Tag: InternationalNews

{{A foreign man and woman studying Portuguese in Brazil were held for hours while the woman was sexually assaulted aboard a public transport van they boarded over the weekend in Rio de Janeiro’s showcase Copacabana beach neighborhood, police said in a statement.}}

Two men aged 20 and 22 were taken into custody and a third was being sought in connection with the attack, which saw the pair held for around six hours starting shortly after midnight on Saturday, police said.

The victims’ nationalities were not immediately released, but local media reports have said the woman is American.

The incident raises new questions about security in Rio, which has cracked down on once-endemic drug violence in preparation for hosting next year’s football World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic games.

The city will also be playing host to World Youth Day, a Roman Catholic pilgrimage expected to draw some 2 million people in late July.

The attack also drew comparisons with the fatal December beating and gang rape of a young woman on a New Delhi bus. Six men beset a 23-year-old university student and male friend after they boarded a private bus, touching off a wave of protests across India demanding stronger protection for women.

In the Brazil attack, the police statement said the suspects forced other passengers to get out of the van and then sexually assaulted the female tourist inside the vehicle, which was one of a fleet of vans that serve bus routes and seat about a dozen people.

During the alleged assault, the tourists were driven to the poor suburban neighborhood of Sao Goncalo, where the two suspects were apprehended, the statement said.

Reports said the two foreigners had been studying Portuguese in Rio for about a month and that both left Brazil following the attack.

The police statement said that one victim’s cellphone was found in the suspects’ possession.

The suspects had also used a debit card belonging to one of the victims at two gas stations, it said.

{Associated Press }

{{At least seven people have been killed in an attack by dozens of militants on an electricity plant on the outskirts of the Pakistani city of Peshawar.}}

A policeman and a plant employee were killed on the spot and nine people were taken hostage, police said.

Five bodies were later recovered from a nearby field but the whereabouts of the four remaining hostages are unknown.

No group has said it carried out the raid, but the Taliban frequently launch attacks in the region.

The attack temporarily disrupted power to parts of the city – the supply has now been restored.

The assault by militants armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades took place in the early hours of Tuesday in the southern Badh Bher suburb of Peshawar, an area frequently targeted by militants, correspondents say.

“They attacked the power station at around 02:30 (21:30 GMT Monday). They killed two officials on the spot,” Javed Khan, a senior police official in the area, told Agence France-Presse news agency.

The dead include police officers and employees of the power plant.

“They entered the grid station and started setting ablaze each and every thing. They kidnapped nine people and killed five of them later and threw their bodies in the fields,” Police official Mohammad Ishaq said.

{wirestory}

{{Branimir Cvetnic likes to remember his hometown of Mitrovica as the lively, multicultural industrial hub it once was, rather than the grim symbol of Kosovo’s ethnic division it has become.}}

“Back then, Mitrovica was an open city, a city for everybody. And, now … it’s not even possible to compare,” said Cvetnic, 57, whose family has lived here for almost a century. “We used to live together, but can we do it again? I don’t know.”

Mitrovica, a former mining center in northern Kosovo, was sharply split into Serb and Albanian parts at the end of the Kosovo war in 1999.

Officials from Serbia and Kosovo meet in Brussels on Tuesday in hopes of reaching an agreement that could pave the way for reuniting the city — an agreement that the town’s Serbs fear could see their demands sacrificed by a Serbia desperate to join the European Union.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but until now the Serbian government has refused to accept the split. The Serbs of northern Kosovo — up to 50,000 people — have rejected any authority of the ethnic Albanian government in Pristina.

They have created parallel institutions, including hospitals and schools, all financed and supported from the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

But Serbia’s bid for membership in the European Union has been conditioned on normalizing relations with its former province and abolishing the parallel structures.

Impoverished by years of wars and international sanctions during the 1990s, Serbia is desperately seeking to move closer to EU membership.

If a deal is reached on Tuesday, Serbia will likely be granted a date to open talks with the 27-nation bloc, which means access to pre-entry funds and an improved position in the eyes of international investors.

If the deal is not reached, the idea of Serbian membership would likely be put on hold by the EU.

“It will be hard economically if we don’t open talks with the EU,” Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic told reporters on Monday.

In a sign that agreement may be near, Serbia’s influential deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said over the weekend that the country “can no longer afford a frozen conflict.”

Kosovo Serbs now fear the Serbian government will abandon them to save the EU deal. In Mitrovica, they warn that reuniting the town against their will could lead to a Serb exodus or to unrest.

The ethnic division is clear in every corner of Mitrovica — whose population is unknown since the divided groups have never managed to carry out a reliable census.

A huge pile of sand and soil blocks the bridge over the Ibar river that leads into the southern, Albanian part, while Serb flags flutter on buildings and lamp posts in the northern part.

A big banner in the town center reads: “The Serb Town.” The street signs are written in the Cyrillic alphabet traditionally used by Serbs, and the official currency remains the Serbian dinar, instead of the euro used by ethnic Albanians.

North Korea vowed Tuesday to restart a nuclear reactor that can make one bomb’s worth of plutonium a year, escalating tensions already raised by near daily warlike threats against the United States and South Korea.

The North’s plutonium reactor was shut down in 2007 as part of international nuclear disarmament talks that have since stalled.

The declaration of a resumption of plutonium production — the most common fuel in nuclear weapons — and other facilities at the main Nyongbyon nuclear complex will boost fears in Washington and among its allies about North Korea’s timetable for building a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach the United States, technology it is not currently believed to have.

A spokesman for the North’s General Department of Atomic Energy said that scientists will begin work at a uranium enrichment plant and a graphite-moderated 5 megawatt reactor, which generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium and is the core of the Nyongbyon nuclear complex.

The unidentified spokesman said the measure is part of efforts to resolve the country’s acute electricity shortage but also for “bolstering up the nuclear armed force both in quality and quantity,” according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency

KCNA

{{Saudi Arabia may block access to popular Internet messaging applications like Skype, Viber and WhatsApp if telecommunication providers there don’t comply with rules and regulatory conditions, according to the country’s official news agency, SPA.}}

A statement from Saudi Arabia’s Communications and Information Technology Commission released via SPA read, “The Commission emphasizes that it will take appropriate action regarding these applications and services in the event of failure to meet those conditions.”

The statement did not address how the applications in question — which allow Internet users to communicate with each other via text messages and voice calls — were violating any rules, but it did highlight the need for service providers in the country to quickly “work with the developers of these applications to meet regulatory requirements.”

Sunday’s announcement came in response to local media reports last week claiming the CITC, the country’s telecommunications regulator, had asked Saudi telecom companies to allow the government to monitor those applications and had given them until Saturday to respond.

Pope Francis stood before an audience of more than 250,000 people to give his first Easter Sunday speech since he was elected to the papacy, during which he called for world peace, urged respect for the environment and pushed for a diplomatic solution to the crisis on the Korean peninsula.

In his “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world) address, he also appealed for a resumption of peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, an end to the civil war in Syria and political solutions to conflicts in several African countries.

Formally known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina, Pope Francis has made the environment an early hallmark of his pontificate, condemning the “iniquitous exploitation of natural resources” and urging his followers to be “guardians” of creation.

Francis delivered his message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica – the same spot from where he first appeared to the world as pope after his election on March 13 – to a crowd estimated by the Vatican at more than a quarter of a million people.

“Peace in Asia, above all on the Korean peninsula: may disagreements be overcome and a renewed spirit of reconciliation grow,” he said, speaking in Italian.

North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea. Tensions have been high since North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered a third nuclear weapons test in February, breaching UN sanctions and ignoring warnings from North Korea’s sole major ally, China, not to do so.

People thronged the open jeep that carried Pope Francis around at the end of a Mass. He stopped to accept a jersey with his “Bergoglio” name on it from fans of an Argentine football club and to comfort a handicapped man.

Francis, who has brought a more simple and personal style to the papacy, said the message of Easter is that faith can help people transform their lives by letting “those desert places in our hearts bloom”.

{wirestory}

{{South Korea’s new president on Monday promised a strong military response to any North Korean provocation after Pyongyang announced that the two countries were now in a state of war.}}

President Park Geun-Hye’s warning came as North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament was set to hold its annual session and a day after ruling party leaders vowed to enshrine Pyongyang’s right to nuclear weapons in law.

In a meeting with senior military officials and Defence Minister Kim Kwan-Jin, Park said she took the near-daily stream of bellicose threats emanating from the North over the past month “very seriously.”

“I believe that we should make a strong and immediate retaliation without any other political considerations if (the North) stages any provocation against our people,” she said.

Park, a conservative who had advocated cautious engagement with the North during her campaign, has been compelled to take a more hardline posture after assuming office in February.

The Korean peninsula has been caught in a cycle of escalating tensions since North Korea’s long-range rocket launch in December which its critics condemned as a ballistic missile test.

United Nations sanctions were followed by a nuclear test in February, after which came more sanctions and more apocalyptic threats from Pyongyang as South Korea and the United States conducted joint military drills.

Those threats have run the gamut from limited artillery bombardments to pre-emptive nuclear strikes, and have been met with warnings from Seoul and Washington of severe repercussions.

The US military said Monday it had deployed F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to South Korea as part of the ongoing “Foal Eagle” military exercise.

The jets were reportedly flown out of the US air base in Okinawa, Japan.

North Korea has already threatened to strike the US mainland and US bases in the Pacific in response to the participation of nuclear-capable US B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers in this year’s exercise.

The annual gathering of the North’s Supreme People’s Assembly usually scores low on important policy announcements — its role largely limited to unanimously pushing through pre-decided budgets and personnel changes.

But with North Korea having declared itself in a “state of war” with the South, Monday’s session will be closely watched for any sign of the current crisis impacting on the fortunes of members of the ruling elite.

“The North has played most of its political cards, so I don’t see any fresh, tangible threats to come out after the meeting,” said Cho Han-Bum, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification.

“It will probably issue some kind of symbolic statement, like urging all North Koreans to stand ready for a possible war,” Cho said.

{wirestory}

{{India’s highest court has dismissed Swiss drug maker Novartis AG’s petition seeking patent protection for a cancer drug, a serious blow to Western pharmaceutical firms which are increasingly focusing on India to drive sales.}}

In a landmark judgement, the Supreme Court said on Monday that the drug Glivec failed to qualify for a patent according to Indian law.

Since 2006, Novartis was challenging the Indian government to demand protection against Indian companies copying its drugs.

But the court ruled that the drug for which Novartis was seeking a patent “did not satisfy the test of novelty or inventiveness” required by Indian law.

In 2009 it took its challenge against a law that bans patents on newer but not radically different forms of known drugs to the Supreme Court.

The ruling is a “huge disappointment” for Novartis, as it allows Indian companies to continue producing cheaper generic medicine for domestic and international consumers.

The case is the most high-profile of several patent battles being waged in India and could have far-reaching implications in defining the extent of patent protection for multinational drug firms operating in the lucrative market.

{Aljazeera}

{{A 40-year-old Pakistani housewife has made history by becoming the first woman to run for parliament from the country’s northwest tribal region, a highly conservative area that is a haven for Islamist militants.}}

Badam Zari told journalists on Monday that she will participate in the May 11 election to bring greater attention to problems facing women, which she believes the government has ignored.

“I want to reach the assembly to become a voice for women, especially those living in the tribal areas,” Zari said.

Zari is from Bajur, part of Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The area is mostly populated by Pashtun tribesmen who have very conservative views toward women.

Most women in the tribal region are uneducated, rarely work outside the home and wear long, flowing clothes that cover most of their skin when they appear in public.

A picture of Zari in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper showed her wearing a large shawl wrapped around her body and head, with only her eyes showing.

Bajur is also one of the many areas in the tribal region where the army has battled Taliban militants who are waging a bloody insurgency against the government.

The militants have a history of using violence to enforce their hardline views on women.

Last fall, militants in a different part of the northwest shot 15-year-old schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai in the head in an unsuccessful attempt to kill her because she resisted the militants’ views and was a strong advocate of girls’ education.

Zari, who finished high school and does not have any children, said she filed the paperwork necessary to run for office on Sunday in Khar, the main town in Bajur.

She was accompanied by her husband, who she said fully backed her decision to run for a seat in the National Assembly.

“This was a difficult decision, but now I am determined and hopeful society will support me,” Zari said.

Men in Bajur and other parts of the tribal region have historically discouraged women to vote, saying they should remain at home according to local traditions.

Far fewer women vote than men in other parts of Pakistan as well, and females remain underrepresented in the country’s politics.

But there are examples of Pakistani women holding very powerful political positions in the country, such as the late former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Zari said she hopes she can convince women to come out to vote. She said she has not yet received any threats or been discouraged from locals to run.

“My decision to contest the election will not only give courage to women in general and attract attention to their problems, but also helps negate the wrong impression about our society,” Zari said.

“This will reflect a true picture of our society, where women get respect.”

Associated Press