Tag: InternationalNews

{{Security has been stepped up at Jewish sites across Belgium after a gunman shot dead three people at the Jewish Museum in the capital Brussels.}}

A man who was detained by police shortly after the attack has been released without charge. A manhunt has been launched for a different suspect.

A fourth victim remains in a critical condition.

Two of the dead were Israeli tourists, a couple in their 50s, Israel’s foreign ministry said on Sunday.

The Belgian prosecutor’s office said the victims were struck by bullets in the face or throat and Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur said he thought the shooting was probably a “terrorist act”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement strongly condemning the killings which he said were “the result of endless incitement against the Jews and their state”.

Belgium has a Jewish population of some 42,000, about half of whom live in the capital.

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{{Thailand’s military tightened its grip on power on Sunday as it moved to douse smoldering protests fuelled by social media and to rally commercial agencies and business to revitalize a battered economy.}}

The military overthrew the government on Thursday after months of debilitating and at times violent confrontation between the populist government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the royalist establishment.

Critics say the coup will not end the conflict between the rival power networks: the Bangkok-based elite dominated by the military, old money families and the bureaucracy, and an upstart clique led by Yingluck’s brother and former telecommunication mogul Thaksin Shinawatra. The Shinawatras draw much of their influence from the provinces.

The military has detained leaders of the ousted government including Yingluck and an unknown number of her ministers, party officials, and supporters. Leaders of six months of anti-government protests against Yingluck have also been held.

The military has thrown out the constitution, censored the media and on Saturday it dismissed the upper house Senate, Thailand’s last functioning legislature, in what amounts to a clean sweep of the political landscape.

Power now lies squarely in the hands of army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha and his junta known as the National Council for Peace and Order, and their priorities appeared to be stamping out dissent and tending to the economy.

agencies

{{Animosity between Russia and the West over Ukraine’s disintegration has forced Russia to change its course toward the East, Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin said in an interview with Russian media on Friday.}}

Yakunin, 65, who manages one of Russia’s biggest companies — Russian Railways employs more than 880,000 people — had sanctions imposed on him by the United States and the European Union in March as member of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.

Yakunin has his own interpretation of the sanctions, saying in softly accented English: “It was clearly stated that I was sanctioned not because of my wrongdoings but because of my connections with some persons on the top of Russian hierarchy,”

“I consider the sanctions list to be a list of people who actually do something positive for our society and our country. It was not us who introduced this clash, but we were sanctioned and disgraced in the mass media, he said.

Yakunin, who has been accused of massive corruption by opposition politician Alexei Navalny, singled out Putin as “a leader who was disgraced in a way that is absolutely not acceptable in normal diplomatic relations even in the modern tense period of life.”

He said Western pressure was “not civilized behavior” and that this demonstrated lack of democracy in the West.

The Moscow Times spoke to Yakunin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a huge annual get-together that attracts thousands of high-profile business leaders and official from Russia and abroad. This year, the international contingent is slightly thinner than usual, as executives, particularly from the U.S., have bowed to political pressure to keep away.

“Lots of people who came to this forum explain in private that in their countries American ambassadors were reaching them with letters and telephone calls urging them not to come to this event or they will have to face consequences,” Yakunin said.

In this situation nothing remains to Russia but to turn to the east, he said.

“We can aim at reaching new level of relations with our friends in China, South Korea, Japan, the Pacific countries, Latin America and so on,” he said.

But while confident of the bounties that await Russia from ramping up cooperation with new partners, Yakunin is sure that the West will turn back to Russia as soon as the media pressure subsides.

“Business people are very pragmatic. Russia is a very important market, which has nothing to do with emotions, he said.

{Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin}

TheMoscowtimes

{{The mayor of a village in north-western France has been castrated and killed by a jealous husband, reports say.}}

Dominique Leboucher, 55, was murdered on Thursday night by a man who accused him of having an affair with his wife, police sources told media.

The unnamed attacker then reportedly killed himself.

Mr Leboucher, a former insurance salesman, was only elected mayor of Bretteville-le-Rabet in Normandy in March, local media say.

He became a councillor in 2001 before taking up the post of deputy mayor in 2008, according to French newspaper Ouest-France.

Bretteville-le-Rabet is a small village in Normandy with fewer that 250 residents.

Yannick Guesnon, one of the Mr Leboucher’s deputies, told media he did not believe the theory about the married mayor’s infidelity, adding that the attack appeared to be “an act of madness”.

A police investigation is under way.