Tag: InternationalNews

{{After rescuing a burning ship from pirate-infested waters off Yemen and a sinking oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, South African salvage master Nick Sloane faces his biggest test off an idyllic Mediterranean island.}}

The 52-year-old says the attempt to raise the Costa Concordia cruise ship from its watery grave, due to begin on Monday, is his “most challenging” yet in a career that has taken him to six continents and two warzones.

The Zambia-born Sloane was flown to the Italian island of Giglio last year from New Zealand, where he was working on a spill from the MV Rena oil tanker, for the biggest ever salvage operation of a passenger ship.

He has led an international operation with 500 salvage workers including divers, welders and engineers operating 24 hours a day around the rusting 290-metre (951-foot) hulk, which is bigger than the Titanic.

When the lifting of the 114,500-tonne ship gets under way, Sloane will be the one giving the commands from a control room on the shore and monitoring the unprecedented operation through eight monitors.

The ruddy salvage master hit a low point last year when storms hampered the operation and there were serious difficulties drilling into the granite seabed to install a metal platform to hold the ship stable.

“There was a lot of questioning. ‘Are you sure it’s going to work?’ ‘This is crazy!’” he remembers.

Work has sped up since then and Sloane has said he is confident of success, while remaining realistic

The most serious risk is buckling in the hull as the luxury liner is dragged upright, which Sloane has compared to a “banana” effect — the extent of which will only become clear as the operation is underway.

“There’s a lot of unknown factors about the ship. We’ve made a lot of assumptions,” he admits.

Sloane has warned that the hull is slowly compressing in on itself and that now is the last chance to lift the Costa Concordia before it collapses too much.

“You can’t afford to wait. Time is your worst enemy,” he says, warning about the large swells expected once winds known as the sirocco hit the island in autumn.

{wirestory}

U.S.-Russian talks on eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons program have reached a “pivotal point,” a U.S. official said, and both nations said on Friday they wanted to renew efforts to negotiate a peaceful end to the war in Syria.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met in Geneva to discuss a Russian proposal under which Syria would sign international treaties banning chemical weapons and hand over its stocks of such weapons to the international community for destruction.

The U.S. official said the two sides were “coming to agreement” on the size of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles and talks were continuing into Saturday.

U.S. President Barack Obama, after a meeting in Washington with Kuwait’s emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, reiterated that he would insist any deal on Syria’s chemical weapons be “verifiable and enforceable.

In Washington, senior Obama administration officials said the United States did not expect a U.N. Security Council resolution formalising the deal to include potential use of military force. But officials said Obama retained that option.

Independent of the United Nations, Obama has threatened the use of force in response to an August 21 chemical weapons attack in Syria that U.S. officials say killed about 1,400 people. But as part of negotiations toward a U.N. resolution, the United States sees no benefit in trying to include the potential use of force.

The reason is that Washington does not see Russia ever agreeing to such a step and could use its veto power to nix such a resolution, the officials said.

Russia holds a veto on the Security Council and previously used it on three occasions when Western powers sought to condemn Assad over the war in Syria. President Vladimir Putin has said the proposal on chemical weapons will only succeed if the United States and its allies rule out the use of force.

{agencies}

{{The United States and Russia began high-stakes talks on Thursday on Moscow’s plan for Syria to surrender its chemical weapons as Damascus formally applied to join a global poison gas ban, but Secretary of State John Kerry underscored that U.S. military force may still be necessary if diplomacy fails.}}

“This is not a game,” Kerry said in an appearance with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after opening talks in Geneva aimed at fleshing out Russia’s plan to secure and dispose of Syria’s stockpiles of chemical arms.

The talks were part of a diplomatic push that prompted President Barack Obama to put on hold plans for U.S. air strikes in response to a chemical weapons attack on civilians near Damascus on Aug. 21.

The United States and its allies say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces carried out the attack with sarin nerve gas, killing more than 1,400 people, including 400 children. Russia and Assad blame rebel forces.

The United Nations said it received a document from Syria on joining the global anti-chemical weapons treaty, a move Assad promised as part of a deal to avoid U.S. air strikes.

The move would end Syria’s status as one of only seven nations outside the 1997 international convention that outlaws stockpiling chemical weapons. Other holdouts include neighbours Egypt and Israel, as well as North Korea.

The United States immediately warned Syria against stalling tactics to avoid military strikes. Assad told Russian state television in an interview broadcast on Thursday he would finalise plans to abandon his chemical arsenal only when the United States stops threatening to attack him.

Kerry expressed some optimism about the talks in Geneva – expected to last two days – saying, “We do believe there is a way to get this done” and that the United States was “grateful” for ideas put forward by Russia to resolve the crisis.

But he and Lavrov differed sharply on U.S. military threats.

“We proceed from the fact that the solution of this problem will make unnecessary any strike on the Syrian Arab Republic,” Lavrov said during the appearance with Kerry.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been Assad’s most powerful backer during the civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people since 2011, delivering arms and – with China – blocking three U.N. resolutions meant to pressure Assad.

{France24}

{{Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri urged small-scale attacks inside the United States to “bleed America economically”, adding he hoped eventually to see a more significant strike, according to the SITE monitoring service.}}

In an audio speech released online a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Zawahri said attacks “by one brother or a few of the brothers” would weaken the U.S. economy by triggering big spending on security, SITE reported.

Western counter-terrorism chiefs have warned that radicalized “lone wolves” who might have had no direct contact with al Qaeda posed as great a risk as those who carried out complex plots like the 9/11 attacks.

“We should bleed America economically by provoking it to continue in its massive expenditure on its security, for the weak point of America is its economy, which has already begun to stagger due to the military and security expenditure,” he said.

Keeping America in such a state of tension and anticipation only required a few disparate attacks “here and there”, he said

“As we defeated it in the gang warfare in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan, so we should follow it with …war on its own land. These disparate strikes can be done by one brother or a few of the brothers.”

At the same time, Muslims should seize any opportunity to land “a large strike” on the United States, even if this took years of patience.

The Sept 11, 2011 attacks, in which hijacked airliners were flown into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Washington and a Pennsylvania field, triggered a global fight against al Qaeda extremists and their affiliates. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the attacks.

In his audio speech, Zawahri said Muslims should refuse to buy goods from America and its allies, as such spending only helped to fund U.S. military action in Muslim lands.

reuters

{{Voters in the state of Colorado have kicked out two US politicians who promoted tighter gun controls after last year’s Aurora cinema shooting, which killed 12 people.}}

State senate president, John Morse, and senator Angela Giron, both Democrats, were kicked out in a historically unprecedented recall election. The pro-gun National Rifle Association part funded the campaign for the poll.

Morse, who signed into law a bill boosting gun control rules after the Aurora shootings in July last year and the Newtown school massacre in December, was forced out on a 51 to 49 percent vote. Giron lost by 56 to 44 percent. Both stood by their decision to back tougher gun controls.

“The loss of an election is nothing when weighed against the loss of lives to gun violence,” Morse said in a statement. “I am proud of the fact that we made Colorado safer. The recall election didn’t change the fact that sensible gun safety laws are now in effect.

{{‘No regrets’}}

“I do not regret acting after the horrific massacres we suffered, and I do not regret standing up against the powerful gun lobby to do what was right.”

Giron, who voted in favour of the gun control legislation, which entered into force on July 1, added: “I’m a little perplexed. This is what I know: I know that I have not one iota of regret from what I voted on.

“This is only going to make us stronger and better,” she told the Denver Post. “We will win in the end, because we are on the right side,” she told constituents.

Morse and Giron will be replaced by two Republicans, councilman Bernie Herpin and former police officer George Rivera, who opposed the new law which passed without the support of a single Republican.

The new legislation, which limits gun magazines to 15 rounds and requires universal background checks, came after a series of shootings.

Mass shootings

James Holmes, a mentally unstable student, is accused of killing 12 people when he opened fire in a crowded movie screening in Aurora, outside Denver, in one of the worst mass shootings in US history.

And on December 14 last year a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

The NRA donated $360,000 to back the recall ballots in Colorado – the first ever use of a state mechanism allowing for politicians to be kicked out by popular vote, according to the Denver Post newspaper.

An NRA spokesman told the newspaper that it “is proud to have stood with the men and women in Colorado who sent a clear message that their Second Amendment rights are not for sale.”

agencies

{Al Jazeera is to take legal action against Egypt’s military-backed government over what the media network says is a “sustained campaign of harassment and intimidation” against its journalists in the country.}

The Qatar-based network says that since deposed President Mohammed Morsi was overthrown in July, a large number of its journalists have been arrested and detained, either without charge or on what it calls politically-motivated charges.

Al Jazeera’s offices have been raided and closed, equipment confiscated, correspondents deported and its transmission jammed by signals coming from military installations.

In a statement on Thursday, Al Jazeera said it had instructed London-based lawyers, Carter-Ruck, to take action in international courts and before the United Nations to protect its journalists and their right to report from Egypt.

“Al Jazeera cannot permit this situation to continue. The right of journalists to report freely in situations of this kind is protected by international law and is reaffirmed by UN Security Council Resolution 1738 (2006),” a spokesman said.

“However, the new regime in Egypt has disregarded this fundamental right and seems determined to silence all independent journalism and reporting in the country, leaving only the voices of its own state-controlled media to be heard.”

Source: Al Jazeera