Tag: InternationalNews

{{A Russian scientist freed on Saturday after nearly a decade in jail for selling secrets to China accused Vladimir Putin’s “court” of turning the Kremlin leader into a tsar and of using the legal system to punish opponents.}}

Valentin Danilov, 66, looked pale and thin as he was released on parole from a prison colony on the edge of the industrial Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk after serving eight years of a 14-year sentence.

But he was defiant over a case which human rights activists say was politically motivated and part of an attempt by Putin to intimidate academics with ties to other countries during his first term as president.

“I would really appreciate it if somebody finally told me what state secret I sold,” Danilov told reporters after he emerged from the prison colony’s high corrugated walls and travelled by car through the snow-dusted streets of Krasnoyarsk to his daughter’s apartment.

He declined to comment directly on President Putin but criticized Russia’s political and judicial system nearly 13 years after the former KGB spy first rose to power and more than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“As for President Putin, I guess everybody would be the same as him in his place. The court makes the tsar. In many cases it’s the people around him that are guilty rather than him himself,” said Danilov.

{{Mexican President Felipe Calderon has sent a bill to congress to change the official name of the country.}}

The current name, the United States of Mexico, was adopted in 1824 and was intended to emulate its northern neighbour.

President Calderon wants to change it to just Mexico, as the country is known the world over.

Mr Calderon, who leaves office on 1 December, said Mexico no longer needed to copy any foreign power.

“The name of our country no longer needs to emulate that of other nations,” Mr Calderon told a news conference.

“Forgive me for the expression, but Mexico’s name is Mexico.”

The name United States of Mexico (Estados Unidos Mexicanos) was brought in after independence from Spain.

It is used mostly on official documents, money and other government material.

Mr Calderon first suggested the name change as a congressman in 2003, but the bill did not make it to a vote.

The constitutional reform Mr Calderon proposes needs to be approved by both houses of Congress and a majority of Mexico’s 31 state legislatures.

Coming with just a week to go before Mr Calderon leaves office, the president’s critics see this as a symbolic gesture.

Mr Calderon will hand over to president-elect Enrique Pena Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

{{In Korea, the chief of a Seoul district prosecution office offered to resign Friday over a sex sandal involving a junior prosecutor, the latest in a series of incidents which have tarnished the elite law enforcement agency.}}

The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office launched an investigation into allegations that a trainee prosecutor performed sexual acts with a female suspect in his office during an interrogation after promising to clear her of charges.

The incident comes as the prosecution office falls under growing criticism after prosecutors were ensnared in a series of incidents involving bribery, sexual harassment and verbal abuse of police officers.

“We are conducting an inspection into the law school graduate who is currently working as a trainee prosecutor at the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors‘ Office,” said Lee Jun-ho, chief of the inspection team Thursday.

Seok Dong-hyeon, chief of the Seoul Eastern District Prosecutors’ Office, said Friday that he will step down from his post to take responsibility.

The accused prosecutor, 30, whose name is withheld, was interrogating the 43-year-old woman without the presence of an inspector, which is against the law.

The prosecutor also had sex with the woman at a nearby motel several days later, the inspectors said.

The misconduct was revealed when the woman tipped off her lawyer, who then asked the prosecutor in charge of supervising him.

“The two involved in the incident made a written agreement not to mention their inappropriate acts to anyone,” said the lawyer.

The trainee prosecutor was interrogating the woman on a Saturday because she said that was the only day she had available. According to a prosecution source, the acts happened by accident when he was placating her.

The official also said the woman called the trainee several days later and they went to the motel together. She allegedly asked the trainee for 50 million won ($46,000) for a settlement.

The inspection team plans to call in the prosecutor to question if he forcefully requested the sexual relations in exchange for favors.

The sex scandal came after chief prosecutor Kim Kwang-jun who received around 900 million won from conman Cho Hee-pal and Eugene Group, a construction-based conglomerate, was arrested last week.

Other prosecutors reportedly involved are being investigated by a special counsel team.

Prosecutor-General Han Sang-dae apologized Thursday for the strings of immoral acts of his employees who are supposed to represent justice and protect the public.

He convened a meeting on the same day with the heads of prosecutors’ offices nationwide and discussed how to strengthen the self inspection and achieve the reform.

The announcement for prosecutorial reform is expected to be unveiled before Dec. 7, earlier than previously thought, due to the latest sex scandal.

However, the public cast doubt on the authority’s promise for reform which has been pledged every time such scandals happened. Previous incidents include the “Benz prosecutor” case in 2011 in which a prosecutor was bribed with a Mercedec-Benz and a brand-name purse; the “sponsored prosecutors” in 2010 in which a dozen prosecutors received sexual favors from a construction firm; and the “Grandeur prosecutor” who received a car and money in return for favors to a suspect in 2008.

{{Osama bin Laden was buried at sea from a US warship amid high secrecy that included his body being referred to as “the package” delivered by “Fedex”, secret military emails reveal.}}

No sailors watched as the body of the al-Qaida leader – killed in a raid on his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 2 May 2011 – was tipped from a board into the North Arabian Sea from aircraft carrier the USS Carl Vinson after brief Islamic rites.

The emails were obtained by the Associated Press under freedom of information.

The news agency said they were heavily blacked out but nonetheless offered the first public disclosure of government information about the al-Qaida leader’s death.

Bin Laden was killed by a navy Seal team that swooped on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

One email stamped secret and sent on 2 May by a senior navy officer briefly describes how bin Laden’s body was washed, wrapped in a white sheet, and then placed in a weighted bag.

According to another message from the Vinson’s public affairs officer, only a small group of the ship’s leadership was informed of the burial.

“Traditional procedures for Islamic burial was followed,” the 2 May email from Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reads. “The deceased’s body was washed (ablution) then placed in a white sheet.

The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker.

After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased’s body slid into the sea.”

Earlier, Gaouette, then the deputy commander of the navy’s Fifth Fleet, and another officer used code words to discuss whether the helicopters carrying the Seals and Bin Laden’s body had arrived on the Carl Vinson.

“Any news on the package for us?” he asked Rear Admiral Samuel Perez, commander of the carrier strike group that included the Vinson.

“Fedex delivered the package,” Perez responded. “Both trucks are safely en route home base.”

The emails include a reference to the intense secrecy surrounding the mission and why few records were held.

“The paucity of documentary evidence in our possession is a reflection of the emphasis placed on operational security during the execution of this phase of the operation,” Gaouette’s message reads.

Recipients of the email included Admiral Mike Mullen, then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and General James Mattis, the top officer at US Central Command. Mullen retired from the military in September 2011.

The Obama administration has kept a tight hold on materials related to the Bin Laden raid. The AP said that in response to separate requests from the AP for information about the mission, the defence department replied in March that it could not locate any photographs or video taken during the raid or showing Bin Laden’s body.

It also said it could not find any images of Bin Laden’s body taken while it was on board the Vinson.

The Pentagon said it could not find any death certificate, autopsy report or results of DNA identification tests for Bin Laden, or any pre-raid materials discussing how the government planned to dispose of Bin Laden’s body if he were killed.

The defence department also refused to confirm or deny the existence of helicopter maintenance logs and reports about the performance of military gear used in the raid.

One of the stealth helicopters that carried the Seals to Abbottabad crashed during the mission and its wreckage was left behind. People who lived near Bin Laden’s compound took photos of the wrecked chopper.

The AP has lodged an appeal requesting more information from the defence department. The agency said the CIA, which ran the Bin Laden raid and has special legal authority to keep information from ever being made public, had not responded to requests for records about the mission.

Guardian

{{Nigerian Police on Thursday blamed a radical Islamist sect for attacks that witnesses say left 18 people dead over the past two days in Nigeria’s troubled north, part of a cycle of spiraling violence that is exacerbating religious tensions and that the government has been powerless to stop.}}

Meanwhile, members of a largely Muslim community in the small village about 30 miles (50 kilometers) from Nigeria’s largest northern city of Kano turned against its Christian minority after a trader was accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad, police said Thursday.

Although police say nobody died in the violence, a witness reported seeing four dead bodies.

Christians and Muslims have lived together peacefully across the country of 160 million for years, but the growing violence is creating a climate of religious distrust and local communities have lost faith in the government’s ability to protect them.

Suspected members of the radical lslamist sect known as Boko Haram carried out three attacks Wednesday and Thursday in different parts of the northeastern city of Maiduguri, said Borno state police spokesman Gideon Jibrin.

Jibrin declined to say how many people had been killed overall, but witnesses said 18 people died — including three children.

Boko Haram did not immediately claim responsibility. The group is believed to be responsible for more than 740 deaths this year alone, according to an AP count, and is also blamed for attacks targeting mosques, churches, schools, phone masts and government buildings.

Separately, Kano state police chief Ibrahim Idris said Thursday nobody died in the religious violence in a town in the state, but resident Sadiq Ahmed said he saw four dead bodies outside Christian-owned shops that had been set ablaze.

Ahmed also said he saw a burned-down church.

Idris said he believes the trader was misunderstood and that the situation is now calm.

Earlier this week, a Christian vigilante group in central Nigeria killed a Muslim resident after he defied an illegal checkpoint the group had put up to protect their church from a Boko Haram attack, even though the sect had not previously struck in that area.

The killing sparked riots that left 10 people dead.

President Goodluck Jonathan, whose government has responded to the crisis by sending more troops to the most affected areas, recently said on state-run television that Boko Haram remained a “faceless” group and that there was nobody for the government to meet with to seek peace.

{{Israeli authorities arrested an Arab Israeli on Thursday on accusations he planted a bomb on a bus in Tel Aviv that wounded 27 people and threatened to sabotage efforts to broker a cease-fire to end the fighting in Gaza, police said.}}

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the man, from the village of Taybeh in Israel, was connected to the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups.

A Palestinian militant cell based in the West Bank village of Beit Lakiya sent the man to put a bomb connected to a mobile phone on the Tel Aviv bus Wednesday, Rosenfeld said.

After he planted the bomb, the man, who police declined to identify, left the bus and called his handlers, who remotely detonated the explosive by calling the phone, he said.

“He admitted to carrying out the terrorist attack,” Rosenfeld said.

{{A Russian beauty queen is standing by her controversial withering public criticism of corruption in her country during this year’s Miss Earth competition.}}

“I wrote it from the bottom of my heart, from my soul,” 24 year-old Natalia Pereverzeva told press in Manilla, Philippines, where the competition is taking place.

The comments first appeared six months ago in an essay as part of her entrance to the competition, but garnered attention when they were part of her presentation in the pageant this week.

The essay was written in response to a question about why she is proud of her country and began with an expected praise for her homeland, but quickly shifted into controversial waters.

“But my Russia — it is also my poor, long-suffering country, mercilessly torn to pieces by greedy, dishonest, unbelieving people,” she wrote.

“My Russia — it is a great artery, from which the ‘chosen’ few people are draining away its wealth. My Russia is a beggar.

My Russia cannot help her elderly and orphans. From it, bleeding, like from a sinking ship, engineers, doctors, teachers are fleeing, because they have nothing to live on,” the essay continued.

She also touched on other sensitive subjects, including Russia’s long wars in the Caucuses region, the rise of nationalism in the country, and the general lack of interest in political issues among the wide swath of Russia’s public.

“I was totally shocked,” she said on Tuesday about the firestorm her comments have sparked.

The winner of the 2010 Miss Moscow pageant also defended herself against criticism from some Russian editorials that have blasted her for defaming the country on an international stage.

“It was my civic opinion and I wrote it with huge pride for my country. I love Russia and I am proud of its people, its history and tradition. I think every Russian would agree with what I wrote.”

ABC

{{Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is appearing in court to answer questions about suspicions he illegally accepted donations from France’s richest woman to fund his 2007 election campaign.}}

A judge in Bordeaux on Thursday will decide whether the 57-year-old Conservative will be charged with taking advantage of the 90-year-old L’Oreal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt.

Sarkozy has consistently denied all allegations.

Bettencourt’s former accountant told police that she handed over €150,000 ($192,000) in cash she was told would be passed on to Sarkozy’s campaign treasurer.

In July, a magistrate ordered the seizure of Sarkozy’s diaries.

{Wirestory}

{{Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is being credited with brokering the cease-fire today between Israel and Hamas, but the international gratitude and praise he is gettting could come with a political price at home.}}

Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama heaped praise on the Egyptian president.

Obama called his Egyptian counterpart today to thank him for his efforts in the negotiations, and Clinton expressed her gratitude personally in the press conference announcing the deal.

“I want to thank President Morsi for his personal leadership to de-escalate the situation in Gaza and end the violence,” said Clinton.

“This is a critical moment for the region. Egypt’s new government is assuming the responsibility and leadership that has long made this country a cornerstone of regional stability and peace.”