Tag: InternationalNews

{Prime Minister Netanyahu says recent Israeli raids aimed at preventing attempts to transfer advanced arms to Hezbollah.}

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the recent air strikes by his country inside Syria targeted weapons bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and the same would be done again if necessary.

Israeli warplanes struck several targets in Syria early on Friday, prompting retaliatory missile launches, in one of the most serious incidents between the two countries in recent years.

Syria’s military said it had downed an Israeli plane and hit another as they were carrying out pre-dawn strikes near the famed desert city of Palmyra which was recaptured from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) this month.

The Israeli army denied that any planes had been hit.

Netanyahu said in footage aired on Israeli television networks: “When we identify attempts to transfer advanced weapons to Hezbollah and we have intelligence and it is operationally feasible, we act to prevent it.”

“That’s how it was yesterday and that’s how we shall continue to act,” he added.

The Israeli air force said earlier that it had carried out several strikes on Syria overnight, but that none of the ground-to-air missiles fired by Syrian forces in response had hit Israeli aircraft.

It was an unusual confirmation by Israel of air raids inside Syria.

“Overnight … aircraft targeted several targets in Syria,” an Israeli army statement said on Friday.

“Several anti-aircraft missiles were launched from Syria following the mission and [army] aerial defence systems intercepted one of the missiles.”

The Syrian army described the attack as an act of aggression that aided the ISIL group, which is fighting against the Syrian government.

Rocket sirens sounded in Israeli settlements in the Jordan valley, the military said and two witnesses heard an explosion a few minutes later, Reuters news agency reported.

A Jordanian military source said shrapnel from one missile fell in the north of the kingdom without causing any casualties, according to AFP news agency.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Activist with ties to Basque community says separatist group ETA will officially hand in its weapons by April 8.}

Basque separatist group ETA will fully disarm by April 8, a French environmental activist with ties to the Basque community promised on Friday.

The group announced a permanent cease-fire in 2011, but the governments of Spain and France have so far refused to take part in its disarmament because ETA tied it to the future of its members, both in and out of jail.

The two countries have demanded that ETA lay down its weapons without conditions and disband.

Txetx Etcheverry, a prominent figure in the French Basque community who tried to arrange a disarmament in 2016, told AP news agency that the new initiative was agreed upon with the ETA and will be carried out whether French authorities agree to receive the weapons or not.

“If the French government doesn’t take responsibility, the Basque civil society will take a step forward. We can’t imagine five more years of inaction,” Etcheverry said, pledging that “ETA will be disarmed by midnight on April 8.”

ETA, which in Basque stands for “Basque Country and Freedom,” was founded in 1959 during the Spanish dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

It has killed 829 people in its nearly four-decade campaign to create a Basque homeland in a region straddling northern Spain and southwest France.

The group was most violent in the 1980s, staging hundreds of shootings of police, politicians and businesspeople.

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

In recent years, police operations have weakened the ETA. If the disarmament was completed, would primarily be symbolic, given that the group’s reduced arsenal is believed to be obsolete.

ETA has linked its total dissolution to allowing imprisoned members to serve their sentences closer to home in northern Spain, among other demands.

But on Friday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy rejected any concessions.

“ETA has chosen to disarm unilaterally. It should do it and should also disband,” Rajoy, who leads Spain’s conservative Popular Party, said at a party meeting.

“The government of Spain will do what it has always done – to apply the law, which is the same for everybody.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{Pakistani Taliban faction says it carried out attack on border post as suicide attack is foiled in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.}

Eight people, including two soldiers, have been killed in a raid on a Pakistani military border post in the Khyber tribal area, according to the Pakistan military.

The raid was launched from Afghan territory on Friday and resulted in the killing of six attackers and two Pakistani soldiers.

“Last night, there was an aerial operation targeting terrorists locations in the Rajgal valley of Khyber tribal area,” the statement said.

The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan’s Jamaat-ur-Ahrar faction claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement issued via email to media, claiming it had attacked three border posts, capturing one.

“One of the Pakistani forces’ posts was defeated by the mujahideen and set on fire,” said Asad Mansoor, spokesman for the group.

Pakistan shares a largely unpatrolled 2,500km-long mountainous border with Afghanistan, which the latter disputes.

Afghanistan rejects the colonial-era Durand Line border drawn up in 1893 and does not want a solid recognition of the boundary.

In a separate incident on Friday, Pakistan’s military said it foiled an attempted suicide attack on a paramilitary training centre in Shabqadar in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Two suicide bombers and a soldier were killed in the attempted attack, while another soldier was wounded, the military said.

Since a wave of violence in February claimed more than 130 lives across Pakistan, authorities there have sealed the main border crossings with Afghanistan, blaming that country for giving sanctuary to Pakistani Taliban fighters.

Afghanistan denies the charge, and has long accused Pakistan of providing sanctuary to Afghan armed groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Haqqani Network.

On Thursday Sartaj Aziz, foreign policy adviser to the Pakistani prime minister, and Haneef Atmar, the Afghan national security adviser, met for talks in London aimed at ending the latest impasse.

“Discussions were substantive, constructive, forward-looking and resultful,” said Omar Zakhilwal, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Pakistan, in a statement following the meeting.

“The success of this important meeting certainly will be judged by the common people of our two respective countries as to how this, in practical terms, responds to their aspiration for good neighbourly relations, peace and their well being.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{After reports of civilian deaths in village, Centcom says air strike on ‘al-Qaeda meeting’ killed ‘several terrorists’.}

The US military says it carried out a deadly air strike on an al-Qaeda meeting in northern Syria and will investigate reports that more than 40 civilians were killed when a mosque was struck in a raid in the same area.

Jets struck the village of Al Jina, in Aleppo province, on Thursday at the time of evening prayer when the mosque was full of worshippers, with local activists saying up to 300 people were inside at the time of the attack.

Al Jina is located in one of the main rebel-held parts of Syria, encompassing the western parts of Aleppo province and neighbouring Idlib.

The area’s population has been swollen by refugees, according to UN agencies.

Al Jazeera’s Natasha Ghoneim, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkish-Syrian border, said Centcom admitted it carried out an air strike in Idlib but that the precise location of the attack was still in question.

“Right now, Syrian Civil Defence personnel are struggling to get people from under the rubble of a mosque in the village of Al Jinah in the western countryside of Aleppo province,” she said.

“They say that dozens of people were killed in the strike there and that several people are believed to be still alive under the rubble. They are trying to get them out and, according to the Syrian Civil Defence, more bodies are to be recovered.

“The US military is saying that they conducted an air strike in Idlib province and that this air strike was not targeting a mosque but a meeting of al-Qaeda members. They are saying that the confusion might be because the meeting was held about 15 metres away from a mosque but the US military is saying that the mosque is still standing.

“A reporter asked Centcom if they inadvertently targeted a mosque in Aleppo province instead of Idlib and they responded that they would be looking into the reports of civilian casualties.”

According to a Centcom statement, “US forces conducted an air strike on an al-Qaeda in Syria meeting location March 16 in Idlib, Syria, killing several terrorists”.

Colonel John Thomas, spokesman for US Central Command (Centcom), said: “We did not target a mosque, but the building that we did target – which was where the meeting took place – is about 15 metres from a mosque that is still standing.”

“We are going to look into any allegations of civilian casualties in relation to this strike,” Thomas said when asked about reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) that 42 people died.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the SOHR, which monitors the war via a network of contacts across Syria, said that most of those killed were civilians.

“Many people are still trapped under rubble and we believe the number of casualties will increase,” he told the DPA news agency.

The Idlib Press Centre, which is run by activists, said at least 50 people were killed in the attack.

Activists posted pictures of bodies scattered on the floor near the mosque.

Teams with the White Helmets organisation (Syrian Civil Defence), a volunteer rescue group that operates in rebel-held parts of Syria, also shared images of people being pushed into ambulances and panic-stricken residents searching among the rubble for survivors.

The war, which on Wednesday entered its seventh year, started as a largely unarmed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s rule in March 2011.

It has since escalated into a full-scale conflict that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead and more than half of the country’s prewar population displaced inside and outside of Syria.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Panel led by ex-UN boss Kofi Annan says camps where tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are trapped should be closed.}

Myanmar should close bleak camps where tens of thousands of displaced Rohingya Muslims have been trapped for nearly five years, according to a commission led by former United Nations chief Kofi Annan.

More than 120,000 Rohingya have languished in camps for internally displaced people (IDP) since they were driven from their homes after a wave of inter-religious violence engulfed western Rakhine State in 2012.

Most are not allowed to leave the camps, where they live in piecemeal shelters with little access to food, and are denied access to basic education and healthcare.

“It’s really about time they close the camps and allow people, particularly those who have gone through the [citizenship] verification process, access to freedom of movement and all rights of citizenship,” Annan told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi last year appointed Annan to head a commission given the task of healing long-simmering divisions between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine.

“The commission calls for a plan to close all IDP camps in Rakhine state,” Ghassan Salame, a member of the body, told reporters at the launch of the body’s interim report on Thursday.

The report also called for the government to ensure “security and livelihood opportunities at the site of return/relocation” for those leaving the camps, including the building of new houses.

Residents complain of a system of checkpoints in parts of Rakhine state and widespread extortion by officials at roadblocks.

Myanmar has long faced international condemnation for its treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority, with the issue reaching boiling point in recent months after the army launched a bloody crackdown in the north of Rakhine following a number of deadly attacks on several police border posts in October.

UN investigators who interviewed escapees in Bangladesh have accused Myanmar’s security forces of responding with a campaign of murder, gang rape and arson that may amount to genocide.

According to the UN, 74,000 people have fled the conflict zone since October.

In February, a UN report accused Myanmar’s security forces of carrying out mass rapes, burning families to death and other killings, possibly amounting to crimes against humanity.

Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, on Monday called the on UN to launch its highest-level investigation into the violence, which she said may be part of a government campaign to drive the Rohingya from the country.

But a draft resolution tabled by the UN Human Rights Council stopped short of calling for a Commission of Inquiry into the violence.

Salame said the Annan commission backed calls for an independent investigation into the violence in northern Rakhine in its report, but said anything further would be beyond the body’s remit.

It identified three initial camps to close – one housing more than 200 Rohingya, along with two others that are home to Buddhist Rakhines and Kaman Muslims who were also displaced in the 2012 violence.

Suu Kyi’s office welcomed the report and said it would implement the “large majority of recommendations” without giving more details.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Three suffer gunshot wounds and another five are hurt in stampede after shooting in south of France, officials say.}

A teenage pupil has opened fire at a high school in a small southeastern French town, wounding at least three people, including the headmaster, according to officials.

Five more people were treated for injuries sustained during a stampede after Thursday’s shooting at the cafeteria of the Tocqueville high school in Grasse, near Cannes.

The three people with light gunshot injuries were taken to hospital.

One 17-year-old pupil armed with a rifle, two handguns and two grenades was arrested after the shooting, police said.

Visiting the scene of the attack, France’s Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said the shooting was “a crazy act” by an “unstable young man fascinated by firearms”.

‘Heroic headmaster’

Vallaud-Belkacem saluted the school’s headmaster as “heroic”.

She said that, “when he saw the pupil taking out his gun, he rushed up to him to reason with him … and received a bullet injury in the arm.”

The Grasse Town Hall said the incident was not “terrorist” related.

“The first investigations suggest that he [arrested teen] had consulted American-style mass killing videos,” an interior ministry spokesman said

Schools in Grasse, a town of 50,000 people, were locked down after the incident, and local educational authorities asked parents to stay away.

“Students are safe. Thank you to parents for not coming yet so that security forces can operate,” the head of local educational services, Emmanuel Ethis, wrote on Twitter.

Al Jazeera’s David Chater, reporting from Grasse, said a major police operation was under way across the town.

“There is a sense of shock here,” he said. “You can see all the school children sitting by the side of the road, really shocked about what happened.

“We don’t know any of the details about what could had been the possible motivation here, but it really has had a terrible effect on this city and the feelings of the students.”

Witnesses interviewed by local TV stations described a scene of panic as the gunman entered the school’s cafeteria with pupils rushing to hide under tables or sprinting for the exit.

“It was total panic,” Achraf, a student, said on BFM TV.

“The gunshots were at four to five metres from where we were. We thought the gunman was coming towards us. We heard him shouting.

“I just know the gunman by sight. He was gentle and low-key key, not a nasty guy.”

Another pupil described how he and other students hid from the gunman.

“We heard a gunshot and then an administrator came out and said ‘there’s an attack, hurry up and hide’,” the student told Al Jazeera.

“We hid in a backroom and barricaded the door with shelving units, then we heard three shots fired. He came along and tried to open the door, but he thought nobody was inside and so he left.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{White House repeats allegations of surveillance by Obama administration despite senior legislators rejecting claim.}

President Donald Trump stands by his accusation that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign, the White House has said, despite three senior legislators rejecting Trump’s claim.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a statement on Thursday they saw “no indications” of surveillance at Trump Tower in New York as the president claimed in Twitter posts on March 4.

“Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either before or after Election Day 2016,” Republican Chairman Richard Burr and Senator Mark Warner, the committee’s Democratic vice chairman, said in a statement.

The top Republican in Congress, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, on Thursday added his voice to those saying there was no sign of phone tapping.

But White House spokesman Sean Spicer forcefully defended Trump’s assertion during a briefing, citing media reports that have discussed intelligence collection on possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia in the campaign.

“There is no question that there were surveillance techniques used throughout this,” Spicer said.

When pressed for further evidence, Spicer chastised the media for focusing so much attention on comments disparaging Trump’s claim about surveillance.

He said reporters have not focused enough on comments from officials denying evidence of any collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

The Russian government has rejected an accusation by US intelligence agencies that it worked to influence the election in Trump’s favour by hacking computer systems, among other methods.

Ryan said: “The point is, the intelligence committees in their continuing, widening, ongoing investigation of all things Russia, got to the bottom – at least so far – with respect to our intelligence community that – that no such wiretap existed.”

Trump accused Obama of tapping his phone during the late stages of the campaign, but provided no evidence.

Obama said through a spokesman that it was “simply false”.

“How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!,” Trump wrote.

Trump appeared to back away from his accusation of literal “wire-tapping” in a Fox News interview on Wednesday night.

“But wiretap covers a lot of different things. I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks,” Trump said.

In the briefing on Thursday, his pres secretary cited unproven media reports that President Barack Obama asked Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, to monitor Trump in order to “make sure there were no American fingerprints”.

Spicer quoted at length from a Fox News report, which alleged Obama had used GCHQ to dodge US legal restrictions on monitoring US citizens.

In the Fox report – which came almost two weeks later – Andrew Napolitano claimed that “three intelligence sources have informed Fox News that President Obama went outside the chain of command” to order the tap.

“He didn’t use the NSA, he didn’t use the CIA, he didn’t use the FBI, and he didn’t use the Department of Justice,” Napolitano said, adding that Obama used GCHQ.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Pentagon set to be major winner while state department and federal programmes in for steep reductions.}

Donald Trump will ask US Congress for drastic cuts to many federal programmes as he seeks to increase defence spending and spend more money deporting illegal immigrants.

In a plan designed to translate campaign promises into dollar and cent commitments, the Republican president proposed a 28 percent cut in state department funding.

That could be a signal for steep reductions in foreign aid and funding to UN agencies, with knock-on effects around the world.

The Pentagon will be the major winner with a nearly 10 percent boost. The US defence budget is already greater than that of the next seven nations combined.

Separately, about $4bn will be earmarked this year and next to start building a wall on the US southern border.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that Mexico will pay for that wall – which will cost at least $15bn, according to estimates by the Bernstein Research group, a consultancy firm.

Trump’s proposal covers only a fraction of the $3.8 trillion federal budget – which is dominated by health, pension and other baked-in costs.

The text will be heavily revised and enlarged on by Congress, before a full budget is released around May.

In that sense, the plan is as much a political statement as a fiscal outline: a fact not lost on the White House.

“This is a hard power budget, it is not a soft power budget,” Mick Mulvaney, White House budget chief, said.

The former Congressman said he scanned Trump’s campaign speeches for inspiration.

The budget could be a signal to Trump’s supporters that he is a “man of action” and not a “typical politician”.

Security has been a major vote winner. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 51 percent of Republicans believe the US will be safer from terrorism at the end of his term.

The budget may also be seen as a signal to the world that Trump’s US may be less engaged and will put “America first”.

Diplomats and some former defence officials have already sounded a warning that less spending on things like democracy promotion and humanitarian aid will spell more trouble, and military spending, down the road.

More than 120 retired generals and admirals recently signed a letter warning “that many of the crises our nation faces do not have military solutions alone”.

They cited Jim Mattis, now defence secretary, as once saying “if you don’t fully fund the State Department, then I need to buy more ammunition”.

‘Drastic cuts’

The Environmental Protection Agency, which helps monitor air, water and other standards, will also see significant cuts.

That is in keeping with Trump’s promise to gut regulation.

“We believe that the core functions [of the EPA] can be satisfied with this budget,” said Mulvaney.

On Wednesday, Trump travelled to Detroit, the home of the US car-manufacturing industry and announced he will freeze targets to limit future vehicle emissions.

READ MORE: Trump administration to ’empower’ US police forces

Steve Bannon, Trump’s top adviser, has promised a broader “‘deconstruction of the administrative state”.

But Trump’s plan is already facing criticism from Democratic politicians.

“It will prescribe drastic cuts in many of the programs and agencies that keep America safe, whether it’s environmental programmes, whether it is food safety, drug safety,” said John Yarmuth, Kentucky representative.

The senior member on the House of Representatives budget committee speculated that the proposal could be a negotiating position, an opening salvo in Trump’s “art of the deal”.

“If they want to negotiate with the health and safety and future of the American people, then that’s pretty cynical,” he said.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Leni Robredo urges Filipinos to ‘defy incursions on their rights’ as she denounces president’s bloody anti-drug war.}

The Philippine vice president has raised an alarm about the country’s bloody crackdown on illegal drug use, saying it can’t be solved “with bullets alone” and adding that Filipinos should “defy brazen incursions on their rights”.

Vice President Leni Robredo’s comments, some of her sharpest critiques so far of Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug campaign, are likely to antagonise the brash-talking president.

In her speech, which will be shown at a UN-linked forum on extrajudicial killings on Thursday, she raised concerns about a lack of transparency and accountability in Duterte’s crackdown, and the mounting number of killings, which she described as “summary executions”.

Since July last year, more than 7,000 people have been killed, Robredo said in the video.

“We are now looking at some very grim statistics,” she added.

INTERACTIVE: Who’s liable for the mounting death toll?

Robredo, who belongs to the opposition Liberal Party, said she had received several complaints from residents who had been rounded up by police, and told they had no rights to demand search warrants as they were living illegally on land they didn’t own.

She said Filipinos should demand greater transparency in the publicly funded campaign and ask “why no one is being held accountable”, citing what she said were hundreds of complaints filed with the Commission on Human Rights, which recommended that the Department of Justice file criminal complaints.

National police spokesman Senior Superintendent Dionardo Carlos said the allegations, if true, violated police policy and should have been reported to authorities so they could investigate.

“If these are happening, or have happened, our request is for specifics because these are not sanctioned,” Carlos said.

Robredo said she publicly asked Duterte “to direct the nation towards respect for rule of law, instead of blatant disregard for it”.

“We ask him to uphold basic human rights enshrined in our constitution, instead of encouraging its abuse. We also ask the Filipino people to defy brazen incursions on their rights,” she added.

Duterte and his national police chief have said they do not condone extrajudicial killings, but have repeatedly threatened drug suspects with death in public speeches.

Last month, rights group Amnesty International accused police of behaving like the criminal underworld they are supposed to be suppressing, systematically targeting the poor and defenceless, recruiting paid killers, stealing from the people they kill, and fabricating official incident reports.

Source:Al Jazeera