Tag: InternationalNews

{Student not charged but held for interrogation, police say, after Rezaul Siddique was hacked to death in Rajshahi.}

Police have detained a student in connection with the murder of a university teacher in Bangladesh, a killing that was claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group.

Tamijuddin Sarker, a senior police officer, said the student was arrested on Saturday night, hours after the Rezaul Karim Siddique, a 58-year-old English professor, was hacked to death in the northern city of Rajshahi.

“The student was not formally charged for the murder but was detained for interrogation,” the officer said, adding that a six-member panel of investigators had begun working to resolve the murder.

Siddique was attacked from behind with machetes as he walked to the bus station from his home.

Two or three assailants rode up on a motorcycle and attacked Siddique, slitting his throat and hacking him to death.

On Sunday, Rajshahi University teachers went on strike to demand punishment of the killers, while students staged a demonstration on campus.

They called on the government to arrest the criminals and ensure safety of the teachers, writers and free thinkers.

Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar, reporting from Dhaka, said it was unclear why Siddique was targeted.

“The police say that the manner of his murder was very similar to the others and they believe that it is a religiously motivated attack,” he said.

“His colleagues say Siddique had never been publicly critical of Islam unlike the seven others who have been murdered in the same way.

“He had been a cultural activist, not someone who had been critical of religion, and his cultural activities were seen as unreligious.

“He launched a music school in a very conservative village, so the criteria for targeting people appear to have been broadened.”

ISIL claimed that its fighters killed Siddique because “he promoted atheism”, according to the Amaq news agency, which is affiliated with the group.

The attack was similar to those perpetrated by ISIL, who have claimed killings of secularist bloggers in the country.

The assailants have used sharp weapons and struck from behind, a method used by suspected fighters to kill Bangladeshi bloggers and publishers in 2014 and 2015, according to police.

Five secularist bloggers and one publisher have been killed by suspected armed fighters in Bangladesh since last year.

{Region in western Maharasthtra state reels under worst drought in decades as wells dry up and heatwave worsens.}

Around 330 million people in India are affected by drought, according to the government.

The Marathwada region in India’s western Maharashtra state is badly affected, reeling under the worst drought in decades.

Around 400km from Mumbai, the region has been getting insufficient rains for the past three years.

Temperatures are in the low 40s in some areas, with others only cooling to 38C at night. It is worse for the poor in rural areas, who are forced to drink whatever water they can.

In 2015, the region received only 49 percent of what is considered a normal amount of rainfall.

Some parts received even less: a meagre 35 percent of normal rainfall.

Trains loaded with water are being moved across the country, but farmers’ wells are drying up and drinking water is being rationed.

Arriving almost daily, each train brings millions of litres of water to this drought-stricken area. But even this is not enough.

“It’s not helped much because we only got it once before in the past 15 days,” a village resident told Al Jazeera.

“We’re only getting 50 litres per house every eight days, while others are getting 200 every day.”

This year’s heatwave is making things worse. Temperatures in many parts of India are well above average, with some places reporting temperatures more than 5C higher than would be expected at this time of the year.

The heat is now being blamed for the death of more than 100 people and fears are rising that this could turn into a major catastrophe.

Globally heat waves are one of the largest causes of weather-related deaths.

The situation is particularly hazardous if the temperatures do not drop during the night, because this would normally be when the body would recover from the heat.

The situation in India is exacerbated because many people do not have access to air-conditioning.

Electric fans can only provide relief if temperatures are below 35C, and they have also been shown to accelerate dehydration.

Last year 2,500 people died in a heat wave which gripped the country in May.

For now, the farmers await the monsoon downpours that are forecast for June.

{Police say the pattern of the attack fitted with previous killings of secular and liberal activists in the country.}

Unidentified attackers have hacked a university professor to death in Bangladesh, police say, adding that the assault bore the hallmarks of previous killings of bloggers and online activists.

Police said Rezaul Karim Siddique, a 58-year-old English professor, was attacked from behind with machetes as he walked to the bus station on Saturday from his home in the country’s northwestern city of Rajshahi.

Two or three assailants rode up on a motorcycle and attacked Siddiquee, slitting his throat and hacking him to death, police official Golam Sackline said, adding that an investigation had been launched.

Al Jazeera’s Maher Sattar, reporting from Dhaka, said it was unclear why Siddique was targeted.

“The police say that the manner of his murder was very similar to the others and they believe that it is a religiously motivated attack,” he said.

“His colleagues say that Siddique had never been publicly critical of Islam unlike the seven others who have been murdered in the same way.

“He had been a cultural activist, not someone who had been critical of religion and his cultural activities were seen as unreligious. He launched a music school in a very conservative village, so the criteria for targeting people appears to have been broadened.

“There is now concern among liberals as to whether it’s possible to express yourself and your beliefs any more with the same freedom that they had in the past.”

Teachers and students at Rajshahi University staged a demonstration on campus after the murder.

Homegrown assailants have been blamed for a number of murders of secular bloggers and online activists since 2013, the most recent being in the capital Dhaka early this month.

Police say that in each of the attacks unidentified assailants hacked the victim to death with machetes or cleavers.

Eight members of banned Ansarullah Bangla Team, including a top cleric who is said to have founded the group, were convicted late last year for the murder of atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider in February 2013.

The recent killings have sparked outrage at home and abroad, with international rights groups demanding that the secular government protect freedom of speech in the Muslim-majority country.

Ansar al-Islam, a Bangladesh branch of Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, this month claimed responsibility for the murder of 26-year-old Nazimuddin Samad, a law student who was killed on the streets of Dhaka, according to US monitoring group SITE.

Police, however, blamed the Ansarullah for the murder.

{Tremors and aftershocks leave about 12,500 injured and another 58 missing while destroying 7,000 buildings.}

The death toll from Ecuador’s devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake last week has risen to 654 people, the government has announced.

The quake of April 16 – the worst in nearly seven decades – injured around 12,500 people and left 58 missing along the country’s ravaged Pacific coast.

“These have been sad days for the homeland,” President Rafael Correa said during his regular Saturday television broadcast. “The country is in crisis.”

Several strong tremors and more than 700 aftershocks have continued to shake the country since the major quake, sparking momentary panic but little additional damage.

Tremors are expected to continue for several weeks.

With close to 7,000 buildings destroyed, more than 26,000 people were living in shelters.

Some 14,000 security personnel were keeping order in quake-hit areas.

Survivors in the quake zone were receiving food, water and medicine from the government and scores of foreign aid workers, though Correa has acknowledged that bad roads delayed aid reaching some communities.

Correa’s leftist government, facing mammoth rebuilding at a time of greatly reduced oil revenues, has said it will temporarily increase some taxes, offer assets for sale and possibly issue bonds abroad to fund reconstruction.

Congress will begin debate on the tax proposal on Tuesday.

Correa has estimated damage at $2bn-$3bn. Lower oil revenue has already left the country of 16 million people facing near-zero growth and lower investment.

{German chancellor on a visit to Turkey says “refugees will have more opportunities near their home”.}

The German chancellor has sought the creation of “safe zones” to shelter refugees inside Syria, a proposal criticised by the UN and rights groups.

Speaking at a university in the city of Gaziantep, Angela Merkel called for “zones where the ceasefire is particularly enforced and where a significant level of security can be guaranteed”.

Keeping people displaced from their homes on the Syrian side of the border would help the 28-nation bloc and Turkey, which hosts 2.7 million Syrian refugees, stem the flow of refugees to European shores.

Merkel, who visited Nizip refugee camp near the Syria border along with senior EU leaders on Saturday, heaped praise on Turkey for its efforts at the camp.

“Our goal is not only to stop illegal migration, but for refugees to have more opportunities near their home,” Merkel said.

The UN has warned against the safe-zone plan unless there was a way to guarantee the refugees’ safety in the war-torn state. Aid workers have also opposed it.

A ceasefire between the Syrian government and rebel groups in place since February end has faltered, forcing tens of thousands of people to flee the fighting.

But they are not allowed to cross into Turkey, and instead are camped near the Azaz border crossing where local agencies offer humanitarian support.

Turkey only allows critically injured Syrians to enter the country where more than 2.7 million refugees are registered.

EU-Turkey deal

EU leaders have faced criticism for striking a deal last month with Turkey under which Ankara would get a package of incentives – from billions in refugee aid to progress on visa-free access to the bloc for Turkish citizens – in exchange for help in returning refugees.

The deal to send back thousands of refugees and migrants from the Greek islands to Turkey has been dubbed as immoral and a violation of international humanitarian law. Rights groups say Turkey is not a country where returnees can be guaranteed proper protection.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the deal had already had a significant impact and that the number of people illegally crossing the Aegean Sea each day had dropped from 6,000 in November to 130.

One side of the bargain, used to sell the refugee deal to the Turkish public, was Turks winning quicker visa-free travel to Europe, a pledge that now could go unfulfilled, at least by the June deadline Prime Minister Davutoglu had wanted.

On Saturday Davutoglu said there would be no more readmissions if visa liberalisation was not enacted, but that he believed the EU would take the necessary steps.

Davutoglu, Merkel, EU Council President Donald Tusk and Vice-President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans visited the Nizip camp on Saturday and inaugurated a child protection centre in Gaziantep.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrian children in Turkey have still no access to education.

Davutoglu said Turkey had met all its responsibilities, including giving refugees the right to work. But a work permit scheme for refugees designed to protect them from exploitation has been slow to gain traction.

Yet Tusk on Saturday praised Turkey as a refugee host.

“Today Turkey is the best example in the entire world of how to treat refugees. I am proud that we are partners. There is no other way,” he said.

Amnesty International has said Syrians are being shot at trying to enter Turkey while others are being deported to Syria against their will, a claim Davutoglu refuted on Saturday.

{Solar Impulse 2 lands in San Francisco following a 62-hour, nonstop solo flight without fuel.}

A solar-powered plane has landed in California, completing a risky, three-day flight across the Pacific Ocean as part of its journey around the world.

Pilot Bertrand Piccard landed the Solar Impulse 2 in Mountain View, in the Silicon Valley south of San Francisco, following a 62-hour, nonstop solo flight without fuel.

The plane taxied into a huge tent erected on Moffett Airfield where Piccard was greeted by the project’s team.

The landing came several hours after Piccard performed a fly-by over the Golden Gate Bridge as spectators watched the narrow aircraft with extra wide wings from below.

“I crossed the bridge. I am officially in America,” he declared as he took in spectacular views of San Francisco Bay.

Piccard and fellow Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg have been taking turns flying the plane on an around-the-world trip since taking off from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, in March 2015. It made stops in Oman, Myanmar, China, Japan and Hawaii.

The trans-Pacific leg was the riskiest part of the plane’s global travels because of the lack of emergency landing sites.

“The idea here is not so much that solar planes can immediately replace jet planes powered by fossil fuel,” Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds, reporting from Mountain View, said.

“It is rather to give the pioneers of the technology inspiration for other uses of solar power.”

Wider wings

The plane’s ideal flight speed is about 28 mph, though that can double during the day when the sun’s rays are strongest. The carbon-fiber aircraft weighs more than 2,268kg, or about as much as a mid-size truck.

The plane’s wings, which stretch wider than those of a Boeing 747, are equipped with 17,000 solar cells that power propellers and charge batteries. The plane runs on stored energy at night.

Solar Impulse 2 will make three more stops in the US before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe or Northern Africa, according to the website documenting the journey.

The project, which began in 2002 and is estimated to cost more than $100m, is meant to highlight the importance of renewable energy and the spirit of innovation. Solar-powered air travel is not yet commercially practical, however, given the slow travel time, weather and weight constraints of the aircraft.

{Torture survivors sue psychologists who designed programme described as brutal, physically harmful and not effective.}

For the first time since the US launched the so-called War on Terror, two former CIA contractors are in federal court.

Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who designed the CIA’s torture programme, are trying to get a judge to throw out the lawsuit filed on behalf of some of the men who were tortured.

More than 100 men say they were subjected to waterboarding and beatings during interrogations in Afghanistan.

According to the 2014 US Senate Intelligence Committee report on the torture programme, Mitchell and Jessen, who had no experience in interrogations, were paid $81m to teach the CIA how to break the detainees during questioning.

The Senate report called the programme “brutal” “physically harmful” and “not effective”.

{Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed says firming up an April 11 ceasefire essential to success of negotiations in Kuwait.}

The UN envoy for Yemen has hailed a “constructive” first full day of peace talks but called for a halt to air strikes by a Saudi-led coalition and missile fire by Houthi rebels.

Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed said firming up an April 11 ceasefire was essential to the success of the negotiations in Kuwait.

The envoy, who spent months getting the warring sides to the negotiating table, said Friday’s talks had been “very constructive”.

“There was a consensus on strengthening the ceasefire and the two sides were committed to the need to achieve peace and that this is the last opportunity,” he said.

The United Nations hopes that the negotiations will end fighting across Yemen that has killed more than 6,800 people and driven more than 2.5 million from their homes since March last year.

The Houthis have held Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since September 2014 and their advance triggered a Saudi-led air campaign in support of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government.

As the talks got under way, military sources told the AFP news agency that the ceasefire was largely holding on the ground, although clashes were continuing around the flashpoint city of Taiz, where pro-government forces have been under rebel siege for months, and in Jawf province on the Saudi border.

Ould Cheikh Ahmed said the rebels complained of continuing air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition while the government side complained of continued ceasefire violations by the rebels.

He said he had contacted Saudi Arabia about the coalition air strikes and they had said the raids were ordered only in response to ceasefire violations by the rebels.

“The ceasefire is respected between 70 percent to 80 percent all over Yemen,” Ould Cheikh Ahmed said.

The talks are based on UN Security Council resolution 2216 which calls for the Houthi fighters to withdraw from areas they seized since 2014 and hand heavy weapons back to the government, the UN envoy said.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from the talks, said a major hurdle in the negotiations was a “huge trust deficit” between the warring sides.

“The UN envoy along with the different factions are trying to work on confidence-building measures and start a political process with the aim of forming a national unity government,” he said.

“For the United nations this is a very critical moment. They have to seize the opportunity or there is not going to be peace any time soon.”

The war has taken on regional implications, as Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia accuses regional Shia rival Iran of arming and training the Houthis.

Iran says it only provides the rebels with political support, though the US Navy says its sailors and allies have seized weapons heading for Yemen from Iran.