Tag: InternationalNews

{{Diaries kept by three young women held captive for a decade in an Ohio home helped US prosecutors describe their suffering in a memo released ahead of their tormentor’s sentencing hearing Thursday.}}

The entries spoke of rape, vicious beatings, of being chained to a wall and locked in a dark room, of “being treated like an animal,” of “anticipating the next session of abuse,” and of “his threats to kill,” prosecutors said.

The women also wrote of “dreams of some day escaping and being reunited with family,” of “missing the lives they once enjoyed” and of their overwhelming desire for freedom.

Their tormentor, Ariel Castro, last week agreed to plead guilty and spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table.

The former school bus driver, 53, is expected to speak about his catalogue of crimes when he is formally sentenced Thursday.

“Although he admits his disgusting and inhuman conduct, the defendant remains remorseless for his actions,” Cuyahoga county prosecutor Timothy McGinty wrote in the sentencing memo released late Wednesday.

At least one of Castro’s victims Michelle Knight, 32 may also deliver a statement by video or even in person, media reported.

Knight was the first to be snatched off the street in 2002 when she was 20. Next came Amanda Berry, kidnapped the night before her 17th birthday in 2003.

Then came Gina DeJesus who was just 14 and a friend of Castro’s daughter when she was abducted in 2004.

{agencies}

{{Ukraine’s leading confectioner Roshen has suspended its exports to Russia after chief sanitary inspector Gennady Onishchenko banned the products, saying that they don’t meet quality and safety standards.}}

The Federal Consumer Protection Service inspected Roshen’s products from Moscow stores and found that they had “toxic impurities” while milk chocolate produced by the company even held traces of benzopyrene, a carcinogenic chemical, according to an announcement published on the service’s website.

The faulty products were shipped from four of Roshen’s Ukraine-based factories. The chocolates manufactured at the Lithuanian and Russian factories did not incur the same condemnation.

“The quality and safety requirements have been breached,” Onishchenko told Interfax this week. “There are grounds to talk of systemic violations of our country’s current legislation on protecting consumer rights.”

But Roshen’s representatives said they have not received any formal complaints about their products from Russian authorities and neither have their Moscow distributors from which the samples were taken. But the company has decided to voluntarily suspend the supply of their products until the situation clears up.

“Roshen has always complied with all the rules for certification of confectionary products and met all the necessary health standards,” according to the company’s statement.

Roshen doubts that the Federal Consumer Protection Service used the right samples in their quality checks, the statement continued. They also noted that the presence of benzopyrene in the chocolates can not be in violation of Russian regulations because the country has no official norms for how much of this substance can appear in confectionary products.

Roshen is not the first Ukrainian producer to get banned from Russia. Onishchenko stopped the supply of Ukrainian cheeses to the country in February 2012, though supplies were later resumed, and has now concentrated his efforts on an inquiry into Ukrainian baked goods.

As with previous bans, experts suspect that there are political motives for the decision. Ukraine has increased an emergency car tax in March to protect local producers from a high volume of imports. Russia has lost an estimated $36 million as a result of this tax, with the ban on Roshen chocolate seen by some as retaliation.

Pavel Rozenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, said the move is likely Russia’s answer to his country’s continued refusal to join the Russian trade bloc, which already includes Belarus and Kazakhstan.

He added that he expects other similar measures to be taken by Russia as Ukraine readies to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union, the New Region news agency reported.

Onishchenko, however, disagreed with the suggestion. He said the consumer rights watchdog had asked Ukrainian authorities to set up a quality control system when they were dealing with the cheese ban. He added that otherwise, more bans would be imposed in the future.

The Moscow Times

{{Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso has retracted remarks suggesting that the country could learn from Nazi Germany’s constitutional reform.}}

Mr Aso said on Monday Japan could “learn the technique” Nazi Germany used to change the Weimar constitution.

The remarks come amid debate in Japan over its pacifist constitution, which restricts the military to a self-defence role.

Mr Aso’s comments drew criticism from neighbouring China and South Korea.

“I retract my remarks in which I cited the Nazis as an example, as it has ended up leading to misunderstanding,” Mr Aso, who is also finance minister and a former prime minister, told reporters on Thursday.

“It is clear from all my remarks that I have an extremely negative view of the events involving the Nazis and the Weimar constitution.”

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters: “I want to make it clear that the [Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe cabinet will never view the Nazi government positively”.

On Monday, Mr Aso had said in a speech that: “The German Weimar constitution changed, without being noticed, to the Nazi German constitution. Why don’t we learn from their tactics?”

In 1933 after a fire burned down the German parliament, Adolf Hitler, who was chancellor at the time, and President Paul von Hindenburg enforced a state of emergency, suspending civic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution.

Hitler then successfully passed the Enabling Act, which meant he could pass laws without consulting parliament – a move viewed as crucial to consolidating his grip on power.

Retracting the remarks on Thursday, Mr Aso said he highlighted the case as “as a bad example of changes made without a substantial debate or understanding by the citizens”.

In response to Mr Aso’s Monday speech, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that Mr Aso’s comments had alarmed Japan’s neighbours, state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

“We demand the Japanese side reflect on its history, fulfil its commitments on historical issues and win the trust of Asian neighbours and the international community through concrete actions,” Mr Hong said.

South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tai-young said the “remarks definitely hurt many people”.

“It is clear what such comments on the [Nazi] regime mean to people of the time and to those who [suffered] from Japan’s imperialistic invasion”, he said.

{{‘Expand and deepen’}}

Constitutional reform is a delicate issue in Japan. Under Article 9 of its post-war constitution, Japan is blocked from the use of force to resolve conflicts except in the case of self-defence.

But Mr Abe – who now controls both houses of parliament after a win in last month’s upper house polls – has indicated he wants to re-examine the role of Japan’s military to meet the changing security environment in the Asia-Pacific region.

Mr Abe has said he wants to “expand and deepen” debate over the constitution in order to ease tight restrictions on the armed forces – something China and South Korea, which were invaded by Japan during WWII, are opposed to.

Mr Aso, his deputy, has made verbal gaffes in the past. During his term as prime minister, he accused doctors of lacking common sense and called the elderly a “feeble” group – despite his party relying heavily on older voters to keep it in power.

In May, Osaka’s Mayor Toru Hashimoto came under fire after he said that “comfort women”, women who were forced to become prostitutes for Japan’s WWII troops, were “necessary”.

{{The Queen was expected to urge Britons to pray and remain united and resolute in the event of the “madness” of nuclear war, papers from 1983 show.}}

The script for a hypothetical broadcast has the monarch describing the threat to the “brave country” as “greater” than any other in history.

It also mentions the Queen’s son Prince Andrew, then in the Royal Navy.

The speech, devised by Whitehall officials at one of the most fraught Cold War periods, was never recorded.

The document, released by the government under the 30-year rule, was drawn up as part of a war-gaming exercise in the spring of 1983, which worked through potential scenarios.

{{‘Madness of war’}}

Among the other pieces of history released from the archives on Thursday were:

Margaret Thatcher blocked a 21-year-old William Hague from a potential job as a Treasury adviser, saying his appointment would be a “gimmick” and could prove “an embarrassment”

The then British PM secretly wanted the Army to move coal around the UK in the event of a miners’ strike

Government officials considered deliberately flooding Essex and Kent to prevent London being swamped by a tidal surge as it waited for the Thames Barrier to be completed

The UK sent a laser weapon designed to “dazzle” Argentine pilots during the Falklands war

A senior government official had urged Mrs Thatcher to seek out a fertile female panda for London Zoo before a visit to China in 1982.

Although it was only a simulation, the text of the Queen’s address – written as if broadcast at midday on Friday 4 March 1983 – seeks to prepare the country for the ordeal of World War III.

The script, which starts off by referring to the Queen’s traditional Christmas address, reads: “The horrors of war could not have seemed more remote as my family and I shared our Christmas joy with the growing family of the Commonwealth.

“Now, this madness of war is once more spreading through the world and our brave country must again prepare itself to survive against great odds.

“I have never forgotten the sorrow and the pride I felt as my sister and I huddled around the nursery wireless set listening to my father’s [George VI’s] inspiring words on that fateful day in 1939 [at the start of the World War II].

“Not for a single moment did I imagine that this solemn and awful duty would one day fall to me.

“But whatever terrors lie in wait for us all, the qualities that have helped to keep our freedom intact twice already during this sad century will once more be our strength.”

Striking a personal note, the script continues: “My husband and I share with families up and down the land the fear we feel for sons and daughters, husbands and brothers who have left our side to serve their country.

“My beloved son Andrew is at this moment in action with his unit and we pray continually for his safety and for the safety of all servicemen and women at home and overseas.

“It is this close bond of family life that must be our greatest defence against the unknown.

“If families remain united and resolute, giving shelter to those living alone and unprotected, our country’s will to survive cannot be broken.”

The speech concludes by saying the Queen’s message to the nation was “simple”.

{{‘New evil’}}

It adds: “As we strive together to fight off the new evil, let us pray for our country and men of goodwill wherever they may be. God Bless you all.

In the war-gaming exercise, Orange bloc forces – representing the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies – launch a chemical weapon attack on the UK.

Blue forces – representing Nato – retaliate with a “limited-yield” nuclear strike, forcing Orange to initiate a peace process.

The exercise came in the year that US President Ronald Reagan both enraged and alarmed Moscow with his denunciation of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”, his plans for a “Star Wars” ballistic missile shield in space, and the deployment of US nuclear cruise missiles to Europe – including to RAF Greenham Common.

Tensions increased when the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner that strayed into their airspace, killing all 269 on board.

A Nato military exercise, codenamed Able Archer, then nearly triggered an actual conflict with the Soviet leadership apparently convinced it was cover for a genuine attack.

The Soviet Union and the US later negotiated a reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, as the Cold War came to an end.

adapted from BBC

{{President Barack Obama’s national security has team acknowledged for the first time that it has the ability to read the phone records of millions of Americans while looking for just one terrorism suspect.}}

Appearing before the Senate judiciary committee, John Inglis, the NSA’s deputy director, conceded that his agents can track the telephone activities of millions of Americans while searching for one terrorism suspect, but said that agents “try to be judicious” in their searches.

The Obama administration has previously stated that such records are rarely searched and, when they are, officials target only suspected foreign terrorists.

The searches described to the judiciary committee hinge on the “chain” analysis of information gathered on telephone communications. When the NSA identifies a suspect, it can look not just at their phone records, but also the records of everyone they call, everyone who calls those people and everyone who calls those people.

If the average person called 40 people, the analysis would allow the government to mine the records of 2.5 million Americans when investigating one suspect. The NSA conducted 300 such searches last year.

The Democratic senator, Dick Durbin, said: “So what has been described as a discrete programme, to go after people who would cause us harm, when you look at the reach of this programme, it envelopes a substantial number of Americans.”

“We are open to re-evaluating this programme in ways that can perhaps provide greater confidence and public trust that this is in fact a programme that achieves both privacy protections and national security,” Robert Litt, counsel to the director of National Intelligence, told the judiciary committee.

wirestory

Civilian casualties in the Afghan war rose 23 percent in the first half of this year due to Taliban attacks and increased fighting between insurgents and government forces, the UN said Wednesday.

The increase reverses a decline in 2012 and raises questions about how Afghan government troops can protect civilians as US-led NATO troops withdraw from the 12-year war against the Taliban.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said 1,319 civilians died and 2,533 were injured as a result of the war from January 1 to June 30, up 23 percent on the same period in 2012.

UNAMA said there was a 14 percent increase in total civilian deaths and a 28 percent increase in total civilian injuries.

Female civilian casualties rose 61 percent, most caused by fighting on the ground between pro-government and insurgent forces, the UN said in a report.

Child casualties were up 30 percent with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the Taliban weapon of choice, the leading cause.

“The rise in civilian casualties in the first half of 2013 reverses the decline recorded in 2012, and marks a return to the high numbers of civilian deaths and injuries documented in 2011,” the report said.

The UN said 74 percent of the casualties were caused by insurgents, nine percent by pro-government forces and 12 percent as a result of ground fighting between the two sides.

The remaining four or five percent of civilian casualties were unattributed, caused mainly by explosive remnants of war, it added.

While IED attacks remain the highest cause of civilian casualties, increased ground fighting between Afghan troops and insurgents was the second leading cause and a new trend in the first half of 2013.

The NATO combat mission is due to close down at the end of 2014 and Afghan government forces have taken the lead in the battle against the Taliban, who were deposed in the 2001 US-led invasion.

“Despite Afghan forces leading almost all military operations countrywide, a permanent structure does not exist… to systematically investigate allegations of civilian casualties, initiate remedial measures and take follow-up action,” the UN said.

The UN also recorded a 76 percent increase in civilian casualties as a result of insurgents targeting civilian government employees, government offices, district headquarters and other offices.

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