Tag: InternationalNews

{US Secretary of State John Kerry has asked Russia to press its ally Syria into speeding up the removal of chemical weapons.}

The US says only about 4% of chemical weapons declared by the Syrian government have so far been removed.

Mr Kerry raised the issue with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, officials said.

Syria’s chemical weapons are due to be removed and destroyed by 30 June.

Under the terms of the UN-backed plan, Syrian authorities are responsible for packing and safely transporting the chemical weapons to the Mediterranean port of Latakia.

The first consignment of 16 tonnes, from two Syrian sites, left Latakia on 7 January.

A further shipment left on 27 January, according to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

“Secretary Kerry pressed Foreign Minister Lavrov to push the regime for more progress on moving the remaining chemical weapons within Syria to the port in Latakia,” the US State Department official said.

Washington considered progress so far to be “unacceptable”, the official added.

The OPCW, which is overseeing the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal, has been meeting in The Hague to discuss the operation’s progress.

BBC

{A former Norwegian minister nominated fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize on Wednesday in a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
}

“He has contributed to revealing the extreme level of surveillance by nations against other nations and of citizens,” former Socialist Left Party minister Baard Vegar Solhjell told AFP, explaining his move.

“Snowden contributed to people knowing about what has happened and spurring public debate” on trust in government, which he said was “a fundamental requirement for peace”.

In a letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee obtained by AFP, Solhjell and his party colleague Snorre Valen said that they do not necessarily condone or support all of Snowden’s disclosures, but praised him for revealing the “nature and technological prowess of modern surveillance”.

“The level of sophistication and depth of surveillance that citizens all over the world are subject to have stunned us, and stirred debate,” they wrote in the nomination letter.
They added that Snowden’s actions have “led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies”.

AFP

({{AFP}}) – {The Sochi Winter Olympics have opened up a new front of distrust between the United States and Russia, with tensions simmering over security preparations amid fears the games could be targeted by extremist militants.}

Analysts say the former Cold War rivals are unlikely to risk a full-blown confrontation over security in Sochi, the first Olympics held on Russian soil since the US-boycotted 1980 Moscow Games.

Nevertheless, some experts say the failure of the United States and Russia to engage fully over a range of issues could ultimately compromise security at the Olympics.

Micah Zenko, an expert on national security at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, argued that the “safety and security of everyone attending the Winter Olympics is being put at further unnecessary risk because of the reciprocal distrust between Russia and US counterterrorism and intelligence agencies.”

The White House has expressed “concern” about an uptick in reported threats by violent extemists relating to the Sochi Games.

Security fears have been exacerbated by two suicide bombings in the southern city of Volgograd last month — Russia’s deadliest in three years — that killed 34 people.

Other senior US officials meanwhile have complained that Russia has “not been forthcoming in sharing specific threat information.”

The US Olympic Committee has advised athletes heading to Sochi to avoid wearing their team uniforms or Team USA logos outside of Olympic venues during the February 7 to 23 multi-sport event to avoid being targeted.

According to Temuri Yakobashvili, the former deputy prime minister of Georgia and ex-ambassador to the United States, the American concerns are “are very legitimate.”

{President Barack Obama will announce a new plan next week to help Americans who continue to struggle to find jobs even as the economy recovers from recession, his senior adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, said on Saturday.}

Obama’s efforts to help the long-term unemployed are part of an economic strategy he will lay out in his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday and expound upon during a four-state tour, Pfeiffer said in a mass email from the White House.

“With some action on all our parts, we can help more job seekers find work, and more working Americans find the economic security they deserve,” Pfeiffer said in his email.

Obama has vowed to address the gap between rich and poor in America, and has said he will do what he can – even without help from a deeply divided Congress that, so far, has shown little willingness to spend money on new programs.

He has said he will take executive actions to push forward his agenda, as well as the power of the highest office in the nation to motivate business and community leaders to take additional steps.

A White House official said Obama will announce in his Tuesday speech new executive actions on retirement security and job training to help middle-class workers “expand economic opportunity” – a key theme of the speech.

Already this year, Congress thwarted Obama’s efforts to extend jobless benefits for people who have been unsuccessfully seeking work for more than six months.

Benefits for 1.5 million Americans expired at the end of 2013. The Senate failed in mid-January to agree on a plan to renew the benefits.

Obama will hammer home his economic plans during a two-day, four-state trip to Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Pittsburgh on Wednesday, and Milwaukee and Nashville on Thursday, an official said.

Vice President Joe Biden will visit Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, on Wednesday to talk about “education and workforce development,” the White House said. He will be accompanied by his wife, Jill Biden, who is a community college teacher.

After Obama’s trip, he will return to the White House “to outline new efforts to help the long-term unemployed,” Pfeiffer said in his statement.

Obama had promised earlier this month that he would bring a group of chief executive officers to the White House in an effort to persuade them to hire more people from the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

“We’re going to try to work with CEOs to make a pledge that we’re going to take a second look at these Americans who are very eager to get back to work and have the capacity to do so, but aren’t getting the kind of shot that they need,” Obama said on January 14 ahead of a meeting with his cabinet.

Reuters

{Tony Blair has reignited debate about the west’s response to terrorism with a call on governments to recognise that religious extremism has become the biggest source of conflict around the world.}

Referring to wars and violent confrontations from Syria to Nigeria and the Philippines, Blair, writing in the Observer, argues that “there is one thing self-evidently in common: the acts of terrorism are perpetrated by people motivated by an abuse of religion. It is a perversion of faith.”

Identifying religious extremism as an ever more dangerous phenomenon, the spread of which is easier in an online age, he says: “The battles of this century are less likely to be the product of extreme political ideology, like those of the 20th century – but they could easily be fought around the questions of cultural or religious difference.”

The former prime minister, who led the country into the Iraq conflict in 2003, appears to acknowledge that previous aspirations to export liberal democracy focused too much on political objectives.

But sources close to Blair insist that he is not in any way indulging in a mea culpa over past interventions by the west, including in Iraq. In the future, he writes, “the purpose should be to change the policy of governments; to start to treat this issue of religious extremism as an issue that is about religion as well as politics, to go to the roots of where a false view of religion is being promulgated and to make it a major item on the agenda of world leaders to combine effectively to combat it. This is a struggle that is only just beginning.”

The promotion of religious tolerance, both within and between countries, states Blair, will be key to fostering peaceful outcomes around the world in the 21st century.

He uses his article to announce the creation a new online forum and database run by his Faith Foundation in collaboration with the Harvard Divinity School, which he hopes will become the world’s leading source of information and debate about religion and conflict.

Blair argues that while the west needs to be ready to take security measures for its protection, such action alone, even military action, “will not deal with the root cause of extremism”.

Debate over Blair’s role in the invasion of Iraq will return to centre stage this summer when the long-awaited Chilcot report into the period running up to the war is published. It is expected to contain damning evidence of how President Bush and Blair jointly engaged in a rush to war to topple Saddam Hussein in the face of warnings of the risks of triggering sectarian divisions across the region.

In the article, Blair directly addresses the chaos left in the wake of the invasion when he argues: “All over the region and including in Iraq, where exactly the same sectarianism threatens the right of the people to a democratic future, such a campaign [for tolerance of other religious views] has to be actively engaged. It is one reason why the Middle East matters so much and why any attempt to disengage is so wrong and short-sighted.”

Critics of the neoliberal interventions of the last decade – including those in Iraq and Afghanistan – have argued that they rely too much on a political “freedom” agenda, focusing on the toppling of tyrants in the belief that the introduction of democracy would be a panacea.

But some fear that to focus too much on deep-seated religious schisms is to ignore the local complexities of such regional conflicts.

On Saturday, Jonathan Eyal, the international director of the Royal United Services Institute, took issue with Blair’s analysis and any implication that western governments were not informed before invading Iraq of the sectarian violence that was likely to be stirred up.

“Predicting when religious differences may descend into outright violence is never easy,” he said. “But it’s just fallacious to claim that those who ordered and led the 2003 Iraq war lacked access to the necessary information about the complexities of that country’s ethnic and religious divisions, or could have ever assumed that they could complete their intervention without rekindling religious bloodshed.”

He added: “It was not the lack of sufficient knowledge about history and religion which led to the Iraqi debacle, but the lack of restraint among politicians who had all the relevant information at their fingertips.”

The Guardian

{French president François Hollande has confirmed that he had separated from his partner of seven years Valerie Trierweiler.}

He told the French news agency Agence France-Presse in a telephone call on Saturday evening: “I make it known that I have put an end to the relationship.”

The announcement came two weeks after it was reported that he was having an affair with a French actress when a magazine published photographs which appeared to show him visiting the actress Julie Gayet.

Trierweiler spent a week in hospital following publication after reportedly taking “one pill too many”. Since she left hospital, she has been staying at an official residence, La Lanterne, near Versailles.

Trierweiler, who has continued to work as a journalist for the glossy magazine Paris-Match, is travelling to India on Sunday in support of the work of the French charity Action Against Hunger.

Hollande told AFP he was speaking in a personal capacity and not as the head of state.

Trierweiler and Hollande have never married. She announced their relationship six months after he left his previous partner, one-time French presidential candidate Segolene Royal, with whom he has four children.

Earlier in the day, his office at the Elysee Palace had said “false rumours” had been circulating in the French media about the split, and no statement would be forthcoming.

Hollande, who has never denied having an affair with Julie Gayet, has admitted to a “difficult moment” in his relationship with Trierweiler.

Gayet is suing the magazine for €50,000 (£41,650) in damages and €4,000 (£3,330) in legal costs, claiming it breached French privacy rules.

Hollande, who has himself threatened legal action over the pictures, said he was “totally indignant” about the story, which he claimed threatened the principle of “respect for private life and people’s dignity”.

Agencies

{The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the country’s central bank, says it will withdraw all currency notes printed prior to 2005 from 31 March.}

The move is being seen as an attempt to curb the circulation of “black money” – cash that has not been declared or taxed.

According to some estimates, India’s underground economy accounts for 50% of its gross domestic product (GDP).

The RBI said consumers will be able to exchange old notes at retail banks.

The bank added that the notes issued before 2005 “will continue to be legal tender”.

“This would mean that banks are required to exchange the notes for their customers as well as for non-customers,” it said in a statement.

However, it said that after 1 July anyone who is not a bank’s existing customer will have to furnish proof of identity and residence if they are looking to change more than 10 notes of 500 and 1,000 rupees denomination.

The central bank said that notes issued prior to 2005 can be indentified easily as they do not have the year of printing marked on them.

BBC

{UN mediator for Syrian peace talks Lakhdar Brahimi is to hold separate talks with rival delegations to assess their willingness to meet together.}

The behind-the-scenes negotiations follow the first day of a major peace conference in Switzerland which ended in bitter divisions.

Mr Brahimi’s initiative takes place before full talks resume on Friday.

It remains unclear whether the two sides will negotiate face-to-face – as planned by the UN – when talks restart.

The BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall says that while the peace process may have got off to a rocky start in Montreux – with heated disagreements on Wednesday – at least neither of the two rival delegations from the government and the opposition walked out.

BBC

{Two people were reported dead in Kiev on Wednesday morning, as police began to move in on protesters who have occupied the centre of the capital.}

Following reports of the deaths, Ukraine’s prime minister, Mykola Azarov, said terrorists were threatening the lives of ordinary citizens in Kiev, and the “criminal” actions of protesters would be punished.

A 30-year-old man died after being shot four times by riot police, Oleg Musiy, the protest’s medical co-ordinator said, adding that the man had been hit in “the neck, head and chest”. He said the body had been brought to the main protest camp on Independence Square, where experts would determine whether rubber bullets or real ones had been used. Video footage showed a body, wrapped in blankets, being loaded into an ambulance while protesters sang the national anthem.

Medics also spoke of a second death, although the police have so far only confirmed one fatality. Another man was seriously injured after falling from a tree and was taken to hospital.

Early on Wednesday morning, amid a swirling blizzard, police began to storm the impromptu barricades on Hrushevskogo St, where clashes have been ongoing since Sunday evening. Protesters initially withdrew, but later returned and hurled stones and molotov cocktails at police.

As Kiev awoke and more people swelled the ranks of the protesters, it was unclear whether the police were preparing for a major attempt to clear Independence Square and the rest of central Kiev of protesters.

Azarov said in an interview with Russian television that the police would use force if necessary to disperse protesters: “If the provocateurs do not stop, then the authorities will be left with no other choice.”

Kiev has been gripped by protest for two months, with people initially rallying against the decision by the president, Viktor Yanukovych, not to sign an integration agreement with the EU.

A new law came into effect on Tuesday that imposes harsh restrictions on freedom of assembly and provides jail terms of up to 15 years for “participating in mass riots”. On Wednesday morning the police repeatedly told protesters through loudspeakers that their actions were “a grave violation of the law” and asked them to disperse.

Yanukovych has promised talks with opposition leaders but has not set a date. On Tuesday former heavyweight boxer and opposition leader Vitali Klitschko went to see the president but was told he was busy. The political opposition has condemned the violence, but is rapidly losing control of the angrier elements of the crowd.

The Guardian