Tag: InternationalNews

{{Leaders of the G-8 wealthy countries were spending the final hours of their summit Tuesday focusing on how to deter kidnappings of foreign workers in Africa and how to corner globe-trotting companies into paying more taxes.}}

They also faced a final few hours of behind-the-scenes haggling to see whether all eight could express a joint position on ending the 2-year-old civil war in Syria. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who backs the government of Bashar Assad against rebel forces, refused to shift his stance during Monday night’s working dinner on the issue.

The other seven leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama, have shown varying degrees of support for the rebels. As well as host Britain, the G-8 includes the United States, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Russia.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is seeking a joint commitment by nations to stop paying ransoms to kidnappers in hopes of deterring the practice following January’s bloody capture by al-Qaeda-linked militants of an Algerian gas facility.

Ten Japanese, five Britons, three Americans and a French national were among the 40 civilians killed as Algerian forces retook the facility.

Hostage-taking of foreign workers for cash payments is on the rise across much of West Africa, particularly Nigeria with its own oil industry dominated by Western companies and foreign managers.

“I want us to discuss how we crack down on terrorist ransoms because this would suffocate one of the main sources of funding for these terrorist organizations, and of course would reduce the incentive to take our citizens hostage,” Cameron said ahead of Tuesday’s discussions.

Cameron has also invited the leaders of Libya and the African Union to join the talks table Tuesday.

The G-8 leaders also are expected to agree on new measures to restrict the ability of multinational corporations to avoid paying taxes in their home countries by using shell companies and other legal accounting tricks to shelter cash in principalities and islands, many of them British, that charge little or no tax.

Britain’s treasury chief, George Osborne, is taking part to help explain Britain’s agreement unveiled last week with its far-flung crown dependencies and overseas territories — including the Channel Islands, Gibraltar and Anguilla — to start sharing more information on which foreign companies bank their profits there.

“You’re going to see concrete achievements today on changing the international rules on taxation, so individuals can’t hide their money offshore and companies don’t shift their profits away from where the profit is made,” Osborne said.

“Of course Britain’s got to put its own house in order,” he added, referring to companies’ practice of funneling money between the British offshore territories and the City of London, the world’s second-largest financial market.

The summit is concluding with rapid-fire press conferences by each departing leader. Obama continues his European trip Tuesday night in Germany.

AP

{{Hungarian prosecutors say they have indicted a 98-year-old former police officer for abusing Jews and assisting in their deportation to Nazi death camps during World War II.}}

Laszlo Csatary, who has denied the charges, was first detained by Hungarian authorities in July 2012 after his case was made public by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization active in hunting down Nazis who have yet to be brought to justice.

Tuesday’s indictment by the Budapest Investigative Prosecutors’ Office says Csatary was the chief of an internment camp for Jews in Kosice — a Slovak city then part of Hungary — in 1944, and that he beat them with his bare hands and a dog whip.

Prosecution spokeswoman Bettina Bagoly said Tuesday that Csatary’s trial is expected start within three months.

{Agencies}

President Barack Obama declared peace in Northern Ireland a “blueprint” for those living amid conflict around the world, while acknowledging that the calm between Catholics and Protestants will face further tests.

Summoning young people to take responsibility for their country’s future, Obama warned there is “more to lose now than there’s ever been.”

“The terms of peace may be negotiated by political leaders, but the fate of peace is up to each of us,” Obama said Monday during remarks at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall. The glass-fronted building would never have been built during the city’s long era of car bombs.

Obama arrived in Northern Ireland Monday morning after an overnight flight from Washington.

Following his speech to about 1,800 students and adults, he flew to a lakeside golf resort near Enniskillen, passing over a sweeping patchwork of tree-lined farms as he prepared to meet with other leaders of the Group of 8 industrial nations on Syria, trade and counterterrorism.

Obama and European Union leaders emerged from a group roundtable meeting to announce that they were opening negotiations next month in Washington toward a broad trade deal designed to slash tariffs, boost exports and fuel badly needed economic growth.

Obama said there will be sensitivities and politics to overcome by parties on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but he’s hopeful they can “stay focused on the big picture” of the economic and strategic importance of the agreement.

“America and Europe have done extraordinary things together before and I believe we can forge an economic alliance as strong as our diplomatic and security alliances, which of course have been the most powerful in history,” Obama told reporters.

{Agencies}

{{Media reports indicate British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and emails when the U.K. hosted international conferences, even going so far as to set up a bugged Internet café in an effort to get an edge in high-stakes negotiations.}}

The report — the latest in a series of revelations which have ignited a worldwide debate over the scope of Western intelligence gathering — came just hours before Britain was due to open the G-8 summit Monday, a meeting of world’s leading economies that include Russia, in Northern Ireland.

The allegation that the United Kingdom has previously used its position as host to spy on its allies and other attendees could make for awkward conversation as the delegates arrive for talks.

“The diplomatic fallout from this could be considerable,” said British academic Richard J. Aldrich, whose book “GCHQ” charts the agency’s history.

Speaking at the G-8 summit, Prime Minister David Cameron declined to address the issue.

“We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now,” he said. “I don’t make comments on security or intelligence issues. That would be breaking something that no government has previously done.”
GCHQ also declined to comment on the report.

The Guardian cites more than half a dozen internal government documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as the basis for its reporting on GCHQ’s intelligence operations, which it says involved, among other things, hacking into the South African foreign ministry’s computer network and targeting the Turkish delegation at the 2009 G-20 summit in London.

The source material — whose authenticity could not immediately be determined — appears to be a mixed bag. The Guardian describes one as “a PowerPoint slide,” another as “a briefing paper” and others simply as “documents.”

Some of the leaked material was posted to the Guardian’s website with heavy redactions. A spokesman for the newspaper said that the redactions were made at the newspaper’s initiative, but declined to elaborate.

It wasn’t completely clear how Snowden would have had access to the British intelligence documents, although in one article the Guardian mentions that source material was drawn from a top-secret internal network shared by GCHQ and the NSA.

Aldrich said he wouldn’t be surprised if the GCHQ material came from a shared network accessed by Snowden, explaining that the NSA and GCHQ collaborated so closely that in some areas the two agencies effectively operated as one.

One document cited by the Guardian — but not posted to its website — appeared to boast of GCHQ’s tapping into smartphones. The Guardian quoted the document as saying that “capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers.”

It went on to say that “Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO (a habit) of using smartphones,” adding that spies “exploited this use at the G-20 meetings last year.”

Another document cited — but also not posted — concerned GCHQ’s use of a customized Internet cafe which was “able to extract key logging info, providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished.”

No further details were given, but the reference to key logging suggested that computers at the café would have been pre-installed with malicious software designed to spy on key strokes, steal passwords, and eavesdrop on emails.

{agencies}

{{Iranians celebrated into Sunday after moderate Hassan Rohani was elected president in a popular repudiation of conservative hardliners, and he pledged a new tone of respect in Tehran’s international affairs after years of increasing antagonism.}}

Rohani, a Shi’ite cleric and former chief nuclear negotiator with Western powers, received a resounding mandate for change from Iranians weary of years of economic decline under U.N. and Western sanctions and security clampdowns on dissent.

His victory goes some way to repairing the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, punctured four years ago when an election marred by fraud allegations led to mass unrest, and may give leverage for reformist voices muzzled since then to re-emerge.

But the hopeful reaction abroad was tempered by skepticism that Rohani could overcome the mistrust and alienation prevailing between Tehran and much of the world, and arch-enemy Israel warned against any complacency on Iran’s disputed quest for nuclear power.

“The international community must not give in to wishful thinking or temptation and loosen the pressure on Iran for it to stop its nuclear program,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

He noted that it was Iran’s theocratic supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and not the president who set nuclear policy. Israel, widely believed to have the Middle East’s only atomic arsenal, and the West fear Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of developing nuclear arms, an accusation Tehran denies.

{agencies}

{{Thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul overnight on Sunday, erecting barricades and starting bonfires, after riot police firing teargas and water cannon stormed a park at the center of two weeks of anti-government unrest.}}

Lines of police backed by armored vehicles sealed off Taksim Square in the center of the city as officers raided the adjoining Gezi Park late on Saturday, where protesters had been camped in a ramshackle settlement of tents.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had warned hours earlier that security forces would clear the square, the center of more than two weeks of fierce anti-government protests that spread to cities across the country, unless the demonstrators withdrew before a ruling party rally in Istanbul on Sunday.

“We have our Istanbul rally tomorrow. I say it clearly: Taksim Square must be evacuated, otherwise this country’s security forces know how to evacuate it,” he told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters at a rally in Ankara.

Protesters took to the streets in several neighborhoods across Istanbul following the raid on Gezi Park, ripping up metal fences, paving stones and advertising hoardings to build barricades and lighting bonfires of trash in the streets.

{reuters}

{{North Korea’s top governing body on Sunday proposed high-level nuclear and security talks with the United States in an appeal sent just days after calling off talks with rival South Korea.}}

The powerful National Defense Commission headed by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un issued a statement through state media proposing “senior-level” talks to ease tensions and discuss a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War.

There was no immediate response from Washington, but President Barack Obama’s envoy on North Korea said Friday that while the U.S. is not averse to talking with Pyongyang, the bar for resuming engagement is higher in the wake of repeated nuclear threats and provocations.

Foreign analysts expressed skepticism, saying impoverished North Korea often calls for talks after raising tensions with provocative behavior in order to win outside concessions.

The rare proposal for talks between the Korean War foes follows months of acrimony over North Korea’s defiant launch of a long-range rocket in December and a nuclear test in February, provocative acts that drew tightened U.N. and U.S. sanctions.

The U.S. and South Korea countered the moves by stepping up annual springtime military exercises that prompted North Korea to warn of a “nuclear war” on the Korean Peninsula.

However, as tensions subsided in May and June, Pyongyang has made tentative overtures to re-establish dialogue with South Korea and Washington.

In a notable shift in propaganda in Pyongyang, posters and billboards calling on North Koreans to “wipe away the American imperialist aggressors” have been taken down in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, a recent proposal from Pyongyang for Cabinet-level talks with South Korea — the first in six years — led to plans for two days of meetings in Seoul earlier this week. The talks dramatically fell apart even before they began amid bickering over who would lead the two delegations.

North Korea fought against U.S.-led United Nations and South Korean troops during the three-year Korean War in the early 1950s, and Pyongyang does not have diplomatic relations with either government.

The Korean Peninsula remains divided by a heavily fortified border.

{agencies}