Tag: InternationalNews

{Ministers appear to be stoking up fears about European Union migrants to distract voters from the real problems Britain faces, a top Brussels official has claimed.}

Viviane Reding said it was “simply not true” that there was an “invasion of foreigners” who were stealing jobs and draining welfare and health resources.

The vice-president of the European commission, who has previously called for a “United States of Europe”, claimed most of the information about the EU given to the UK public was based on myths and warned political leaders that adopting populist tactics to win votes was “destroying the future” of Britain.

During a webchat on European citizenship she said: “Coming back to the subject which the government of the UK has pushed to the agenda, probably in order not to make people speak about the real subjects in the UK, are this supposed invasion of foreigners coming to the UK and stealing the jobs and stealing the social security and the health money.

“The fact and figures, and we all know this, show it is simply not true and I do believe also that the British industry has made it very clear, putting the figures on the table and showing that the GDP of Britain rose by 3-4% because of the input of these working Europeans who come to Great Britain.

“I am mostly frustrated about the political leaders because what is leadership if you just try with populistic movements and populistic speech to gain votes?

“You are destroying the future of your people, actually. That is what I’m really worried upon.

“That is why I ask help from all the reasonable force in Great Britain in order calmly to explain what are the optimum and the worst scenarios, also to explain what Europe is about and what Europe can do and what Europe can’t do, what Europe does and what Europe does not do, because most of the things which are told to the people in Great Britain are myths, have nothing to do with reality.”

The Guardian

{North Korea has announced the first parliamentary elections under Kim Jong Un as the country celebrates the birthday of the young leader who seeks to cement his grip on power after executing his uncle.}

The presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly (SPA) decided the election would take place on March 9, the North’s official KCNA news agency said on Wednesday.

This year’s election will be the first since Kim took power after the death of his father Kim Jong Il in late 2011.

The announcement comes a month after Kim Jong Un had his uncle and top official Jang Song Thaek executed on treason charges.

Observers said the execution was aimed at bolstering Kim’s power but also showed his grip on power was not as tight as his father’s was.

Kim is expected to use the elections to replace ageing legislators with younger ones loyal to him, said analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea.

The country usually holds parliamentary elections every five years, but the polls are largely a formality because candidates are believed to be hand-picked by the ruling Workers’ Party.

The last parliamentary vote – a highly staged process with only one approved candidate standing for each of the 687 districts – was held in 2009 under the leadership of Kim’s father, Kim Jong-Il.

Kim succeeded his father in December 2011, and the March election will be closely watched for any further revelations on the changing power structure in Pyongyang.

Source:
Al Jazeera and agencies

{Angela Merkel has been injured in a skiing accident in Switzerland, her spokesman confirmed today.
}

The German Chancellor broke her pelvis in a fall as she skied cross-country while on holiday in the Engadin region on Friday.

The 59-year-old has been forced to cancel meetings for the next three weeks due to her injury, which requires her to remain lying down as much as possible.

Government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters at a press conference in Berlin that Mrs. Merkel had suffered “serious bruising in connection with a partial fracture on her left posterior pelvic ring.”

He added that she “was going at a low speed” but could not confirm whether anyone else was involved.

Doctors said the injury, which was initially thought to be a bruise, is an “incomplete” bone fracture which requires an extensive period of rest.

The German politician is not able to travel by plane and has had to cancel a planned visit to Poland and a meeting with the Luxembourg Prime Minister in Berlin.

However, Mrs. Merkel will still be able to work from home and will attend the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mr Seibert added

The incident comes just over a week after Mrs. Merkel offered her support to German F1 hero Michael Schumacher after he was critically injured in a ski accident.

Spokesman Mr Seibert said: “Like millions of Germans, the chancellor and government members were extremely dismayed when they heard about Michael Schumacher’s serious skiing accident.

{Frustrated French jobseeker Laurent Le Bret resorted to posting his CV during December on a giant roadside billboard, saying “all he wanted for Christmas was a job”.}

His seasonal wish came true. The 41-year-old, unemployed for the last five months, has just been offered a temporary position “that will probably turn into a full-time post after three months”.

The four-metre by three-metre billboard went up on the side of the RN7 motorway just outside the Riviera town of Antibes in south-east France on December 17.

Alongside a picture of a smiling Le Bret complete with Santa hat, his CV read: “Trilingual operations manager seeks position in hotels, restaurants, tourism and leisure.

“All I want for Christmas is a job.”

‘Father Christmas really came through for me.’

Within 10 days he had been contacted, interviewed and had started his new position as operations manager with the Azureva holiday resort near Antibes.

“Father Christmas really came through for me this year,” he told FRANCE 24. “I couldn’t be happier.”

Seasonal generosity also came from advertising firm Pisoni Publicité which gave him the space – for free.

“We thought it was an interesting idea,” company CEO Vincent Piot told FRANCE 24. “When people come up with ideas like this we are always keen to see what we can do. We’re very happy to prove that what we do works and that Mr Le Bret is back at work.”

With the French economy struggling to recover from financial crisis and recession, and with record unemployment, jobseekers in France are having a hard time getting back to work.

Not all of the country’s 3.3 million unemployed will be as lucky as Le Bret. According to Pisot Publicité, the inventive jobseeker benefitted from around 2,000 euros worth of free advertising space that was seen by upwards of 70,000 drivers a day.

{{France 24}}

{Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë has come out against the controversial comic Dieudonné M’bala M’bala whose trademark gesture of an inverted Nazi salute has alienated many and sparked fervent debates beyond France.}

“Did our elders fight for civilized values for us to cowardly surrender them to criminals?” Delanoë asked on the “Grand Rendez-vous” with Europe 1, iTELE and Le Monde.

“We are in 2014, the year of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris, France and the camps,” he said, adding that Dieudonné is a person who glorifies these crimes against humanity.

Known usually by his first name, Dieudonné’s shows laden with vitriolic humour and what he calls anti-Zionist, rather than anti-Semitist remarks, have drew the ire of the French government – including French Interior Minister Manuel Valls – which is currently trying to ban his shows on the premise of inciting disorderly public conduct.

RFI

“He must be fought with all the rigors of the law,” said Delanoë, adding that freedom of expression must be respected but within the boundaries of human dignity.

Born in Paris to a Cameroonian father and French mother, Dieudonné once garnered thousands of fans to his shows absent of hateful lines and actually appealed to left-wing crowds.

He created sketches with his former childhood friend and Jewish comic Elie Semoun that tackled discrimination and racism.

But a departure to the far-right in the early to mid-2000s saw him lash out at Jews and belittle and make fun of the Holocaust during his shows and public appearances.

In 2009, he ran on an anti-Zionist platform in the European elections and made Jean-Marie le Pen, the founder of the National Front Party, the godfather of his son.

A week ago the comic shocked many – and not for the first time – as he said of a well-known Jewish journalist: “Me, you see, when I hear Patrick Cohen speak, I think to myself: ‘Gas chambers … too bad (they no longer exist).”

Dieudonné – which means “god given” – has been put on trial numerous times for racial slurs and has personally described himself as “non-Jewish, non-Muslim, not really black and not really white.”

{Iraqi security forces are preparing a “major attack” to retake the city of Fallujah from al Qaeda-linked militants, a senior government official said on Sunday.}

Special forces had already conducted operations in the city, the official said. The regular army had paused on the edge of the city to allow residents time to leave, awaiting orders to launch “the attack to crush the terrorists”.

On Saturday, a senior security official in Anbar province said Fallujah was under the control of al Qaeda-linked group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Washington said it would help Baghdad in its battle against al Qaeda-linked militants but that there would be no return of US troops.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Sunday that Washington was ready to help Baghdad in its battle against the militants, but added that it was “their fight”.

“We are not obviously contemplating returning, we are not contemplating putting boots on the ground,” Kerry told reporters in Jerusalem.

ISIL is the latest incarnation of Al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate and has made a striking comeback this year, taking advantage of widespread discontent among Sunnis and its newfound bases in neighbouring Syria, where it has become a major player in the nearly three-year-old conflict.

ISIL militants have also taken control of parts of Ramadi, the provincial capital, and on Sunday seized control of the nearby village of Bubali after heavy fighting, a witness said.

Both Ramadi and Fallujah were insurgent strongholds in the insurgency against American troops and the Iraqi government after 2003. Fallujah was the target of two major assaults by US forces.

Violence in Iraq last year reached a level not seen since 2008, when the country was just emerging from a brutal period of sectarian killings.

“We are very, very concerned about the efforts of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant, which is affiliated with al Qaeda, who are trying to assert their authority not just in Iraq, but in Syria,” Kerry said.

“These are the most dangerous players in that region. Their barbarism against the civilians in Ramadi and Fallujah and against Iraqi security forces is on display for everyone in the world to see.”

(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP, REUTERS)

{ A secretive U.S. spy court has ruled again that the National Security Agency can keep collecting every American’s telephone records every day, in the midst of dueling decisions in two other federal courts about whether the surveillance program is constitutional.}

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Friday renewed the NSA phone collection program, said Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such periodic requests are somewhat formulaic but required since the program started in 2006.

The latest approval was the first since two conflicting court decisions about whether the program is lawful and since a presidential advisory panel recommended that the NSA no longer be allowed to collect and store the phone records and search them without obtaining separate court approval for each search.

In a statement, Turner said that 15 judges on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on 36 occasions over the past seven years have approved the NSA’s collection of U.S. phone records as lawful.

Also Friday, government lawyers turned to U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to block one federal judge’s decision that threatens the NSA phone records program.

The opposing lawyer who spearheaded the effort that led to the ruling said he hopes to take the issue directly to the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department filed a one-page notice of appeal asking the appeals court to overturn U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s ruling last month that the program was likely unconstitutional. The government’s move had been expected.

Larry Klayman, who filed the class-action suit against President Barack Obama and top administration national security officials, said he intends to petition the federal appeals court next week to send the case directly to the Supreme Court. Klayman said the move was justified because the NSA case was a matter of great public importance.

“There are exigent circumstances here,” Klayman said. “We can’t allow this situation to continue. The NSA’s continuing to spy on everybody.”

Turner said U.S. intelligence agencies would be willing to modify the phone records surveillance program to provide additional privacy and civil liberties protections as long as it was still operationally beneficial. He said the Obama administration was carefully evaluating the advisory panel’s recent recommendations.

Judges sitting on the secretive spy court have repeatedly approved the program for 90-day periods. They also have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of the program — a judicial bulwark that held strong until Leon’s surprise decision last month.

Leon said the NSA’s program was “almost Orwellian,” a reference to writer George Orwell’s futuristic novel “1984,” and that there was little evidence the operation had prevented terrorist attacks. He ruled against the government but agreed to postpone shutting down the program until the government could appeal.

In a separate case involving the same NSA phone records program, a district judge in New York last month upheld the government’s data collection as lawful. The American Civil Liberties Union, which lost that case, said this week it will appeal to a federal appeals court in New York.

AP

{The Obama administration proposed two new federal gun control rules Friday to ensure more information about the mentally ill reaches background check databases, after a series of high-profile US shootings.}

The rules come on top of a series of executive actions President Barack Obama announced after the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting that left 20 young children and six staff dead in December 2012.

The massacre relaunched a push for gun control laws in America and a handful of states have since tightened gun rules.

But the national measures Obama sought, including a plan for enhanced background checks on gun buyers and a ban on assault-style rifles, failed in the US Senate in April due to fierce opposition from gun rights supporters.

In the first nine months of 2013 following a presidential directive, federal agencies have provided more than 1.2 million records identifying persons prohibited from buying or owning guns for mental health reasons, the White House said.

The figure is a 23 percent increase from the number of records that federal agencies had made available by the end of January 2013.

Under the new rules proposed by the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, the federal background check database would be able to access some mental health records, due to an exemption to existing privacy law.

The Justice Department is also proposing to “clarify” that people involuntarily held at inpatient and outpatient institutions should be barred from buying guns.

“Too many Americans have been severely injured or lost their lives as a result of gun violence,” the White House said.

“While the vast majority of Americans who experience a mental illness are not violent, in some cases when persons with a mental illness do not receive the treatment they need, the result can be tragedies.”

The White House renewed its call for congressional action, including expanding background checks and making gun trafficking a federal crime.

“Passing common-sense gun safety legislation… remains the most important step we can take to reduce gun violence,” it said.

“The vast majority of Americans support these critical measures, which would protect our children and our communities without infringing on anyone’s Second Amendment rights (to keep and bear arms).”

Despite the effort, background checks are not required for the many private purchases that take place outside of licensed gun dealers, such as online or at gun shows.

In a stark reminder of guns in America, a man shot 12 people dead at a US Navy facility a few miles (kilometers) from the White House in September.

AFP

{Bangladesh’s opposition began enforcing a 48-hour general strike on the eve of elections as its leader remains confined to her home.}

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, which is boycotting Sunday’s polls, called the Saturday strike in a final bid to torpedo a contest which is already sure to be won by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League.

The strike comes after BNP leader Khaleda Zia issued an appeal to voters to also “completely boycott” what she called “a scandalous farce” and accused the government of placing her under house arrest.

The vote build-up has been dominated by violence, with election-related unrest killing around 150 people since the date was set in October.

Observers fear the contest will spur new unrest after Bangladesh endured its bloodiest 12 months since the brutal 1971 independence war against Pakistan.

The main headline in Saturday’s Dhaka Tribune read: “Tension, fear mark build-up to the polls” while all newspapers carried pictures of the latest victims of the violence, many of them with horrific burns.

Although the government officially denies Zia has been detained, aides say she has been barred from leaving her Dhaka home for nearly a week.

Dozens of riot police could be seen outside her home on Saturday, along with water-cannon and sand trucks, preventing anyone from crossing through barriers.

In her first public comments since her confinement, Zia said “the government has effectively placed me under house arrest and my house has been sealed off by security and intelligence agents”.

The BNP and 20 other parties are boycotting the polls after Hasina rejected their demands that it be overseen by a neutral caretaker government.

Aljazeera

{Just days after Colorado became the first US state to allow recreational marijuana use, French researchers are citing a potential new breakthrough in preventing cannabis addiction. }

On Thursday, French scientists said their work had found that a naturally occurring hormone acts as spontaneous defense in the brain against the “high” caused by marijuana – and could therefore be useful in treating addiction to the drug.

Studying lab rats, the researchers found that the steroid hormone pregnenolone reduced the activity of a particular brain molecule called the type-1 cannabinoid receptor (CB1).

The hormone, which was not previously believed to have any biological effect of its own, actually cancels out the mild euphoria induced by THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, according to lead author Pier Vincenzo Piazza of the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM).

“These researchers weren’t trying to be buzzkills,” said the journal Science, in which the study appears. “Their discovery could lead to new approaches to treating marijuana intoxication and addiction — and it may allow researchers to isolate the medicinal properties of cannabis while blocking its behavioral and somatic effects.”

Clinical trials in humans upcoming

About 147 million people globally (roughly 2.5 percent of the population) use cannabis, according to the World Health Organization.

While marijuana is known to relieve symptoms of depression, glaucoma, spasms and the nausea associated with cancer and AIDS treatment, they can also impair brain development, memory and lung function, and some specialists can lead to addiction.

Researchers discovered the previously unknown role of pregnenolone when they gave high doses of cannabis to lab rats – roughly three to 10 times more than the typical human marijuana smoker might be exposed to, Piazza told Agence France-Presse.

The high doses of cannabis raised the brain’s level of pregnenolone, which, in turn, blocked the harmful effects of THC on the brain.

Piazza told AFP that the researchers were aiming to launch clinical trials in people within a year and a half.

Meanwhile, in the US, legal recreational use of marijuana may hit more states in the coming months. The state of Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, is set to follow in Colorado’s footsteps later this year, with similar efforts being planned in Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada and Oregon.

Under federal law, however, cannabis — like heroin, LSD and ecstasy — is considered illegal.

(With AFP and Reuters)