Tag: InternationalNews

{{The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Tuesday it had reached an agreement on a draft authorisation backing the use of military force in Syria, but setting strict limits on the scope of any possible strikes.}}

Among the provisions set out by the draft resolution, which will be voted on Wednesday by the committee, is a 60-day limit on US military action in the country, with a possibility of a single 30-day extension subject to conditions.

The draft also expressly forbids the deployment of any US ground forces in the country.

US President Barack Obama is asking Congress to back his call for limited US strikes on Syria to punish President Bashar al-Assad for his suspected use of chemical weapons against civilians during a civil war that has killed more than 100,000 people.

If the new draft resolution is approved by the committee on Wednesday, it will be sent to the full Senate for a vote after members return from their summer recess on September 9.

The House of Representatives must also pass its own version of the military authorisation, and the two must be reconciled before they can be submitted for Obama’s signature.

{france24}

{{Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has warned the US against taking one-sided action in Syria, but has also said that Russia “doesn’t exclude” the possibility of supporting a UN resolution authorising military strikes.}}

He says that such an endorsement would require “convincing” evidence that President Bashar al-Assad’s government used chemical weapons against citizens.

He also says the currently available evidence does not fulfil this criteria.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Associated Press news agency and Russia’s state Channel 1 television, Putin said it would be “absolutely absurd” for Assad’s forces to have used chemical weapons at a time when they were in the ascendency in the conflict.

“From our viewpoint, it seems absolutely absurd that the armed forces, the regular armed forces, which are on the offensive today and in some areas have encircled the so-called rebels and are finishing them off, that in these conditions they would start using forbidden chemical weapons while realising quite well that it could serve as a pretext for applying sanctions against them, including the use of force,” Putin said in the interview, released on Wednesday.

Figures vary regarding the alleged chemical weapons attack on August 21, with the US government saying that 1,429 people were killed by poison gas in the attack, and aid agencies putting that number at closer to 355.

Assad’s government has blamed the attack on the rebels, and a UN inspection team that examined the attack sites near Damascus is awaiting lab results on soil and tissue samples.

“If there are data that the chemical weapons have been used, and used specifically by the regular army, this evidence should be submitted to the UN Security Council,” added Putin.

“And it ought to be convincing. It shouldn’t be based on some rumours and information obtained by special services through some kind of eavesdropping, some conversations and things like that.”

He also cited experts who believed that the current evidence “doesn’t look convincing”, and raised the possibility that the armed opposition had “conducted a premeditated provocative action trying to give their sponsors a pretext for military intervention”.

{agencies}

{{The US ambassador to Brazil was summoned by authorities over new allegations that the US National Security Agency (NSA) spied on President Dilma Rousseff, an official said.}}

US Ambassador Thomas Shannon “was called to explain” the claims made by US journalist Glenn Greenwald, a Brazilian foreign ministry spokesman said.

“If these facts prove to be true, it would be unacceptable and could be called an attack on our country’s sovereignty,” Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo said on Monday.

Greenwald, a Guardian newspaper columnist who obtained secret files from NSA leaker Edward Snowden, has told Globo television that the agency snooped on the communications of Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, told Globo’s news programme “Fantastico” that a document dated June 2012 shows that Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s emails were being read. The document is dated a month before Pena Nieto was elected.

The document Greenwald based the report on includes communications from Pena Nieto indicating who he would like to name to some cabinet posts among other information. It’s not clear if the spying continues.

In the case of Brazil’s leader, the June 2012 document “doesn’t include any of Dilma’s specific intercepted messages, the way it does for Nieto,” Greenwald told the Associated Press news agency in an email.

“But it is clear in several ways that her communications were intercepted, including the use of DNI Presenter, which is a programme used by NSA to open and read emails and online chats.”

Calls to Rousseff’s office and a spokeswoman were not answered. Messages sent to a spokesman for Pena Pieto weren’t immediately returned.

In July, Greenwald co-wrote articles in O Globo that said documents leaked by Snowden indicate Brazil was the largest target in Latin America for the NSA programme, which collected data on billions of emails and calls flowing through Brazil.

The Brazilian government denounced the NSA activities outlined in the earlier reports.

Greenwald began writing stories based on material leaked by Snowden in May, mostly for the Guardian newspaper in Britain.

Before news of the NSA programme broke, the White House announced that Rousseff would be honoured with a state dinner in October during a trip to the US, the only such full state dinner scheduled this year for a foreign leader.

Source: Agencies

{{Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told French daily Le Figaro Monday that the use of nerve gas against targets in rebel-held parts of Syria would have been “illogical”, while warning that an attack on his country could set off a “regional war”.}}

In excerpts of an interview to be published in full in Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper, Assad challenged French President François Hollande and US President Barack Obama to provide convincing proof that he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people.

“Those who make accusations must show evidence,” he told Le Figaro. “We challenge the United States and France to do this. Obama and Hollande have been incapable of doing this, including for their own people.”

Assad, who has been waging a two-and-a-half-year civil war against a rebel coalition that has claimed more than 100,000 lives, said he would neither deny nor admit that his country possessed such weapons — but insisted it would have been tactically illogical for his forces to use them against the alleged targets.

Military intervention against his country, he added, would “set off a powder keg” that “everyone would lose control of once ignited”.

“Chaos and extremism would ensue,” he said. “There is a risk of regional war.”

France, he warned, would become the enemy of the Syrian state: “Whoever contributes financial or military support to the terrorists is an enemy of the Syrian people,” he said, adding: “If the French state shows itself to be hostile to the Syrian people, that state becomes its enemy.”

Assad also warned of consequences for France if it chooses this path. “This hostility will only end when the French state changes its policies,” he said. “There will certainly be negative repercussions for French interests.”

France24

{{Talks at the U.N.’s aviation body must bridge a deep divide between developed and emerging nations over airline emissions to avert the threat of a carbon trade war with the European Union.}}

After more than a decade of debate at the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), there is little sign emerging powers China and India are ready to pay to pollute.

Failure to get a deal would open the way for the European Union to resume international implementation of its own law that makes all aviation using EU airports buy carbon allowances.

The last time it tried to enforce the law over frustration at a lack of ICAO progress, the EU faced counter-measures and the suspension of Chinese orders for Airbus jets. Some orders are still frozen.

In response to claims it was breaching sovereignty, the EU suspended the law, but said it would re-impose it unless the ICAO found an alternative.

With time running short before the EU has to decide what to do, the ICAO will hold a preliminary meeting on September 4.

That in theory will finalize the ground work for an outline global deal at the triennial general assembly beginning on September 24 at the ICAO headquarters in Montreal. But still it would require further talks and only take effect in 2020.

Some EU officials say they are hopeful there will be convincing progress towards a global market-based mechanism.

“I’m optimistic, but it’s difficult and we need political will from the United States, China and India,” one EU official said on condition of anonymity.

Sources close to the talks said a compromise option was to limit carbon charges to national airspace, rather than the entire flight, a U.S. position that Europe initially opposed.

{agencies}

{{Microsoft Corp said it will buy Nokia Oyj’s phone business and license its patents for 5.44 billion euros ($7.2 billion), making its boldest foray yet into mobile devices and bringing executive Stephen Elop back into the fold.}}

Nokia chief Elop, a former Microsoft executive, will return as Microsoft’s board ponders a successor to current CEO Steve Ballmer, who will depart sometime in the next 12 months after initiating a reorganization intended to transform the software company into a devices and services group in the mould of Apple Inc.

The sale of Nokia’s phone business marks the exit of a 150-year-old company that once dominated the global cellphone market and remains one of Europe’s premier technology brands, even though Apple and Samsung Electronics’ ascendancy all but reduced it to irrelevancy in Asia and North America in recent years.

“For a lot of us Finns, including myself, Nokia phones are part of what we grew up with. Many first reactions to the deal will be emotional,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade, on his Twitter account.

The sale price of the phone business, at about one-quarter of its sales last year, represented a “fire sale level,” according to analyst Tero Kuittinen at consultancy Alekstra, although others disagreed on pricing.

“What should be paid for declining business, where market share has been constantly lost and profitability has been poor?” said Hannu Rauhala, an analyst at Pohjola Bank. “It is difficult to say if it’s cheap or expensive.”

Nokia – reduced to its networks business, navigation offerings and patent portfolio after the sale – is still the world’s No. 2 mobile phone maker behind Samsung, but it is not in the top five in the more lucrative and faster-growing smartphone market.

Sales of Nokia’s Lumia series have helped the market share of Windows Phones in the global smartphone market climb to 3.3 percent, according to consultancy Gartner, overtaking ailing BlackBerry Ltd for the first time this year. Still, Google Inc’s Android and Apple’s iOS system make up 90 percent of the market.

Canadian Elop, hired from Microsoft in 2010, has been cited among the frontrunners to take over from Ballmer, criticized for missing the mobile revolution, kicking off Microsoft’s foray into the market with the tepid-selling Surface tablet only in 2012.

Buying Nokia’s gadget business thrusts Microsoft deeper into the hotly contested market, despite some investors urging the company to stick to its core strengths of business software and services.

reuters

{{Syria is capable of confronting any external attack from the US and other Western countries, President Bashar al-Assad said Sunday.}}

His comments came after US President Barack Obama said there should be a military strike on Syria in response to the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime, but that he will seek approval from Congress before any armed intervention.

“Syria … is capable of confronting any external aggression,” state television quoted Assad as saying at a meeting with Iranian officials.

“The American threats of launching an attack against Syria will not discourage Syria away from its principles … or its fight against terrorism supported by some regional and Western countries, first and foremost the United States of America.”

Syria generally refers to rebels fighting to topple Assad as “terrorists”.

Meanwhile, Syria on Sunday urged US lawmakers to show “wisdom” in their vote on a proposed military strike on Damascus.

Labelling Obama “hesitant, disappointed and confused”, Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Muqdad again denied his regime was behind a poison gas attack on August 21 that precipitated calls for military action.

france24