Tag: InternationalNews

{{More than 50 people have been killed in a prison riot in western Venezuela, hospital staff say.}}

The riot was triggered when local media broadcast news that soldiers had been sent to Uribana prison in Barquisimeto to search for weapons, Prisons Minister Iris Varela said.

Hospital director Ruy Medina told press that some 90 people were injured, mostly from gunshot wounds.

The dead are thought to include inmates, guards and prison workers.

The director of Barquisimeto hospital, Ruy Medina, put the death toll at 54, Venezuela’s Clarin newspaper reported.

Venezuelan Human rights activist Carlos Nieto Palma told media, “What should have been a normal procedure in any prison ended in a clash between National Guard [soldiers] and inmates.”

He added that Uribana prison was among the most dangerous in the country.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles blamed the violence on “incompetent and irresponsible government”.

Venezuela’s prisons are blighted by overcrowding and the proliferation of weapons and drugs.

Media reports say it appears that prisoners who had heard about the search in advance from news reports were waiting for the National Guard when they arrived.

It is thought that the search was aimed at disarming gangs within the prison and had been planned for some time, she reports.

There has been no official account of the incident or confirmation of the number of casualties, but the government says it will carry out a full investigation.

Agencies

{{A Frenchwoman who spent seven years in prison in Mexico on kidnapping charges returned to a hero’s welcome in Paris on Thursday, declaring she had been cleared by the Mexican court that ordered her freed.}}

Florence Cassez was greeted by France’s foreign minister as she left the plane, with the promise of a meeting Friday with the president.

Her arrest, trial and 60-year prison sentence made her a cause celebre in France, where television networks carried her return live, hours after relatives of kidnap victims angrily shouted “Killer!” as a police convoy whisked her away from the Mexico City prison.

Two consecutive French presidents called for the release of Cassez, who was ordered freed Wednesday because of flaws in her trial, bringing to a close a case that had strained relations between the countries.

“I was cleared,” she said Thursday. “I suffered as a victim for more than seven years.”

Anti-crime activists in Mexico vigorously opposed the ruling to free her.

The wife of one kidnap victim showed up on Wednesday as reporters gathered outside the Mexico City prison where Cassez had been held.

Michelle Valadez said her husband, Ignacio, was kidnapped and held for three months by Cassez’s boyfriend’s gang in 2005.

“We paid the ransom, but they killed him anyway,” she sobbed. “It’s not fair what they’ve done to us, it’s not fair they’re freeing her.”

The Mexican Supreme Court panel voted 3-2 to release Cassez because of procedural and rights violations during her arrest, including police staging a recreation of her capture for the media.

The justices pointedly did not rule on her guilt or innocence, but said the violations of due process, the right to consular assistance and evidentiary rules were so grievous that they invalidated the original guilty verdict against her.

Cassez, 38, was arrested in 2005 and convicted of helping her Mexican then-boyfriend run a kidnapping gang.

“If she had been turned over to court custody promptly, if she had been allowed prompt consular assistance, this (raid) staging couldn’t have taken place, and the whole affair would have been totally different,” Justice Arturo Zaldivar said during discussion of the ruling.

Because the case was mishandled, the truth remains unknown, said the president of Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, Luis Gonzalez Placencia.

“In this country we can no longer ignore police obtaining evidence by tampering with it, by using torture, by staging raids,” Gonzalez said.

“We will never know whether Florence is guilty or innocent, but we know for certain there are specific people who violated due process.”

Wednesday’s ruling put another spotlight on Mexico’s historically corrupt justice system and drew reactions from both countries’ presidents.

“I want to recognize the Mexican justice system because it put the law first,” French President Francois Hollande said on television on Wednesday.

“That was the trust we put in it. And today we can say that between France and Mexico, we have the best relations that it is possible to have.”

Cassez, in a news conference at the airport in Paris, said the decision showed the Mexico is transforming its approach to human rights.

“It’s not just good for Florence Cassez. It’s good for all of Mexico,” she said. “I hope it will be a precendent.”

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said in a statement that he will
“absolutely” respect the court’s decision.

Agustin Acosta, an attorney for Cassez, called the ruling “a resounding message in favor of justice and respect for human rights.” Police torture and fabrication of evidence have long been tolerated in Mexico.

Mexican police acknowledged they staged a raid on a ranch outside Mexico City to depict the hostages’ rescue and Cassez’s detention.

After Cassez was detained and held incognito for a day, Mexican police hauled her back to the ranch and forced her to participate in the raid staged for television cameras, a type of display for the news media not unusual in Mexico.

The Frenchwoman said she had lived at the ranch, but did not know kidnapping victims were held there.

Cassez ultimately spent seven years in prison and became the center of a vigorous debate between Mexicans who say she was abused by the criminal justice system and those who say setting her free would only reinforce a sense that crimes such as kidnapping go unpunished.

Mexico has one of the world’s highest kidnapping rates, and there has been increasing public pressure to halt what is seen as widespread impunity for criminals.

At least one victim identified Cassez as one of the kidnappers, though only by hearing her voice, not by seeing her.

It was not immediately clear how the ruling might affect the case against Cassez’s ex-boyfriend, Israel Vallarta, who is charged with allegedly leading the gang and is being tried separately.

But the ruling provoked a backlash from Mexican anti-crime activists, including Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who led a successful decade-long fight to bring her son’s kidnappers to justice even though his body was never found.

“Today, they opened the door to impunity, today a lot of people are going to go free,” Miranda de Wallace told news media. “We already live without public safety, now it’s going to be worse.”

Ezequiel Elizalde, a kidnap victim who testified against Cassez, told local media that the ruling discredited the Mexican justice system. “Get a weapon, arm yourself, and don’t pay any attention to the government,” he said.

AP

{{The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has launched an investigation into drone strikes and will review resultant civilian casualties to determine whether the attacks constitute a war crime.}}

Ben Emmerson, a UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, formally launched the inquiry on Thursday, in response to requests from Russia, China and Pakistan.

A statement released by the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights states that the inquiry will provide a “critical examination of the factual evidence concerning civilian casualties”.

It also states that the inquiry ultimately intends to make recommendations to the UN General Assembly to prompt countries to “investigate into the lawfulness and proportionality of such attacks”.

“This is not an investigation into the conduct of any particular state. It’s an investigation into the consequence into this form of technology,” Emmerson said.

“The reality is that the increasing availibility of this technology […] makes it very likely that more states will be using this technology in the coming months and years and includes raising the spectre that non state organisations – organisations labelled as terrorist groups – could use the technology in retaliation,” he added.

He said that it was a “very serious and escalating situation” which must be addressed by the international community “urgently”.

At a press conference on Thursday in London, Emmerson said that the British government had already agreed to co-operate with the investigation and that he was ‘optimistic’ that the US would do the same.

He also requested the US to release ‘before and after’ videos of the drone strikes and internal reports of those killed, including civilians.

Emerson’s team will conduct the inquiry in consultation with military experts and journalists from the UK, Yemen and Pakistan.

Drone deaths

Chris Woods, a senior journalist at London-based The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) said that “more than 400 US covert drone strikes have so far taken place in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia which have killed at least 3,000 people”.

On a twitter post from Emmerson’s press conference, Woods said that the “inquiry will study 25 drone strikes, where civilians [were] reported killed across Yemen, FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan], Somalia, Afghanistan and Gaza”.

“We believe more than 500 were likely to have been civilians [in those attacks]. The UN inquiry is important because it will focus on the key questions of the legality of such strikes, and the reported deaths of civilians,” he told Al Jazeera.

He added that TBIJ believes that there is not enough evidence to support the claims of some US officials who say that Pakistan secretly approves drone strikes.

Robert Densmore, editor of Defence Report magazine told Al Jazeera that the inquiry “is something that [needed] to happen to drive forward some more regulation”.

He said the inquiry could lay a framework to a potential UN convention to govern the use of drones – something similar to conventions in place for undetectable landmines and cluster ammunition.

“I think there could be enough multilateral pressure to convince the US that this would be something to pursue” he said.

{{North Korea’s top governing body warned Thursday that the regime will conduct its third nuclear test in defiance of U.N. punishment, and made clear that its long-range rockets are designed to carry not only satellites but also warheads aimed at striking the United States.}}

The National Defense Commission, headed by the country’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, denounced Tuesday’s U.N. Security Council resolution condemning North Korea’s long-range rocket launch in December as a banned missile activity and expanding sanctions against the regime.

The commission reaffirmed in its declaration that the launch was a peaceful bid to send a satellite into space, but also clearly indicated the country’s rocket launches have a military purpose: to strike and attack the United States.

While experts say North Korea doesn’t have the capability to hit the U.S. with its missiles, recent tests and rhetoric indicate the country is feverishly working toward that goal.

The commission pledged to keep launching satellites and rockets and to conduct a nuclear test as part of a “new phase” of combat with the United States, which it blames for leading the U.N. bid to punish Pyongyang. It said a nuclear test was part of “upcoming” action but did not say exactly when or where it would take place.

“We do not hide that a variety of satellites and long-range rockets which will be launched by the DPRK one after another and a nuclear test of higher level which will be carried out by it in the upcoming all-out action, a new phase of the anti-U.S. struggle that has lasted century after century, will target against the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people,” the commission said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“Settling accounts with the U.S. needs to be done with force, not with words, as it regards jungle law as the rule of its survival,” the commission said.

It was a rare declaration by the powerful commission once led by late leader Kim Jong Il and now commanded by his son.

The statement made clear Kim Jong Un’s commitment to continue developing the country’s nuclear and missile programs in defiance of the Security Council, even at risk of further international isolation.

North Korea’s allusion to a “higher level” nuclear test most likely refers to a device made from highly enriched uranium, which is easier to miniaturize than the plutonium bombs it tested in 2006 and 2009, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the private Sejong Institute in South Korea.

Experts say the North Koreans must conduct further tests of its atomic devices and master the technique for making them smaller before they can be mounted as nuclear warheads onto long-range missiles.

The U.S. State Department had no immediate response to Thursday’s statement. Shortly before the commission issued its declaration, U.S. envoy on North Korea Glyn Davies urged Pyongyang not to explode an atomic device.

“Whether North Korea tests or not, it’s up to North Korea. We hope they don’t do it. We call on them not to do it,” he told reporters in Seoul after meeting with South Korean officials. “It will be a mistake and a missed opportunity if they were to do it.”

Davies was in Seoul on a trip that includes his stops in China and Japan for talks on how to move forward on North Korea relations.

South Korea’s top official on relations with the North said Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile development is a “cataclysm for the Korean people,” and poses a fundamental threat to regional and world peace.

“The North Korean behavior is very disappointing,” Unification Minister Yu Woo-ik said in a lecture in Seoul, according to his office.

North Korea claims the right to build nuclear weapons as a defense against the United States, its Korean War foe.

{Wirestory}

{{Britain, Germany and the Netherlands urged their citizens Thursday to immediately leave the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi in response to what was described as an imminent threat against Westerners.}}

The warnings come a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton testified to Congress about the deadly September attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the ambassador to Libya.

They also come as French troops battle al-Qaida linked militants in Mali, and follow the deaths of dozens of foreigners at the hands of Islamist extremists in Algeria — though it remained unclear if those two events were linked to the European nations’ concerns about Libya.

The foreign ministries of the three countries issued statements variously describing the threat as specific and imminent but none gave details as to its exact nature.

Germany and Britain urged their nationals still in Benghazi to leave “immediately” while Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Thijs van Son said that “staying in this area is not to be advised.”

It was not immediately clear how many people could be affected; Britain’s Foreign Office said likely “dozens” of its citizens were in the city, while Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Thijs van Son said there are four Dutch citizens registered as being in Benghazi and possibly two more.

Several countries have for months advised against all travel to the city, especially after the U.S. consulate was attacked, and local residents said that many foreigners had already left in recent weeks.

Benghazi, a city of 1 million people, is a business hub where many major firms employ Westerners. It also was where the Libyan uprising against longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi began in 2011.

Gadhafi was eventually toppled and killed after NATO backed the rebel movement, and the Arab country has since struggled with security.

Al-Qaida-linked militants operate in the country alongside other Islamist groups.

Adel Mansouri, principal of the International School of Benghazi, said British and foreign nationals were warned two days ago about a possible threat to Westerners.

He said the school’s teachers were given the option of leaving but decided to stay.

The school has some 540 students. Most are Libyan with some 40 percent who hold dual nationality.

Less than 5 percent are British while 10 to 15 students have U.S.-Libyan nationality, Mansouri said.

Classes were not due to resume until Sunday because of a holiday Thursday.

“We told the British ambassador we are staying, and we’ll be in touch,” said Mansouri, himself a Libyan-British dual national. “We don’t see a threat on the ground.”

Saleh Gawdat, a Benghazi lawmaker, said French doctors who were working in Benghazi hospitals have left the city and that the French cultural center has closed out of concerns about potential retaliation over the French-led military intervention in nearby Mali, which began two weeks ago.

Violence in Benghazi has targeted both foreigners as well as Libyan officials in recent months — with assassinations, bombings and other attacks.

{Agencies}

British Prime Minister David Cameron wants nothing to do with a United States of Europe, an idea that’s gaining currency as the countries that use the euro struggle to fix their debt crisis.

A day after he shook up Europe’s political landscape by offering citizens the prospect of a vote on whether to stay in the 27-country European Union, Cameron insisted Thursday he wants Britain to remain an integral part of the bloc but that more unification would not be the answer.

“To try and shoehorn countries into a centralized political union would be a great mistake and Britain would not be a part of it,” he said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.

Over the past few months, many in the EU, particularly among the 17 countries that use the euro, are on a drive for closer unification, and that’s raised particular concerns in Britain, which has often viewed the bloc through a business prism.

“If you mean that Europe has to be a political union, a country called Europe, then I disagree,” said Cameron, who insisted he is arguing for a more flexible EU — not to walk out on it. On Wednesday, Cameron put an end to months of speculation by revealing he intends to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU if he wins the next general election, expected in 2015.

But many politicians in Europe think closer political ties are exactly what is needed to maintain continental unity in the face of a debt crisis that’s laid bare fundamental flaws in the euro. The European Union, which last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, effectively started amid the rubble of World War II — the motivation to avoid future wars.

Some even think Europe’s end-game has to be to resemble the United States of America. Countries would be so tied together in their economic and social fabric to make war inconceivable.

A number of European leaders have accused Cameron of putting the bloc at risk to deal with domestic political problems. His Conservative Party has a hardcore element that is highly skeptical of the EU, while an anti-EU party, the UK Independence Party, is gaining ground in the polls most notably at the expense of Cameron’s Conservatives.

Italian Premier Mario Monti said Britain should set aside ideology and look at its membership in the EU with “pragmatism, which should be a British attitude of mind.”

He argued that Britons, for all their hostility to EU regulations and bureaucracy, benefit so much from the single market that they would be scared to leave — a ready access to markets and over half a billion people would be a gamble too far.

Most of British business appears to want to stay in the EU but out of the integrationist drive — the question is whether that can be achieved.

“The vast majority of businesses across the UK want to stay in the single market, but on the basis of a revised relationship ….. that promotes trade and competitiveness,” said John Langworth of the British Chambers of Commerce.

He was among 55 British business leaders who issued a public letter to the Times of London on Thursday complaining about demands from Brussels and calling for a “a more competitive, flexible and prosperous European Union that would bring more jobs and growth for all member states.”

Growth is certainly something that Europe is craving. The eurozone as a whole is in recession and figures Friday are expected to show the British Economy, the EU’s third-largest, half way back to its third recession in four years — a recession is commonly defined as two successive quarters of negative economic growth.

The leaders of Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands and Denmark — also in Davos for the gathering of political and business elites — stressed the importance of Britain’s place in the EU.

But Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt acknowledged Cameron’s budget concerns.

“Every morning we need to get up in the morning and ask, are we spending public money in the right way,” she said. “If we are doing it at the member state level we should be doing it at the European level as well.”

Britain’s relations with Europe have been strained since the end of World War II. It did not join the European Steel and Coal Community, the forebear of what would later become the European Union, in 1951.

Britain later realized there were benefits accruing from joining up with some of its wartime friends and foes, and joined the evolving European bloc.

It has stood against many efforts to forge closer ties, notably the creation of the euro, but has been at the forefront of the drive to create a single market.

Agencies

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has claimed the Islamic Republic can create 10 times more wealth from inventions than oil.

Addressing a crowd in the western city of Hamedan, Ahmadinejad scoffed at a western sanction against Tehran for its suspect nuclear programme.

“Don’t buy our oil? To hell with you,” Ahmadinejad said in remarks aimed at the West.

“It’s better if you don’t buy… 10 times more money will head to people’s pockets through the inventions of our scientists.”

Last week, Ahmadinejad said Iran must move away from dependence on oil revenues to overcome Western sanctions that have slowed the economy and disrupted foreign trade.

Iran has long depended on oil sales for about 80 percent of its foreign currency revenue.

Iran’s income from oil and gas exports has dropped by 45 percent as a result of sanctions. The West fears Iran may ultimately be able to develop nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies.

Iran’s national currency has also lost about 8 per cent of its value in the past two days, hitting a record low against the US. dollar and other foreign currencies in street trading.

Street traders said Tuesday it reached 36,200 rials to the dollar. It was 33,500 rials on Sunday.

Iran’s national currency lost nearly 40 percent of its value in 2012 alone.

Each US dollar was traded at about 10,000 rials as recently as early 2011. Iranian authorities have accused the West of waging an “economic war”.

The country is living under stepped up Western sanctions that also include banking restrictions that make it increasingly difficult for Iran’s Asian customers to pay for oil deliveries.

The government is preparing an austerity budget for the next Persian calendar year that begins on March 21.

It aims to avoid a budget deficit by substantially increasing income taxes to make up for shrinking oil revenues.

{wirestory}

{{North Korea has vowed to strengthen its nuclear weapons programme, after the UN Security Council voted to expand existing sanctions against Pyongyang.}}

North Korea said on Wednesday it would hold no more talks on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and would boost its military and nuclear capabilities.

“We will take measures to boost and strengthen our defencive military power including nuclear deterrence,” its foreign
ministry said in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA.

Hours earlier, the Security Council voted unanimously to condemn North Korea’s December rocket launch.

The launch is considered by the West as part of a covert programme to develop ballistic missiles that can carry warheads.

The council reiterated its previous demand that North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons programme in a “complete, verifiable and irreversible manner” and cease launches.

The secretive state, already under tough UN sanctions for nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, said the launch was intended to put a satellite in space.

Aljazeera

{{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is in good spirits and recovering six weeks after he underwent cancer surgery in Cuba, his government said Tuesday in a continuation of more upbeat assessments of the leader’s fragile health.}}

Information Minister Ernesto Villegas said officials received a “very encouraging” report Tuesday about the president’s condition from Jorge Arreaza, Chavez’s son-in-law and science minister.

Villegas said after a Cabinet meeting that there was still no date set for
Chavez’s return to Venezuela.

The president underwent his fourth cancer-related operation in Havana on Dec. 11 and hasn’t appeared or spoken publicly since.

The government has said the 58-year-old president is improving after suffering complications including a severe respiratory infection.

Chavez is showing strength during a “hard, complex” struggle, Villegas said.

“He’s attentive to the development of events in Venezuela,” he said, adding that when Foreign Minister Elias Jaua met with Chavez in Cuba on Monday, the president was in “very good spirits.” Jaua said Monday on Twitter that he had shared jokes with Chavez.

Agencies

{{Prime Minister David Cameron promised on Wednesday to give Britons a straight referendum choice on whether to stay in the European Union or leave, provided he wins an election in 2015.}}

Cameron ended months of speculation by announcing in a speech the plan for a vote sometime between 2015 and the end of 2017, shrugging off warnings that this could imperil Britain’s diplomatic and economic prospects and alienate its allies.

Cameron said Britain did not want to pull up the drawbridge and retreat from the world but that public disillusionment with the EU is at “an all-time high”.

“It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time for us to settle this question about Britain and Europe,” Cameron said.

His Conservative party would campaign for the 2015 election promising to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership.

“When we have negotiated that new settlement, we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple in or out choice to stay in the European Union on these new terms; or come out altogether. It will be an in-out referendum.”

Cameron said he wants Britain to claw back some powers from Brussels, a proposal that other European countries reject.

Britain would do an “audit” to determine what powers Brussels had that should best be delegated to member states.

Sterling fell to its lowest in nearly five months against the dollar on Wednesday as Cameron was speaking.

Whether Cameron will ever hold the referendum remains as uncertain as the Conservatives’ chances of winning the next election due in 2015.

They trail the opposition Labour party in opinion polls, and the coalition government is pushing through painful public spending cuts to try to reduce Britain’s large budget deficit, likely to upset voters in the meantime.

Cameron’s promise looks likely to satisfy much of his own party, which has been split on the issue, but may create uncertainty when events could put his preferred option – a looser version of full British membership – out of reach.

The move may also unsettle other EU states, such as France and Germany.

European officials have already warned Cameron against treating the bloc as an “a la carte menu” from which he can pick and choose membership terms.

The United States, a close ally, has said it wants Britain to remain inside the EU with “a strong voice”.

The speech could also exacerbate rifts with Cameron’s pro-European Liberal Democrat junior coalition partners.

Cameron said he would prefer Britain, the world’s sixth biggest economy, to remain inside the 27-nation EU but he also made clear he believes the EU must be radically reformed.

It was riskier to maintain the status quo than to change, he said.

“The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy,” he said.

If Britain left the EU, Cameron said it would be “a one-way ticket, not a return”, adding however that he would campaign to stay inside a reformed EU “with all my heart and soul”.

Reuters