Tag: InternationalNews

{{Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was released from a New York hospital on Wednesday, three days after doctors discovered a blood clot in her head.}}

Clinton’s medical team advised her Wednesday evening that she was making good progress on all fronts and said they are confident she will fully recover, said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines.

Doctors had been treating Clinton with blood thinners to dissolve a clot in a vein that runs through the space between the brain and the skull behind the right ear.

“She’s eager to get back to the office,” Reines said in a statement, adding that the secretary and her family are grateful for the excellent care she received at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Reines said details of when Clinton will return to work will be clarified in the coming days.

{Wirestory}

{{North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for an end to confrontation between the two Koreas, technically still at war in the absence of a peace treaty to end their 1950-53 conflict, in a surprise New Year’s broadcast on state media.}}

The address by Kim, who took power in the reclusive state after his father, Kim Jong-il, died in 2011, appeared to take the place of the policy-setting New Year’s editorial published annually in the past in leading state newspapers.

But North Korea has offered olive branches before and Kim’s speech does not necessarily signify a change in tack from a country which vilifies the United States and U.S. ally South Korea at every chance.

Impoverished North Korea raised tensions in the region by launching a long-range rocket in December it said was aimed at putting a scientific satellite in orbit, drawing international condemnation.

North Korea, which considers the North and South one country, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is banned from testing missile or nuclear technology under U.N. sanctions imposed after its 2006 and 2009 nuclear weapons tests.

“An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontation between the north and the south,” Kim said in an address that appeared to be pre-recorded.

{Reuters}

{{Pope Benedict XVI said Tuesday he is convinced that peace will prevail in 2013, despite the inequality, terrorism and “unregulated financial capitalism” that afflict the world today.}}

Benedict celebrated a New Year’s Day Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica to mark the church’s world day of peace.

His target audience was in the front pews: diplomats accredited to the Holy See, who next week will attend the pope’s annual address about the plight of the world’s poor and its war-torn regions.

In his homily, Benedict said that despite today’s terrorism, criminality and the inequality between rich and poor, he is convinced the “numerous works of peace, of which the world is rich, are testimony to the innate vocation of humanity to peace.”

He cited “unregulated financial capitalism” as evidence of an “egotistical and individualistic mentality” that is rife in the world.

Later, Benedict appeared at his studio window overlooking St. Peter’s Square to wish the crowds below a Happy New Year.

Nearby, a man scaled the scaffolding along the colonnade surrounding the square and draped a banner calling on Benedict to “Stop Terrorism.” After a few hours of police negotiations, he came down and was escorted away.

The protest didn’t appear to cause the pope any disturbance.

Agencies

{{Trade, tax compliance and promoting greater transparency will be the main focus of the next meeting of leaders of the Group of Eight major economies in June, Britain said on Wednesday as it assumed the group’s rotating presidency.}}

Prime Minister David Cameron said he hoped the group’s seven other member nations – the United States, France, Russia, Italy, Japan, Canada and Germany – would join Britain in trying to “fire up economies and drive prosperity”.

“At the heart of my agenda for the Summit are three issues – advancing trade, ensuring tax compliance and promoting greater transparency,” Cameron said in a letter to other G8 leaders.
The next G8 meeting is expected to be held in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland.

On trade, Cameron said deals between the European Union and Canada, Japan and the United States was on the table, and efforts are also expected to be made to close international tax loopholes and strengthen global tax standards.

Cameron also hopes to boost transparency and accountability of aid spending.

The British prime minister said the G8 economies together account for around half of the world’s economic output and so should be able to achieve ambitious goals.

{Wirestory}

{{Gunmen in northwest Pakistan killed five teachers and two aid workers from a non-governmental organization Tuesday as they were driving home from work.}}

The group’s director said they may have been targeted for their anti-polio work.

Militants in the past have accused health workers of acting as spies for the U.S., alleging the vaccine is intended to make Muslim children sterile. Last month, nine people working on an anti-polio vaccination campaign were shot and killed.

Four of those shootings were in the northwest where Tuesday’s attack took place.

The attack was another reminder of the risks to women educators and aid workers from Islamic militants who oppose their work.

It was in the same conservative province where militants shot and seriously wounded 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai, an outspoken young activist for girls’ education, in October.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the latest shootings.
In a separate attack in the southern city of Karachi, also likely to have been carried out by militants, four people were killed and dozens injured when a bomb went off just as a large political rally was dispersing.

The teachers and aid workers in the northwest were killed in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on their way home from a community center where they worked at a medical clinic and primary school.

The director of the group targeted Tuesday said he suspected that the workers were attacked because the non-governmental organization has been active in vaccination campaigns designed to wipe out polio.

{{Wirestory}}

{{Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is confronting “new complications” due to a respiratory infection nearly three weeks after undergoing cancer surgery, his vice president said in Cuba as he visited the ailing leader for the first time since his operation.}}

Vice President Nicolas Maduro looked weary and spoke with a solemn expression in a televised address from Havana on Sunday. He described Chavez’s condition as delicate.

“Several minutes ago we were with President Chavez. We greeted each other and he himself referred to these complications,” Maduro said, reading from a prepared statement.

The vice president’s comments suggest an increasingly difficult fight for Chavez.

The Venezuelan leader has not been seen or heard from since undergoing his fourth cancer-related surgery Dec. 11, and government officials have said he might not return in time for his scheduled Jan. 10 inauguration for a new six-year term.

“The president gave us precise instructions so that, after finishing the visit, we would tell the (Venezuelan) people about his current health condition,” Maduro said.

“President Chavez’s state of health continues to be delicate, with complications that are being attended to, in a process not without risks.”

Maduro was seated alongside Chavez’s eldest daughter, Rosa, and son-in-law Jorge Arreaza, as well as Attorney General Cilia Flores. He held up a copy of a newspaper confirming that his message was recorded on Sunday.

{{Deep inside caves, in remote desert bases, in the escarpments and cliff faces of northern Mali, Islamic fighters are burrowing into the earth, erecting a formidable set of defenses to protect what has essentially become al-Qaida’s new country.}}

They have used the bulldozers, earth movers and Caterpillar machines left behind by fleeing construction crews to dig what residents and local officials describe as an elaborate network of tunnels, trenches, shafts and ramparts.

In just one case, inside a cave large enough to drive trucks into, they have stored up to 100 drums of gasoline, guaranteeing their fuel supply in the face of a foreign intervention, according to experts.

Northern Mali is now the biggest territory held by al-Qaida and its allies.

And as the world hesitates, delaying a military intervention, the extremists who seized control of the area earlier this year are preparing for a war they boast will be worse than the decade-old struggle in Afghanistan.

“Al-Qaida never owned Afghanistan,” said former United Nations diplomat Robert Fowler, a Canadian kidnapped and held for 130 days by al-Qaida’s local chapter, whose fighters now control the main cities in the north. “They do own northern Mali.”

Al-Qaida’s affiliate in Africa has been a shadowy presence for years in the forests and deserts of Mali, a country hobbled by poverty and a relentless cycle of hunger.

In recent months, the terror syndicate and its allies have taken advantage of political instability within the country to push out of their hiding place and into the towns, taking over an enormous territory which they are using to stock arms, train forces and prepare for global jihad.

The catalyst for the Islamic fighters was a military coup nine months ago that transformed Mali from a once-stable nation to the failed state it is today.

On March 21, disgruntled soldiers invaded the presidential palace. The fall of the nation’s democratically elected government at the hands of junior officers destroyed the military’s command-and-control structure, creating the vacuum which allowed a mix of rebel groups to move in.

With no clear instructions from their higher-ups, the humiliated soldiers left to defend those towns tore off their uniforms, piled into trucks and beat a retreat as far as Mopti, roughly in the center of Mali.

They abandoned everything north of this town to the advancing rebels, handing them an area that stretches over more than 620,000 square kilometers (240,000 square miles).

It’s a territory larger than Texas or France — and it’s almost exactly the size of Afghanistan.

Turbaned fighters now control all the major towns in the north, carrying out amputations in public squares like the Taliban did. Just as in Afghanistan, they are flogging women for not covering up.

Since taking control of Timbuktu, they have destroyed seven of the 16 mausoleums listed as world heritage sites.

The area under their rule is mostly desert and sparsely populated, but analysts say that due to its size and the hostile nature of the terrain, rooting out the extremists here could prove even more difficult than it did in Afghanistan.

Mali’s former president has acknowledged, diplomatic cables show, that the country cannot patrol a frontier twice the length of the border between the United States and Mexico.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM, operates not just in Mali, but in a corridor along much of the northern Sahel. This 7,000-kilometer (4,300-mile) long ribbon of land runs across the widest part of Africa, and includes sections of Mauritania, Niger, Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and Chad.