Tag: InternationalNews

{Wrongful death legal claim says American reporter deliberately “hunted down” to silence her reporting.}

Relatives of Marie Colvin, an American journalist killed in Syria in 2012, have taken legal action against the Syrian government, claiming that she was “hunted down” because of her reporting.

Agents working for the government of President Bashar al-Assad deliberately went after journalists and media activists, according to the “wrongful death” claim filed on Saturday in Washington by the Center for Justice and Accountability.

Colvin, who had been reporting from the besieged city of Homs, worked for The Sunday Times, a British newspaper.

The claim, filed in US federal court on behalf of Cathleen Colvin, Marie Colvin’s sister, and Justine Araya-Colvin, the journalist’s niece, said Syrian officials launched a rocket attack on a makeshift broadcast studio in a neighbourhood of Homs.

Colvin, a 56-year-old veteran correspondent and New York native, died in that attack along with French photojournalist Remi Ochlik on February 22, 2012.

Just hours before her death, she filed her final report on the effect a relentless government bombardment of Homs was having on civilians. The attack by the Syrian army also killed several opposition activists.

“The plan was formulated at the highest levels of the Syrian government,” the claim said. “There were no lawful military targets in the vicinity of the media centre at the time of the attack … No armed rebels were present in or around the media centre. The occupants targeted were unarmed civilians.”

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said at the time that circumstantial evidence and witnesses pointed to the possibility that government forces had taken deliberate action that led to the deaths of Colvin and Ochlik.

More than two dozen journalists were reported killed in Syria in 2012 alone.The government has contended that its attacks targeted what it called “terrorists”.

The lawsuit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages, said there were no lawful military targets in the vicinity of the media centre at the time of the attack and no armed rebels were present in or around the centre.

{Several protesters arrested at rallies for disruption as week US President Obama deemed “very tough” draws to close.}

Thousands have protested across the US over police killings of black men for a fifth straight day, with several people – including a prominent activist – arrested for violence and disruption.

Demonstrations continued into the early hours of Sunday, as what US President Barack Obama has called a “very tough week” drew to a close, five days after Alton Sterling – a 37-year-old black man and father of five – was killed by white police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

His death was followed by the police killing in Minnesota of Philando Castile, a young, black man who worked at a local school serving food to children. Castile’s death was filmed by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and livestreamed on Facebook.

On Thursday, five white police officers were killed by a suspect named as Micah Johnson, a former US soldier who police said claimed he wanted to kill white people.

Obama said Americans of all races and backgrounds were “rightly outraged” by the attack in Dallas, and “rightly saddened and angered” by the fatal police shooting of both Sterling and Castile.

Seeking to calm tensions, he said America was not “as divided as some suggest”.

‘I’m under arrest y’all’

On Saturday night, as a few hundred protesters gathered at the Baton Rouge Police Department, police arrested Deray Mckesson, a key figure in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mckesson livestreamed his own arrest on Periscope, and could be heard saying, “I’m under arrest y’all” as fellow protesters asked why he was being held.

The protest seemed tense as police in riot gear appeared on the scene, apparently to clear the road so traffic could pass. A police spokesman said two firearms were confiscated and several arrests made, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Protesters waved homemade signs while drivers honked their horns in support and some stopped with bottles of water.

In Minnesota, police said arrests were made after protesters began throwing fireworks, bottles and rocks at officers during a protest that shut down a section of Interstate 94, a motorway, on Saturday night.

The march started outside the governor’s mansion, where protesters have gathered since Castile’s death.

About 100 protesters remained just before midnight as police, some in riot gear, walked toward them. The St Paul Police Department tweeted that multiple officers were injured by fireworks thrown by protesters. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people had been arrested.

Other rallies were held in California, Colorado, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Utah. Hundreds gathered in each city, with up to 1,000 people joining the march in New York.

{Air strikes continue across the country as government forces push to encircle rebel-held areas of Aleppo city.}

Air strikes have killed at least 22 people in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, as a government-announced ceasfire entered its third and final day and pro-government forces continued a push to encircle rebel-held areas of Aleppo city.

Dozens of others were injured after air strikes hit the town of Darkush, near the Turkish border in western Idib, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“The toll of the attack is now 22 people, including a child and seven women,” observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said on Friday afternoon

Darkush is held by the al-Qaeda affiliated al-Nusra Front and allied rebel groups, which control the entirety of northwestern province of Idlib.

A Facebook page run by activists in the town posted photographs showing a column of grey smoke curling out of a town tucked in verdant hills.

It said some of the wounded had been transferred to nearby hospitals, and others across the border inside Turkey.

The UK-based observatory had no immediate word on who carried out the strikes but said that it was likely to have been either the Syrian government or its ally Russia, rather than the US-led coalition.

The Syrian army announced on Wednesday that it would observe a 72-hour nationwide ceasefire for Eid al-Fitr, the feast marking the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

But on Thursday, pro-government forces made major steps towards completely encircling the rebel-held parts of Aleppo, capturing high ground overlooking the strategic Castello Road – the only road into and out of the opposition half of the city.

“The Syrian government is now closer than ever to achieving its goal of surrounding Aleppo. This would isolate the city from other opposition controlled areas and from the border with Turkey. For the opposition, it’s a fight for survival,” Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr said on Friday, reporting from the Syria-Turkey border.

“It’s also a question of survival for the estimated 300,000 people living in the eastern districts of Aleppo. A siege would only cause more suffering in a city devastated by years of war. “

Nearly 600,000 Syrians are living under siege in 18 communities across the country, according to figures from the United Nations. If Aleppo is surrounded by government forces, it will become number 19.

“The people are afraid of a siege. The road is totally closed right now. We may have enough goods and medicine for a month,” Aleppo-based media activist Mujahid Abu Joud told Al Jazeera.

“If the government succeeds, it will be the first time the city is besieged.”

The Kremlin said on Wednesday that President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Barack Obama had agreed to “intensify” military coordination in Syria.

The White House said that the two leaders had “confirmed their commitment to defeating ISIL and the al-Nusra Front”.

Last month, air strikes on the provincial capital Idlib city killed at least 21 civilians, including five children.

Russia launched air strikes in support of the Damascus regime in September, one year after the international coalition, which was bombing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in Iraq, extended its raids to Syria.

More than 280,000 people have been killed in Syria since the country’s civil war erupted in 2011, starting with peaceful protests that swiftly escalated into an armed rebellion increasingly dominated by jihadist groups.

{The man often referred to as “Pakistan’s Mother Teresa” has died at a Karachi hospital.}

Prominent Pakistani philanthropist Abdul Sattar Edhi has died from renal failure, his family has said. He was 88.

Earlier on Friday, Faisal Edhi told a news conference that his father was in critical condition at the intensive care unit of a Karachi hospital.

His condition took a turn for the worse in the afternoon when he faced difficulty breathing while undergoing dialysis at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation. Doctors had put Edhi on ventilator, his son Faisal said.

Edhi’s war was against prejudice, cruelty. No politics, no fatwas, no greed. Just humanity for the sake of humanity.

In June, he reportedly declined an offer from former president Asif Ali Zardari for treatment abroad, saying he would only be treated in a government hospital in Pakistan.

Edhi, was born in 1928 in a village called Bantva inside what is now India’s Gujarat state.

He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service in 1986. The Edhi Foundation operates ambulance services, orphanages, women’s shelters, dispensaries and morgues in several Pakistani cities.

{Alleged launch came after Washington and Seoul deployed an advanced missile system in the South.}

North Korea fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile on Saturday but the launch appears to have failed in the early stages of flight, South Korea’s military said.

The launch came a day after the US and South Korea pledged to deploy an anti-missile system and two days after North Korea warned it was planning a tough response to what it called a “declaration of war” from the United States.

That followed Washington slapping sanctions on the nation’s leader Kim Jong Un.

The South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that the missile was launched at about 1130am Seoul time (0230GMT) in waters east of the Korean peninsula.

Al Jazeera could not indepedently verify the launch.

The missile was likely fired from the submarine as planned but appears to have failed in the early stage of flight, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

‘Means for attack’

Al Jazeera’s Sohail Rahman, reporting from Tokyo, quoted Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as saying the launch had no major impact on his country’s territorial waters or sovereignty, but that it was a challenge to the international community and resolutions made by the UN Security Council.

“It comes after a week of intense diplomatic and military activity on the Korean Peninsula,” Rahman said.

The North has conducted a string of military tests that began in January with its fourth nuclear test and included the launch of a long-range rocket the next month.

The UN Security Council imposed harsh new sanctions on the country in response to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test and the long-range rocket.

South Korea and the United States said on Friday they would deploy an advanced missile defence system in South Korea, drawing a sharp and swift protest from neighbouring China, Pyongyang’s sole major ally.

Pyongyang also conducted a test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) in April, calling it a “great success” that provided “one more means for powerful nuclear attack”.

{Following police killings of black men, protests resume after officers at Dallas rally were killed in ‘revenge’ attack.}

Thousands have taken to the streets of US cities to denounce police killings of two black men this week, a day after a man killed five police officers at a similar demonstration in the city of Dallas.

Protesters on Friday clogged roadways in New York City, Atlanta and Philadelphia, and events in San Francisco and Phoenix also drew large crowds.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or significant numbers of arrests, though in Phoenix police in riot gear used pepper spray on protesters, some of whom threw rocks at officers, local media said.

Videos posted online showed protesters also gathering in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where 37-year-old Alton Sterling was shot dead by police early on Tuesday.

The largest demonstration appeared to be in Atlanta, where thousands of people marched, chanting and waving signs demanding justice, video posted to social media showed.

Footage from broadcasters showed a large crowd facing off with dozens of police vehicles blocking a local interstate highway.

{{‘No justice, no peace’}}

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed tweeted that the rally was largely peaceful, though about 10 people had been arrested.

Friday was the second day of demonstrations against the killings since the fatal shootings of Sterling and of 32-year-old Philando Castile near St Paul, Minnesota.

The killings again stoked racial tension that has flared repeatedly across the country since the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Castile was killed by police during a traffic stop on Wednesday, and his girlfriend broadcast live footage of the immediate aftermath of his shooting on Facebook, drawing millions of viewers.

Sterling was killed on Tuesday during an altercation with two white police officers outside a shop. A gruesome video of that incident caused uproar on social media.

“No justice, no peace, no racist police,” demonstrators shouted late on Friday in Baton Rouge, where state and local police in riot gear tried to keep them from blocking a busy roadway.

Thursday’s demonstrations over the killings of Sterling and Castile were largely peaceful until gunfire rang out at a Dallas rally that was winding down.

Authorities said 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a black American soldier who had fought in Afghanistan, launched a sniper attack that killed five police officers and wounded nine other people. According to police, he later said he had wanted to “kill white people.”

Police killed Johnson with a bomb-carrying robot after cornering him in a parking garage, ending an hours-long standoff.

{North Korea vows a tough response to new US sanctions on leader Kim Jong-un and other top officials.}

North Korea has promised a tough response to what it deemed a “declaration of war” by the United States, after Washington blacklisted the country’s leader Kim Jong-un for the first time over human rights abuses.

Pyongyang described the sanctioning of Kim as a “hideous crime”, the official Korean Central News Agency reported on Thursday.

“What the US did this time, not content with malignantly slandering the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is the worst crime that can never be pardoned,” it cited the foreign ministry as saying.

In announcing the sanctions on Wednesday, the US Department of Treasury said Kim and 10 other top officials were behind the killing and torture of political prisoners in the country’s system of political prison camps.

“Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labour, and torture,” said Adam Szubin, the acting Treasury under-secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

The Treasury said Kim, North Korea’s Supreme Leader, was responsible for abuses in his roles as head of the country’s Ministry of State Security and Ministry of People’s Security.

According to officials in Washington, North Korea’s Ministry of State Security holds between 80,000 and 120,000 prisoners in political prison camps where torture, execution, sexual assault, starvation and slave labour are common.

The US also alleged that another ministry overseen by Kim runs a network of police stations, detention centres and labour camps, where suspects under interrogation “are systematically degraded, intimidated and tortured”.

Authorities in Washington for the first time identified other top officials directly involved in rights abuses, including Choe Pu Il, the minister of people’s security, Ri Song-chol, a senior official in the Ministry of People’s Security, and Kang Song-nam, a bureau director with the Ministry of State Security.

Treasury official Tom Malinowski, who oversees human rights and labour issues, said that many of the people on the list had not been previously known.

“This won’t bring any sort of dramatic change, but lifting anonymity of these functionaries will make them think twice when they consider an act of cruelty or oppression,” Malinowski said.

Another senior US official said that naming the specific officials involved would help strip the anonymity under which they carry out systematic abuses.

{Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom will now square off for Conservative party leadership and the role of prime minister.}

Britain is on its way to getting its second female prime minister, after Tory members of parliament narrowed the race for leadership of the country’s ruling Conservative party.

The race pits Home Secretary Theresa May, a rising star of the party’s right, against her eurosceptic rival Andrea Leadsom. The winner will replace Prime Minister David Cameron, who announced his resignation after Britain voted last month to leave the European Union.

May won 199 votes and Leadsom 84 in a second vote by Conservative politicians. Justice Secretary Michael Gove received only 46 votes and was eliminated from the race.

“This vote shows that the Conservative Party can come together, and under my leadership it will,” May told supporters shortly after the results were announced.

Now that Conservative MPs have had their say, the final decision will be left up to the wider membership – some 150,000party members across the country.

Grassroots Conservatives will have the final say on whether May or Leadsom becomes Britain’s first woman prime minister since Margaret Thatcher was forced from office in 1990.

The result of the contest is expected by September 9, meaning businesses and investors must endure two more months of uncertainty over who will lead the huge task of disentangling Britain’s economy from the European Union while trying to safeguard trade and investment.

Leadsom emerged as a star of the victorious “Leave” campaign in Britain’s EU referendum.

May, who is well ahead in the polls, supported the “Remain” camp, but says she has the mettle to unite a party that – like the country – is divided over the referendum result.

The new leader will be responsible for leading Britain’s exit negotiations with the 28-nation EU as well as helping to steady the country’s government and economy, which has been deeply shaken by the reaction of markets to the EU vote.

“Andrea Leadsom is undoubtedly the outsider, but she will play up her Brexit credentials,” said Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips on Thursday in Westminster.

“She was prominent on the Leave side during the referendum, unlike Theresa May. And she will argue that only a true believer can really take control and lead the process whereby Britain comes out of the EU.”

Almost two-thirds of Conservative MPs voted for Theresa May.

“She will appear to the wider membership as a safe pair of hands in these very uncertain times, and she has years of experience at the top of government,” said Phillips.

Prime Minister David Cameron said last month that he was stepping down after voters, many of them swayed by concerns over high immigration and a desire to reclaim “independence” from Brussels, rejected his entreaties to keep Britain in the EU and his warnings that leaving would spell economic disaster.

Investor concerns about the effect of the referendum have mounted in recent days, with asset managers suspending trading in commercial property funds worth billions of pounds after too many people rushed to withdraw their money at once.

The British pound levelled off on Thursday after two days of nervous trading drove it below $1.30 for the first time in more than three decades.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser to Europe’s largest insurer Allianz, told Reuters news agency on Thursday that the pound could sink towards parity with the dollar unless politicians got a grip.

“After the Brexit referendum, the UK has to urgently get its political act together,” El-Erian told Reuters in a telephone interview. “‘Plan B’ depends on the politicians in London and across the Channel, but so far they have not stepped up to their economic governance responsibilities.”

{Suicide bombings, gun and mortar attack also wound 50 north of Baghdad, as death toll from previous attack rises to 292.}

At least 30 people have been killed in an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) suicide bomb, gun and mortar attack on a Shia shrine north of Iraq’s capital Baghdad, officials said.

The incident comes just days after the worst bombing in the country since the US-led invasion of 2003, which was also claimed by ISIL. That attack, in a bustling Baghdad street packed with shoppers, killed 292 people, according to the health ministry.

The overnight assault on the Sayyid Mohammed shrine in Balad also wounded 50 people, the army’s Joint Operations Command spokesman said in a statement on Friday.

The shrine was first targeted with mortar rounds before suicide bombers arrived and opened fire. Two of the bombers blew themselves up in a market next to the shrine, while a third was killed and his explosives belt defused, the statement said, giving no further details on how he was killed.

Iraq had been on high alert after Sunday’s devastating attack in Baghdad ahead of the Eid al-Fitr holiday to mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Health Minister Adila Hamoud said late on Thursday that the bodies of 115 people killed in the bombing had now been handed over to families, while the identities of 177 others had yet to be determined.

{{Trapped by flames}}

The blast also wounded 200 people, said the minister, who on Tuesday told the AFP news agency that the process of identifying the dead – which she put at 150 at the time – was expected to take 15 to 45 days.

The attack has overshadowed what would normally be a joyful holiday for Iraqi Muslims, instead turning it into a time of mourning and sadness. Families have said they are furious over delays in identifying their relatives.

Police Major-General Talib Khalil Rahi said the suicide bomber on Sunday detonated a minibus loaded with plastic explosives and ammonium nitrate.

The initial blast killed a limited number of people, but flames spread and trapped people inside shopping centres that lacked emergency exits, Rahi told a news conference in Baghdad.

Interior Minister Mohammed Ghabban resigned after the attack, and authorities also announced the execution of five convicts and the arrest of 40 fighters in an apparent effort to limit fallout.