Tag: InternationalNews

{{Afghanistan’s president has accused U.S. forces of continuing to capture and hold Afghans in violation of an agreement signed earlier this year between the two countries.}}

Hamid Karzai’s late Sunday statement, which did not include any specific demands for the U.S., was made days after the beginning of negotiations on a bilateral security agreement that will govern the U.S. military presence in the country after the majority of troops draw down in 2014.

Karzai’s critics say he frequently strikes populist, nationalist stances that give him leverage in talks with the Americans.

The Afghan president said some detainees are still being held by U.S. forces even though Afghan judges have ruled that they be released. He also decried the continued arrest of Afghans by U.S. forces.

The two countries signed the detainee transfer pact in March but the handover of detention facilities has been slowed by the U.S., which has argued both that the Afghans are not ready to take over their management and insisted that the Afghan government agree to hold without trial some detainees that the U.S. deems too dangerous to release.

“These acts are completely against the agreement that has been signed between Afghanistan and the U.S. President,” said the statement, released by Karzai’s office after the president was briefed by judicial authorities on the transfer.

He urged Afghan officials to “take serious measures” to push for taking over all responsibility for the detention center on the edge of the main U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan.

The detainee transfer agreement was one of two pacts that were key to a broad but vague strategic partnership agreement signed by Kabul and Washington in May that set forth an American commitment to Afghanistan for years to come.

The second pact covers “special operations” such as certain American raids and other conduct on the battlefield.

A third detailed pact — dubbed the bilateral security agreement — is now under negotiation, and covers logistical and legal questions such as the size and number of bases and the immunity of U.S. forces from prosecution.

The two countries officially opened negotiations on the bilateral security agreement last week, and have given themselves a year to sign the pact.

Karzai is under pressure to give an appearance of upholding Afghan sovereignty — which he has repeatedly claimed to champion — without putting so many restrictions on U.S. forces that an agreement becomes impossible.

It is believed that the United States wants to retain up to 20,000 troops in Afghanistan after 2014 to train and support Afghan forces and go after extremists and groups, including al-Qaida.

Afghanistan now has about 66,000 U.S. troops and it remains unclear how many will be withdrawn next year as they continue to hand over security to Afghan forces.

The foreign military mission is evolving from combat to advising, assisting and training Afghan forces.

The bilateral security agreement is essentially a status of forces agreement and will set up a legal framework needed to operate military forces in Afghanistan, including taxation, visas and other technical issues. It does not need to be ratified by the U.S. Congress. The U.S. has similar agreements with dozens of countries.

In Iraq, a similar deal fell apart after U.S. officials were unable to reach an agreement with the Iraqis on legal issues and troop immunity that would have allowed a small training and counterterrorism force to remain there.

Karzai said last month that the issue of soldiers being protected from prosecution in Afghanistan could be a problem in the talks. He has said Afghanistan might demand prosecutions in some cases.

The issue took on new meaning after Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly attacked Afghan civilians in two villages in southern Afghanistan.

The American soldier faces 16 counts of premeditated murder and six counts of attempted murder in the March 11 attacks against civilians.

A preliminary hearing was held this week at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.

{{A new coalition of Syrian dissidents opposed to President Bashar al-Assad will have an ambassador in France, the French president said Saturday.}}

The announcement is a boost for the coalition, which seeks to unite the opposition against the Syrian government under a single vision.

The French decision to give the coalition an ambassador follows its pledge, and one by the United States, to support the coalition.

The Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council have also endorsed the coalition.

French President Francois Hollande met with the newly elected leader of the coalition, Ahmed Moaz al-Khatib, in Paris on Saturday.

Turkish town on Syrian border deals with fighting, ethnic differences
“France reiterated how it was attached to finding a solution quickly and that solution must first pass through the affirmation of a political transition,” Hollande said.

“This is why we took — I took — the decision to recognize the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.”

The two leaders talked about ways in which the coalition could gain both legitimacy and credibility, Hollande said.

The ambassadorship is a stamp of approval for the coalition’s efforts to become the centralized conduit for aid, and for an integrated military command.

The new coalition agreed that it wants al-Assad gone and that no one would talk with his government. Spokesman Mohammed Dugham said the only option now is a totally new government.

{{Barack Obama met with Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi at her home in Myanmar on Monday, lauding her “courage and determination” during an historic visit to the once repressive and secretive country.}}

The first sitting U.S. president to visit Myanmar, Obama urged its leaders, which have embarked on a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms since 2011, not to extinguish the “flickers of progress that we have seen.”

Obama said that his visit to the lakeside villa where the pro-democracy icon spent years under house arrest marked a new chapter between the two countries.

“Here, through so many difficult years, is where she has displayed such unbreakable courage and determination,” Obama told reporters, while standing side by side with his fellow Nobel peace laureate.

“It is here that she has human freedom and human dignity cannot be denied.”

The country, which is also known as Burma, was ruled by military leaders until early 2011 and for decades was politically and economically cut off from the rest of the world.

Suu Kyi also warned that Burma’s opening up would be difficult.
“The most difficult time in any transition is when we think success is in sight, then we have to be very careful that we are not lured by a mirage of success and that we are working toward its genuine success for our people and friendship between our two countries,” she said.

{{Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has arrested people planning bomb attacks with the support of Western and Israeli spy agencies in the oil-producing province of Khuzestan, state television reported.}}

“In the last few days a number of terrorist elements connected to foreign intelligence services … were identified and arrested along with a significant amount of explosives materials and items sent from a country in the Persian Gulf area,” the Intelligence Ministry statement said, according to Iranian state television’s website on Friday.

“These elements, led by Western-Zionist intelligence services, sought to commit other acts of sabotage, which were foiled.”

The statement said the individuals, who it did not otherwise identify or give details on, had planned to blow up parts of
Khuzestan’s energy infrastructure.

Khuzestan, in Iran’s southwest, is home to a large population of ethnic Arab Iranians, also known as Ahwazis, who have long complained of and occasionally protest against economic deprivation and systematic discrimination.

The region has also periodically suffered violent action by fighters.

{{In the US. northwestern Minnesota state, a teenager was refused the Catholic sacrament of confirmation after he posted an online photo condemning the marriage amendment, according to his family.}}

Shana Cihak says her 17-year-old son, Lennon, was not allowed to participate in the religious rite of passage at Assumption Church in Barnesville last month after posting a Facebook picture of himself holding a political sign that he changed to oppose the constitutional amendment.

The proposed measure to ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota was defeated Nov. 6.

On Thursday, Assumption pastor the Rev. Gary LaMoine declined to confirm or deny whether Cihak was not allowed to receive confirmation.

LaMoine said he’s been in consultation with Diocese of Crookston officials and he plans to address the matter with parishioners at Assumption Church this weekend.

A spokesman for the diocese did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“I’d prefer that it would have been handled internally but for some reason or another, it just hasn’t been able to be done that way,” LaMoine said.

“So I’ll say something to my parishioners. … I don’t want to let it go on without any kind of response.”

{{Ethnic rebels in northern Myanmar staged a deadly attack on a prison convoy, state media reported Friday, highlighting one of the country’s violence-plagued corners days before President Barack Obama’s historic visit to the former pariah state.}}

About 30 ethnic Kachin rebels ambushed the five-car convoy Wednesday in Kachin state, killing two convicts and injuring 14 others, the state-owned Kyemon newspaper reported.

The newspaper did not give further details about the attack or the rebels’ possible motives.

While President Thein Sein’s government has concluded cease-fires with several ethnic guerrilla groups, it still faces a bitter insurgency from the Kachin Independence Army.

Clashes between the military and ethnic rebels have displaced tens of thousands of civilians, prompting calls by the U.S. and others for humanitarian access to the isolated area.

Obama will visit Myanmar on Monday, in a first for a sitting U.S. president. White House officials on Thursday said he will use his visit “to lock down progress and to push on areas where progress is urgently needed” — most notably freeing political prisoners and ending ethnic tensions in the western state of Rakhine and the northern state of Kachin.

Obama’s stop in Myanmar, scheduled to last about six hours, is the centerpiece of his first foreign tour since winning re-election.

He will bookend the trip with visits to Thailand and Cambodia, a southeast Asian country with an abysmal record on human rights.

{{In USA, an elementary school teacher in south central Louisiana November 7, allegedly told her class of fourth graders that she was “attending America’s funeral” because Barack Obama won the presidential election.}}

Students say the teacher, clad in all black that day, also said the United States will turn into a “new China” under Obama, KATC reports.

“She made the comment that since Michelle Obama is first lady and with the meal plan she has, the kids are gonna look like toothpicks in a few months,” parent Lindsey Shello told KATC.

Shello’s nine-year-old son is a student in the teacher’s class. She was outraged about the episode, and that the teacher had vented her feelings on Facebook.

The teacher, who is never named in the KATC report, reportedly requested a personal meeting with Shello. The teacher also cautioned Shello that her son might be embellishing the story.

However, other kids are apparently telling the same story. Another parent, Chassatey Jackson, says her children have related the same basic account, KATC reports.

Both parents agree that teachers should avoid expressing political opinions in fourth-grade classrooms.

“Her personal opinion needs to remain her personal opinion. She doesn’t need to push it on the kids,” said Shello, according to KATC.

Parents have reportedly contacted the principal at Delcambre Elementary as well as the local school board.

This incident certainly isn’t the first time in recent memory that a schoolteacher has been accused of interjecting personal political beliefs into the classroom.

Just last month, Linda White, an eighth-grade science teacher in Clinton, Mississippi, allegedly told her students of her belief that Obama is a Muslim and, for that reason, he should not serve a second term.

White also reportedly told students she supports Romney because he is a “good Christian,” according to WJTV, the CBS affiliate in Jackson, Mississippi.

White has since resigned her teaching post.

Earlier in October, Lynette Gaymon, a geometry teacher at Charles Carroll High School in Philadelphia reportedly ridiculed sophomore Samantha Pawlucy for wearing a pro-Romney shirt to school and told Pawlucy to remove it.

Gaymon allegedly called Carroll High a “Democratic school,” reports Philly.com. Gaymon, who is black, is also said to have suggested that the shirt was comparable to shirt supporting the Ku Klux Klan.

In the aftermath, Gaymon, the geometry teacher, reportedly received death threats, according to Philly.com. Pawlucy transferred to a different school.

In May of 2012, Tanya Dixon-Neely, a social studies teacher at North Rowan High School in Spencer, North Carolina, told a student in her class that he could be arrested for criticizing Obama, and that people had been arrested for criticizing President George W. Bush.

A student captured Dixon-Neely’s rant on hidden video, which later went viral on YouTube.

“Let me tell you something,” Dixon-Neely says in the video, “you will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom.”

The local school board suspended Dixon-Neely, but with pay, according to WBTV, the CBS television affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In 2009, a fairly disturbing video emerged on YouTube showing about 20 children at B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey singing pro-Obama anthems.

One song the children in New Jersey sang quotes directly from the spiritual “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” reports Fox News.

However, the lyrics replace Jesus with Obama: “He said red, yellow, black or white/All are equal in his sight. Barack Hussein Obama.”

{{Sixty years after a landmark accord started German government compensation for victims of Nazi crimes, fund administrators and German officials say payments to Holocaust survivors are needed more than ever as they enter their final years.}}

Most Holocaust survivors experienced extreme trauma as children, suffered serious malnutrition, and lost almost all of their relatives — leaving them today with severe psychological and medical problems, and little or no family support network to help them cope.

In acknowledgement of that, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble was to sign off officially Thursday on revisions to the original 1952 compensation treaty, increasing pensions for those living in eastern Europe and broadening who is eligible for payments.

Contributions to home care for survivors already have been increased.

“Survivors are passing away on a daily basis but the other side is that individual survivors are needing more help than ever,” the Chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Julius Berman, told The Associated Press.

“While a person came out of the camps very young and eventually developed a life of their own over the years, the impact of what happened at the beginning is now coming to the fore. Whether it’s mentally or physically, they’re sicker than their peers of the same age.”

Germany has paid — primarily to Jewish survivors — some €70 billion ($89 billion) in compensation overall for Nazi crimes since the agreement was signed in 1952.

In one change to the treaty that Germany agreed to earlier this year, the country will provide compensation payments to a new category of Nazi victims — some 80,000 Jews who fled ahead of the advancing German army and mobile killing squads and eventually resettled in the former Soviet Union.

They became eligible Nov. 1 for one-time payments of €2,556 ($3,253). The amendment also formalizes an increase in pensions for Holocaust survivors living in formerly communist eastern Europe to the same as those living elsewhere — €300 ($382) per month — from the €200 to €260 ($255 to $331) they had been receiving.

Schaeuble said on Inforadio ahead of the signing ceremony at the Jewish Museum that once Germany and the Claims Conference had identified the additional victims living in the east, it was only natural to include them in the compensation agreement.

“We still do not know the names of all of the victims,” Schaeuble said. “The crimes of the Holocaust were so inconceivably enormous that you can’t know all of the victims or those with claims, so you have to adjust it again and again.”

Germany already increased payments this year for home care for Holocaust survivors by 15 percent over 2011, and has pledged to raise that further in 2013 and 2014.

Compensation has been ever evolving since the 1952 agreement, with annual negotiations between the Claims Conference and the German government on who should receive funds and how much will be paid.

Still, even 67 years after the end of World War II, there is much to set right, said Stuart Eizenstat, the former U.S. ambassador to the European Union who serves as the Claims Conference’s special negotiator.

“One of the things that drives me is that with all of that, the best surveys out there are there are probably 500,000 survivors alive today worldwide and half of them are in poverty or very close to the poverty line.”

{{Xi Jinping has been confirmed as the man to lead China for the next decade.}}

Mr Xi led the new Politburo Standing Committee onto the stage at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, signalling his elevation to the top of China’s ruling Communist Party.

Meanwhile For the first time in China’s modern history, there are hints that a woman has come very close to reaching the highest levels of government.

China today gave its strongest indication yet on who will lead the country for the next decade and for the first time in the history of the communist regime the leadership may include a woman.

At the close of the 18th National Party Congress the state run news agency, Xinhua, released a list of 10 names.

It is widely expected that the seven to nine members who will make up the all-powerful Standing Committee are on the list.

As expected Vice President Xi Jinping and Le Keqiang, a protégé of the departing leader Hu Jintao, were at the top of the list.

But also included is Liu Yandong, a woman thought to be in her 60s from Jiangsu province.

Liu is the epitome of Communist Party royalty, a princess among the many “princelings.” But in China, the policies and personal details of politicians are a state secret.

Very few in this country of over 1.3 billion know more than scant biographical details such as education and former political posts.

Still, the appointment of a woman to top party leadership would be a notable milestone in the government’s 91-year-old history.

Liu was educated at Tsinghua University, outgoing President Hu Jintao’s alma mater.

She serves as his deputy in the party’s youth league and later earned a masters degree in sociology from Renmin University of China.

According to a leaked U.S. cable, Liu’s husband of more than 40 years, Yang Yuanxing, “once told diplomats that his wife speaks good English and is keen on photography.”

Aside from these scant details, little is known about her.

{{Workers across the European Union have launched an unprecedented string of strikes in a coordinated battle against austerity cuts on Wednesday.}}

The strikes are intended to paralyse factories and public sector offices, and have grounded more than 700 flights. Organisers are urging national leaders to abandon fiscal austerity measures and address growing social anxiety.

Walkouts are expected in Spain, Greece, Portugal and Italy, with other protests planned in Belgium, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.

It is the first time unions have engaged in simultaneous strikes across the continent, said the European Trade Union Confederation, which organised the “Day of Action and Solidarity”.

Unions in Spain, the eurozone’s fifth-largest economy, and Portugal, ranked 14th, started strikes at midnight to protest against austerity measures that have combined tax rises with cuts in salaries, pensions, benefits and social services.

Spain, where one in four workers is unemployed in a deep recession, is holding its second general strike in eight months to protest severe budget cuts.

“There has been huge disruption, hundreds of flights have been cancelled, public transport has been hit and the strike is affecting many people,” reported Al Jazeera’s Tim Friend in Madrid.

“People are asking for growth in Spain, rather than cuts, but the government is set on cutting services in order to balance the books.”