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Tag: InternationalNews

  • Cameron’s EU Strategy ‘Wishful Thinking’

    Cameron’s EU Strategy ‘Wishful Thinking’

    Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to renegotiate Britain’s ties with the European Union are wishful thinking and likely to yield only minor concessions that will not unite his governing Conservative party, his coalition partner will warn on Friday.

    In a speech at Thomson Reuters in London, Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy prime minister, will launch one of his strongest critiques of Cameron’s Europe policy so far as he unveils his own ideas for reform and sets out the case for Britain to remain inside the 28-nation bloc.

    “The Conservative leadership has spent the last three years ducking and weaving, looking for a way out,” Clegg will say, according to advance extracts from his speech.

    “David Cameron started with grand plans for the repatriation of powers, then he shifted ground. None of this has anything to do with the real issues – the need for a more competitive EU – it’s all about managing internal Conservative party divisions.”

    Tensions

    The robust nature of Clegg’s criticism is likely to cause tensions within Britain’s two-party coalition government ahead of European elections this month. Clegg’s party, the Liberal Democrats, are the junior partner to the Conservatives, and polls suggest they could come fourth in the vote.

    The UK Independence Party (UKIP), which campaigns for Britain to leave the EU, is likely to poll ahead of both parties, fighting it out for first place with the opposition Labour party.

    Cameron has promised to try to renegotiate Britain’s EU ties and to claw back a range of powers if re-elected next year and to then give Britons a referendum on whether to remain inside the EU in 2017.

    Clegg, whose party has styled itself as Britain’s most pro-EU force, will say the strategy is doomed.

    Threat

    “You cannot secure a new settlement for Britain through a one-off negotiation conducted under the threat of exit,” Clegg, 47, will say at a Reuters Newsmaker event at its London headquarters in Canary Wharf on Friday.

    “He’ll be able to agree various minor opt outs and exemptions for Britain with other European leaders. But we wouldn’t let the French or Germans pick and choose the bits of the Single Market they like, so the idea that they would do the same for us is wishful thinking.”

    Cameron has so far garnered only limited backing for his plans among other EU states and German Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out the prospect of a far-reaching overhaul of the bloc’s treaties.

    The opposition Labour party opposes Cameron’s idea of a referendum, saying it creates uncertainty and discourages foreign investment in Britain.

    Clegg, a Cambridge-educated former member of the European Parliament who speaks five languages, will urge Cameron to change tack, suggesting the only way to achieve reform is at the negotiating table.

    “You fight Britain’s corner effectively not by going on a whistlestop tour of Europe’s capitals, a list of make-or-break demands in hand,” Clegg will say.

    wirestory

  • Saudi Blogger Imprisoned For 10 years

    Saudi Blogger Imprisoned For 10 years

    {{A Saudi court has imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi for 10 years for “insulting Islam” and setting up a liberal web forum, local media report.}}

    He was also sentenced to 1,000 lashes and ordered to pay a fine of 1 million riyals ($266,000; £133,000).

    Amnesty International called the verdict “outrageous” and urged the authorities to quash the verdict.

    Mr Badawi, the co-founder of a website called the Liberal Saudi Network, was arrested in 2012.

    A Saudi newspaper close to the government reported that he had lost his appeal against an earlier, more lenient sentence of seven years and three months in jail and 600 lashes.

    Last year he was cleared of apostasy, which could have carried a death sentence.

    Mr Badawi had previously called for 7 May to be a “day for Saudi liberals”. The website he set up has since been closed.

    {wirestory}

  • Berlusconi Begins Community Service For Fraud

    Berlusconi Begins Community Service For Fraud

    {{Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived at a Catholic care home near Milan on Friday to start a year of community service.}}

    He was sentenced to four years in prison for tax fraud last year, commuted to four hours work a week with elderly dementia patients.

    The care home says the 77-year-old will be treated like any other assistant.

    As he arrived, Berlusconi was heckled by a trade unionist in a clown hat who shouted: “To prison!”

    “We Italian workers have one dream in our hearts: Berlusconi in San Vittore!” he yelled, referring to a prison in Milan, before being led away by police.

    The billionaire has been embroiled in a string of court cases.

    His conviction last year was in connection with the purchase of TV rights by his firm, Mediaset, in the 1990s.

    But he was spared prison because the Italian legal system is lenient to the over-70s.

    Berlusconi chose community service rather than house arrest to serve out his commuted sentence.

    Reporters in Rome says this will enable him to continue to lead his centre-right party, Forza Italia, in the European elections, although he was forced to resign his seat in the upper house of parliament.

    Berlusconi has also had to surrender his passport and his travel within Italy is severely restricted.

    He also has to observe a nightly curfew at his palatial home near Milan.

  • Vladimir Putin Visits Annexed Crimea

    Vladimir Putin Visits Annexed Crimea

    {{President Vladimir Putin has arrived in Crimea, his first visit to the peninsula since Russia annexed it from Ukraine in March.

    He addressed sailors in Sevastopol harbour as part of celebrations marking the 1945 Soviet victory over the Nazis.

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel had said it would be a pity if Mr Putin used the anniversary to visit Crimea.

    Meanwhile, reports say several people died in a shoot-out between Ukrainian troops and separatists in Mariupol.}}

    Kiev recently launched an operation to retake official buildings occupied by pro-Russia rebels in Mariupol and several other cities in Ukraine’s east and south.

    Video footage from Mariupol showed armoured vehicles with Ukrainian flags in the streets, with the sound of gunfire in the background.

    The Ukrainian security services said in a statement that one pro-Russian activist was injured, but there have been no casualties on the Ukrainian side.

    wirestory

  • Monica Lewinsky Breaks Silence

    Monica Lewinsky Breaks Silence

    The one-time White House intern whose affair with President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment has broken her long silence in the media.

    In Vanity Fair magazine, Monica Lewinsky, 40, writes that she deeply regrets the fling.

    The president “took advantage” of her, she writes, though she describes their relationship as consensual.

    In 1998, Republicans failed in their effort to oust him from office on the grounds he had lied about the affair.

    But with Mr Clinton’s wife Hillary said to be mulling a 2016 run for the presidency, the Lewinsky matter has re-emerged in US political discourse, in part because Republicans are eager to wield it against her.

    In an advance excerpt from the article released by Vanity Fair, Ms Lewinsky writes she hopes to reclaim her story and says she is still recognised every day and sees her name thrown about in pop culture and the news media.

    “I, myself, deeply regret what happened between me and President Clinton,” she writes.

    “Let me say it again: I. Myself. Deeply. Regret. What. Happened.”

    Ms Lewinsky writes that she suffered abuse and humiliation after the scandal broke in 1998, in part because she was made a “scapegoat” to protect the president.

    “The Clinton administration, the special prosecutor’s minions, the political operatives on both sides of the aisle, and the media were able to brand me,” she wrote.

    “And that brand stuck, in part because it was imbued with power.”

    Since leaving the Clinton administration, she worked briefly as a handbag designer and as the host of a US reality dating show.

    Ms Lewinsky then moved to London for a graduate degree, but said she has had difficulty gaining employment in the US because of her past.

    wirestory

  • Norwegian Army Tests Virtual-Reality Headset in Tanks

    Norwegian Army Tests Virtual-Reality Headset in Tanks

    {{The virtual-reality Oculus Rift headset has been put to a novel use by the Norwegian army – helping soldiers to drive tanks.}}

    By mounting cameras on the outside of the tank, soldiers were able to create a 360-degree feed to the Oculus headset, worn by the driver.

    The device – still just a prototype – is much cheaper than conventional military camera systems.

    But the picture quality is not yet good enough for operational use.

    The army began testing the headset in 2013 and in April of this year tried out the latest iteration of the hardware.

    “It is a partial success,” project leader Maj Ola Petter Odden told reporters.

    “The concept is sound, but the technology isn’t quite there yet. The picture quality is good for 10-15m [30-50ft] – but after that it is difficult to distinguish details, for example whether an opponent is carrying a weapon.”

    Now he plans to wait until next year for further tests.

    “There will be better hardware and we can test it again then,” he said.

    The virtual-reality headset hit the headlines when Facebook bought the company behind it – Oculus VR – for $2bn (£1.1bn) in March.

    To date neither has said much about what they plan to do together, but this week Oculus VR chief executive Brendan Iribe talked about hopes “to build a one billion player MMO”.

    Massively multi-player online games (MMO) using virtual reality (VR) would be the “holy grail” for the technology, he told delegates at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

    Facebook’s large audience would help make such a platform possible although such an enormous player base would require a much larger network than existed currently, he said.

    And while Oculus is starting off with a big focus in gaming he said that a lot of where VR would go in the next decade would be about “face-to-face communication and social”.

    {agencies}

  • Roger Federer Has Second Set of Twins

    Roger Federer Has Second Set of Twins

    {{Roger Federer’s wife Mirka has given birth to their second set of twins.

    Federer, 32, pulled out of this week’s Madrid Masters tournament on Tuesday as the Swiss world number four chose to be with his wife for the birth in Zurich.}}

    “Mirka and I are so incredibly happy to share that Leo and Lenny were born this evening,” tweeted Federer, who will likely miss next week’s Rome Masters.

    The 17-time Grand Slam champion already has four-year-old twin girls, Myla Rose and Charlene Riva.

    Federer, whose older sister Diana also has twins, is expected to return to tennis at the French Open, which starts on 25 May.

    The 2009 champion at Roland Garros has not missed a Grand Slam tournament since 2000.

    Federer, who won the last of his Grand Slam titles at Wimbledon in 2012, last played three weeks ago when he lost to countryman Stanislas Wawrinka in the final of the Monte-Carlo Masters.

    In Madrid on Tuesday, third seed Wawrinka, the Australian Open champion, lost 1-6 6-2 6-4 to Austrian qualifier Dominic Thiem, while fifth seed David Ferrer beat fellow Spaniard Albert Ramos 7-6 (8-6) 5-7 6-3.

    Spain’s Nicolas Almagro needed 11 match points to beat Andrey Golubev 6-3 6-7 (9-11) 7-6 (7-4) and set up a second-round match against Britain’s Andy Murray on Wednesday.

    {wirestory}

  • Thai Court Rules PM Must Step Down

    Thai Court Rules PM Must Step Down

    {{A Thai court found Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra guilty of violating the constitution on Wednesday and said she had to step down, throwing the country into further political turmoil, although ministers not implicated in her case can remain in office}}.

    The decision is bound to anger her supporters, but the survival of her government could take the sting out of protests they had planned for the weekend and may make confrontation between pro- and anti-government groups less likely.

    Yingluck has faced six months of sometimes deadly protests in the capital, Bangkok, aimed at toppling her government. The anti-government protesters failed to achieve their aim in the street but turned to legal challenges to remove her.

    But there appears no end in sight to Thailand’s dysfunctional status quo, putting a further strain on the tourism-led economy which could be heading towards a recession, with protesters still pushing for political reform before any new elections are held.

    The judge who delivered the verdict said Yingluck had abused her position by transferring the National Security Council chief to another post in 2011 so that a relative could benefit from subsequent job moves.

    “The accused was involved in the transfer of Thawil Pliensri from his position as National Security Council head,” the judge said, adding that was done in order for Priewpan Damapong, a relative, to “gain a new position”.

    “The accused acted for her own political benefit … The transfer wasn’t done for the benefit of the country,” he added.

    Yingluck denied wrongdoing when she appeared in court on Tuesday. She was not present on Wednesday and her spokesman was not immediately available for comment.

    It was not immediately clear if she could appeal or if she faced other penalties apart from having to stand down, or if she faced a ban on participation in politics.

    {wirestory}

  • NATO General: Permanent Troops in Eastern Europe an Option

    NATO General: Permanent Troops in Eastern Europe an Option

    {{NATO will have to consider permanently stationing troops in parts of eastern Europe as a result of the increased tension between Russia and Ukraine, the alliance’s top military commander said.}}

    NATO has arranged a number of short-term army, air force and naval rotations in eastern Europe, including the Baltic republics, Poland and Romania, but these are due to finish at the end of this year.

    Asked Тuesday whether NATO might have to look at permanently stationing troops in the alliance’s member states in eastern Europe, U.S. Air Force General Philip Breedlove said: “I think this is something we have to consider and we will tee this up for discussion through the leaderships of our nations to see where that leads.”

    NATO leaders are due to hold a summit in Wales in early September.

    In the run-up to the summit, NATO commanders, defense ministers and foreign ministers would look at “tougher questions” about whether the alliance had the right footprint in Europe, Breedlove told a news conference in Ottawa.

    “We need to look at our responsiveness, our readiness and then our positioning of forces to be able to address this new paradigm that we have seen demonstrated in Crimea and now on the eastern border of Ukraine,” he said.

    Breedlove, who said on Monday he did not think Moscow would send troops into eastern Ukraine, stressed the steps that NATO had taken so far were designed to support eastern members of the alliance.

    “We are taking measures that should be very easily discerned as being defensive in nature. This is about assuring our allies, not provoking Russia, and we are communicating that at every level,” he said.

    Breedlove insisted the so-called U.S. strategic “pivot” toward Asia would have no effect on its commitment to NATO and collective defense, though he acknowledged that U.S. troop levels in Europe have been reduced by about three-quarters from Cold War levels.

    Asked if the U.S. troop levels would be enough in light of the Russian moves, he said: “In our own country now, and I think in every other NATO nation, based on the paradigm that we see that Russia has presented in Crimea and on the border of Ukraine … we are all going to have to reevaluate some of the decisions that have been made (after the end of the Cold War).”

    Breedlove declined to say whether he thought that France should scrap the sale of two Mistral helicopter-carrier frigates to Russia, saying this was “a national decision” that was up to France. Moscow has said it would demand compensation if this took place.

  • Thailand PM in Court Over Abuse of Power

    Thailand PM in Court Over Abuse of Power

    {{Thailand’s prime minister has appeared before the Constitutional Court in Bangkok to defend herself against allegations of abuse of power.}}

    The complaint was filed by senators who said Yingluck Shinawatra’s party benefited from improperly transferring her national security chief in 2011.

    Ms Yingluck could be removed from office and banned from politics for five years if found guilty.

    The decision is expected on Wednesday, the court said after the hearing.

    The prime minister’s supporters believe the top courts are biased against her and the case is an attempt by the elite to force her from office.

    Reporters in Bangkok says if the Constitutional Court also bans enough of her cabinet to disable her caretaker administration, her ministers have warned there will be chaos, with large-scale protests by pro-government red-shirts a certainty.