Tag: InternationalNews

{{Islamist insurgents in Iraq have seized the city of Tikrit, their second major gain after capturing Mosul on Tuesday, security officials say.}}

Tikrit, the hometown of former leader Saddam Hussein, lies 150km (95 miles) north of the capital Baghdad.

Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki vowed to fight back against the jihadists and punish those in the security forces who fled offering little or no resistance.

The insurgents are from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

ISIS, which is also known as ISIL, is an offshoot of al-Qaeda.

It controls considerable territory in eastern Syria and western and central Iraq, in a campaign to set up a Sunni militant enclave straddling the border.

There were also reports on Wednesday of fighting further south, in Samarra, 110km north of Baghdad.

Separately, at least 21 people were killed and 45 hurt by a suicide bomber at a Shia meeting in Baghdad, police said.

{{‘Do not give in’}}

As many as 500,000 people fled Mosul after the militants attacked the city. The head of the Turkish mission in Mosul and almost 50 consulate staff are being held by the militants, Turkish officials say.

Turkey’s foreign minister warned there would be “harsh retaliation” if any of its citizens were harmed.

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{{France told Iran it must cut back a key part of its nuclear programme and Tehran cast doubt on the chances of meeting a July deadline for a deal with world powers, highlighting the major hurdles negotiators still face.}}

Iran’s talks with six major powers on curbing its nuclear programme in exchange for an end to sanctions could be extended for another six months if no deal is reached by a July 20 deadline, a senior Iranian official said.

While an extension is possible, experts believe both sides may come under pressure from critics at home to seek better terms during this extra time period, further complicating negotiations.

Singling out a big gap in negotiating positions that will be difficult to overcome in less than two months’ time, France’s foreign minister said Iran should drop a demand to have thousands of uranium enrichment centrifuges.

Instead it should restrict itself to a few hundred of the machines used to increase the concentration of the fissile isotope.

Iran – which says its nuclear programme is peaceful and rejects accusations it has been seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability – now has around 19,000 centrifuges installed, of which roughly 10,000 are operating, according to the U.N. nuclear agency.

Enriched uranium can have both civilian and military uses, depending on the degree of refinement.

“We are still hitting a wall on one absolutely fundamental point which is the number of centrifuges which allow enrichment,” Laurent Fabius told France Inter radio on Tuesday.

“We say that there can be a few hundred centrifuges, but the Iranians want thousands so we’re not in the same framework.”

Paris has long held out for strict terms in the negotiations and it was not immediately clear whether Fabius was spelling out Paris’ position or that of the six powers, also including the United States, Germany, Britain, China and Russia.

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{{Pakistani Taliban have said they were behind an attack at the country’s largest airport that killed at least 28 people, including 10 militants.}}

The raid began late on Sunday at a terminal used for cargo and VIP flights at Karachi international airport.

Following reports of fresh violence early on Monday, airport officials said the siege was now over and flights were set to resume in the afternoon.

Karachi has been a target for many attacks by the Taliban.

A spokesman for the group, Shahidullah Shahid, said Monday’s assault was “a message to the Pakistan government that we are still alive to react over the killings of innocent people in bomb attacks on their villages”.

The dead terminal staff were said to be mostly security guards from the Airport Security Force (ASF) but also airline workers. At least 14 people were wounded.

Analysts say the attack further undermines Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s attempt at initiating peace talks with the Taliban.

The negotiations have made little headway since February. Critics have argued that they could allow the militants to regroup and gain strength.

{{The kidnapping of 200 Nigerian girls and several recent horrific murders of women is expected to raise pressure on the world community to take concrete action to punish those responsible for sexual violence at a global summit in London this week.}}

Invited by Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie and British Foreign Secretary William Hague, government ministers, military and judicial leaders and aid workers from about 150 nations will join the first global summit to end sexual violence in conflict.

The June 10-13 summit follows a run of shocking cases of violence against women including the kidnap of schoolgirls by Islamist Boko Haram, the stoning to death of a pregnant woman in Pakistan in a so-called “honour killing”, and the gang-rape and murder of two Indian teenagers who were hanged from a tree.

Hague said too often those who committed these crimes never faced justice and the summit would agree the first international protocol on how to document and investigate sexual violence in conflicts.

“Often it is the lack of evidence that means that these things go unpunished,” Hague told Sky television on Sunday.

“Now this will lead to prosecutions. None of this will be achieved overnight but this is a problem which has been getting worse in recent decades and is utterly unacceptable in the 21st century.”

The conference, with 1,200 attendees including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, will be co-hosted by Hague and Jolie, special envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), who joined forces in 2012 to tackle rape and sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations.

Oscar-winner Jolie’s involvement in humanitarian issues dates back to 2001 when she travelled to Sierra Leone as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and was horrified to see the impact of years of civil war when an estimated 60,000 women were raped.

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{{Pope Francis has told Israeli and Palestinian leaders they “must respond” to their people’s yearning for peace “undaunted in dialogue” during an unprecedented prayer meeting among Jews, Christians and Muslims at the Vatican on Sunday.}}

The pope made his vibrant appeal to Israeli President Shimon Peres and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas at the end of a two-hour evening service in the Vatican gardens, an encounter he hopes will relaunch the Middle East peace process.

“Peacemaking calls for courage, much more so than warfare. It calls for the courage to say yes to encounter and no to conflict; yes to dialogue and no to violence; yes to negotiations and no to hostilities,” he said.

The pope spoke after Jewish rabbis, Christian cardinals and Muslim Imams read and chanted from the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran in Italian, English, Hebrew and Arabic in the first such inter-religious event in the Vatican.

At times the chanting made it seem that participants were in a synagogue or outside a mosque in the Middle East rather than a primly manicured triangular lawn, a spot the Vatican chose as a “neutral” site with no religious symbols.

In his strong speech in Italian, Francis called for respect for agreements and rejection of acts of provocation. “All of this takes courage, it takes strength and tenacity,” he said.

Francis, who made the surprise invitation to the two leaders during his trip to the Holy Land last month, said that the search for peace was “an act of supreme responsibility before our consciences and before our peoples” and noted that millions around the world of all faiths were praying with them for peace.

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{{Kosovo’s ruling party of Prime Minister Hashim Thaci claimed a third term on Sunday in an election marked by a low turnout among Kosovars frustrated with widespread poverty and corruption.}}

With votes from 70% of polling stations counted, Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) held 30%, ahead of its arch rival in the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) with 26%.

Thaci is likely to form a coalition government with smaller parties and ethnic Serbs to secure his third four-year term in power, but his reliance on others could hamper his ability to govern effectively.

Turnout of only 43%, down from the two previous parliamentary elections, reflected widespread frustration among the Balkan country’s 1.8 million people at the lack of progress made since Thaci presided over the territory’s secession from Serbia in 2008.

“Tonight, Kosovo has won. From tomorrow we will start work on our new mission,” Thaci told supporters in the capital, Pristina. “We will tell the world that Kosovo’s independence was just the beginning, not the end.”

Fifteen years since breaking away in war, Kosovo ranks among Europe’s poorest countries. A third of the workforce is unemployed and corruption is rife.

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{{ U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Friday proposed that Jordan’s U.N. ambassador, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, replace Navi Pillay as the United Nations’ human rights chief based in Geneva, the world body’s press office said.}}

The nomination will now go to the 193-nation U.N. General Assembly for approval. Several U.N. diplomats said there was unlikely to be any resistance to the appointment given that Prince Zeid is generally popular and has established a solid reputation as a human rights advocate.

Prince Zeid, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and Cambridge University, has previously served as Jordan’s ambassador to the United States and Mexico. He was also a political affairs officer in UNPROFOR, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia during the Balkan conflict.

Last year Prince Zeid was among the U.N. envoys who called for a boycott of a U.N. meeting on international justice the United States and others described as “inflammatory” and a forum to merely complain about the treatment of Serbs in war crimes tribunals. The session was organised by a Serbian politician who chaired the General Assembly at the time.

If approved as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid will replace Pillay, a South African jurist who in 2012 was given an abbreviated second term of only two years due to criticism the United States, which disliked her criticism of Israel, U.N. diplomats said at the time.

In 2012, Syria also made clear it was not a fan of Pillay, whom the Syrian delegation described as “hostile” towards the government of President Bashar al-Assad because of its approach to the country’s civil war, now in its fourth year.

Pillay has accused the Syrian government of war crimes and called for the conflict to be referred to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Last month Russia and China vetoed a French-drafted resolution that would have brought the Syrian conflict to the ICC.

The Jordanian diplomat who will replace Prince Zeid as Amman’s U.N. ambassador is Dina Kawar, who will become the sixth female to head a delegation on the U.N. Security Council. Jordan will be on the 15-nation council through the end of 2015.

reuters