Tag: InternationalNews

{{Former President George H.W. Bush remained in the intensive care unit of a Houston hospital on Thursday, but his longtime chief of staff issued a reassuring message, urging the media and the public to “put the harps back in the closet.”}}

Bush, 88, a Republican who during his one term in office led a coalition of nations that ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, was admitted to Methodist Hospital November 23 for bronchitis.

He was transferred to intensive care on Sunday after setbacks including a persistent fever, family spokesman Jim McGrath has said.

“I don’t have any guidance so far today except to say no news is good news,” McGrath said on Thursday. Hospital spokesman George Kovacik added that the former president remained in intensive care on Thursday.

But in a statement addressed to the “national media” on Bush’s condition on Thursday, chief of staff Jean Becker sought to strike an upbeat tone.

“Yes, President Bush is in ICU where he is getting the best medical care in the world,” she wrote. “Is he sick? Yes. Does he plan on going anywhere soon? No. He has every intention of staying put.

“He would ask me to tell you to please ‘put the harps back in the closet,’” she said.

{{President Vladimir Putin on Friday signed a bill banning Americans from adoptingRussian children, part of a harsh response to a U.S. law targeting Russians deemed to be human rights violators.}}

Although some top Russian officials including the foreign minister openly opposed the bill and Putin himself had been noncommittal about it last week, he signed it less than 24 hours after receiving it from Parliament, where both houses passed it overwhelmingly.

The law also calls for closure of non-governmental organizations receiving American funding if their activities are classified as political — a broad definition that many fear could be used to close any NGO that offends the Kremlin.

It was not immediately clear when the law would take effect, but presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying “practically, adoption stops on Jan. 1.”

Children’s rights ombudsman Pavel Astakhov said this week that 46 children who were about to be adopted in the U.S. would remain in Russia if the bill comes into effect.

The bill has angered Americans and Russians who argue it victimizes children to make a political point, cutting off a route out of frequently dismal orphanages for thousands of children.

UNICEF estimates that there are about 740,000 children not in parental custody in Russia while about 18,000 Russians are on the waiting list to adopt a child. The U.S. is the biggest destination for adopted Russian children — more than 60,000 of them have been taken in by Americans over the past two decades.

Russians historically have been less enthusiastic about adopting children than most Western cultures.

Lev Ponomarev, one of Russia’s most prominent human rights activists, hinted at that reluctance when he said Parliament members who voted for the bill should take custody of the children who were about to be adopted.

“The moral responsibility lies on them,” he told Interfax. “But I don’t think that even one child will be taken for upbringing by deputies of the Duma.”

The law is in response to a measure signed into law by President Barack Obama this month that calls for sanctions against Russians assessed to be human rights violators.

That stems from the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was arrested after accusing officials of a $230 million tax fraud. He was repeatedly denied medical treatment and died in jail in 2009. Russian rights groups claimed he was severely beaten and accused the Kremlin of failing to prosecute those responsible; a prison doctor who was the only official charged in the case was acquitted by a Moscow court on Friday.

The U.S. law galvanized Russian resentment of the United States, which Putin has claimed funded and encouraged the wave of massive anti-government protests that arose last winter.

The Parliament initially considered a relatively similar retaliatory measure, but amendments have expanded it far beyond a tit-for-tat response.

Many Russians have been distressed for years by reports of Russian children dying or suffering abuse at the hands of their American adoptive parents. The new Russian law was dubbed the “Dima Yakovlev Bill” after a toddler who died in 2008 when his American adoptive father left him in a car in broiling heat for hours.

Russians also bristled at how the widespread adoptions appeared to show them as hardhearted or too poor to take care of orphans. Astakhov, the children’s ombudsman, charged that well-heeled Americans often got priority over Russians who wanted to adopt.

A few lawmakers even claimed that some Russian children were adopted by Americans only to be used for organ transplants or become sex toys or cannon fodder for the U.S. Army. A spokesman with Russia’s dominant Orthodox Church said that children adopted by foreigners and raised outside the church will not enter God’s kingdom.

{{Defying a storm of domestic and international criticism, Russia moved toward finalizing a ban on Americans adopting Russian children, as Parliament’s upper house voted unanimously Wednesday in favor of a measure that President Vladimir Putin has indicated he will sign into law.}}

The bill is widely seen as the Kremlin’s retaliation against an American law that calls for sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators.

It comes as Putin takes an increasingly confrontational attitude toward the West, brushing aside concerns about a crackdown on dissent and democratic freedoms.

Dozens of Russian children close to being adopted by American families now will almost certainly be blocked from leaving the country.

The law also cuts off the main international adoption route for Russian children stuck in often dismal orphanages: More than 60,000 Russian youngsters have been adopted in the United States in the past 20 years.

There are about 740,000 children without parental care in Russia, according to UNICEF.

All 143 members of the Federation Council present voted to support the bill, which has sparked criticism from both the United States and Russian officials, activists and artists, who say it victimizes children by depriving them of the chance to escape the squalor of orphanage life.

The vote comes days after Parliament’s lower house overwhelmingly approved the ban.

Seven people with posters protesting the bill were detained outside the Council before Wednesday’s vote. “Children get frozen in the Cold War,” one poster read. Some 60 people rallied in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city.

The bill is part of larger legislation by Putin-allied lawmakers retaliating against a recently signed U.S. law that calls for sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators. Although Putin has not explicitly committed to signing the bill, he strongly defended it in a press conference last week as “a sufficient response” to the new U.S. law.

Originally Russia’s lawmakers cobbled together a more or less a tit-for-tat response to the U.S. law, providing for travel sanctions and the seizure of financial assets in Russia of Americans determined to have violated the rights of Russians.

{{Indian Police has closed down New Delhi’s key government district ahead of Monday’s visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin, after two days of pitched street battles following the gang rape of a woman on a bus.}}

Putin is scheduled to meet with Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh Monday afternoon and later with the Indian president.

Authorities erected security barriers throughout the city’s Raisina Hills area — home to the presidential mansion, the parliament building and federal ministerial blocks.

Only those authorized to work in the district were allowed to pass.

Furious weekend demonstrations rocked Raisina Hills as public outrage surged after a 23-year-old woman was sexually assaulted and beaten to near death on a bus on December 16 by a group of six suspects, now under arrest, police say.

Singh again expressed solidarity with the rape victim in a televised address on Monday.

He also reiterated an earlier appeal for calm and a pledge of safety for women and children.

{{Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Monti said Sunday that he could not accept Silvio Berlusconi’s offer to run on a centre-right ticket in the February general elections, accusing his predecessor of political flip-flopping.
By News Wires (text).}}

Italian Premier Mario Monti is spurning Silvio Berlusconi’s offer to run on a center-right ticket backed by the media mogul in February elections.

Monti told a news conference in Rome on Sunday that his predecessor’s flipping back and forth between condemning the government’s economic policies and then praising the premier convinced him that “I couldn’t accept his offer.”

Monti didn’t immediately say if he might run on his own ticket 13 months after his non-elected government was appointed to save Italy from the eurozone debt crisis.

{{Russia’s foreign minister says Moscow would welcome any country’s offer of a safe haven to Syrian President Bashar Assad, but underlined that Moscow itself has no intention of giving him shelter if he steps down.}}

Russia has repeatedly used its veto right along with China at the U.N. Security Council to protect its old ally from international sanctions, but it has increasingly sought to distance itself from Assad.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters late Friday that countries in the region he wouldn’t name publicly had asked Russia to convey their offer of a safe passage to Assad.

He said that Russia responded by telling them to go directly to Assad: “We replied: ‘What do we have to do with it? If you have such plans, you go straight to him.’”

Asked if Moscow could offer a refuge to Assad, Lavrov responded that “Russia has publicly said that it doesn’t invite President Assad.”

{{This month’s rocket launch by reclusive North Korea shows it has likely developed the technology, long suspected in the West, to fire a warhead more than 10,000 km (6,200 miles), South Korean officials said on Sunday, putting the U.S. West Coast in range.}}

North Korea said the December 12 launch put a weather satellite in orbit but critics say it was aimed at nurturing the kind of technology needed to mount a nuclear warhead on a long-range missile.

North Korea is banned from testing missile or nuclear technology under U.N. sanctions imposed after its 2006 and 2009 nuclear weapons tests and the U.N. Security Council condemned the launch.

South Korea retrieved and analyzed parts of the first-stage rocket that dropped in the waters off its west coast.

“As a result of analyzing the material of Unha-3 (North Korea’s rocket), we judged North Korea had secured a range of more than 10,000 km in case the warhead is 500-600 kg,” a South Korean Defense Ministry official told a news briefing.

North Korea’s previous missile tests ended in failure.

North Korea, which denounces the United States as the mother of all warmongers on an almost daily basis, has spent decades and scarce resources to try to develop technology capable of striking targets as far away as the United States and it is also working to build a nuclear arsenal.

But experts believe the North is still years away from mastering the technology needed to miniaturize a nuclear bomb to mount on a missile.

South Korean defense officials also said there was no confirmation whether the North had the re-entry technology needed for a payload to survive the heat and vibration without disintegrating.

Despite international condemnation, the launch this month was seen as a major boost domestically to the credibility of the North’s young leader, Kim Jong-un, who took over power from his father who died last year.

Apparently encouraged by the euphoria, the fledgling supreme leader called for the development and launching of “a variety of more working satellites” and “carrier rockets of bigger capacity” at a banquet in Pyongyang on Friday which he hosted for those who contributed to the lift-off, according to North Korean state media.

{{U.S. officials have deported a woman believed to be the daughter of Mexico’s most wanted drug lord.}}

Alejandrina Gisselle Guzman Salazar was deported on Tuesday, her lawyer said, a day after she pleaded guilty in federal court to possession of a false visa.

Shortly after Guzman Salazar’s arrest in October, a U.S. federal official said she was the daughter of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who authorities have said heads Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

On Wednesday, her lawyers declined to comment on whether she was related to the accused drug lord.

“I don’t know the answer to that, and it wasn’t part of the case. … We never asked, because it wasn’t relevant, whether it was true or not,” attorney Guadalupe Valencia said.

CNN

{{Police say one of two bank robbers have been arrested after the pair’s brazen escape from a high-rise federal jail in downtown Chicago sparked a dayslong manhunt.}}

FBI spokeswoman Joan Hyde says Joseph Banks was captured late Thursday.

Banks fled the Metropolitan Correctional Center early Tuesday with Kenneth Conley by apparently smashing a hole in a wall at the bottom of a narrow cell window and squeezing through, before scaling down about 20 stories using a knotted rope or bed sheets.

Police helicopters and canine units swarmed the Chicago area, but not until hours after the men were last accounted for by correctional officers’ headcount.

The search later spread beyond Chicago to the homes of anyone officers could find with ties to the men.

Both men face hefty prison sentences.