Tag: InternationalNews

{{Two elderly South Korean women forced to work in Japanese war-time military brothels canceled a meeting on Friday with the mayor of the city of Osaka after he refused to withdraw remarks asserting the brothels were “necessary” at the time.}}

The mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto, an outspoken populist who has often stirred controversy, sparked a storm of criticism at home and abroad when he said last week that the military brothels had been needed, and Japan has been unfairly singled out for wartime practices common among other militaries.

Victims of Japan’s war-time aggression, including many people in China and South Korea, are sensitive to what they see as any attempt by Japanese politicians to excuse Japanese abuses before and during the war.

Octogenarians Kim Bok-dong and Kil Won-ok said they had hoped their planned meeting with Hashimoto, who heads the small right-leaning Japan Restoration Party, would encourage him to change his mind but they had heard he planned to manipulate them by an “apology performance” in front of media.

“Indescribably heart-wrenching reality and history of the victims cannot be traded with his apology performance and sweet talk,” the women said in a statement provided by the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan.

“We do not want to kill ourselves twice,” they said. “If he truly feels sorry to us and regretful, he must take back his criminal comments and make a formal apology. He should hold himself responsible for his wrongdoing and retire from politics.”

Hashimoto also said there was no evidence the Japanese military directly abducted “comfort women”, as they are euphemistically known in Japan, to work in the brothels before and during World War Two.

Historians estimate that as many as 200,000 women were forced into sexual slavery in the Imperial Japanese Army’s brothels before and during the war.

On Friday, Hashimoto, who trained as a lawyer, told reporters he had not meant to imply that he personally approved of the wartime brothel system and said he was sorry that the women’s feelings had been hurt by the misunderstanding.

But he declined to withdraw the remarks.

“I believe at the moment there’s nothing I should withdraw,” he said during a news conference. “But I feel sorry if media coverage (of his remarks) hurt comfort women’s feelings.”

Former Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo was extradited on Friday to the United States to face money-laundering charges, just days after former dictator Efrain Rios Montt’s genocide conviction was overturned.

A U.S. grand jury decided in 2009 that Portillo, who was in office from 2000 to 2004, should face charges that he laundered $70 million through U.S. banks.

A Guatemalan court cleared Portillo of local embezzlement charges in May 2011, but the country’s Supreme Court later endorsed an extradition request by the United States that Portillo face money-laundering charges.

“This decision is an important affirmation of the rule of law and due process in Guatemala,” the U.S. embassy said after Portillo was flown out of the country.

Local authorities picked Portillo up from a military hospital where he was receiving treatment for liver problems. He was transferred to the hospital in April from a jail where he had been held pending a decision on the extradition.

Portillo’s lawyers said police put the former president on a plane headed for New York.

“They showed up at the hospital, said, ‘Get dressed, put on this shirt and we are taking you to the air force base,’” attorney Mauricio Berreondo told reporters just before the flight took off.

“See you soon Guatemala, this is a kidnapping,” local media quoted Portillo as saying at the airport.

The U.S. grand jury’s indictment claims Portillo, 61, laundered government money through U.S. and European accounts. French prosecutors are also investigating the allegations.

Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s attorney general, said the extradition was conducted properly and there were no legal reasons to prevent it. “As far as I know, there is no legal action pending,” she said. “It’s solid.”

Portillo took office promising to redistribute wealth in the poverty-plagued Central American country. He fled Guatemala for Mexico shortly after completing his term in 2004.

He was extradited from Mexico to Guatemala in 2008 to stand trial on the embezzlement charges.

Portillo’s supporters were quick to defend the former president.

“He hasn’t committed a single crime,” Carlos Estrada told reporters at the airport. In a cry to arms, he said: “We’re going to take the country, it doesn’t matter what it takes, even our lives.”

Portillo’s extradition came just days after former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, 86, had his 80-year genocide conviction annulled by Guatemala’s top court. The May 10 conviction had been hailed as a landmark for justice in the Central American nation where as many as 250,000 people were killed in a 1960-1996 civil war.

Rios Montt, whose government was supported by the administration of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, had been found guilty of overseeing the killings by the armed forces of at least 1,771 members of the Maya Ixil population during his 1982-83 rule.

Critics say the annulment of his conviction highlights the weaknesses of Guatemala’s justice system.

{reuters}

{{Jordan’s King Abdullah II says extremism has “grown fat” off of the longstanding conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.}}

“Good faith talks must get going,” he said in Saturday remarks at the opening of a two-day meeting of the Geneva-based World Economic Forum on the shores of the Dead Sea.

He pointed to an Arab peace initiative that offers Arab recognition to Israel in exchange for land to Palestinians based on the 1967 borders. The king called on a halt to Jewish settlement construction in territories claimed by the Palestinians for a future state.

The World Economic Forum has gathered 900 participants from 23 countries to discuss Mideast economic growth.

{wirestory}

{{A female suicide bomber injured at least 11 police officers and civilians, including two children, in the southern Russian region of Dagestan on Saturday, police said.}}

Police spokesman Vyacheslav Gasanov said the bomber blew herself up in the central square in the provincial capital, Makhachkala. He did not give details about the injured children.

Since 2000, at least two dozen women, most of them from the Caucasus, have carried out suicide bombings in Russian cities and aboard trains and planes.

All were linked to an Islamic insurgency that spread throughout Dagestan and the predominantly Muslim Caucasus region after two separatist wars in neighboring Chechnya.

The bombers are often called “black widows” in Russia because many are the widows, or other relatives, of militants killed by security forces.

The Tsarnaev brothers suspected of carrying out last month’s Boston marathon bombings, are ethnic Chechens who lived in Dagestan before moving to the United States.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed a shootout with police days after the April 15 bombings, spent six months in Dagestan in 2012.

Dagestan remains an epicenter of violence in the confrontation between radical Islamists and federal forces.

This week, a double explosion in Makhachkala killed four civilians and left 44 injured, while three security officers and three suspected militants have been killed in other incidents.

Human rights groups accuse security agencies of abductions, torture and extrajudicial killings of civilians that further fuel the confrontation with Islamic radicals.

AP

{{Russia’s oldest human rights group went to court on Friday to try to stop state prosecutors forcing it to register as a “foreign agent” under a law it says is intended by President Vladimir Putin to silence dissent.}}

Memorial, which has fought political repression since Soviet times, refuses to comply with the law which critics describe as a crude attempt to reassert Putin’s authority after tens of thousands called for him to quit during protests last year.

The law obliges foreign-funded non-governmental organizations involved in “political activities” to operate under a label which has echoes of the Cold War and overtones of treason. Memorial says it also helps the state tighten controls.

“We’re not sitting and waiting. We’re staging a counter-attack,” Memorial’s head, Alexander Cherkasov, said. “They’re taking us back to the ideas of the (Soviet) past. It’s a sign of madness.”

Inspired by Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and five others’ wish to create a monument to remember the victims of dictator Josef Stalin’s repression, Memorial started work in 1987 as the Soviet Union opened up under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Its initial goal was to document the Communist totalitarian past, but it developed quickly into a human rights organization and criticized the detention of anti-Putin protesters last year at a rally that turned violent.

{reuters}

{{Part of a four-lane freeway bridge over a river in rural Washington state collapsed on Thursday, sending vehicles and drivers tumbling into the frigid water, authorities said.}}

Two of the three people rescued from the river were hospitalized with hypothermia, said Given Kutz, a spokesman for Skagit County in the northern part of the state.

There were apparently no fatalities. “They (rescuers) don’t expect anyone else (remains) in the water,” he said.

Authorities were awaiting confirmation on the cause of the collapse, said a second Skagit County spokesman, Jim Martin. Local media reported it might have been caused by a truck striking the structure.

It was not raining at the time, Washington State Patrol spokesman Trooper Mark Francis said.

The bridge is on the Interstate 5 freeway where it crosses the Skagit River between the towns of Mount Vernon and Burlington, 55 miles north of Seattle.

The freeway is the main corridor for car traffic between Seattle and Vancouver, Canada.

The bridge was built in 1955, according to the website for the National Bridge Inventory Database.

{agencies}

{{Israel’s prime minister says a new report by the U.N. atomic agency shows that international pressure is having no effect on halting Iran’s suspect nuclear program.}}

In a confidential report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said this week that Iran has upgraded its uranium enrichment facilities and advanced in building a plutonium-producing reactor. Israel and the West believe both programs are geared toward making nuclear weapons.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that “it’s clear” that economic and diplomatic pressure have been “unable to prevent Iran from pursuing its nuclear weapons program.” Israel has repeatedly signaled it will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails to curb the Iranian program.

Netanyahu spoke at a meeting with British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who voiced “strong concerns” about the Iranian nuclear program.

{agencies}

{{British Airways said on Friday a plane travelling from London to Oslo was forced to make an emergency landing after a fault in one of the engines.}}

Video footage on Sky News showed the plane at London’s Heathrow’s airport with smoke billowing out of its right engine.

“It’s right engine was on fire. This plane was coming over and suddenly the tone of the engine changed dramatically. I’d almost say it was like a blowout or an explosion,” witness Clive Cook told media.

The airport, Europe’s busiest, closed both its runways to deal with the incident, but one has since been re-opened.

A spokesman for the London fire brigade, which attended the incident, said they believed the fire was now out.

“There has been an incident involving a BA aircraft at Heathrow airport this morning and both runways have been closed as a result,” a spokeswoman for the airport said. “All passengers have been safely evacuated from the plane in question.”

{{A British soldier was hacked to death by two men shouting Islamic slogans in a south London street on Wednesday, in what the government said appeared to be a terrorist attack.}}

A dramatic clip filmed by an onlooker just minutes after the killing showed a man with hands covered in blood, brandishing a bloodied meat cleaver and a knife.

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day,” the black man in his 20s or 30s, wearing a wool jacket and jeans and speaking with a local accent, shouted in the Video footage.

“This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

The attack was the first apparent Islamist killing in London since suicide bombers struck transport in July 2005. The capital was shocked by the bizarre scene of a killer covered in gore, declaring his motive to onlookers.

Police shot the two suspects while trying to arrest them, and the wounded men were taken into custody. No information was immediately released about the identity of the suspects.

“I apologize that women had to witness that, but in our lands our women have to see the same thing. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you,” the videotaped man said before crossing the street and speaking casually to the other attacker.

Prime Minister David Cameron cut short a visit to France to return to London and chair an emergency national security meeting.

“The police are urgently seeking the full facts about this case but there are strong indications that it is a terrorist incident,” Cameron said before cutting short talks with French President Francois Hollande to return home.

“We have had these sorts of attacks before in our country and we never buckle in the face of them,” he said.

{reuters}