Tag: InternationalNews

{Afghanistan on Monday rejected as baseless a U.S. intelligence forecast that the gains the United States and allies have made in the past three years will be significantly rolled back by 2017.}

The U.S. National Intelligence Estimate also predicted that Afghanistan would fall into chaos if Washington and Kabul failed to sign a pact to keep an international military contingent there beyond 2014.

President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman dismissed the U.S. forecast, reported by the Washington Post on the weekend, and suggested there was an ulterior motive for it.

“We strongly reject that as baseless as they have in the past been proved inaccurate,” Faizi told Reuters.

Relations between Afghanistan and the United States have grown seriously strained recently by Karzai’s refusal to sign the security pact that would permit some U.S. forces to stay.

U.S. officials have said that unless a deal is reached to keep perhaps 8,000 U.S. troops, the Taliban might stage a major comeback and al Qaeda could regain safe havens.

The pact must also be signed for the United States and its allies to provide billions more dollars in aid.

Without a deal, the United States could pull out all troops, the so-called zero option, leaving Afghan forces to battle the Taliban on their own.

The United States has set a Tuesday deadline for Afghanistan to sign the pact but the White House has said it is prepared to let the deadline slip until early January.

The U.S. intelligence estimate predicted setbacks even if some U.S. troops remained. But some U.S. officials felt the forecast was overly pessimistic, the Washington Post said.

LAND FOR PEACE?

Faizi suggested the leaking of the gloomy U.S. intelligence report was part of bid to press Karzai into granting the Taliban control of some areas as part of a peace moves.

“If it’s a design to hand over parts of Afghanistan to the Taliban, we will never allow that and it will never succeed,” Faizi said. “The Taliban can only come back through a political process.”

Efforts over the past couple of years to bring the Taliban into peace talks have come to nothing. The insurgents, fighting to expel foreign forces and set up an Islamist state, denounce Karzai as a U.S. “puppet”.

Karzai recently said certain foreigners had been asking him to give up control of some areas to get peace talks going.

“Foreigners told us recently to hand over or give away some areas to the Taliban, and from where a peace process could begin,” Karzai told reporters at a briefing last week.

He did not identify the foreigners.

Karzai also denied having reached agreement with the United States on the wording of contentious clauses in the U.S. security pact. But he added that the “zero-option” was an empty threat.

“The U.S. won’t go and I have realized that,” he said.

“Look at all those buildings and bases they have built in Bagram, Helmand and their embassy compound,” Karzai said, referring to a big air base north of Kabul and a violence-plagued southern province.

Reuters

{Two missiles fired from southern Lebanon exploded in northern Israel, prompting the Israeli military to hit back with about twenty artillery shells, an army spokesman said.}

“The Israeli artillery responded to the Sunday rocket attacks from Lebanon against Israel that left no victims, targeting the area where these projectiles were fired from,” an army spokesman told AFP news agency.

The Katyusha-style rockets landed in a field west of the town of Kyriat Shmona, without causing any casualties or damage, Israeli military radio reported.

Tension has spiked on the border between the two countries since Lebanese troops gunned down an Israeli soldier driving near the frontier on December 16.

Israel’s border with Lebanon has been largely quiet since the 2006 war with the Shia movement Hezbollah.

The last time a soldier was killed there was in August 2010, when two Lebanese soldiers and a journalist also died.

In August, four Israeli soldiers were wounded by an explosion some 400 metres inside Lebanese territory, in a blast claimed by Hezbollah.

Last week, Hezbollah said one of its top leaders was killed near Beirut and blamed Israel for his murder, a charge denied by Israel, which warned against any retaliation.

Source:
Agencies

{China must take “excessive” counter-measures after Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s controversial war shrine visit, state-run media urged on Friday, reflecting the smouldering resentment among Chinese at its onetime invader.}

China expressed strong opposition and summoned Tokyo’s ambassador on Thursday to deliver a “strong reprimand” after Abe paid respects at the Yasukuni shrine.

The site honours several high-level officials executed for war crimes after World War II, a reminder of Japan’s 20th century aggression and a source of bitterness for China and other Asian countries.

“People are getting tired of such futile ‘strong condemnations’,” said an editorial in the Global Times, a paper that is close to the ruling Communist Party and often strike a nationalist tone.

“China needs to take appropriate, even slightly excessive countermeasures” or else “be seen as a ‘paper tiger’”, it warned.

It suggested barring high-profile Japanese politicians and other officials who went to the shrine from visiting China for five years.

Abe’s visit was the first by an incumbent Japanese prime minister to the inflammatory site since 2006, and came as tensions between the two Asian powers have escalated since 2012 over an island dispute.

State-run media also excoriated Abe, who has sought to shore up Japan’s military.

“In the eyes of China, Abe, behaving like a political villain, is much like the terrorists and fascists on the commonly seen blacklists,” the Global Times said.

The China Daily called the visit “an intolerable insult” that had “slammed the door to dialogue shut”, adding that “Abe knew it would be an insult. But he does not care”.

It criticised the leader’s “sheer hypocrisy” and “nasty track record”, including “his denial of the aggressive nature of Japanese intrusions during WWII, his lack of remorse for Japan’s historical sins”.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Abe’s visit “a flagrant provocation against international justice and treads arbitrarily on humanity’s conscience”, a ministry statement said on Thursday.

China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-largest economies, have important trading ties.

But conflict over East China Sea islands known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan have soured diplomatic relations since last year.

AFP

{ A strong explosion has shaken the Lebanese capital, sending black smoke billowing from the center of Beirut.
}

The blast went off a few hundred meters (yards) from the government headquarters and parliament building. The cause was not immediately known.

Troops were seen deploying nearby, and ambulances were rushing to the area

Lebanon has seen a wave of bombings over the past months as tensions rise over Syria’s civil war.

{{New York Times}}

{Thai police in the capital Bangkok have fired teargas at protesters trying to prevent political parties from registering for February’s elections.}

About 500 protesters tried to storm a stadium where election commission officials were working.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra called the snap elections after weeks of protests that demanded an unelected “people’s council” take power.

The demonstrators say political reforms are needed before polls can take place.

On Thursday, the protesters – some of whom were throwing stones – tried to break into the stadium where the electoral commission was registering candidates.

But police responded with tear gas, dispersing the crowd.

There were no reports of serious injuries.

Ms Yingluck dissolved parliament and called an election on 9 December, after more than 150,000 demonstrators took to the streets calling for her government to step down.

Last Sunday, she said elections must take place and urged protesters to express their views at the ballot box.

“If we don’t hold on to the democratic system, what should we hold on to?”

The Pheu Thai Party won the last election in 2011, and has a majority in parliament.

However, protesters say her brother – ousted former leader Thaksin Shinawatra – remains in charge.

Mr Thaksin is currently in self-imposed exile after he was overthrown in a military army coup in 2006 and convicted of corruption.

BBC

(Reuters) – Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who revealed details of electronic surveillance by American and British spy services, warned of the dangers posed by a loss of privacy in a message broadcast to Britain on Christmas Day.

In a two-minute video recorded in Moscow, where Snowden has been granted temporary asylum, he spoke of concerns over surveillance and appeared to draw comparison with the dystopian tale “1984” which described a fictional state which operates widespread surveillance of its citizens.

“Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us are nothing compared to what we have available today.”

“We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person,” he said.

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” said Snowden. “They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.”

The “Alternative Christmas Message”, broadcast annually on Britain’s Channel 4 television since 1993, mimics the format of the yearly address to the nation by Queen Elizabeth.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said.

Snowden left his NSA post in Hawaii in May and went public with his first revelations from Hong Kong a few weeks later.

In June, he left for Russia and stayed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for nearly six weeks until the Kremlin granted him temporary one-year asylum.

The United States has revoked his passport and demanded he be sent home to face charges for stealing secrets.

Earlier this month there were signs of thawing attitudes when Richard Ledgett – a top NSA official who leads a task force at the agency responding to the leaks – left open the option for Snowden to return to the United States in an amnesty.

“It’s worth having a conversation about,” he told CBS.

“I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured and my bar for those assurances would be very high,” Ledgett said. Senior officials in the Obama administration remain opposed to such a move.

Last week a White House-appointed panel proposed curbs on some key NSA surveillance operations, recommending limits on a program to collect records of billions of telephone calls, and new tests before Washington spies on foreign leaders.

“The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it,” Snowden said in the Christmas address.

“Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.”

Reuters

{The Iranian parliament has voted to consider a proposal to pick another city as the nation’s capital, potentially moving the seat of government from the overcrowded Tehran.}

Iran’s official news agency IRNA said on Tuesday that politicians had accepted outlines of the proposal with 110 out of 214 present lawmakers supporting it. The chamber has 290 seats.

Under the plan, a council would be set up and spend two years studying which alternate location would be best.

While there was no suggestion in the bill which cities would be looked at, several central and western cities already have said they would like to be considered.

Supporters of the plan said Tehran, with a metropolitan population of 12 million people could not support the capital.

They pointed at the heavy pollution, the city’s traffic jams and risk of earthquakes there. Iran is located on several faults and experiences a light earthquake a day, on average.

Still, moving the capital seems unlikely, due to the high cost involved.

Vice-president Mohammad Ali Ansari, who is in charge of parliament affairs, said he opposed the plan, which he said was was not practical, and that politicians did not have the power to order the capital to be moved.

He said relocating the capital was part of main policies of the ruling establishment, a reference to the authority of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, who has final say on all state matters.

“It is impossible to decide about making the decision on moving without consulting his Excellency,” Ansari said.

Costly plan

Parliament speaker Ali Larijani opposed the plan over the cost and said the Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog that vets the bills, would likely reject it as well.

Saeed Leilaz, a Tehran-based political-economic analyst, also said the plan was not feasible.

“This will cost dozens of billion dollars for a government that has not enough to pay the monthly salary of its staff,” Leilaz said.

Iran has been crippled by Western sanctions over its disputed nuclear power programme, which has cut its access to the oil money that makes up to 80 percent of its foreign income and 50 percent of budget.

Politicians and officials occasionally have raised the idea over the past 50 years, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted King Mohmmad Reza Pahlavi.

US advisers reportedly had asked the king to relocate the capital because it was too close to borders of the Soviet Union.

During World War I, the Iranian government decided to move the capital temporarily when Russian and British forces occupied parts of the country, although the order was never carried out.

Source:
AP