Tag: InternationalNews

{{Israel will release 26 Palestinian prisoners ahead of renewed peace talks set for later this week, an official statement said.}}

Following the government decision late on Sunday, the Israel Prisons Service published the names of the 26 selected to be freed ahead of the talks.

The detailed list, published shortly after the announcement, includes the prisoners’ names, felonies, date of arrest as well as the names of their victims.

Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton, reporting from Jerusalem, said that the Israeli security agency said most of them were “low risk” prisinors.

The longest serving prosoner has written a letter to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas saying they “didn’t want to be used as a bargaining chip”, Journalists reported.

“You should not agree with the releases to give way in any way in these peace talks,” the letter said.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a panel had decided upon the identity of the prisoners to be released within the next two days, the first of 104 long-term Palestinian prisoners to be freed in four stages, depending on progress in the talks.

{Aljazeera}

China has arrested an activist on a charge of subversion, his brother and a rights group said on Sunday, the second such arrest in less than two months and the latest sign that the authorities are hardening their stance toward dissent.

Yang Lin, 45, a critic of China’s one-party system who lives in the southern province of Guangdong, was arrested on a charge of “inciting subversion of state power”, his brother, Yang Mingzhu, said by telephone.

In China, an inciting subversion charge is commonly levelled against critics of one-party rule. It carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail, though lengthier sentences have been handed down.

Yang Mingzhu said he had received a notice of his brother’s arrest, dated July 19, but it gave few details.

The U.S.-based group Chinese Human Rights Defenders said Yang Lin, had spent a year in a labor camp, and he was also a signatory of “Charter 08” – a manifesto organized by jailed Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo – which calls for political reform.

“He would not hesitate in throwing himself wholeheartedly in helping disadvantaged citizens fight for their rights and in activities promoting constitutional democracy,” the advocacy group said on its website on Sunday.

Chinese liberals and intellectuals had hoped the new government that took over this year, under President Xi Jinping, would be more tolerant of calls for reform but authorities have seemed to indicate they will not tolerate any challenge to their rule.

In recent months, authorities have detained at least 16 anti-corruption activists involved in demonstrations calling for government officials to disclose their assets.

The Futian District Detention Centre, where the brother said Yang Lin was being held, declined to comment.

A formal arrest usually leads to a trial. Activists who are detained are sometimes released before they are formally arrested.

In June, authorities formally arrested a man for inciting subversion after he applied for permission to demonstrate on June 4, the 24th anniversary of the bloody crackdown on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

wirestory

{{The United States has condemned the latest bombings in Baghdad which killed dozens of people, saying attackers who targeted civilians during celebrations marking the end of Ramadan were “enemies of Islam”.}}

Car bombs ripped through markets, shopping streets and parks late on Saturday as Iraqis were out celebrating Eid, the end of the Muslim fasting month, killing 57 and wounding more than 150.

Eighteen months since the last U.S. troops withdrew, Sunni Islamist militants have been regaining momentum in their insurgency against Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government.

The civil war in neighboring Syria has aggravated sectarian tensions further and Iraq’s Interior Ministry has said it is facing an “open war”.

“The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the cowardly attacks today in Baghdad,” the State Department said in a statement.

“The terrorists who committed these acts are enemies of Islam and a shared enemy of the United States, Iraq, and the international community,” it said.

It said the United States would work closely with the Iraqi government to confront al Qaeda and discuss this during a visit of Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari next week to Washington.

This has been one of the deadliest Ramadan months in years, with bomb attacks killing scores of people. The latest bombings were similar to attacks in Baghdad on Tuesday in which 50 died.

More than 1,000 Iraqis were killed in July, the highest monthly death toll since 2008, according to the United Nations.

Elsewhere in Iraq on Saturday, similar explosions hit bustling streets and a mosque. The attacks targeted mainly Shi’ite districts and the renewed violence has raised fears Iraq could relapse into the severe sectarian bloodshed of 2006-2007.

“This carnage reflects the inhuman character of its perpetrators,” United Nations envoy to Iraq Gyorgy Busztin said in a statement.

“All honest Iraqis should unite to put an end to this murderous violence that aims to push the country into sectarian strife,” he said.

The State Department said Saturday’s attacks bore the signs of al Qaeda’s Iraqi (AQI) branch. It reiterated a $10 million reward for information leading to the killing or capture of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the AQI leader.

Last month al Qaeda claimed responsibility for simultaneous raids on two Iraqi prisons and said more than 500 inmates had escaped in the operation, one of its most brazen in Iraq.

The reward for Baghdadi is second only to information leading to Ayman al-Zawahri, the chief of al Qaeda’s network, the State Department said.

{reuters}

{{HarperCollins, Simon & Shuster and Penguin are among publishers who have filed a complaint against restrictions imposed on Apple by a US court.}}

Last month Apple was found guilty of conspiring with publishers to fix the price of e-books bought via iTunes.

It was ordered to terminate deals with five major companies and allow other e-book retailers to sell to iPad and iPhone users for the next two years.

The publishers say they are being punished by the restrictions.

Under agreements put in place between Apple and companies including Hatchett and Macmillan, electronic book price-fixing took place, creating unfair competition for other retailers, the court ruled last month.

At the time most of the publishers reached separate settlements totalling more than $150m (£96m) but Apple said it would fight the “false allegations”.

According to the Associated Press news agency, the publishers’ complaint says: “The provisions do not impose any limitation on Apple’s pricing behaviour at all.

“Rather, under the guise of punishing Apple, they effectively punish [publishers that settled in the case].”

Garner analyst Van Baker told media that the ruling seemed “heavy-handed”.

“It is basically putting a stake through a portion of Apple’s business, and I confess to being surprised by that,” he said.

“It strikes me as a pretty heavy-handed solution to the issue.”

{{The Italian coastguard found Saturday the bodies of six migrants dead on a tourist beach in Sicily while more than 100 others, thought to be Syrians, were rescued, officials said.}}

“The bodies were reported by employees of a beach resort” near the island’s second largest city Catania at dawn, a port official said.

Investigators said the boat was carrying around 120 people including women and small children.

“We are transferring the other passengers from the little fishing boat they were in. We assume they are all Syrians,” he said, adding that they included women and small children. He did not know where they had set sail from.

Italian media said the six migrants who died could not swim and drowned trying to reach the shore just 15 metres (50 feet) from where the boat ran aground.

Frogmen were searching around the stricken vessel for other possible victims.

Another group of about 100 migrants, mostly Syrian families, were rescued overnight Wednesday off the coast of Calabria on the Italian mainland.

They had left Syria two weeks earlier and had to change boats several times before being left adrift aboard an 11-metre (35-foot) vessel.

Improved weather and calmer waters have seen a spike in boat people arrivals in recent days.

But shipwrecks are frequent because the boats are often old, rickety and overloaded. Human traffickers regularly abandon their passengers when Italian or Maltese coastguards spot them.

(AFP)

{{Israel appealed to the European Union on Friday to rethink plans to withhold funds from Israeli organizations in the occupied territories, a shift in tone from earlier recrimination and retaliation.}}

Under guidelines adopted by the executive European Commission in June, Israeli “entities” operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will not be eligible for EU grants, prizes or loans from next year.

The move was welcomed by Palestinians, who seek statehood in those territories, and deplored by Israel, which has settled the West Bank extensively and considers all of Jerusalem its undivided capital – a status not recognized internationally.

The rightist Israeli government responded on July 26 by announcing curbs on EU aid projects for thousands of West Bank Palestinians. On Thursday it accused the Europeans of harming Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and said it would not sign new deals with the 28-nation bloc given the planned EU cuts.

But Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin took a more diplomatic tack on Friday, offering to negotiate with the European Union over the guidelines, which he described as a challenge to the Jewish state’s sovereignty.

“We are ready to hold a creative dialogue with the Europeans. We understand their position. We reject it, we don’t like it, but it’s their right when it comes to using their money,” Elkin told Israel Radio.

“We are asking the Europeans also to take into consideration the legal and other problems this creates on the Israeli side. We want to return and are ready to negotiate. But if the terms are the way they are today – unprecedented and several steps beyond anything heretofore – then we won’t be able to do it.”

{wirestory}

{{Eighteen of the 19 U.S. embassies and consulates closed this month due to worries about potential terrorist attacks will reopen on Sunday, the U.S. State Department said on Friday.}}

“Our embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, will remain closed because of ongoing concerns about a threat stream indicating the potential for terrorist attacks emanating from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

The United States will also keep its consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, shuttered, Psaki said, adding it closed on Thursday due to a “separate credible threat.”

The United States shut about 20 of its embassies and consulates in the Middle East and Africa on Sunday after saying it had picked up information through surveillance and other means about unspecified terrorist threats. It later said the missions would remain closed through August 10.

A worldwide alert said that al Qaeda could be planning attacks in the Middle East and North Africa.

The reopening U.S. posts are located in Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, Madagascar, Burundi, Djibouti, Sudan, Rwanda, Mauritius, as well as three in Saudi Arabia and two in the United Arab Emirates.

The U.S. government this week warned its citizens to avoid traveling to Pakistan, while some American diplomats from Yemen were evacuated and U.S. nationals were told to leave the country immediately.

President Barack Obama, during a White House news conference on Friday, declined to comment on reports of drone strikes in Pakistan that targeted militants in that country.

The State Department did not indicate when its facilities in Sanaa and Lahore might reopen, saying it will continue to evaluate the “threats.”

U.S. embassies and consulates offer emergency services to Americans traveling abroad and attempt to advance U.S. diplomatic and business interests in host countries.

reuters