Tag: InternationalNews

{{U.N. experts are poised to move into Syria within 24 hours to investigate reported chemical weapons attacks in the country’s civil war, but President Bashar Assad’s government still has not given them the green light to enter the country, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday.}}

Ban told reporters in The Hague that an advance team is already waiting at a final staging post on Cyprus, while the U.N. negotiates “technical and legal” issues with Damascus.

All reports of chemical attacks “should be examined without delay, without conditions and without exceptions,” Ban said.

His comments appeared aimed at increasing pressure on Assad’s regime and ensuring that U.N. inspectors are given access to all sites of reported chemical weapons attacks and not just those Damascus wants them to see.

Ban said it is “a matter of principle” to investigate all allegations and not just a case in which Syria alleges that rebels used poison gas.

“I am hopeful we will be able to finish this as soon as possible, and I urge the Syrian government to be more flexible so this commission can be deployed as soon as possible,” Ban said. “We are ready.”

Syria asked the United Nations last month to investigate an alleged chemical weapons attack by rebels on March 19 on Khan al-Assal village in northern Aleppo province. The rebels blamed regime forces for the attack.

Britain and France followed up by asking the U.N. chief to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use in two locations in Khan al-Assal and the village of Ataybah in the vicinity of Damascus, all on March 19, as well as in Homs on Dec. 23.

Ban was speaking at the headquarters of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, which is sending a team of 15 experts to join the commission, along with World Health Organization staff.

The team is led by Ake Sellstrom, a Swedish professor who was a U.N. chemical weapons inspector in Iraq and now works at a research institute that deals with chemical incidents.

Ban said he spoke to Sellstrom on Sunday night and he was now heading to join the advance party in Cyprus.

Syria is widely believed to have a large stockpile of chemical weapons, but it is one of only eight countries in the world that have not signed up to the chemical weapons convention, which means that it does not have to report any chemical weapons to the Hague-based organization that monitors compliance with the treaty.

Ban said the experts need to get to Syria as soon as possible to investigate the attacks.

“The longer we wait, the harder this essential mission will be,” he said.

{Associated Press}

The French Senate opened debate Thursday on a controversial bill that would extend the right to marry and adopt to same-sex couples.

The lower house has already approved the legislation. If it passes the Senate, it would mark the biggest step forward for French gay rights advocates in more than a decade.

But the plan faces stiff opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, other religious groups and social conservatives, with huge numbers turning out for protest marches in Paris in recent weeks.

At the same time, the legislation has won wide backing from gay rights advocates.

The Senate debate is expected to continue into next week.

France is not the only nation currently wrestling with the polarizing issue.

Uruguayan senators voted overwhelmingly in favor of a same-sex marriage measure Tuesday, despite vocal opposition from the Catholic Church. Next week, lawmakers in the lower house are expected to vote on the Senate’s version.

Legislators in the United Kingdom are also weighing proposals to legalize same-sex marriage.

In the United States, the issue went before the Supreme Court last week, and justices are now deliberating over the matter.

Nine states and the District of Columbia issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, including three states — Maryland, Washington, and Maine — where voters approved it in ballot initiatives last year. The other 41 states have specific laws blocking gays and lesbians from legally marrying.

The first same-sex couples walked down the aisle in the Netherlands in 2001. Since then, almost a dozen countries have passed laws allowing same-sex marriages and domestic partnerships, including Canada, South Africa, Belgium and Spain.

In Argentina, the push to legalize same-sex marriage met with fierce opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, with Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio — then the archbishop of Buenos Aires and now the pope — engaging in a notorious war of words with the government over the issue. It was approved in 2010.

The issue also has divided Australia, where lawmakers voted against a bill to legalize same-sex marriage last September. A poll for the advocacy group Australian Marriage Equality indicated that 64% of those surveyed “support marriage equality.”

agencies

{{North Korea advised the Russian and British embassies in Pyongyang today evacuate their staff, saying their safety could be at risk “in the event of conflict from April 10.”}}

“The proposal was made to all the embassies in Pyongyang, and we are now trying to shed light on the situation,” Sergei Lavrov told journalists in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, according to Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office in Britain confirmed the request in a statement. “The British Embassy in Pyongyang received a communication from the North Korean government this morning.”

The news was the latest escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula, spurred by near daily bellicose threats North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has made, since the U.S. and South Korea began large scale military exercises last month.

On Thursday, U.S. officials confirmed that two medium-range missiles had been moved to North Korea’s eastern coast, fueling speculation that North Korea was planning a missile strike.

In response, South Korea sent two Aegis destroyers equipped with advanced radar systems to both its coasts. The untested North Korean Musudan missile is estimated to have a range of between 1,800 and 2,500 miles, potentially putting U.S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam within its range.

The call to evacuate foreign embassies appeared to be the latest tactic by North Korea to dial up the rhetoric and win concessions from the U.S. and South Korea.

Pyongyang has already threatened a nuclear strike against the U.S., declared it has scrapped the Korean War armistice, vowed to restart a plutonium reactor, and blocked South Koreans from entering the jointly run industrial complex in Kaesong.

ABCnews

{{Pakistan has deported three Frenchmen who have been held in secret since they entered the country illegally 10 months ago to fight NATO troops in neighbouring Afghanistan, officials said Thursday.}}

Investigators are expected to question the men in France, where the case is likely to draw parallels with Mohammed Merah, the 23-year-old who shot dead seven people in southwest France in March 2012 after returning from Pakistan.

Investigators said Pakistani police arrested the trio on May 28 last year after they entered the country illegally from Iran.

They were detained along with Naamen Meziche, another Frenchman of North African extraction previously known to Western security services as a presumed member of Al-Qaeda.

“They said they came to Pakistan to deepen their knowledge of Islam and to fight in Afghanistan,” one investigator told reporters.

Meziche’s arrest was announced last June but French and Pakistani officials had kept quiet about the other three.

At the time, Pakistani officials said Meziche was probably heading to Somalia.

But Western experts said he had been en route to Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal belt on the Afghan border, an Al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold.

Investigators believe Meziche could have been taking the other three to the tribal belt, a rear base for the Taliban’s war in Afghanistan and a location of Al-Qaeda training camps.

Officials say the three men left France in January 2012, telling their families in Orleans south of Paris that they were going on pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. But five months later they were detained in Pakistan.

On Thursday a French diplomatic source confirmed that the last of the three suspects was now back on French soil, after being deported over the last 48 hours.

Their precise link to Meziche, who will also be deported, remains unclear.

It also remains unclear whether they will face trial. A new law banning French citizens from going abroad for militant training came into force last December, only after their arrest.

(AFP)

{{The Quebec government will offer commercial-priced loans to purchasers of Bombardier’s made-in-Quebec CSeries plane, according to a document published in the province’s Official Gazette this week.}}

The document said the government would offer loans totaling up to $1 billion, and stated that Bombardier had requested government involvement in financing the planes.

The official decree orders Investment Quebec, a provincial government business credit agency, to provide the financing “to the clients of Bombardier Inc. for the purchase of CSeries airplanes assembled in Quebec, up to a maximum cumulative amount of US$1 billion.”

Quebec said the manufacturing of airplanes was of significant economic interest to the province.

The CSeries will be Bombardier’s biggest aircraft, and it takes the company into a new market segment, competing with smaller jets from industry leaders Boeing Co and Airbus.

The new jet is not just an engineering challenge. Bombardier must win over customers as well, and orders have been sluggish.

As of late March, it had 148 firm orders of its targeted 300, though that figure excludes a 32 jet commitment to Russia’s Ilyushin Finance Co that needs shareholder approval.

Bombardier said last month that it is behind schedule in developing the plane but expects the first test flight by the end of June.

{{ A newspaper op-ed piece by an Israeli writer has revived an emotional debate surrounding Israel’s 45-year rule over the West Bank and east Jerusalem: Do Palestinians who throw rocks at Israelis exercise a “birthright” of resisting military occupation, as the author argued? Or is stone-throwing an indefensible act of violence?}}

The heated argument — along with a police complaint West Bank settlers filed against the author — was another sign of the deepening gulf between the two peoples after decades of conflict.

The debate comes at a time when Israelis are watching for any signs of a third Palestinian “intifada,” or uprising, against the occupation that began in 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

Palestinians want the three territories for a state. However, two decades of intermittent Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have come up empty and Israel — while withdrawing from Gaza in 2005 — has moved more than half a million of its civilians to the rest of the occupied lands during the four-decade occupation in what much of the world says violates international law.

In the past 25 years, Palestinians have launched two uprisings. The first erupted in 1987 and was characterized by large demonstrations, often accompanied by stone-throwing.

Israeli troops responded with tear gas, live fire and mass arrests. The revolt led to negotiations that produced interim peace deals.

The second intifada broke out in 2000, after failed talks on a final deal, and violence escalated on both sides. Palestinians used guns and bombs, including suicide attacks.

Israel retook parts of the West Bank earlier handed to partial Palestinian control and began targeting militant leaders in missile attacks from helicopters.

In an op-ed piece in the Haaretz daily Wednesday, Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote that Israel has engaged in systematic violence against the Palestinians as part of its well-oiled machinery of occupation.

“Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule,” wrote Hass, who covers the Palestinians and lives in the West Bank. Limitations of that right could include “the distinction between civilians and those who carry arms,” she wrote.

Her words elicited a flood of angry reactions in Israel on Thursday, including from the mother of a 3-year-old Israeli girl who was critically injured last month in a West Bank road accident triggered by stone-throwing.

Another writer brought up the case of a 1-year-old boy who, along with his father, was killed under similar circumstances in 2011.

The Council of Settlements, the main umbrella group for Jewish settlers, filed a complaint with police against Hass and her employer, Haaretz, accusing them of incitement to violence against Israelis driving on West Bank roads.

Haaretz declined comment Thursday.

Hass, a prize-winning journalist, has been fiercely critical of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians to an extent that places her far outside the Israeli political mainstream.

She told The Associated Press on Thursday that she believes those skewering her intentionally ignored her reference to the limitations of resistance.

“The choice not to read those very clear sentences is part of the Israeli culture of denial of its institutionalized violence against the Palestinians,” she said in an emailed response to questions.

Even Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli peace negotiator and longtime advocate of Palestinian statehood, joined the chorus of critics, an apparent sign of a broad Israeli consensus on the issue.

“Stone-throwing is not a “birthright and duty’ of those being ruled (by others), but an act of violence that can lead to death, disability and injury,” Beilin wrote in the Israel Hayom daily.

His comments, perhaps more than the more predictable reactions of West Bank settlers, illustrated the divide between Israelis and Palestinians after decades of conflict and growing Israeli-enforced physical separation between the sides.

Ghassan Khatib, a West Bank intellectual who has served in Palestinian Cabinets, unequivocally defended the Palestinians’ right to resist occupation but said non-violence is preferable to guns and bombs.

Palestinians gained worldwide sympathy during the first uprising, as the David to Israel’s Goliath, but lost it during the second intifada, when they unleashed suicide bombings and shooting attacks on Israeli civilians.

“I think the non-violent and non-military struggle is more useful to the Palestinian cause,” Khatib said. Asked about stone-throwing, he said he considers it part of the non-military approach.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said stone-throwing throwing cannot be considered a legitimate form of protest because it is violent.

“People are being killed, people are being injured,” he said.
While the political battle lines are drawn, the legal dimension is murky.

Palestinians say the right to resist occupation stems from the right to self-determination, affirmed in various U.N. resolutions.

A 1974 resolution recognizes “the right of the Palestinian people to regain its rights by all means,” provided they’re in line with the U.N. Charter.

Eliav Lieblich, who teaches international law at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel, said international law does not dictate exactly how they can claim that right.

“There is full recognition that nations under occupation have the right to self-determination, but international law didn’t take the extra step to say that they are allowed to resist the occupying power using force,” he said.

Palestinians, along with Israeli and international human rights groups, charge that Israel’s military often uses disproportionate force against Palestinian protesters, such as live ammunition and rubber-coated steel pellets.

There has also been a sharp increase in settler violence against Palestinians and their property in recent years, rights groups have said.

On Wednesday, two Palestinians were killed by army fire in a clash near a West Bank checkpoint. The Israeli military says Palestinians threw firebombs, while a Palestinian human rights group says they hurled stones and empty bottles.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused Israel of overreacting to street protests. Abbas was one of the most outspoken opponents of the armed uprising a decade earlier.

Instead, Abbas and his Fatah movement have called for “popular resistance,” or acts of civil disobedience.

Abbas aide Nabil Shaath said this includes demonstrations, hunger strikes, a boycott of Israeli products and setting up protest tent camps to reclaim expropriated lands.

Shaath said the Palestinian Authority is not urging Palestinians to throw stones, but that “if they decide it’s the way to defend themselves against automatic weapons (of soldiers), then it’s up to them.”

Mustafa Barghouti, a leading Palestinian activist, said Palestinians have become more sophisticated in their protests over the years.

He said a group that has set up protest camps on West Bank land earmarked for a settlement is training activists to stick to passive resistance.

“Even when the army came, people did not throw stones,” he said.

AP