a government-held neighbourhood.

A car bomb blast hit Damascus on Monday, Syrian state news agency SANA reported, without giving details of casualties.

An AFP journalist heard the powerful explosion, which SANA said hit the modern, upmarket Kafar Sousse area in the southwest of the war-torn country’s capital.

The official Al-Ikhbariya television channel said at least one person was injured, while the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which also reported the car bomb attack, spoke of casualties without giving details.

SANA also reported that the Syrian army on Monday carried out operations against opposition fighters in areas across the country, including the provinces of Aleppo, Deraa, Deir Az Zor, Hama and Homs.

The Syrian uprising started with largely unarmed protests against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, but it quickly turned into a full-blown civil war that has since continued unabated.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights network estimates that more than 280,000 people have died in the five years of bloodshed.

{Police said nine suspects were killed in a safehouse after a two-hour gun battle in the capital, Dhaka.}

Nine suspected gunmen were killed by police in an early morning operation in Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka, according to police.

Police said they stormed the fourth floor of a rented block of flats in the Kallyanpur area at 5am on Tuesday morning, where they killed nine men who were wearing black clothes and white turbans.

The operation, which the police named Storm 26, lasted an hour. A tenth man who was shot by police survived and was taken to hospital.

“They were university students. We got some of their ID cards from their clothes,” Deputy Commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, Masud Ahmed, told Al Jazeera.

“We are now searching the property, and a bomb squad is present.”

The incident followed a routine “block raid” operation in the area conducted by the Dhaka Metropolitan police which had started after midnight.

“During the operation, someone from inside one house, threw a cocktail and a few of the men tried to escape from the building,” Ahmed said, referring to a petrol bomb.

The police did not release the names of the suspects or the universities they attended.

“Right now for sake of investigation, we can’t tell you their identities, but I can confirm that they are Bangladeshi,” Ahmed said.

The operation came a month after gunmen stormed a restaurant and bakery in an upmarket area of the capital and killed 22 people after a hostage siege, including nine Italians, seven Japanese, an American and an Indian.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL) later claimed responsibility for the attack.

Many Bangladeshis were shocked to discover that three of the five attackers, who were all killed in an army raid that ended the siege, had attended some of the country’s most prestigious private schools.

The men had gone missing from their homes in the months before the attack.

On Monday, authorities released a list of 68 names of young people whose families had reported them missing, suggesting some of them could have joined armed groups.