Tag: InternationalNews

{{The United States said on Wednesday it had sanctioned Iran’s main agency in charge of broadcasting for helping the government censor Western reports, part of a broader effort by Washington to pressure Tehran’s nuclear program.}}

The Treasury Department also said sanctions that shackle Iran’s oil earnings took effect, as scheduled, on Wednesday. Iran’s earnings now have to be credited to accounts in countries that buy Iranian crude.

Under the conditions, Tehran can only use the funds to buy goods from its oil customers, preventing the money from being repatriated and used on the nuclear program the West believes is developing weapons.

Iran says the program is for purely civilian purposes.

“This will significantly restrict Iran’s ability to make use of the oil revenue that it’s earning,” a senior U.S. official told reporters about the sanctions.

In its crackdown on Iran’s state-sponsored media, the Treasury named the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, its director, Ezzatollah Zarghami, and others as subject to sanctions that effectively block their access to the U.S. financial system.

Human rights groups have said Iran is using state media reports to trample dissent, and have pointed to forced confessions of political detainees in front of state media outlets.

Iran is using social media to hunt down political activists and is engaged in a campaign to filter out unwanted television content, the senior U.S. official said.

After Iran’s 2009 presidential election, the government increased its jamming of foreign channels, including the BBC and Voice of America, the Treasury said.

Reuters

{{A German university has voted to strip Education Minister Annette Schavan of her doctorate after an investigation into plagiarism allegations.}}

The University of Duesseldorf’s philosophy faculty decided on Tuesday that she had carried out “a deliberate deception through plagiarism”.

The minister has denied the claims and said she will appeal.

An earlier plagiarism row brought an end to the political career of Germany’s defence minister in 2011.

Large parts of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg’s 2006 legal dissertations were found by Bayreuth University to have been copied and he stood down before it issued its damning verdict in May 2011.

Using the same words as Duesseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University, it concluded that he had “deliberately deceived”.

When Ms Schavan became the second minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to be accused of copying her doctorate, in this case by an anonymous blogger, she insisted she had never “knowingly falsely cited any sources” and promised to respond to the accusations.

But the faculty committee concluded that her work, which dealt with the formation of conscience, included a “substantial number of unaccredited direct quotes from other texts”.

In a statement declaring the doctorate invalid and withdrawing it from Ms Schavan, the faculty head Bruno Bleckmann said they had “decided by secret ballot, by 12 votes to two, with one abstention”.

{{Fifteen babies rescued by officers from a human trafficking ring had been sold by their parents for 10,000 yuan for a girl and around 30,000 yuan for a boy, said police in south China’s Guangdong Province.}}

One of the babies was found dead and 27 suspects were caught, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

The babies are under a year old and the youngest was only 10 days old when police found them during a joint operation in October.

The babies were to be sold by traffickers for at least 50,000 yuan for boys and 20,000 yuan for girls in Guangdong’s Huizhou City, police said.
Many of the parents in the poor Wenshan County in southwestern Yunnan Province had fled or left home to find work, police said.

Others were traced but denied selling a child and went into hiding.
Only one baby has been claimed while the others are still at a children’s home in Guangdong.

Police have detained three fathers.

Police compared the babies’ DNA with their database of missing babies and were surprised to find none was reported missing.

“I’ve handled lots of baby trafficking cases,” said Xie Ying, a police officer in Huizhou. “Suspects swindle or take the babies by force in almost all cases,” he said.

Traffickers kept telling the young parents that selling the baby to a richer family would benefit the child, police said.

Xie said the money offered was a lot for some parents.
“They can build a new house with the money earned,” he said.

Children’s home head Chen Su’e said authorities will work with police to determine the children’s futures once the investigation is finished.

“They will not be adopted because they are not abandoned babies,” she said. “Their legal relationship with their parents still exists.”

{{UK Parliament voted heavily in favour of legalising gay marriage on Tuesday, but Prime Minister David Cameron’s authority in his own party took a blow as his Conservatives split in two over the measure he had championed.}}

In the first of several votes required for its passage, the lower house of parliament backed the legislation by 400-175, but more than half of Cameron’s 303 MPs voted against or abstained, signalling deep unease with it and his leadership.

During a debate that lasted more than six hours, many Conservative MPs denounced the legislation, saying it was morally wrong, not a public priority, and unnecessarily divisive, threatening a corrosive legacy of bitterness.

Conservative lawmaker Gerald Howarth told parliament that the government had no mandate to push through a “massive social and cultural change”.

“This is not evolution, it’s revolution,” added Edward Leigh, another Conservative member of parliament, saying marriage was “by its nature a heterosexual union”.

Although the vote went Cameron’s way, many analysts believe he will now have to address a deep seam of discontent running through his party.

He made a last minute televised statement ahead of the vote, arguing gay marriage would make society stronger.

“I’m a big believer in marriage. It helps people to commit to each other, and I think that’s why gay people should be able to get married too,” he said.

He later hailed the result of the vote as “a step forward for our country”.

Reuters…http://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-split-first-gay-marriage-vote-passes-072132532.html

{{Six Spanish tourists were raped by a gang of armed, masked men in the Mexican resort of Acapulco, the latest chapter of violence that has tarnished the once-glamorous Pacific coast resort.}}

The vicious, hours-long attack occurred before dawn Monday at a house that six Spanish men, six Spanish women and a Mexican woman had rented on a quiet, idyllic stretch of beach on the outskirts of Acapulco.

The attackers gained access to the house because two of the Spaniards were in the yard and apparently were forced to open the door, Acapulco Mayor Luis Walton told a news conference late Monday.

The five attackers burst into the house and held the group at gunpoint, he said.

They tied up the six men with phone cords and bathing suit straps and then raped the six Spanish women. The Mexican woman was not raped.

Guerrero state Attorney General Martha Garzon said the Mexican woman begged the men not to rape her and the assailants told her they would spare her because she is Mexican.

“Fortunately we have strong evidence to lead us to those responsible for this reprehensible act,” Garzon told Radio Formula.

The attack began about two hours after midnight Monday and the victims were only able to report the crime five hours later, at nearly seven in the morning.

AP

{{Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro voted in Cuba’s general election on Sunday and chatted with well wishers and Cuban reporters in Havana for more than an hour, in his first extended public appearance since 2010.}}

Castro had voted from his home in three previous elections since taking ill in 2006 and ceding power to his brother Raul two years later.

A stooped, snow white bearded Castro, 86, was seen on state-run television as he cast his ballot in the late afternoon, wearing a blue plaid shirt and light blue jacket.

The announcer said Castro talked about efforts to reform the economy, Latin American integration, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and other matters.

He was heard in a weak voice praising popular participation in Sunday’s election.

“The people are truly revolutionary, they have really sacrificed. We don’t have to prove it, history will. Fifty years of the blockade and they haven’t given in,” he said.

Cubans went to the polls to elect a Communist Party-selected slate of 612 deputies to the National Assembly and more than 1,000 delegates to provincial assemblies, at a time of change in how they live and work, but not in how they vote.

President Raul Castro and other leaders were also shown on television casting their ballots and commenting on the importance of the election as a show of support for reforms and independence from the United States.

Raul Castro is decentralizing the state-dominated economy, allowing more space for private initiative in agriculture and retail services and has lifted many restrictions on personal freedoms, such as travel and buying and selling homes and cars.

wirestory

{{U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his South Korean and Japanese counterparts warned North Korea against any “provocative” moves Sunday ahead of a possible new nuclear bomb test by Pyongyang.}}

In a round of calls Sunday, Kerry, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korea’s Kim Sung-hwan all agreed the North must understand “that it will face significant consequences from the international community if it continues its provocative behavior,” according to a summary of the calls from the U.S. State Department.

Earlier Sunday, North Korea announced that its leader, Kim Jong Un, “has made an important decision” that would strengthen the country.

The brief statement on the state-run news agency KCNA provided no details, but it said the decision was made at a meeting of the reclusive Stalinist state’s Party Central Military Committee.

Across the Demilitarized Zone, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak called on his government to be prepared for a possible test.

Lee paid a visit to the underground bunker that serves as the South’s crisis management center, his press office reported.

North Korea has conducted two previous nuclear tests, in 2006 and 2009, and proclaimed itself a “nuclear state” in 2012. U.S. officials told CNN last week that the North appeared to be ready test another nuclear device “at any time.”

U.S. analysts believe the 2006 test had a yield of about 1 kiloton — comparable to the explosive power of about 1,000 tons of TNT — while the second was roughly 2 kilotons, National Intelligence Director James Clapper told a Senate committee in 2012.

By comparison, the bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was roughly 15 kilotons.

CNN

{{A gas buildup ignited by an electrical spark or other heat source caused the blast that killed 37 people and wounded dozens of others last week at the state oil company’s headquarters, Mexico’s attorney general said.}}

But Attorney-General Jesus Murillo Karam said investigators were still looking for the source of the gas, and revising records of building inspections to determine why Petroleos Mexicanos had not discovered the gas accumulation.

As a state company, Pemex is responsible for inspecting its own buildings.

Murillo said late Monday that an investigation by Mexican, Spanish, U.S. and British experts into the petroleum giant’s worst disaster in more than a decade found no evidence of explosives in the Thursday afternoon blast that collapsed several lower floors of the Pemex administrative building.

He said the investigators believe that an electrical spark or other source of heat had detonated the gas.

With the exception of three victims, none of those killed had the burn marks or damaged ear drums that are typical evidence of a bombing, he said.

Nor was there any sign of a crater or fracturing of the building’s steel beams, also common signs of the detonation of an explosive device.

Murillo said officials had yet to discover the source of what initial evidence indicated to be methane gas that leaked from a duct or tunnel or came from the sewer system and built up in the basement of the building.

Murillo said that an independent contractor had told investigators that he was working with a crew of three men performing maintenance in the basement of building B2.

The contractor said the basement wasn’t lit, so his crew had rigged illumination by attaching a crude electric cable to a power source in the ceiling.

The contractor told investigators that seconds after he moved to a higher floor, he heard a noise and then the building was rocked by an explosion.

The three men were found dead in the lower basement with burn marks, one with a fragment of cable stuck to his body. They had no evidence of the dismemberment typical in the detonation of explosives.

Murillo described the blast as a “diffuse” explosion whose blast moved slowly and horizontally, typical of the detonation of a cloud of gas, rather than an explosion that would have emanated from a relatively compact source like a bomb.

He said laboratory tests had turned up “zero” evidence of any explosive.

AP