Tag: InternationalNews

{Almost one third of embattled President Temer’s cabinet under investigation for involvement in ‘Cash Wash’ scheme.}

Brazil’s Supreme Court has announced corruption investigations into at least eight ministers and dozens more top politicians in a sweeping decision that affects almost one third of embattled President Michel Temer’s government and many of his top allies.

The list of names under investigation released by Justice Edson Fachin on Tuesday read like a Who’s Who of Brazilian politics, tarnishing past statesmen and potential presidential candidates alike.

The list, whose contents had been subject to furious speculation and a number of leaks, became public when Fachin lifted the seal on plea bargain testimony from 77 employees of construction company Odebrecht, which has admitted paying millions of dollars in bribes.

In Sao Paulo, residents banged pots and pans in protest against political corruption, while in the capital Brasilia deputies left a session in the lower house earlier in the day as news of the list began to break.

The investigation into eight ministers, or nearly a third of the president’s cabinet, poses a serious threat to Temer’s efforts to pass austerity reforms that he says are needed to regain investor confidence and lift the economy out of its worst recession on record.

Temer’s office declined to comment.

“More than having eight ministers on the list, the biggest problem for the government is seeing its whole political nucleus there,” said Danilo Gennari, partner with Brasilia-based consultancy Distrito Relacoes Governamentais, referring to the implication of key government allies.

Among that core is Temer’s chief of staff Eliseu Padilha, an experienced politician considered key in negotiations with Congress to pass the administration’s crucial pension reform.

Padilha said he will defend himself in court.

{{‘Institutional paralysis’ }}

Temer’s ministers of foreign affairs, trade and agriculture also are under investigation, as well as the heads of both houses of Brazil’s Congress and former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

“The political crisis will deepen and we risk an institutional paralysis because the entire Brazilian political system is under question,” opposition senator Jorge Viana, who is under investigation himself, said in a statement.

It also throws into doubt the credibility of a number of potential presidential candidates for elections in 2018, with some of the most commonly mentioned names under investigation.

PSDB party leader Aecio Neves and former Foreign Minister Jose Serra are cited on Fachin’s list, with a possible investigation of Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin referred to a lower court.

Temer has vowed to suspend ministers who are charged and dismiss any if indicted.

Tuesday’s decision to make public the names targeted in the investigation goes back to March, when Brazil’s top public prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to open 83 investigations into senior politicians based on the Odebrecht employees’ testimony.

Local media have reported the testimony accuses dozens of politicians of taking bribes to help what was once Latin America’s biggest builder win lucrative contracts with state-run oil company Petrobras.

Source:Al Jazeera

{The highest honour given to a citizen by the UN, Yousafzai received the award to promote girls education.}

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has been appointed a UN Messenger of Peace to promote girls education, more than four years after a Taliban gunman shot her in the head.

At 19, Yousafzai is the youngest Messenger of Peace, the highest honour given by the UN for an initial period of two years.

She was also the youngest person to win the Nobel peace prize in 2014 when she was 17.

The Pakistani education activist came to prominence when she was shot in the head in 2012 as she was leaving school in Pakistan’s Swat valley, northwest of the country’s capital Islamabad.

She was targeted for her campaign against efforts by the Taliban to deny women education.

“You are not only a hero, but you are a very committed and generous person,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told Yousafzai.

Other current Messengers of Peace include actors Leonardo di Caprio (climate change), Charlize Theron (prevention of HIV and elimination of violence against women), and Michael Douglas (disarmament).

Yousafzai has become a regular speaker on the global stage and visited refugee camps in Rwanda and Kenya last July to highlight the plight of refugee girls from Burundi and Somalia.

“Now this is a new life, this is a second life and it is for the purpose of education.”

“The extremists tried all their best to stop me, they tried to kill me and they didn’t succeed,” Yousafzai said on Monday.

In January 2009, Yousafzai began to keep a diary for the BBC’s Urdu service, in which she detailed how she had been affected by the Taliban’s rule, and what life was like for her and her peers under them.

She wrote then under the pen name “Gul Makai”, the name of the heroine from a local Pashtun folk tale.

Swat valley was under the control of the local chapter of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) during that time. The TTP-Swat enforced a strict interpretation of Islam in the valley, ruling with an iron fist.

One of its many edicts enforced a complete ban on women’s education.

Yousafzai now lives in the UK, where she received medical treatment following her shooting.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Tillerson says ‘Assad family reign coming to end’ as he heads to Moscow after talks with G7 ministers on Syrian war.}

The US secretary of state has said he hopes Russia will abandon its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad because actions such as last week’s chemical attack have stripped him of all legitimacy.

Rex Tillerson made the remarks at the conclusion on Tuesday in Italy of a meeting of foreign ministers of the Group of Seven (G7) and “like-minded” countries.

“It is clear to us the reign of the Assad family is coming to an end,” he said shortly before leaving the Tuscan city of Lucca for Moscow.

“We hope that the Russian government concludes that they have aligned themselves with an unreliable partner in Bashar al-Assad.”

A British proposal to slap extra sanctions on Syrian and Russian military officials, however, failed to win the support of the G7, Angelino Alfano, Italy’s foreign minister, said.

Alfano, who chaired Tuesday’s talks, said: “At this time there is no consensus for further new sanctions as an effective tool for reaching the objective that we have set ourselves.”

He also said that Russia should not be “pushed into a corner” over Syria, but that it should put pressure on Assad to stop the use of chemical weapons, and should join the international push for peace in Syria.

The Syrian government has denied it was behind the April 4 attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun.

Russia has also rejected the accusations that Assad used chemical arms against his own people while stating that it will not cut its ties with him.

Assad has been locked in a six-year-old civil war that has devastated Syria and displaced half its population.

“Returning to pseudo-attempts to resolve the crisis by repeating mantras that Assad must step down cannot help sort things out,” Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said on Monday.

The same day, Boris Johnson, UK’s foreign minister, praised last week’s US missile strike on a Syrian airbase as a “game changer”, and said that support for Assad “was toxifying the reputation of Russia” and suggested that sanctions could be imposed on Russia if it refused to change course.

However, Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, says it is questionable whether sanctions would have any effect on Syria.

“We know that sanctions alone will not make much of a difference,” she said, speaking to Al Jazeera from London on Tuesday.

“We have seen sanctions against Ukraine, and they didn’t achieve much. So, the only way forward is a dialogue with Russia.

“Rex Tillerson’s visit to Russia is not going to be a game changer. It is a start but we know that after this visit, Russia is not going to declare it has severed its ties with the Assad regime. What will make a difference is if Russia sees that there is the political will on part of the United States.”

Khatib said if the US took this opportunity to show that regime change or political transition was a serious priority and that the administration was willing to engage in political action in order to make it happen, it would cause Western countries to rally behind the US.

“This will be what will bring Russia to the negotiating table as [the Russians] have so far only paid lip service to political change,” she said.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Number of executions drop worldwide, Amnesty International says, attributing decrease mainly to fewer hangings in Iran.}

The number of executions worldwide dropped by 37 percent in 2016 compared to the year before, mainly because Iran hanged fewer people, Amnesty International said in its 2016 global review of the death penalty published on Tuesday.

China executed more people than all other countries in the world put together, Amnesty said.

But it is difficult to get a clear number as Beijing classifies most information related to the death penalty as “state secrets”. It is estimated to be in the 1,000’s each year.

“China wants to be a leader on the world stage, but when it comes to the death penalty it is leading in the worst possible way – executing more people annually than any other country in the world,” said Salil Shetty, secretary-general of Amnesty International.

“The Chinese government has recognised it is a laggard in terms of openness and judicial transparency, but it persists in actively concealing the true scale of executions. It is high time for China to lift the veil on this deadly secret and finally come clean about its death penalty system.”

Excluding China, states around the world executed 1,032 people in 2016, according to Amnesty’s records.

The vast majority of those executions – 856 – were carried out in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

{{Historic low in US}}

Meanwhile, the US reached a historic low in its use of the death penalty in 2016.

For the first time in a decade the US was not one of the five biggest executioners, giving hope to human rights activists. Still 20 people were put to death there, mostly by lethal injection.

Another 2,832 people are still on death row in the US.

Amnesty said the decrease in executions was due partly to litigation on lethal injection protocols and challenges in sourcing chemicals in several states.

The group added that the possible resolution of some lethal injection challenges could see the level of executions start to take off again in 2017 – including in the state of Arkansas, the governor scheduled eight executions during a 10-day period this April.

At least 856 executions were carried out across the MENA region in 2016, a drop of 28 percent from 2015 which had seen a sharp increase from previous years.

Iran executed at least 567 people alone, accounting for 66 percent of all the confirmed executions in the region.

Saudi Arabia carried out at least 154 executions in 2016 – just four fewer than the record high of 158 executions in 2015, which was the highest recorded figure since 1995.

In Egypt the number of executions doubled from 22 in 2015 to 44 in 2016 – ranking the country sixth place worldwide.

That increase came as President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi cracked down on political rivals, including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Amnesty said “Egypt has witnessed an unprecedented increase in mass death sentences after unfair trials”.

“Many MENA states justify their use of the death penalty by claiming that they are acting to counter grave security threats, despite there being no evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime,” said James Lynch, head of the death penalty team at Amnesty International.

“The reality is that many of those executed across the region are from poor and marginalised communities, in hundreds of cases sentenced to death for non-violent crimes.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah vow to react to any future ‘aggressions against Syria’, whoever carries them out.}

Allies of Damascus have threatened reprisals against any party that carries out “aggression” against Syria, two days after US missile strikes hit a Syrian airbase.

“The aggression against Syria oversteps all red lines. We will react firmly to any aggression against Syria and to any infringement of red lines, whoever carries them out,” said a statement on Sunday from the Syria-based joint operations room for government backers Russia, Iran and allied forces including Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

“The United States knows very well our ability to react,” said the statement published on the website of Al-Watan, a daily newspaper close to the regime.

The statement also accused the US of acting before any investigation into the suspected chemical attack was conducted and did not wait for any UN approval.

“We, as Syria’s allies, will increase our military support toward Syria and support its people in many other ways,” the statement said.

On Friday, the US carried out its first military action against Bashar al-Assad’s government since the start of Syria’s six-year war.

The cruise missile strike came after a suspected chemical attack on Idlib’s rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday killed at least 87 people, including many children.

“We condemn any attack targeting civilians and also condemn what happened in Khan Sheikhoun, even if we are convinced it was a premeditated act by certain countries and organisations to serve as a pretext to attack Syria,” Sunday’s statement added.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Moscow slams London after British FM cancels visit, saying UK has no real influence in international affairs.}

Russia has slammed the United Kingdom after British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson cancelled a scheduled visit to Moscow over its support for the Syrian government, claiming Britain has “no real influence” internationally.

The cancellation “once again confirms doubts about the added value of dialogue with the British, who do not have their own position on the majority of current issues,” the foreign ministry said in a statement on Sunday.

The British have “no real influence on the course of international affairs, remaining ‘in the shadow’ of their strategic partners,” it added.

“We don’t believe we need dialogue with London more than [London] needs it [with us],” it said.

The statement added there was a “fundamental misunderstanding or ignorance of what is happening in Syria and Russia’s efforts to resolve the crisis”.

{{Trip cancelled }}

Johnson announced on Saturday he would not travel to Moscow next week, saying that “developments in Syria have changed the situation fundamentally”.

“My priority is now to continue contact with the US and others in the run-up to the G7 meeting on 10-11 April,” he said.

“We deplore Russia’s continued defence of the Assad regime even after the chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians.”

Johnson then called on Russia to do “everything possible to bring about a political settlement in Syria and work with the rest of the international community to ensure that the shocking events of the last week are never repeated”.

His decision came in response to a suspected chemical weapons attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday which killed at least 86 people, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Moscow has sought to deflect blame from its long-time ally Bashar al-Assad over the incident and says Syrian jets struck a rebel arms depot where “toxic substances” were being put inside bombs.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Basque group hands over arms after waging a deadly independence campaign for more than 50 years.}

The armed Basque separatist group ETA has formally given authorities in France information about the location of its arm stashes, according to an independent verification panel.

ETA says its initiative will bring the final curtain down on a decades-long armed campaign to gain independence for the Basque country straddling the Spanish-French border.

“This information [about the arms caches] was immediately conveyed to the relevant French authorities, who will now secure and collect ETA’s arsenal,” the International Verification Commission (IVC), which is in charge of verifying the disarming process but is not recognised by either France or Spain, said in a statement on Saturday.

The panel said it “believes that this step constitutes the disarmament of ETA”.

The commission’s spokesman, Ram Manikkalingam, a former adviser on the Sri Lanka peace process, told reporters in the French city of Bayonne that the panel had received the list of caches via “the artisans of peace” – a French civil society group headed by an environmentalist, Txetx Etcheverry.

French police are on standby to take possession of the weapons, officials told AFP news agency.

Inactive for more than five years, ETA had said it would hand over its arms, a historic step following a decaes-long violent campaign that claimed more than 800 lives, mostly in Spain.

Disarmament is the second-to-last step demanded by France and Spain, which want ETA to formally disband. The organisation has not said whether it would do that.

“Disarming, of course isn’t the same as disbanding, and we are told ETA members have gone away for a period of reflection to decide where they go from here,” Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee, reporting from Bilbao, said.

“One thing is for certain though: an armed group without arms doesn’t have much point’.

{{‘Nothing in return’}}

In Spain’s capital, Madrid, the government on Saturday dismissed ETA’s disarmament as a unilateral affair and warned that the group – which it denounces as a “terrorist” organisation – could expect “nothing” in return.

“It will not reap any political advantage or profit,” said Inigo Mendez de Vigo, Spain’s culture minister and its government spokesman.

“May it disarm, may it dissolve, may it ask forgiveness and help to clear up the crimes which have not been resolved,” he said.

A government source told the Reuters news agency that Madrid did not believe the group would hand over all its arms, while Spain’s state prosecutor has asked the High Court to examine those surrendered for murder weapons used in unresolved cases.

Anger among Basques at political and cultural repression during the Spanish dictatorship of General Francisco Franco led to the founding of ETA – which in Basque stands for “Basque Country and Freedom” – in 1959.

Following Spain’s return to democracy in the 1970s, the Basque region gained more autonomy and the group’s continued bombings and assassinations caused public support to wane.

One year after its last deadly attack, the killing of a French police officer near Paris in March 2010, ETA announced it was renouncing violence.

{{‘Death and pain’}}

Journalist Gorka Landaburu, who had written articles critical of ETA and in return got a bomb in the mail which left him blind in one eye and took a thumb off, said he believed the entire armed struggle was a waste of time.

“It’s easy to apologise – I’m not asking them to punish themselves in public. But they need to think hard about what they actually gained in 50 years,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Nothing. They just caused death and pain, even on their own side.”

The group chose not to disarm in 2011 when it called its truce, but has been severely weakened in the past decade after hundreds of its members were arrested in joint Spanish and French operations and weapons were seized.

In a symbolic gesture in 2014, ETA released a video showing masked members giving up a limited weapons cache to verifiers.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Some 60 passengers on the ferry were returning from a wedding when it collided with another boat in the Irrawaddy Delta.}

At least 20 people were killed when a boat carrying scores of wedding guests capsized in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy Delta, officials said, with more feared drowned as rescue workers renewed their search in daylight.

Most of the dead were women, according officials, who said the boat sank on Friday evening when it collided with a river barge in Pathein, a port city west of the commercial capital Yangon.

“Altogether 16 women and four men were killed in the boat accident,” regional MP Aung Thu Htwe told AFP on Saturday morning.

“We estimate nine people are still missing,” he said, adding that some 30 people had been rescued alive the night before.

The boat was believed to be carrying between 60 and 80 people when it sank, according to state media and a local police officer.

“They were crossing to the other side of the river after attending a wedding in Pathein. Most of them were relatives from the same village,” said the police officer, who requested anonymity.

Both boats were unlit when they collided in the middle of the river, he added.

Local authorities and red cross workers resumed the search operation this morning, the police officer said.

“We will do search and rescue for the whole day,” he told AFP.

Fatal boat accidents are common in Myanmar, where many people living along its flood-prone rivers rely on often overcrowded ferries for transport.

In October, 73 people, including many teachers and students, died when their packed vessel capsized in central Myanmar on the Chindwin River.

Earlier that year in April at least 21 people, including nine children, died after their boat sank off the coast of Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine.

Around 60 people died the year before, in March 2015, when their ferry went down in the same treacherous waters off the Rakhine coast.

Source:Al Jazeera