Tag: InternationalNews

{{The village school in India where 23 children died by poisoning last week had been providing lunch under a government-sponsored scheme without checks or monitoring by local officials to see if the food was stored carefully or cooked properly.}}

Although it is the first such disaster in the “midday meal” project that feeds about 120 million children every day across India, a Reuters review of audit reports and research papers shows officials have long ignored warnings of the lack of oversight and accountability in the program.

“You only come and do checks when you get complaints or when there are serious cases,” said Rudranarayan Ram, the local education administrator for the village of Gandaman in Bihar state, where the children died. “This was the first time.”

The poisoning, which police suspect was caused by storing cooking oil in a used pesticide container, killed the children so quickly that some died in their parents’ arms while being taken to hospital.

Ram, who was tasked with monitoring the program, said the headmistress of the school, who has fled, bought the food and the oil in which it was cooked. He just doesn’t know from where nor how the items were stored.

Although fatal contamination is extremely rare in the midday meal scheme, auditors in several states have described unhygienic conditions in which the food under the program is prepared and served, and the poor quality of food itself. Two audit reports by the state governments of Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh have said the food in the scheme was often laced with stones and worms.

Another survey by the Indian Institute of Management noted children in Gujarat state were made to wash up after their meals by “rubbing the playground soil on the plates and then giving a quick rinse”.

“If the government checks, they will find that the children who have been eating midday meals are under great physical threat,” said Ajay Kumar Jha, professor at A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies, who led a team to monitor the program in Bihar in April.

The midday meal scheme of giving school pupils a free lunch is the largest such program in the world. It has been widely lauded as one of the most successful welfare measures in India, home to a quarter of the world’s hungry, because it also boosts school enrolments and helps children to continue studies.

{{Israel says it will release a number of Palestinian prisoners as part of an agreement made with US Secretary of State John Kerry to resume peace talks.}}

Yuval Steinitz, minister responsible for international relations, said it would involve “heavyweight prisoners in jail for decades”.

Mr Kerry announced on Friday that initial talks would be held in Washington “in the next week or so”.

The Israeli minister’s remarks are the first details of the deal.

Mr Kerry had declined to tell reporters in Amman what the two sides had agreed to, saying that the “best way to give these negotiations a chance is to keep them private”.

The agreement came at the end of four days of frenetic shuttle diplomacy, on Mr Kerry’s sixth visit to the region in the past few months.

Mr Steinitz told Israeli public radio that the agreement adhered to the principles set out by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for kick-starting the talks.

The release of prisoners would take place in stages, he said.

According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 4,817 Palestinians are held in Israeli jails. The release of prisoners held before the 1993 Oslo peace accords has been a long-held Palestinian demand.

For their part, the Palestinians had committed themselves to “serious negotiations” for a minimum of nine months, said Mr Steinitz, who is a member of the prime minister’s Likud Beiteinu party.

But he made clear that Israel had not accepted Palestinian pre-conditions, including a halt to settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“There is no chance that we will agree to enter any negotiations that begin with defining territorial borders or concessions by Israel, nor a construction freeze.”

Israel and the Palestinians last held direct talks in 2010, which were halted over the issue of settlement-building.

Settlements are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

{wirestory}

{{A night of violence erupted in the Paris suburb of Trappes on Friday, apparently sparked by a row over France’s controversial ban on face coverings.}}

Reports suggest upwards of 200 people clashed with security forces outside the town’s police station from around 9pm on Friday night, with the violence continuing into the early hours of Saturday morning.

Demonstrators were seen throwing projectiles at police, while a number of bins were set on fire. Several pictures and videos purporting to show the violence have been posted on social media sites such as YouTube and Twitter.

Around a dozen vans carrying riot police were deployed to the area, while a helicopter was dispatched to carry out surveillance of the town, located around 27km west of the centre of Paris.

Order was restored at around 3am when the crowd began to disperse, a police source told Reuters.

There were also reports that a young boy was rushed to hospital after being injured by a shot from a Flash-Ball – a hand-held device that fires non-lethal projectiles and is often carried by police in France.

{france24}

{{China’s central bank removed controls on bank lending rates, effective Saturday, in a long-awaited move that signals the new leadership’s determination to carry out market-oriented reforms.}}

The move gives commercial banks the freedom to compete for borrowers, a reform the People’s Bank of China said on Friday will help lower financial costs for companies. Previously, the lending floor was 70 percent of the benchmark lending rate.

However, the PBOC, in a statement, left a ceiling on deposit rates unchanged at 110 percent of benchmark rates, avoiding for now what many economists see as the most important step Beijing needs to take to free up interest rates.

The latest step underscores Beijing’s resolve to start fixing distortions in its financial system and the economy more broadly as it tries to shift from export- and investment-led growth to more consumption-led activity.

Some analysts said cheaper credit could help support the economy, which has seen year-on-year growth fall in nine of the last 10 quarters.

“This is a big breakthrough in financial reforms,” said Wang Jun, senior economist at China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, a prominent government think-tank in Beijing.

“Previously, people had thought the central bank would only gradually lower the floor on lending rates. Now they scrapped the floor once and for all.”

The Australian dollar rose modestly on the news on hopes cheaper credit will lead to more demand from Australia’s biggest export market.

The announcement provided some support to weak stock markets in Europe .FTEU3 and a timely reminder to the world’s top financial leaders meeting in Moscow of China’s intention to rebalance its economy.

A Group of 20 draft communiqué will urge China to encourage more domestic demand-driven growth as part of wider efforts to rebalance the world economy, G20 sources said.

The United States welcomed the move, saying China promised to let markets play a bigger role in allocating credit during the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington last week.

“This is a welcome further step in the reform and liberalization of China’s financial system,” Holly Shulman, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury, said in an email.

{agencies}

{{When a North Korean ship carrying Cuban arms was seized last week in Panama on suspicion of smuggling drugs, Cuba first said it was loaded with sugar for the people of North Korea, according to a Panamanian official familiar with the matter.}}

Cuban officials were quick to request the ship be released, pledging there were no drugs on board, and made no mention of the weapons which two days later were found hidden in the hold under 220,000 sacks of brown sugar, the official told Reuters.

“They said it was all a big misunderstanding,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Cuba declined to comment on the official’s account.

Questions still surround the cargo of sugar and what Cuba called “obsolete” Soviet-era weapons which it said it was sending halfway around the world to be repaired in North Korea.

The discovery has put the already isolated Asian nation under increased diplomatic pressure because the cargo is suspected of being in breach of a U.N. arms embargo against Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile program.

For Cuba, the benefits of smuggling out-of-date weapons to North Korea did not seem to make up for the potential pitfalls, experts said.

“It’s baffling. It’s hard to believe Cuba would risk so much for so little,” said Frank Mora, the Pentagon’s senior official for Latin America during president Obama’s first term.

Panamanian officials say the shipment was probably part of an arms-for-sugar exchange aimed at refurbishing Cuba’s aging air defenses.

“We understand it was a barter deal, arms for sugar, that’s what our intelligence sources are telling us,” said the Panamanian official familiar with the investigation.

A U.S. official confirmed that one of the theories being studied is that it may have been a barter deal.

A senior Panamanian official said on Friday that investigators unloading the cargo may have discovered explosive material on board the ship, and would check it this weekend.

While Cuba needs to upgrade its arsenal, Mora and others say, the botched smuggling operation was so clumsy and ill-conceived that it appeared out of character for the usually circumspect and highly disciplined Cuban military.

Nevertheless, it may not have been the first such attempt.

Security experts say five North Korean-flagged vessels have transited through the Panama Canal in the last three years. One ship, the O Un Chong Nyon Ho, passed through the canal and docked in Havana in May 2012.

“It’s interesting that this kind of relationship exists between Cuba and North Korea,” said Bruce Bagley, a Latin America expert at the University of Miami and former consultant to Panama’s intelligence service.

“It shows that both Cuba and North Korea are quite isolated and are seeking some solace in each other’s commercial and diplomatic embraces. They have few alternatives and they don’t have any hard cash,” he said.

{reuters}

{{People arriving by boat to seek asylum will no longer be resettled in Australia but will go to Papua New Guinea, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has announced.}}

The news came as Mr Rudd set out an overhaul of asylum policy ahead of a general election expected shortly.

Australia has seen a sharp rise in the number of asylum-seekers arriving by boat in recent months.

Mr Rudd said the “hard-line decision” was taken to ensure border security.

The prime minister, who ousted Julia Gillard as Labor Party leader amid dismal polling figures last month, made the announcement in Brisbane flanked by the PNG Prime Minister Peter O’Neill.

“From now on, any asylum-seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as a refugee,” Mr Rudd said.

Under the agreement, new arrivals will be sent to PNG for assessment and settled there if found to be a refugee.

To accommodate the new arrivals, an offshore processing centre in PNG’s Manus island will be significantly expanded.

No cap has been placed on the number of people Australia can send to PNG, Mr Rudd said.

The prime minister said the move was aimed at dissuading people from making the dangerous journey to Australia by boat.

“Our country has had enough of people-smugglers exploiting asylum-seekers and seeing them drown on the high seas,” he said.

BBC

{{Detroit has become the largest city in United States history to file for bankruptcy after decades of decline and mismanagement rendered the city insolvent.}}

Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder, said on Thursday that there was no other option to tackle the city’s $18.5bn of debts.

“This is a situation that’s been 60 years in the making in terms of the decline of Detroit. From a financial point of view, let me be blunt, Detroit is broke,” Snyder said in a video on the state’s official website.

Once the fourth largest city in the US, Detroit’s population has shrunk from 1.8 million in 1950 to 685,000 today – as crime, flight to the suburbs and the decline of the car-making industry ate away at its foundations and finances.

“The fiscal realities confronting Detroit have been ignored for too long,” Snyder said in a statement accompanying the bankruptcy file.

“I’m making this tough decision so the people of Detroit will have the basic services they deserve and so we can start to put Detroit on a solid financial footing.

“The only feasible path to a stable and solid Detroit is to file for bankruptcy protection.”

However, the filing puts the city on an uncertain course that could mean laying off municipal employees, selling assets and scaling back already threadbare basic services.

{aljazeera}