Tag: InternationalNews

{Police investigate apparent attack on census workers and soldiers guarding them in nation’s second biggest city, Lahore.}

Islamabad, Pakistan – An explosion has targeted a Pakistani government census team, killing at least five people in the eastern city of Lahore, officials say.

The blast on Wednesday morning in Pakistan’s second largest city also wounded at least nine people, all suffering from major injuries, according to a source at Lahore’s General Hospital, where they were being treated.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group claimed responsibility, saying it was a suicide attack.

Khawaja Imran Nazir, health minister of Punjab province, of which Lahore is the main city, confirmed the death toll.

“The target seems to be the census team and the soldiers guarding them,” Malik Ahmed Khan, a spokesperson for the Punjab government, told local television news channel Geo.

MIitary sources told Al Jazeera that four military personnel – three army soldiers and one member of the air force – were killed in the attack.

{{‘Act of terrorism’}}

Rana Sanaullah, a senior provincial minister, told Geo the attack “appeared to be an act of terrorism”.

“Sacrifice of precious lives of civil enumerators and soldiers is beyond any doubt a great sacrifice,” Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s army chief, said in a statement, without giving any details about the number of soldiers killed in the bombing.

Pakistan’s Bureau of Statistics launched its first door-to-door population census since 1998 last month, working in conjunction with the military, which has deployed 200,000 troops to provide security for the exercise.

At least 119,000 government employees are taking part in the exercise as enumerators.

The lead-up to the census has been marked by political debate on how the results may show changing demographics – potentially redrawing electoral constituencies – across the country.

Television footage from the scene showed a destroyed vehicle and debris scattered on the road, as police formed a security cordon around the site’s perimeter.

{{Surge in violence}}

Pakistan has seen a surge in violence in the past two months, starting with a series of attacks that killed more than 130 people in mid-February.

Those attacks were claimed by the Pakistan Taliban and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

At least 13 people were killed in Lahore when a suicide bomber targeted police at a protest demonstration on February 13

In response, Pakistan’s military announced it was launching a new operation – dubbed Radd-al-Fasaad, or Elimination of Mischief/Chaos – across the country, to cement the gains made against the Pakistan Taliban during a previous three-year operation launched in 2014.

Source:Al Jazeera

{US-South Korean announcement follows threats by the North of retaliation against expansion of international sanctions.}

North Korea has fired a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan, according to South Korea and the US military.

The development comes just days after North Korea threatened to retaliate if the global community expanded sanctions targeting the country.

South Korea’s defence ministry said the missile had flown about 60km on Wednesday. It was launched from the Sinpo region on North Korea’s eastern coast.

“The military is keeping a close watch over North Korea’s provocative moves and maintaining a high defence posture,” it said.

The US military said it was a KN-15 medium-range ballistic missile which it had determined posed no threat to the US mainland.

Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, confirmed that North Korea had launched “yet another” intermediate-range ballistic missile.

“The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment,” he said in a statement.

Japan condemned the launch and said it violated UN Security Council resolutions.

“Japan never tolerates North Korea’s repeated provocative actions. The government strictly protested and strongly condemned it,” Yoshihide Suga, the chief cabinet secretary, said.

{{Trump-Xi meeting}}

North Korea is on a quest to develop a long-range missile capable of hitting the US mainland with a nuclear warhead, and has so far staged five nuclear tests, two of them last year.

Wednesday’s developments came after US President Donald Trump said, before a meeting with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, that the US was prepared to go it alone in bringing the North to heel if China did not step in.

North Korea’s foreign ministry on Monday criticised the US for its tough talk and for an ongoing joint military exercise with South Korea and Japan which the North sees as a dress rehearsal for invasion.

The “reckless actions” are driving the tense situation on the Korean peninsula “to the brink of a war”, a ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the official KCNA news agency.

The idea that the US could deprive North Korea of its “nuclear deterrent” through sanctions is “the wildest dream”, it said.

Trump and Xi will hold their first face-to-face meeting on Thursday at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida where the growing tensions on the Korean peninsula are expected to be high on the agenda.

The hardened US stance followed recent North Korean missile launches that North Korea described as practice for an attack on US bases in Japan.

In February the North simultaneously fired four ballistic missiles off its east coast, three of which fell close to Japan.

North Korea is barred under UN resolutions from carrying out ballistic missile launches or nuclear tests.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Suspected ISIL fighters unleash overnight attacks after infiltrating northern Iraqi city, security sources say.}

Dozens of people have been killed in a series of attacks in the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit, according to security sources.

The overnight attacks on Wednesday came after several suspected ISIL fighters infiltrated Tikrit, around 170km north of the capital, Baghdad.

The attackers, who reportedly wore police uniforms and used a police vehicle to enter the city, targeted a security checkpoint and the house of a police colonel, who was killed with four members of his family, according to officers.

Two suicide bombers detonated their vests when surrounded by police, and three others were killed in separate clashes.

A total of 31 bodies were taken to hospital, including 14 belonging to policemen, Nawfal Mustafa, a doctor at the city’s main hospital, told the Reuters news agency.

The death toll rose in the morning as more bodies were found, belonging to civilians killed in their shops.

The violence, which also left at least 42 people wounded, prompted Tikrit authorities to declare a curfew in the city. Sporadic gunfire could still be heard on Wednesday morning.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but ISIL fighters have carried out similar attacks in Tikrit in the past, in an apparent diversionary tactic as Iraqi forces push ahead with a US-backed offensive to dislodge the group from the remaining districts under its control in Mosul, further north.

ISIL, or the Islmamic state of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized Tikrit during a lightning offensive that overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in the summer of 2014, but Iraqi forces recaptured it the following year.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Opposition says government or Russian jets pounded the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib.}

At least 58 people, including nine children, were killed in an air raid that released “toxic gas” on the rebel-held Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday, a monitor said.

Tuesday’s attack caused many people to choke or faint, and some had foam coming out of their mouths, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, citing medical sources who described it as a sign of a gas attack.

Damascus has repeatedly denied using such weapons and the Syrian army could not immediately be reached for comment.

The AFP news agency later reported, citing one if its journalists on the scene, that a rocket had slammed into a hospital where the victims were being treated, bringing rubble down on top of medics as they struggled to deal with victims.

The Observatory monitoring group, which tracks the war through a network of contacts on the ground, was unable to confirm the nature of the substance used.

Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher, reporting from Beirut, said locals on ground expected the number of dead would increase.

“The national opposition in Syria is calling for the United Nations to launch an immediate inquiry for the security council to meet and to condemn behind this attack,” he said.

Syrian government or Russian jets pounded the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idib in the morning, the monitoring group said.

On Sunday, suspected Russian fighter jets bombed a hospital in a city in the northern province of Idlib, wounding several people, a rescue group said.

At least ten people were wounded when three strikes targeted the main hospital in Maaret al-Numan, destroying the building, a White Helmets group official told Al Jazeera.

The White Helmets, also know as the Syrian Civil Defence, is are volunteer rescuers that operate in rebel-held territory.

“For the past week, Idlib has been targeted by ongoing air strikes, and after yesterday’s attack, one of its main hospitals has been mostly destroyed and can no longer function,” Majid, another member of the White Helmets, said.

Over the past year, Doctors Without Borders has received reports of at least 71 attacks on at least 32 different health facilities, which it runs or supports in Syria.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Death toll, currently at 273, could rise as rescuers search for more victims and survivors after flooding and mudslides.}

Colombians are preparing to bury scores of decomposing bodies as rescuers continue to search for victims of weekend flooding and landslides that devastated a city in the southern part of the country, killing at least 273 people.

Desperate families queued for blocks in the heat to search a morgue for loved ones who died when several rivers burst their banks in the early hours of Saturday, sending water, mud and debris crashing down streets and into houses as people slept.

Bodies wrapped in white sheets lay on the concrete floor of the morgue in Mocoa on Monday as officials sought to bury them as soon as possible to avoid the spread of disease.

“Please speed up delivery of the bodies because they are decomposing,” said Yadira Andrea Munoz, a 45-year-old housewife who expected to receive the remains of two relatives who died in the tragedy.

But officials asked for families to be patient.

“We don’t want bodies to be delivered wrongly,” said Carlos Eduardo Valdes, head of the forensic science institute.

The death toll has ticked up as rescuers searched with dogs and machinery in the mud-choked rubble.

Many families in Mocoa have spent days and nights digging through the debris with their hands despite lack of food, clean water and electricity.

“We spent two days here already, our family members were identified yesterday and their bodies still haven’t been delivered,” Andres Lopez, a survivor, told Al Jazeera.

“There are serious logistical issues. There are only two officials doing the paperwork.”

Three days after floodwaters rushed through the city of Mocoa, the authorities said they will check any report of movement that could be a sign of life and are not yet ready to concede that it is too late find anyone alive from the list of the more than 200 people missing.

“We do not like to create false expectations but where there is a possibility of life we will do everything possible,” said Carlos Ivan Marquez, director of Colombia’s National Unit of Disaster and Risk Management.

President Juan Manuel Santos, who made a third visit to the area on Monday, blamed climate change for the disaster, saying Mocoa had received one-third of its usual monthly rain in just one night, causing the rivers to burst their banks.

Others said deforestation in surrounding mountains meant there were few trees to prevent water washing down bare slopes.

More than 500 people were staying in emergency housing and social services had helped 10 lost children find their parents. As many as 43 children were killed.

Al Jazeera’s Alessandro Rampietti, reporting from Mocoa, said the government has declared an economic, social, and ecological emergency in the area to make it easier to transfer public funds for aid and reconstruction.

Families of the dead will receive about $6,400 in aid and the government will cover hospital and funeral costs.

Even in a country where heavy rains, a mountainous landscape and informal construction combined make landslides a common occurrence, the scale of the Mocoa disaster was daunting compared with recent landslides, including one in 2015 that killed nearly 100 people.

Colombia’s deadliest landslide, the 1985 Armero disaster, killed more than 20,000 people.

Source:Al Jazeera

Republicans threaten to change Senate rules to prevent Democrats from blocking Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation.

Democrats have gathered enough support to hold up a Senate confirmation vote on President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee but Republicans threaten to change the Senate rules to ensure conservative judge Neil Gorsuch gets the lifetime job.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-9 along party lines on Monday to send Gorsuch’s nomination to the full Senate, setting up a political showdown this week between Trump’s fellow Republicans and the opposition Democrats that appears likely to trigger a change in long-standing Senate rules to allow his confirmation.

Democrats, portraying Gorsuch as so conservative he is outside the judicial mainstream, have amassed 42 senators in support of a procedural hurdle called a filibuster requiring a super-majority of 60 votes in the Republican-led, 100-seat Senate to allow a confirmation vote.

Even before the panel voted, committee member Christopher Coons put the Democrats over the threshold as the 41st senator backing the filibuster bid, Reuters reported.

The Senate’s Republican leaders insist Gorsuch will be confirmed on the Senate floor on Friday regardless of what the Democrats do. Republicans hold a 52-48 Senate majority.

Senate Republicans who last year refused to even consider Democratic former president Barack Obama’s nomination of appellate judge Merrick Garland to fill the same high court vacancy that Trump has selected Gorsuch to fill.

“Democrats, including me, are still furious at the way Judge Merrick Garland was treated last year. But the traditions and principles that have defined the Senate are crumbling, and we are poised to hasten that destruction this week,” Coons said.

Gorsuch was nominated to fill a vacancy created by the February 2016 death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

{{Integrity questioned}}

Democrats have accused Gorsuch of being insufficiently independent of Trump, evading questions on key Supreme Court rulings of the past including on abortion and political spending, and favouring corporate interests over ordinary Americans.

In the face of the filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would be expected to force a confirmation vote by having the Senate change its rules and allow for a simple majority vote for confirmation of Supreme Court justices, a move sometimes called the “nuclear option” that Trump favours.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, leading the filibuster effort, said McConnell should have the “vision and courage to see past this impasse” and not “go nuclear,” suggesting that Trump replace Gorsuch with a new consensus nominee chosen after meeting with Democrats.

Senate confirmation of Gorsuch, 49, would restore the nine-seat high court’s conservative majority, fulfilling one of Trump’s top promises during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump in January nominated Gorsuch, a conservative appeals court judge from Colorado. He could be expected to serve for decades.

On the Senate floor, McConnell called the Democratic strategy “a new low,” saying there was no principled reason to oppose a judge as well qualified and widely respected as Gorsuch.

He did not explicitly say he would use the “nuclear option,” but several Republicans said that would happen.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the decision would be McConnell’s. Republican Senator John McCain, a long-time opponent of Senate rules changes, told reporters he would support the move.

{{‘Dangerous precedent’}}

Republicans control the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade.

The inability of Senate Republicans to coax enough Democratic support to avoid the “nuclear option” reflected the intense partisan divide in Washington and the Trump administration’s failure to win the cooperation of the opposition party.

Senators Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s top Democrat, and panel member Patrick Leahy, along with fellow Democrats Mark Warner and Ben Cardin, also announced filibuster support on Monday.

Spicer accused Democrats of partisan obstruction that sets “a very dangerous precedent” and told a briefing that “we’re obviously disappointed that the overwhelming majority of them are still playing politics with the nation’s highest court”.

The actual confirmation vote would be by a simple majority if the filibuster is stopped. To date, four Democrats oppose a filibuster, four short of the eight that Republicans needed.

With the failure of Republican healthcare legislation in Congress and with courts blocking the president’s ban on people from several Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, winning confirmation for Gorsuch has taken on even more importance for Trump.

The 60-vote super-majority threshold that gives the minority party power to hold up the majority party has over the decades forced the Senate to try to achieve bipartisanship in legislation and presidential appointments.

Republican committee member Lindsey Graham said, “If we have to, we will change the rules, and it looks like we’re going to have to. I hate that. I really, really do.”

While Gorsuch’s opponents would fight a Senate rule change, it was the Democrats who in 2013 changed the Senate rules to limit filibusters after Republicans used the procedure against Obama’s appeals court nominees.

The Senate, then led by Democrats, barred filibusters for executive branch nominees and federal judges aside from Supreme Court justices. Even if Republicans do change the rules, legislation, as opposed to appointments, would still need to meet a 60-vote threshold.

Source:Al Jazeera

{A New Jersey teen has pleaded guilty to a plot allegedly inspired by the Islamic State group to kill Pope Francis during his 2015 visit to the United States.}

The US Justice Department on Monday said Santos Colon, 15 years old at the time, sought to recruit a sniper to shoot the pope as he celebrated mass in Philadelphia on September 27, 2015.

Colon also allegedly planned to set off explosives.

{{FBI AGENT}}

But the teen unwittingly recruited an undercover FBI agent for the job, and was arrested quietly 12 days before the event.

“Colon engaged someone he believed would be the sniper, but in reality was an undercover FBI employee. Colon engaged in target reconnaissance with an FBI confidential source and instructed the source to purchase materials to make explosive devices,” the Justice Department said in a statement.

Court documents said Colon sought to carry out the act in support of the Islamic State group and that he had used the adopted name Ahmad Shakoor.

In a plea bargain with prosecutors, Colon, now 17, agreed to forgo trial and plead guilty as an adult to one charge of providing material support to a terror group.

With the deal, prosecutors dropped three other charges filed against him as a juvenile.

15 YEARS

Court documents said the charges were in relation to the Islamic State group, which Washington has designated a foreign terrorist organisation.

But there were no details on how Colon became interested in the group and if or how he communicated with them.

Pope Francis celebrated mass for tens of thousands of followers in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the historic east coast city to cap a week-long visit for the World Meeting of Families

Colon’s home is in Lindenwold, New Jersey, just southeast of Philadelphia.

Colon faces a maximum of 15 years in prison but sentencing would likely be held off until 2021 while he undergoes psychiatric treatment in a secure facility.

In a plea statement, Colon acknowledged having been a patient in a mental institution in the past.

Source:AFP

{Norte de Ciudad Juarez wraps up due to ongoing violence against journalists, director says.}

A Mexican newspaper has announced it will no longer publish after 27 years in existence because of increasing insecurity along the border with the United States.

The director of the newspaper, Norte de Ciudad Juarez, in the state of Chihuahua announced the plans on Sunday to suspend publication in an editorial, saying the decision was made in part due to a lack of guarantees for critical journalism.

The announcement by Oscar Cantu comes just weeks after the shooting to death of a journalist who worked for Norte.

Miroslava Breach, 54, wrote about organised crime for Norte and the publication La Jornada.

She was shot dead in her car by one or more unknown gunmen.

Her death occurred just days after the killing of the director of the news portal El Politico in the state of Veracruz.

Mexico is ranked 149th in Reporters Without Borders’ list of countries based on press freedom, which is the most dangerous of any country that is not experiencing war.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said that at least 38 journalists have been killed since 1992 in Mexico with a motive confirmed to be their work.

While Cantu cited security as the main reason for the newspaper closing down, he also referred to economic reasons.

The ‘farewell’ was also published at the newspaper’s website.

“We have always tried to report with the greatest possible amount of truth, objectivity, honesty and transparence.”

Source:Al Jazeera