Islamist militants attack intelligence site in Somali capital

MOGADISHU: Islamist rebels blew up a car bomb on Sunday at a national-intelligence site in Somalia's capital, officials and the rebel group said.

Seven militants were killed in the attack and in fighting at the Mogadishu facility, according to an intelligence officer, who asked that he be identified only as Nur. He gave no details on casualties among the security forces, if any.

Ahmed Hussein, a senior police officer, confirmed the car bombing and armed attack and added that the facility included underground cells.

"It seems their target was to cause a mess here and thus free their militant colleagues held in the underground cells, but that will not happen," Nur said.

The Islamist group al Shabaab claimed responsibility for the assault, in a statement by Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab's spokesman for military operations, to Reuters. It was the latest in a series of attacks in Mogadishu in recent months, including a July raid on the presidential compound.

That compound is near the national intelligence site, and it was also attacked using what has become a familiar tactic: a vehicle tries to blast its way through perimeter security and gunmen charge in afterwards.

The president was not present during the July raid.

Al Shabaab, which wants to impose its own strict version of Islam, controlled Mogadishu and the southern region of Somalia from 2006 to 2011. It was driven out of the capital by peacekeeping forces deployed by the African Union.

African forces launched a new offensive this year to drive the Islamists out of towns and other areas they still control. Several centres have been retaken, but al Shabaab remains in control of some towns and swathes of countryside.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Somalia,Reuters,Al Shabaab,Ahmed Hussein,Abdiasis Abu Musab al Shabaab

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Iceland raises volcano aviation alert again

REYKJAVIK (ICELAND): Iceland's authorities on Sunday raised the aviation warning code to red for a region close to the subglacial Bardarbunga volcano after a small fissure eruption in the area.

The country's meteorological agency described the eruption in the Holuhraun lava field, about five kilometers (three miles) north of the Dyngjujoekull glacier, as a "very calm lava eruption and can hardly be seen on seismometers."

"Visual observation confirms it is calm, but continuous," the weather agency said on its website.

Sunday morning's eruption, which took place about 0500 GMT (1am EDT), followed a smaller one in the same site on Friday that also prompted authorities to briefly raise the aviation warning code to restrict flights in the area.

The red warning code — the highest in the country's alert system — meant that no flights are allowed in an airspace area of about 40 square nautical miles north of the eruption area, up to 6,000 feet (1.1 miles) from the ground. Aviation officials said the restrictions do not affect commercial flights, which fly much higher than that.

No volcanic ash has been detected, and the Civil Protection Department said all Icelandic airports remained open.

The fissure eruption was a crack that came to the surface about 40 kilometers (28 miles) from the main Bardarbunga volcano, which lies under the vast Vatnajokull glacier that dominates the eastern corner of Iceland.

Though remote and sparsely populated, the area is popular with hikers in the summer. Officials earlier evacuated all tourists in the region after thousands of small earthquakes rocked the area in recent days.

Although Sunday's fissure eruption was more powerful than the one on Friday, experts said the situation is contained and is unlikely to result in the same level of aviation chaos as 2010. In April that year, an eruption at the Eyjafjallajokul volcano wreaked havoc on millions of travelers. More than 100,000 flights were canceled after officials closed Europe's air space for five days out of fear that volcanic ash could damage jet engines.

Dave McGarvie, a volcanologist at Britain's Open University, said the fissure eruptions produce only very small amounts of ash — they produce mostly lava — and are highly unlikely to cause any aviation disruption.

"It's good news in the sense that it appears to be very small, very contained. It's not spreading under the glacier — if it did you'll get a lot of flooding," he said.

He said Icelandic authorities are mostly concerned that the main volcano under the ice cap will erupt, but there are no signs so far that this is imminent.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Iceland volcano alert,Iceland

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Iraqi forces break militant siege of Shia town

BAGHDAD: Iraqi security forces and Shia militiamen on Sunday broke a six-week siege imposed by the Islamic State extremist group on the northern Shia Turkmen town of Amirli, following US airstrikes against the Sunni militants' positions, officials said.

Army spokesman Lt Gen Qassim al-Moussawi said the operation started at dawn Sunday and the forces entered the town shortly after midday.

Speaking live on state TV, al-Moussawi said the forces suffered "some causalities," but did not give a specific number. He said fighting was "still ongoing to clear the surrounding villages."

Breaking the siege was a "big achievement and an important victory" he said, for all involved: the Iraqi army, elite troops, Kurdish fighters and Shia militias.

Turkmen lawmaker Fawzi Akram al-Tarzi said they entered the town from two directions and were distributing aid to residents.

About 15,000 Shia Turkmens were stranded in the farming community, some 105 miles (170 kilometers) north of Baghdad. Instead of fleeing in the face of the Islamic State group's rampage across northern Iraq in June, the Shia Turkmens stayed and fortified their town with trenches and armed positions.

Residents succeeded in fending off the initial attack in June, but Amirli has been surrounded by the militants since mid-July. Many residents said the Iraqi military's efforts to fly in food, water and other aid had not been enough, as they endured the oppressive August heat with virtually no electricity or running water.

Nihad al-Bayati, who had taken up arms with fellow residents to defend the town, said some army units had already entered while the Shia militiamen were stationed in the outskirts. He said residents had fired into the air to celebrate the arrival of the troops.

"We thank God for this victory over terrorists," al-Bayati told The Associated Press by phone from the outskirts of Amirli. "The people of Amirli are very happy to see that their ordeal is over and that the terrorists are being defeated by Iraqi forces. It is a great day in our life."

State TV stopped regular programs and started airing patriotic songs following the victory announcement, praising the country's security forces. They have been fighting the militants for weeks without achieving significant progress on the ground.

On Saturday, the US conducted airstrikes against the Sunni militants and air-dropped humanitarian aid to residents. Aircraft from Australia, France and Britain joined the US in the aid drop, which came after a request from the Iraqi government.

The Pentagon's press secretary, Rear Adm John Kirby, said military operations would be limited in scope and duration as needed to address the humanitarian crisis in Amirli and protect the civilians trapped in the town.

The Islamic State extremist group has seized cities, towns and vast tracts of land in northeastern Syria and northern and western Iraq. It views Shias as apostates and has carried out a number of massacres and beheadings — often posting grisly videos and photos of the atrocities online.

The US started launching airstrikes against the Islamic State extremist group earlier this month to prevent the insurgents from advancing on the Kurdish regional capital Irbil and to help protect members of the Yazidi religious minority stranded on Mount Sinjar, in Iraq's northwest, where US planes also dropped humanitarian aid.

The US also launched airstrikes near Mosul Dam — the largest in Iraq — allowing Iraqi and Kurdish forces to retake the facility, which had been captured by Islamic State fighters.

Earlier Saturday, the US Central Command said five more airstrikes had targeted Islamic State militants near Mosul Dam. Those attacks, carried out by fighter aircraft and unmanned drones, brought to 115 the total number of airstrikes across Iraq since August 8.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=shia,Iraq Shia town,Iraq militants

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Syrian militants capture 43 UN workers, 81 trapped

UNITED NATIONS: Militants fighting the Syrian army have detained 43 UN peacekeepers in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and trapped another 81 in the region, and the world body is working to secure their release, the United Nations said on Thursday.

The affected peacekeepers are from the Philippines and Fiji, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.

"During a period of increased fighting beginning yesterday between armed elements and Syrian Arab Armed Forces within the area of separation in the Golan Heights, 43 peacekeepers from the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) were detained early this morning by an armed group in the vicinity of Al Qunaytirah," the UN press office said in a statement.

It added that another 81 UNDOF peacekeepers were being restricted to their positions in the vicinity of Ar Ruwayhinah and Burayqah. Dujarric said the 81 trapped troops were from the Philippines and the 43 seized ones from Fiji.

"The United Nations is making every effort to secure the release of the detained peacekeepers, and to restore the full freedom of movement of the force throughout its area of operation," it said.

Britain's UN ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, president of the security council this month, told reporters the trapped peacekeepers were surrounded by Islamist militants.

The 15-nation security council, which was meeting on the humanitarian situation in Syria, was also discussing the issue of the kidnapped peacekeepers, Lyall Grant said.

The Philippine army said in a statement that militants and had surrounded the Philippine contingent's encampments with Fijian hostages in tow and demanded that the Filipino troops surrender their firearms.

"The Philippine peacekeepers held their ground and demonstrated their resolve to defend their positions," it said. "They did not surrender their firearms as they may in turn be held hostage themselves."

The security council issued a statement strongly condemning the seizure of the peacekeepers and calling for their immediate release. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon echoed the council word's in his own statement of condemnation.

Reporters asked Dujarric if the United Nations was in contact with the group holding the Fijians. He declined to specify who the world body was in contact with but said there was communication under way. "There are contacts being held at different levels, on the mission and on the ground," he said. "They are talking to representatives of various armed groups that they have ... operational contact with. They are talking to countries in the region."

Dujarric was also asked about the rules for peacekeepers in such situations.

"In extreme circumstances, these troops are trained and prepared and equipped to defend themselves, but, obviously, each situation has to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis," he said.

Fiji army chief says committed

UN officials say that the peacekeepers, whose job is to monitor the cessation of hostilities, carry small arms that are only to be used in extreme circumstances. In previous situations where UNDOF peacekeepers were held hostage, the troops did not use their weapons.

The Quneitra crossing on the Golan is a strategic plateau captured by Israel in a 1967 Middle East war. Syria and Israel technically remain at war. Syrian troops are not allowed in an area of separation under a 1973 ceasefire formalized in 1974.

UNDOF monitors the area of separation, a narrow strip of land running about 45 miles (70 km) from Mount Hermon on the Lebanese border to the Yarmouk River frontier with Jordan. There are 1,223 UNDOF peacekeepers from six countries.

Before the Syrian civil war, now in its fourth year, the region was generally quiet and the peacekeepers had mostly found their biggest enemy to be boredom.

The force's personnel come from Fiji, India, Ireland, Nepal, Netherlands and the Philippines. The United Nations said this week that the Philippines has decided to pull out of UNDOF, and from a UN force in Liberia, which is struggling with an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus.

Blue-helmeted UN troops were seized by militants in March and May 2013. In both of those cases they were released safely.

Austria, Japan and Croatia have all pulled their troops out of UNDOF due to the deteriorating security situation and spillover from the Syrian war.

But Fijian Army Commander Brigadier-General Mosese Tikoitoga told Reuters in an interview on Friday that he would not be recommending to his government that Fiji follow suit.

"If I was to make any recommendation, I would increase our forces in Syria. That would be my recommendation," he said by phone from Fiji.

"We will not make any recommendations of pulling out from the UN or any other engagement, because our contribution to UN peacekeeping - if we don't want to do this, then who else in the world would want to do this?"

He added that he was confident the Fijians would be released soon based on the strength of their contacts in the Golan Heights region.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=United Nations Disengagement Observer Force,UN peacekeepers,UN Force,Syrian militants

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Separatists say will allow 'trapped' Ukrainian forces to withdraw

MOSCOW/DONETSK Ukraine: Pro-Moscow rebels fighting in Ukraine said on Friday they would comply with a request from the Kremlin and open up a 'humanitarian corridor' to allow the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops they have encircled.

It was not clear how the government in Kiev would react to the offer, suggested first by Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the first word from the Ukrainian military was negative.

It said in a statement that Putin's call showed only that "these people (the separatists) are led and controlled directly from the Kremlin".

Kiev has accused Russian troops of illegally entering eastern Ukraine and, backed by its US and European allies, has said it will fight to defend its soil.

Russia stands accused of pushing troops and weapons into the former Soviet republic to shore up a separatist rebellion that a week ago appeared to be on its last legs. That development has sharply escalated the five-month conflict over eastern Ukraine.

In his late-night statement, released by the Kremlin, Putin adopted a softer tone, though without acknowledging that Russia's military is involved in the conflict.

"It is clear that the rebellion has achieved some serious successes in stopping the armed operation by Kiev," Putin was quoted as saying in the statement.

"I call on the militia forces to open a humanitarian corridor for encircled Ukraine servicemen in order to avoid pointless victims, to allow them to leave the fighting area without impediment, join their families ... to provide urgent medical aid to those wounded as a result of the military operation."

Hours later, Alexander Zakharchenko, leader of the main rebel entity in eastern Ukraine, told a Russian television station his forces were ready to let the encircled Ukrainian troops pull out.

He said they would have to leave behind their heavy armored vehicles and ammunition.

Russian troops

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called an urgent meeting of security chiefs late on Thursday to work out how to respond to rapid advances made by rebels in the south of the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.

He told the meeting that the situation was "extraordinarily difficult ... but controllable" after Russian-backed rebels seized the town of Novoazovsk in the southeast, on the shore of the Azov Sea.

Earlier Poroshenko said he had canceled a visit to Turkey because of the "rapidly deteriorating situation" in the eastern Donetsk region, "as Russian troops have actually been brought into Ukraine".

In comments overnight, Ukrainian defence minister Valery Heletey accused Russia of giving "a criminal order" sending paratroopers and military equipment into Ukraine.

Many Russian soldiers had been captured and many killed, he said. "Unfortunately, they have been buried simply under building rubbish. We are trying to find their bodies to return them to their mothers for burial," Heletey said.

Russia's defense ministry again denied the presence of its soldiers in Ukraine, using language redolent of the Cold War.

"We have noticed the launch of this informational 'canard' and are obliged to disappoint its overseas authors and their few apologists in Russia," a ministry official, General-Major Igor Konashenkov, told Interfax news agency. "The information contained in this material bears no relation to reality."

But some skeptical Western governments appeared to be running out of patience with Moscow's denials.

Referring to talks that Putin held with Poroshenko just two days ago, British Prime Minister David Cameron said: "It is simply not enough to engage in talks in Minsk, while Russian tanks continue to roll over the border into Ukraine. Such activity must cease immediately."

Poland's foreign minister said Russian "aggression" had created the most serious security crisis in Europe for decades. A top Nato official said Russia had significantly escalated its "military interference" in Ukraine in the past two weeks.

"We assess well over 1,000 Russian troops are now operating inside Ukraine," said Dutch Brigadier-General Nico Tak, head of Nato's crisis management center. "They are supporting separatists (and) fighting with them."

The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions on Moscow, and both Russia and Nato have stepped up military exercises, creating the tensest East-West standoff since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

The United States is considering a number of options in response to Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine and believes increasing sanctions are the "most effective tool", US state department spokeswoman Jean Osaki said.

German chancellor Angela Merkel said an EU summit at the weekend would discuss the possibility of further sanctions.

Dust-covered column

In southern Russia on Thursday, a Reuters reporter saw a column of armored vehicles and dust-covered troops, one of them with a face injury, about 3 km (2 miles) from the border with the part of Ukraine that Kiev says is occupied by Russian troops.

The column was driving east, away from the border, across open countryside near the village of Krasnoyarsk, in Russia's Ros region.

None of the men or vehicles had standard military identification marks, but the reporter saw a Mi-8 helicopter with a red star insignia — consistent with Russian military markings — land next to a nearby military first-aid tent.

Asked if he was with the Russian military, a man near the tent in camouflage fatigues but without any identifying insignia, said only: "We are patriots."

The US ambassador to Kiev, Geoffrey Pratt, tweeted: "Russian supplied tanks, armored vehicles, artillery and multiple rocket launchers have been insufficient to defeat Ukraine' armed forces. So now an increasing number of Russian troops are intervening directly in fighting on Ukrainian territory.

"Russia has also sent its newest air defense systems including the SA-22 into eastern Ukraine & is now directly involved in the fighting," he said.

Fighting in the east erupted in April, a month after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in response to the toppling of a pro-Moscow president in Kiev.

A United Nations report this week said more than 2,200 people have been killed, not including the 298 who died when a Malaysian airliner was shot down over rebel-held territory in July.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Vladimir Putin,Ukrainian forces,pro-Moscow rebels,Petro Poroshenko,NATO

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Ex-Myanmar beauty queen accused of stealing crown

YANGON (Myanmar): A Myanmar beauty queen who was stripped of her title for allegedly being rude and dishonest has run off with the $100,000 jeweled crown, a South Korea-based pageant said Friday.

Myanmar, which only recently emerged from a half-century military rule and self-imposed isolation, started sending contestants to international beauty pageants for the first time in decades in 2012.

May Myat Noe was crowned Miss Asia Pacific World in Seoul in May 2014. But, according to David Kim, director of media for the Seoul-based pageant, the 18-year-old was a disappointment from the start.

Attempts to reach May Myat Noe for comment were unsuccessful Friday and her Myanmar phone was switched off. According to the online edition of Eleven Media, a Myanmar newspaper, she was back in the country and would address a news conference soon, although it wasn't clear when.

Following her success, the organizers said they were arranging singing and video deals for her. But they also wanted to change the 5'7" teen's looks, Kim said.

"We thought she should be more beautiful ... so as soon as she arrived we sent her to the hospital to operate on her breasts," he said.

"It's our responsibility," he said, adding that sponsors picked up the $10,000 tab, as they have for past winners. "If she has no good nose, then maybe, if she likes, we can operate on her nose. If it's breasts, then breasts."

Kim said that troubles started from there. The beauty queen brought her mother with her to Seoul for what was supposed to be a 10-day visit, but that quickly turned into three months, incurring extra cost to the organizers, he said.

She "lied" and "never had respect for the main organization, the national director, the manager, media or fans who made her the winner," organizers said in a statement.

May Myat Noe was notified earlier this week that she would have to give up her title and the crown, Kim said. She was also given an airplane ticket back to Yangon, but never showed up, with Eleven Media reporting that she got on an earlier flight.

Kim said she absconded with the bejeweled Swarovski tiara _ valued anywhere between $100,000 and $200,000.

"Everyone knows she is no longer the queen, but she thinks as long as she keeps this crown she's the winner," he said. "She's not."

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Russian troops in Ukraine 'intolerable, unacceptable'

PARIS: French President Francois Hollande warned on Thursday it would be "intolerable and unacceptable" if Russia troops were to be operating on Ukrainian territory, as western intelligence believes.

"If it turns out that there are Russian soldiers present on Ukrainian soil, it would be intolerable and unacceptable," he told a Paris gathering of French ambassadors from around the world.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Francois Hollande,Ukraine,Russian troops

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Ebola zone countries isolated as airlines stop flights

FREETOWN: The three nations at the centre of the west African Ebola outbreak were left increasingly isolated as more airlines suspended flights to the crisis zone.

Air France has agreed to Paris's request for a "temporary suspension" of services to Sierra Leone, leaving its capital Freetown and Monrovia in neighbouring Liberia with just one regular service, from Royal Air Morocco.

"In light of the analysis of the situation and as requested by the French government, Air France confirms it is maintaining its program of flights to and from Guinea and Nigeria," the flag carrier said yesterday.

Air France's decision came a day after British Airways said it was suspending flights to Liberia and Sierra Leone until next year due to Ebola concerns.

Health ministers from west African nations hit by Ebola will gather in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, today to discuss responses to the epidemic.

Authorities in the worst-hit nations are scrambling to contain the most serious outbreak of the lethal tropical virus in history, which has killed more than 1,400 people since it erupted early this year.

The United Nations' envoy on Ebola, David Nabarro, earlier this week took a swipe at airlines who have scrapped flights to Ebola-hit countries, saying the growing isolation "makes it difficult for the UN to do its work".

Brussels Airlines normally runs four flights a week to Liberia and Sierra Leone and three to Guinea, but has also cancelled several services since Saturday due to the closure of the Senegalese border.

The carrier said it would decide on its future schedule this weekend.

The company committed to providing three separate flights to Freetown, Monrovia and Conakry this week in response to passenger demand and to deliver 40 tonnes of medical supplies from the United Nations.

Only Royal Air Morocco has vowed to stick to its normal flight schedule - once a day to Conakry and every other day on average to Monrovia and Freetown.

"Our approach is supportive rather than mercenary," airline spokesman Hakim Challot told AFP, adding: "From Casablanca, the take-up of seats to these three countries is extremely low, around 10 per cent".

UN officials have pledged to step up efforts against the lethal tropical virus, which has infected more than 2,600 and killed 1,427 since the start of the year.

Liberia has been worst hit, with 624 deaths recorded. Guinea, where the outbreak was first detected, has reported 406 deaths, Sierra Leone has 392 and Nigeria five, according to the WHO.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Ebola,Sierra Leone,Nigeria,Liberia,Guinea

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

6 dead, 21 missing in landslide in southwest China

BEIJING: Six people died and 21 remained missing on Thursday after a landslide hit a village in southwestern China, according to Chinese state media.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that 77 houses collapsed or were buried in the Wednesday night landslide in the village of Yingping in Guizhou province. Xinhua said another 21 people were injured in the landslide.

State television network CCTV said a small reservoir was breached during the landslide, and the flooding caused further damage to the village. The channel showed dozens of rescuers combing a wide site covered in dried mud.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=landslide,China landslide

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

UN scientist with Ebola in Germany for treatment

BERLIN: A scientist who was infected with Ebola while working for the World Health Organization in Sierra Leone began receiving treatment on Wednesday in a Hamburg hospital after being flown overnight to Germany.

The man, whose name and condition are being withheld for patient privacy reasons, is being treated at the UN agency's request in city's University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, home to the well-known Bernhard-Nocht Clinic for Tropical Medicine.

"Hamburg has a special expertise in caring for tropical diseases," said Internal Medicine director Ansgar Lohse. "That's the reason the request was addressed to us."

WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib identified the patient as a man from Senegal infected while working for the agency as a consultant.

To date, WHO says more than 240 health care workers have developed the disease in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria; more than 120 have died.

Dr Stefan Schmiedel, who is helping oversee the treatment, said the clinic would not be using experimental medicine, instead concentrating on "supportive care" such as fever reduction and fluid management.

"In West Africa the patients die relatively quickly of the illness, or survive and then return to health," he said. "How that will go under our medical supervision, we can't yet estimate."

Christy Feig, director of WHO communications, said a team of two experts was sent Tuesday to investigate how the infectious disease expert was exposed to the Ebola virus.

She said the epidemiologist was a surveillance officer, a job that typically involves coordinating the outbreak response by liaising with local health workers, lab experts and hospitals but not direct treatment of patients.

"He wasn't in treatment centers normally," she said by telephone from Sierra Leone. "It's possible he went in there and wasn't properly covered, but that's why we've taken this unusual measure — to try to figure out what happened."

She said the team is checking if there is an infection risk in the living and working environment that has not been uncovered.

"The international surge of health workers is extremely important and if something happens, if health workers get infected and it scares off other international health workers from coming, we will be in dire straits," she said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=UN scientist,Sierra Leone,Nigeria,Liberia,Guinea

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Afghan presidential candidates pull out of audit

KABUL, Afghanistan: Afghanistan's troubled presidential election was rocked by more turmoil on Wednesday as both candidates vying to succeed Hamed Karzai pulled their observers out of a ballot audit meant to determine the winner of a June runoff.

First, Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister, pulled his monitors from the audit to protest the process that his team claims is fraught with fraud.

Then, the United Nations, which is helping supervise the US-brokered audit, asked the other candidate, former finance minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, to also pull out his observers in the interest of fairness.

The UN team said the audit then proceeded without both candidates' teams.

It was not immediately clear if the pullout meant the two candidates would reject the audit results — and thereby also the final result of the election. That could have dangerous repercussions in a country still struggling to overcome ethnic and religious divides and battling a resurgent Taliban insurgency.

The US brokered the audit of the eight million ballots from the presidential runoff as a way to end what had been a debilitating impasse over election results. But the audit itself has proceeded in fits and starts this summer as both sides argued over every ballot.

Abdullah came in first during the first round of voting in April but preliminary results from the June runoff showed Ahmadzai in the lead. That sparked accusations of rampant fraud from the Abdullah camp.

Ahmadzai's camp also alleged voting irregularities and both sides agreed to the audit after a visit by US secretary of state John Kerry in July. It was decided the process would be led by the UN and Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission, and observed by monitors from each candidate's campaign team.

On Tuesday, Abdullah's camp threatened to boycott the audit if their concerns over fraud were not addressed. Then on Wednesday, it followed through on the threat and pulled observers from the recount, which is being carried out in warehouses on the edge of the capital, Kabul.

"It is full of fraud," said a spokesman for Abdullah, Fazel Sancharaki, after the pullout. "Nobody is paying attention to our demands."

After the move by the Abdullah camp, UN representative Nicholas Haysom told reporters in Kabul that the UN asked the opposing side to assess whether they should participate in the audit as well and said Ahmadzai's camp later agreed to also pull out.

"The audit will now proceed to its conclusion," Haysom said. "We do not anticipate any significant disruption to the process going forward."

Abdullah has not spoken publicly since the boycott was announced. The campaign still has the option of sending observers back to the audit, and Haysom said they were ready to address concerns from either side.

Initially, Abdullah's team was concerned that not enough ballots have been invalidated to correspond to the level of fraud the team believes happened, and asked that the criteria for invalidation be expanded.

The election impasse has also hurt Afghanistan's economy, as customers worrying about the outbreak of civil war hold onto their money and investors put the brakes on new projects as they wait to see how the crisis unfolds. It has also delayed the signing of a new security pact with the United States that would allow a small number of troops to stay in Afghanistan past December.

Karzai, who has been trying to bring both sides together to overcome the impasse, met with the two candidates Sunday and again Tuesday. He insisted the inauguration of the new president must happen by September 2 — two days before Natomembers are expected to meet in Wales.

Without a new president, it's unclear who would represent Afghanistan at a meeting that will discuss the military coalition's support for Afghan forces. A spokesman for Karzai, Aimal Faizi, said the president was not willing to go himself and that it was better to send the new president. Karzai has clashed with Nato over such issues as night raids and civilian casualties in airstrikes. The president has refused to sign an agreement allowing international forces to stay in Afghanistan past December.

Afghanistan has faced a renewed Taliban insurgency this summer as the militants test Afghan forces who are fighting for the first time largely without international backup.

In the central Ghor province, governor Anwar Rahmati said Wednesday that local security forces were battling a group of roughly 700 Taliban in the southern Pasaband district. Militants have killed nine police officers and captured another 30, Rahmati said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=NATO,John Kerry,Hamed Karzai,Fazel Sancharaki,Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

15 Australian fighters killed in Iraq, Syria: Spy chief

SYDNEY: Fifteen Australians, including two suicide bombers, are believed to have died fighting in Syria and Iraq, intelligence chief David Irvine said on Wednesday, while warning espionage and foreign intervention threats were increasing.

Canberra has expressed alarm that Australians have joined violent jihadist groups such as Islamic State (ISIS) overseas.

One Islamic State fighter, Australian man Khaled Sharrouf, sparked outrage when an image of his Sydney-raised son posing with the rotting head of a Syrian soldier was reportedly posted on Twitter.

"The draw of foreign fighters to Syria and Iraq is significant and includes more Australians than any other previous extremist conflicts put together," Irvine said.

He said the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) believed the number of citizens posing a potential security threat had increased substantially as a result.

"ASIO believes there are about 60 or so Australians fighting with the two principal extremist al-Qaida derivatives, Jahabat-al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq," Irvine said.

"We believe 15 Australians have already been killed in the current conflicts, including two young Australian suicide bombers."

He said 100 more people in Australia were "actively supporting" these extremist groups by recruiting new fighters, grooming suicide bombing candidates, and providing funds and equipment.

Australia has boosted its efforts to counter terrorism on fears that the bloody conflicts in Iraq and Syria are creating a new generation of militants, including increasing spending on security and intelligence.

Irvine said intelligence agencies were concerned about the dangers posed when those who had fought overseas — potentially with a commitment to violence and training in the use of weapons or bomb-making — returned to Australia.

The government also plans to overhaul laws to make it easier to arrest and prosecute terrorists and make it an offence to travel to designated hotspots overseas without a valid reason.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Syria,suicide bombers,Jahabat-al-Nusra,Islamic State,ISIS

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Iran supplies weapons to Iraqi Kurdish forces; Baghdad bomb kills 12

ARBIL: The direct arming of Kurdish forces is a contentious issue because some Iraqi politicians have said they suspect Kurdish leaders have aspirations to break away from the central government completely. The move could also be seen by some as a prelude to Iran taking a more direct role in broader Iraqi conflict.

"We asked for weapons and Iran was the first country to provide us with weapons and ammunition," Barzani said.

Militants from the Islamic State have clashed with Kurdish peshmerga fighters in recent weeks and taken control of some areas on the periphery of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Earlier in the day a car bomb was detonated in a mainly Shia district of eastern Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 28, police and medical sources said.

The bombing in the New Baghdad neighbourhood followed a series of blasts in the Iraqi capital on Monday which killed more than 20 people.

The Islamic State, which controls large swathes of northern and western Iraq, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the New Baghdad neighbourhood on Monday and said in a statement that the attack was carried out as revenge for an attack against a Sunni mosque in Diyala on Friday which killed 68 and wounded dozens.

The Iranian foreign minister held talks with Barzani on Tuesday, one day after visiting senior Shi'ite clerics in southern Iraq. Zarif acknowledged giving military assistance to Iraqi security forces but said the cooperation did not include deploying ground troops in the country.

"We have no military presence in Iraq," Zarif said. "We do have military cooperation with both the central government and the Kurds in different arenas."

Neither Zarif nor Barzani gave any details whether weapons supplied to Kurdish peshmerga forces had been routed through the central government or given directly to Kurdish forces. Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi said on Monday that arms given to the peshmerga had been routed through the central government.

Britain, France, Germany and Italy have also promised to send military assistance to Kurdish security forces to fight the Islamic State.

The United States has carried out a series of airstrikes against the Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq in the past two weeks, partly to protect the Kurdish region from being overrun.

Zarif denied that Iran and the United States were discussing Iraq as part of talks between Iran and Western powers about Iran's nuclear program.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Mohammad Javad Zarif,Massoud Barzani,Islamic State,Iran's nuclear program

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Iran supplies weapons to Iraqi Kurdish forces; Baghdad bomb kills 12

ARBIL: The direct arming of Kurdish forces is a contentious issue because some Iraqi politicians have said they suspect Kurdish leaders have aspirations to break away from the central government completely. The move could also be seen by some as a prelude to Iran taking a more direct role in broader Iraqi conflict.

"We asked for weapons and Iran was the first country to provide us with weapons and ammunition," Barzani said.

Militants from the Islamic State have clashed with Kurdish peshmerga fighters in recent weeks and taken control of some areas on the periphery of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Earlier in the day a car bomb was detonated in a mainly Shia district of eastern Baghdad, killing 12 people and wounding 28, police and medical sources said.

The bombing in the New Baghdad neighbourhood followed a series of blasts in the Iraqi capital on Monday which killed more than 20 people.

The Islamic State, which controls large swathes of northern and western Iraq, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the New Baghdad neighbourhood on Monday and said in a statement that the attack was carried out as revenge for an attack against a Sunni mosque in Diyala on Friday which killed 68 and wounded dozens.

The Iranian foreign minister held talks with Barzani on Tuesday, one day after visiting senior Shi'ite clerics in southern Iraq. Zarif acknowledged giving military assistance to Iraqi security forces but said the cooperation did not include deploying ground troops in the country.

"We have no military presence in Iraq," Zarif said. "We do have military cooperation with both the central government and the Kurds in different arenas."

Neither Zarif nor Barzani gave any details whether weapons supplied to Kurdish peshmerga forces had been routed through the central government or given directly to Kurdish forces. Prime Minister-designate Haider al-Abadi said on Monday that arms given to the peshmerga had been routed through the central government.

Britain, France, Germany and Italy have also promised to send military assistance to Kurdish security forces to fight the Islamic State.

The United States has carried out a series of airstrikes against the Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq in the past two weeks, partly to protect the Kurdish region from being overrun.

Zarif denied that Iran and the United States were discussing Iraq as part of talks between Iran and Western powers about Iran's nuclear program.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Mohammad Javad Zarif,Massoud Barzani,Islamic State,Iran's nuclear program

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Nearly 200 cabin crew resign from Malaysia Airlines

KUALA LUMPUR: Nearly 200 cabin crew have resigned from Malaysia Airlines which was hit by two deadly tragedies this year, the carrier said on Tuesday, and some reportedly cited fears for their safety.

The flag carrier, which prior to this year had a good safety record, has been in the spotlight in the past six months following the disappearance of flight MH370 on March 8 and the shooting down of MH17 on July 17 over rebel-held eastern Ukraine.

The airline said 186 crew had left in the first seven months of this year, with many blaming family pressure prompted by the tragedies.

"Following the MH17 incident, there was a spike in crew resignations but the number has now decreased to acceptable and routinely expected levels," it said in a statement

"Many cited 'family pressure' as the reason for their resignation due to the MH17 and MH370 tragedies."

Abdul Malek Ariff, secretary-general of the employees union, said some "are now are afraid to fly".

Abdul Malek, quoted by the Edge Financial daily on Monday, also said crew shortages were forcing staff to work up to 12 hours a day.

The union represents about 8,000 of Malaysia Airlines' 19,500-strong workforce.

The carrier said it was providing emotional and psychological support to its staff.

The two aviation tragedies killed 537 people including 27 crew members.

Flight MH370 disappeared mysteriously in March en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. No trace has been found despite an intensive search in the southern Indian Ocean.

The airline was widely criticized for its handling of the crisis.

On July 17, MH17 was shot down over war-torn eastern Ukraine, with another 298 people killed.

The ailing airline is in the midst of being taken private by sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional as part of an expected major overhaul.

Khazanah is expected this week to announce a series of restructuring measures including job cuts and axing of unprofitable international routes.

The carrier has struggled amid intense competition, losing $1.3 billion over the past three years even before the two disasters.

For this year's first quarter the airline posted a net loss of 443 million ringgit ($137 million) citing MH370's impact on bookings.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=MH17 MH17 incident,Malaysia Airlines,Khazanah Nasional,Flight MH370

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

We will act if Islamic group threatens US: Dempsey

ABOARD A US MILITARY AIRCRAFT: Gen. Martin Dempsey said on Sunday that once he determines that the Islamic State militants in Iraq have become a direct threat to the US homeland or Europe, he will recommend the US military move directly against the group in Syria.

But the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said that right now, he still believes the insurgent group is still more a regional threat and is not plotting or planning attacks against either the US or Europe.

Speaking on a military plane en route to Afghanistan, Dempsey provided more detail into his thinking about the Islamic militants who have stormed across Iraq, operating out of safe havens in Syria.

So far, the Obama administration has restricted its military action against the militants to specific operations within Iraq, but concerns have increased as the Islamic State group extended its reach, taking control of a swath of land stretching from Syria across the border and deep into western and northern Iraq.

The group took over Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, in June, and has since declared an Islamic state, or caliphate, in territory under its control in Iraq and Syria.

Dempsey also told reporters traveling with him that he believes that key allies in the region — including Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — will join the US in quashing the Islamic State group.

"I think ISIS has been so brutal, and has wrapped itself in a radical religious legitimacy that clearly threatens everybody I just mentioned, that I think they will be willing partners," said Dempsey, expressing optimism for the first time that the Arab nations would join in the conflict. ISIS is an acronym for the Islamic State group.

He contrasted the Islamic State group to the Yemen-based al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which has plotted and attempted attacks against the US and Europe. As a result, the US has conducted counterterrorism strikes against the group within Yemen.

Dempsey said that so far, there is no sign that the Islamic State militants are engaged in "active plotting against the homeland, so it's different than that which we see in Yemen."

"I can tell you with great clarity and certainty that if that threat existed inside of Syria that it would certainly be my strong recommendation that we would deal with it," said Dempsey. "I have every confidence that the president of the United States would deal with it."

He added that those regional partners could come together and squeeze the Islamic State group "from multiple directions in order to initially disrupt and eventually defeat them. It has to happen with them, much less with us."

Up to now, when asked about airstrikes inside Syria, Dempsey and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel have said all options remain on the table. But so far there has been no broader authorization for such operations.

The Obama administration has authorized airstrikes within Iraq to protect US personnel and facilities and to help Iraqi and Kurdish forces assist refugees driven from their homes by the Islamic State. Most of the recent strikes have been around the Mosul Dam, which Islamic militants had taken, but it is now back in the hands of the Iraqi and Kurdish troops.

Senior US leaders, from the White House to the Pentagon, have said the key to success in Iraq is the formation of an inclusive government that will include disenfranchised Sunnis.

As the Islamic State militants moved across Iraq, some Sunnis — including some members of the Iraqi security forces — either threw down their weapons or joined the group.

The US has been encouraged as new Iraqi leaders, including Shiite prime minister-designate Haider al-Abadi, begin to take steps to form a new government and reach out to Sunnis.

Officials have suggested that any additional military assistance from the US to Iraq is contingent on those political and diplomatic steps by the government.

One possibility, said Dempsey, would be to have US forces provide more expanded advice and assistance to the Iraqi force.

He said military assessment teams looked at about 50 Iraqi brigades and a number of the Kurdish units and have a good idea which ones have appropriate training and equipment and have not been infiltrated by militia.

So far, Dempsey said the US has not sought or received permission to put advisers into Iraqi brigades or headquarters units and accompany them into combat.

To date, US forces have conducted a total of 96 airstrikes across Iraq. Of those, 62 have been around the Mosul Dam.

The strikes have helps to break the insurgents' momentum, said Dempsey, and strip away some of the mythology that the Islamic State is impregnable or overwhelming.

Dempsey is on his way to Afghanistan to attend a change of command ceremony Tuesday. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford is stepping down as the top commander there; army gen. John Campbell will take over.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Hundreds dead as Islamic State seizes Syrian air base

BEIRUT: Islamic State militants stormed an air base in northeast Syria on Sunday, capturing it from government forces after days of fighting that cost more than 500 lives, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian observatory for human rights said at least 346 Islamic State fighters were killed and more than 170 members of government forces had died since Tuesday in the fight over Tabqa base, making it one of the deadliest confrontations between the two groups since the start of Syria's war.

The observatory, which monitors violence in Syria through sources on the ground, said fighting raged inside the air base on Sunday. It was the Syrian army's last foothold in an area otherwise controlled by Islamic State, which has seized large areas of Syria and Iraq.

In nearby Raqqa city, an Islamic State stronghold, there was celebratory gunfire and several mosques announced through their loudspeakers that the base had fallen to the Islamists and cheered "God is greatest", a witness told Reuters.

IS fighters displayed the severed heads of Syrian army soldiers in the city square, the witness said, adding that Syrian warplanes were heard over Raqqa following the air base attack. Earlier on Sunday the Syrian air force had bombed areas around the base.

Syrian state television said that after fierce battles, the military was "regrouping".

Citing a military source, it said there was a "successful evacuation of the airport" and that the army was continuing strikes on "terrorist groups" in the area, which it said had suffered heavy losses.

Syrian state media gave no figure for the number of people killed in the clashes.

Islamic State had also trapped around 150 retreating Syrian soldiers in an area near the base and was believed to be holding them captive, the Observatory said.

The Syrian army sent reinforcements to the base overnight on Friday to fight Islamic State, which controls roughly a third of northern and eastern Syria.

Syrian television had shown footage of army forces defending the base on Saturday who had said it was safe from Islamic State's advances. Many of the Islamic State fighters died after Syrian warplanes bombarded the area, the observatory said.

Military Bases

Islamic State, a radical offshoot of al Qaeda, has taken three Syrian military bases in the area in recent weeks, boosted by arms seized in Iraq.

Syria is calculating that the IS push to reshape the Middle East will eventually force the West to deal with President Bashar al-Assad as the only way to tackle the threat, sources familiar with Syrian government thinking have said.

Elsewhere in Syria, the group withdrew from northern areas it controlled outside the city of Homs on Sunday and retreated east after coming under attack from rival Islamist fighters, the Observatory said.

Fighters from the group withdrew from a headquarters north of Homs on the orders of their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Observatory said, citing sources in the area.

They said IS gave up the territory to Nusra Front, al Qaeda's official wing in Syria.

As well as Nusra Front, Western-backed rebels have also been fighting IS in Syria but have regularly been defeated by the group, which in June declared an "Islamic caliphate" in the territory it controls.

Activists have accused the Syrian army of avoiding confrontations with IS because it has weakened rival rebel groups also battling Assad.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Syrian air base,Islamic State seizes Syrian air base

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

French govt dissolved amid internal feud

PARIS: French President Francois Hollande dissolved the government on Monday after an open feud in his cabinet over the country's stagnant economy.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls offered up his socialist government's resignation after accusing the economy minister of crossing a line with his blunt criticism of the government's policies. Hollande accepted the resignation and ordered Valls to form a new government by Tuesday.

France has had effectively no economic growth this year and Hollande's approval ratings are in the teens. The country is under pressure from the European Union to get its finances in order, but economy minister Arnaud Montebourg has questioned whether the austerity pressed by the EU will kick start French growth.

"A major change in our economy policy," was what Montebourg had said was needed from the president and prime minister.

With those words, Montebourg drew the anger of the socialist leadership, which said Montebourg's job was to support the government, not criticize it from within.

"He's not there to start a debate but to put France back on the path of growth," Carlos Da Silva, the Socialist Party spokesman, told Le Figaro newspaper.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=French government dissolved,Francois Hollande,Hollande's approval ratings

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Pakistan's largest city thirsts for a water supply

KARACHI (Pakistan): On the outskirts of the slums of Pakistan's biggest city, protesters burning tires and throwing stones have what sounds like a simple demand: They want water at least once a week.

But that's anything but in Karachi, where people go days without getting water from city trucks, sometimes forcing them to use groundwater contaminated with salt. A recent drought has only made the problem worse. And as the city of roughly 18 million people rapidly grows, the water shortages are only expected to get worse.

"During the last three months they haven't supplied a single drop of water in my neighborhood," protester Yasmeen Islam said. "It doesn't make us happy to come on the roads to protest but we have no choice anymore."

Karachi gets most of its water from the Indus River — about 550 million gallons per day — and another 100 million gallons from the Hub Dam that is supplied by water from neighboring Baluchistan province. But in recent years, drought has hurt the city's supply.

Misbah Fareed, a senior official with the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board that runs the city's water supplies, said that only meets about half the city's needs — 1.2 billion gallons a day.

Karachi's water distribution network has exacerbated the problem by forcing much of the city to get its water through tankers instead of directly from pipes. The Karachi Water and Sewerage Board operates 12 water hydrants around the city where tankers fill up and then distribute. Even people in the richest areas of the city get their water through tankers that come a few times a week to fill up underground cisterns.

But criminals have illegally tapped into the city's water pipes and set up their own distribution points where they siphon off water and sell it.

"I personally know some people previously associated with drug mafias who now switched to the water tanker business," Fareed said. "Just imagine how lucrative the business is."

Other areas of Pakistan pump massive amounts of groundwater. But in the coastal city of Karachi, the underground water is too salty to drink. Many people have pumps but they use the water for things such as showering or washing clothes.

The water shortage is exacerbated by Karachi's massive population. Pakistani military operations and American drone strikes in the northern tribal regions, as well as natural disasters such as flooding and earthquakes, have pushed people toward a city long seen as the economic heart of Pakistan.

The city is trying to increase the amount of water it gets from the Indus River by building another canal — dubbed the K4 project. But even if they were to get political approval from the capital to take more water from the river, it would take a minimum of four years to build.

But analysts say supply isn't the only problem. Farhan Anwar, who runs an organization called Sustainable Initiatives in Karachi, said the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board is horribly overstaffed and many of those are political appointees. The cost for water is also very low and the agency doesn't collect all that it's due, Anwar said. That's made it difficult to upgrade the aging pipes the system does have, meaning contamination and leakages are common.

Meanwhile, Karachi residents have to spend more money or walk further and further to get water. One elderly resident Aisha Saleem said in recent months even the little water they get from the water board is salty.

"Women and kids have to go miles by foot and carry drinking water every day," she said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=water crisis in Karachi,Sustainable Initiatives in Karachi,Karachi Water and Sewerage Board,Karachi thirsts for a water supply

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Yemen's Shia rebel group refuses to stop rallies

SANAA (Yemen): Yemen's Shia rebel group called for new protests on Sunday after rejecting a draft proposal by a presidential delegation to stop their demonstrations in return for a new government and a review of the country's economic policies.

The delegation had negotiated with the Hawthis in the northern city of Saada, hoping to end the massive protests now challenging the government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. The delegation's proposals included installing a new government and revisiting a decision to end government fuel subsidies in the Arab world's poorest country.

On July 30, Hadi's government ended the subsidies, nearly doubling fuel prices and sparking the protests by the Hawthis that have seen them set up tents near ministries in Yemen's capital, Sanaa.

The presidential delegation's proposal was "met with rejection, intransigence and insistence on ignoring the reality and the risks," delegation spokesman Abdel-Malek al-Mikhlafi wrote on his official Facebook page on Sunday. He said the committee will make the draft public after meeting with Hadi.

Meanwhile, the Hawthis called for new rallies Sunday. The group has been holding protests since Monday.

In response, Yemen's government deployed more security forces on the main streets in Sanaa leading to government ministries, its central bank and other government offices.

The Hawthis waged a six-year insurgency in the north against former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh that officially ended in 2010. After Saleh's ouster, they have fought ultraconservative Islamists in several northern cities and towns, accusing them of turning their strongholds into incubators of extremism.

Yemen's international allies have called on the Hawthis to end the protests, warning they could be construed as "antagonistic, militaristic and disrespectful." The protests come as Yemen continues to battle militants and the country's local al-Qaida branch, considered by the US to be the world's most dangerous offshoot of the terror group.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Yemen's Shia rebel group,president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi,Hawthis

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Imran wants to marry in 'Naya Pakistan'

ISLAMABAD: Cricketer-turned-politician and a heartthrob Imran Khan, who is leading his Tehreek-e-Insaaf party in anti-government protests here, has said that he will marry once his dream 'Naya Pakistan' was fulfilled.

In his daily nightly address, Khan last night told this to thousands of his supporters camping in front of parliament, demanding Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's resignation.

"I want to create new Pakistan not only for you but also for me because once Naya Pakistan becomes a reality, I will marry," 62-year-old Khan said to thunderous applause.

Khan married British heiress Jemima Goldsmith in 1995 but the marriage flopped and both agreed to separate in 2004.

They have two sons, Sulieman and Qasim, who live with the mother in Britain.

There are reports that Khan was under family pressure to marry again to put an end to media speculation and some nasty comments in the social media about his alleged affairs.

Khan still has kept himself fit and is considered very popular among women.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Ebola spreads in Nigeria; Liberia has 1,000 cases

ABUJA (Nigeria): Two alarming new cases of Ebola have emerged in Nigeria, widening the circle of people sickened beyond the immediate group of caregivers who treated a dying airline passenger in one of Africa's largest cities.

The outbreak also continues to spread elsewhere in West Africa, with 142 more cases recorded, bringing the new total to 2,615 with 1,427 deaths, the World Health Organization said on Friday.

Most of the new cases are in Liberia, where the government was delivering donated rice to a slum where 50,000 people have been sealed off from the rest of the capital in an attempt to contain the outbreak.

New treatment centers in Liberia are being overwhelmed by patients that were not previously identified. One center with 20 beds opened its doors to 70 possibly infected people, likely coming from "shadow-zones" where people fearing authorities won't let doctors enter, the UN health agency said.

"This phenomenon strongly suggests the existence of an invisible caseload of patients who are not being detected by the surveillance system," the agency said. This has "never before been seen in an Ebola outbreak."

The two new cases in Nigeria were infected by their spouses, both medical workers who had direct contact with Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, who flew into Nigeria from Liberia and Togo and infected 11 others before he died in July. The male and female caregivers also then died of Ebola, health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said Friday.

Nigerian officials initially claimed the risk of exposure to others was minimal because Sawyer was whisked into isolation after arriving at the airport. Lagos state health commissioner Jide Idris later acknowledged that Sawyer was not immediately quarantined.

The two new cases were quarantined two days ago while being tested, Chukwu said. They had previously been under surveillance, meaning they were contacted daily to see if they developed any symptoms, but their movements were not restricted. Once they showed signs of the disease, they were brought in.

Authorities are now trying to identify and monitor everyone they have been in contact with.

In all, 213 people are now under surveillance in Nigeria, including six people, all "secondary contacts" like the caregivers' spouses, being monitored in the state of Enugu, more than 310 miles (500 kilometers) east of Lagos.

A mobile laboratory capable of diagnosing the disease has been moved there, Chukwu said.

Nigeria's total of confirmed infections is now 16. Five of them have died and five have recovered; the rest are being treated in isolation in Lagos, the commercial capital where Sawyer's flight landed.

The damage has been far greater in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, each dealing with hundreds of cases. Liberia has been hit hardest, recording 1,082 cases and 624 deaths.

In Liberia, a teenage boy died after being shot by security forces in West Point, a slum that was blockaded this week to stop the spread of Ebola, a Liberia government spokesman said on Friday. Shakie Kamara was hurt in a clash with police and soldiers who sealed off their peninsula from the rest of Monrovia.

Days earlier in West Point, slum dwellers ransacked a holding center for Ebola patients after realizing that some patients had come from other parts of the city. Looters then made off with bloody sheets and mattresses that could spread the disease.

The government began distributing rice, some of it donated by the World Food Program, to alleviate food shortages a day after cordoning off the slum, said information minister Lewis Brown.

Some countries also continue to impose travel restrictions, even though they aren't recommended by the UN health agency.

On Friday, the Central African country of Gabon announced it was barring all flights and ships from Ebola-stricken countries. South Africa already announced a travel ban for non-citizens from these countries "unless the travel is considered absolutely essential." Senegal closed its borders with Guinea, and is barring air or sea travel from Sierra Leone and Liberia. Cameroon barred flights from Nigeria.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Ebola virus,Ebola,World Food Program,UN health agency,Ebola patients

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Iraq suicide bomber kills at least 11 in Baghdad

BAGHDAD: Iraqi officials say a suicide bombing against an interior ministry building in central Baghdad has killed at least 11 people.

A police officer says the suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden car into the gate of the intelligence headquarters in Karrada district on Saturday afternoon, killing six civilians and five security personnel. He added that 24 other people were wounded.

A medical official confirmed causality figures. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to brief the media.

Since early this year, Iraq has been facing a growing Sunni insurgency with the Islamic State group and allied Sunni militants who have taken over areas in the country's west and north.

The crisis has worsened since June when the group declared an Islamic state, or caliphate, in territory under its control.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Sunni militants,suicide bomber,Iraq suicide bomber,Sunni insurgency,Islamic State group

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

German Chancellor visits Ukrainian capital

KIEV: German Chancellor Angela Merkel flew in to the Ukrainian capital on Saturday and said she wanted to help end a crisis over Ukraine which flared again after Russia sent a convoy of trucks into Ukraine without Kiev's permission.

Making her first visit to Ukraine since the conflict broke out four months ago in the east of the country between pro-Moscow separatists and government forces, Merkel went into talks with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

In brief remarks at the start of their talks, the German leader said she came to Kiev "in a difficult time which is focussed on the unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine."

"I hope that we will be able to discuss bilateral problems and support from Germany as well as the path towards peace, which must be found," she said.

Hours before her plane landed in Kiev, there was heavy artillery bombardment in Donetsk, the main separatist stronghold on the east of Ukraine, near the border with Russia. Reuters reporters saw apartments destroyed and puddles of blood, where, according to residents, two civilians were killed.

The unusually intense shelling may be part of a drive by government forces to achieve a breakthrough against the rebels in time for Ukrainian Independence Day, which falls on Sunday.

Diplomats say Merkel has two aims for the visit: primarily to show support for Kiev in its stand-off with Russia, but also urge Poroshenko to be open to peace proposals when he meets Russian President Vladimir Putin for talks next week.

Truck convoy

A convoy of about 220 white-painted trucks rolled into Ukraine on Friday through a border crossing controlled by the rebels after days waiting for clearance.

Moscow said the trucks moved in without Kiev's consent because civilians in areas under siege from Ukrainian government troops were in urgent need of food, water and other supplies.

Russian state television broadcast footage of some of the trucks being unloaded at a distribution depot in the city of Luhansk, eastern Ukraine, where beleaguered rebels are trying to hold of an offensive by government troops.

Kiev called the convoy a direct invasion, a stance echoed by NATO, the United States, and European leaders.

A Reuters journalist at the Donetsk-Izvaryne border crossing, where the convoy rolled into Ukraine on Friday, said trucks on Saturday had started pouring back onto the Russian side of the border.

The foreign ministry in Moscow said the convoy had now left Ukraine, though a Ukrainian military spokesman disputed this, saying only 184 of the 220 vehicles had re-entered Russia.

The spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, also alleged that the aid trucks had been loading up with equipment removed from Ukrainian armaments factories in rebel-held territory. This could not be independently verified.

In Brussels, NATO said it had reports that Russian troops had been firing artillery at Kiev's forces inside Ukraine - fuelling Western allegations that the Kremlin is behind the conflict in an effort undermine the Western-leaning leadership in Kiev.

"Since mid-August we have multiple reports of the direct involvement of Russian forces, including airborne, air defence and special operations forces in Eastern Ukraine," said NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu.

"Russian artillery support - both cross border and from within Ukraine - is being employed against the Ukrainian armed forces," she said.

The Russian foreign ministry, in a statement, called those allegations "groundless." Russia accuses Kiev, with the backing of the West, of waging a war against innocent civilians in eastern Ukraine, a mainly Russian-speaking region.

The conflict in Ukraine has dragged Russian-Western relations to their lowest ebb since the Cold War and sparked a round of trade sanctions that are hurting already-fragile economies in European and Russia.

Homes destroyed

The crisis over Ukraine started when mass protests in Kiev ousted a president who was close to Moscow, and instead installed leaders viewed with suspicion by the Kremlin.

Soon after that, Russia annexed the Ukrainian region of Crimea, and a separatist rebellion broke out in eastern Ukraine. In the past weeks, the momentum has shifted towards Ukraine's forces, who have been pushing back the rebels.

The separatist are now encircled in their two strongholds, Luhansk and Donetsk.

Reuters reporters in Donetsk said that most of the shelling was taking place in the outskirts, but explosions were also audible in the centre of the city.

In Donetsk's Leninsky district, a man who gave his name as Grigory, said he was in the toilet on Saturday morning when he heard the whistling sound of incoming artillery. "Then it hit. I came out and half the building was gone."

The roof of the building had collapsed into a heap of debris. Grigory said his 27-year-old daughter was taken to hospital with injuries to her head. He picked up a picture of a baby from the rubble. "This is my grandson," he said.

In another residential area, about 5 km north of the city centre, a shop and several houses had been hit. Residents said two men, civilians, were killed.

Praskoviya Grigoreva, 84, pointed to two puddles of blood on the pavement near a bus stop that was destroyed in the same attack. "He's dead. Death took him on this spot," she said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Ukraine Crisis,crisis over Ukraine,German Chancellor,Angela Merkel

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

2 killed in attack on Nato supply convoy in Pak

PESHAWAR: At least two persons were killed and two oil tankers destroyed when unidentified militants on Thursday attacked a Nato supply convoy on the Pak-Afghan highway in restive northwest Pakistan.

The militants attacked two oil tankers near Sur Kamar area in Khyber tribal region, destroying them completely, according to local officials.

Following the attack on the tankers, an exchange of fire took place between them, they said.

The militants fled the scene after the attack. Pakistan is a key supply route for the US-led mission in landlocked Afghanistan, particularly as Nato forces prepare to withdraw troops and equipment by the end of this year.

Nato supply trucks, which carry everything from fuel to munitions and food, often come under attack on their journey between Karachi and border crossing points.

Separately, one person was killed and four others injured when militants attacked a house with a hand grenade in the Chadrar area of Tank district. The injured include women and children.

Also, the security forces foiled a terrorism bid by defusing a five kg homemade bomb in a Basic Health Unit in Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Ebola crisis: This is why '75%' of victims are women

About 75 per cent of people contracting Ebola are women because they are often the primary care-givers, nurses and traders, health officials have said.

The disease, which has claimed the lives of at least 1,229 people across Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, is disproportionality infecting women as the outbreak spreads across West Africa.

Julia Duncan-Cassell, Liberia's minister for gender and development, said health teams at task force meeting in Liberia found three-quarters of those who were infected or died from Ebola were female.

She told the Washington Post: "Women are the caregivers — if a kid is sick, they say, 'Go to your mom.'?

"The cross-border trade women go to Guinea and Sierra Leone for the weekly markets, [and] they are also the caregivers. Most of the time when there is a death in the family, it's the woman who prepares the funeral, usually an aunt or older female relative."

The Ministry of Health in Liberia also said about 75 per cent of the Ebola deaths it has counted so far have been women, Buzz Feed reports.

Suafiatu Tunis, a spokesperson for Community Response Group and a leader of the Social Mobilization Committee on Ebola said female family members are also typically expected to nurse and tend to sick family members, increasing their risk of contracting the disease even further.

Women in West Africa are also the traditional birth attendants, nurses and the cleaners and laundry workers in hospitals. Ebola is transmitted through direct contact with bodily fluids, making hospital transmission the likely method by which it would be passed on to large numbers of people.

Maricel Seeger, a WHO spokeswoman in Monrovia, Liberia, said reaching women and educating them on the disease is crucial to tackling the virus' spread, as they play a major role "as conduits of information in their communities".

"By reaching the women, they are reaching those who can best protect their families, and their own health," she said.

Liberia has the highest death toll and its number of cases is rising the fastest. In response, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has ordered West Point sealed off and imposed a night-time curfew.

At least 50,000 people live on the half-mile-long point, which is one of the poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods of the capital.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

UN Ebola pointman to visit west Africa

MONROVIA: The UN's new pointman on Ebola was due to arrive in west Africa on Thursday for a visit aimed at shoring up health services in the region where at least 1,350 lives have been lost to the virus.

David Nabarro, a British physician appointed last week by UN secretary Ban Ki-moon, said he would focus on "revitalising the health sectors" in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

"One of the major issues is that health sectors and health services in countries affected by Ebola have really suffered," Nabarro told reporters in New York ahead of his trip.

Nabarro will travel to Monrovia, Freetown, Conakry and Abuja as part of his overall mission to coordinate the global response to the worst-ever outbreak of the hemorrhagic fever.

His visit comes at a time when affected countries are scrambling to contain the spread of the killer disease.

Guinea, where the outbreak first appeared earlier this year, sent more than 100 doctors and volunteers to its borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia on Thursday to monitor people entering the country for signs of Ebola.

The move is part of a plan introduced under Guinea's state of emergency, which was declared earlier this month in an effort to stop the spread of the virus that has killed 396 people in the country to date.

"It is necessary that everyone living outside our borders who wishes to enter our country be examined with the utmost rigour," said health minister Colonel Remy Lamah.

The measures in Guinea followed a chaotic day in Liberia's capital, where violence erupted in an Ebola quarantine zone as soldiers opened fire and used tear gas on protesting crowds.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf had ordered a nightime curfew and the quarantine of Monrovia's West Point slum and Dolo Town, to the east of the capital, in a bid to stem the outbreak.

Residents of West Point, where club-wielding youths stormed an Ebola medical facility on Saturday, reacted with fury to the crackdown, hurling stones and shouting at the security forces.

Liberia, with 576 deaths from 972 diagnosed cases, has seen the biggest toll among the four west African countries hit by Ebola.

Deaths from the epidemic that has swept through west Africa since March now stand at 1,350 after a surge of 106 victims in just two days, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

From its initial outbreak in Guinea, the virus spread to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, overwhelming inadequate public health services already battling common deadly diseases such as malaria.

Straining the situation even further, several top officials leading the fight have lost their lives to the disease.

A doctor who treated Nigeria's first Ebola patient was named among the dead on Tuesday, taking the death toll in Africa's most populous country to five.

Fears that the virus could spread to other continents have seen flights to the region cancelled, and authorities around the world have adopted measures to screen travellers arriving from affected nations.

Vietnam said Wednesday it had released two Nigerian air travellers from isolation after their fevers subsided. In Myanmar a local man is still undergoing tests after arriving from Guinea with a fever.

Countries throughout Africa and beyond remain on high alert, with the Equatorial Guinea airline, Ceiba Intercontinental, the latest to suspend flights to the whole region.

But despite the rising death toll, WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib noted "encouraging signs" in Nigeria and Guinea, where prevention measures and work to trace lines of infection were starting to take effect.

The Nigerian outbreak has been traced to a sole foreigner, a Liberian-American who died in late July in Lagos. All subsequent Nigerian victims had direct contact with him.

In Sierra Leone, where 374 people have died, the outbreak has also been traced back to one person: a herbalist in the remote eastern border village of Sokoma.

No cure or vaccine is currently available for Ebola, which is spread by close contact with body fluids, meaning patients must be isolated.

Given the extent of the crisis, the WHO has authorised largely untested treatments — including ZMapp and the Canadian-made VSV-EBOV vaccine, whose possible side effects on humans are not known.

Three doctors in Liberia who had been given the experimental US-made ZMapp are reportedly responding to the treatment.

Researchers also said Wednesday an experimental drug treatment can help monkeys survive an otherwise deadly infection with a tropical virus called Marburg, which is similar to Ebola.

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

Did an exceptional iceberg sink the Titanic?

LONDON: The luxury liner Titanic, which sank in the ice cold Atlantic waters in 1912, was unlucky to have set sail in a year with a greater number of icebergs than normal, scientists say.

While the sinking of the Titanic is typically blamed on human, design and construction errors, a new study points to two other unfavourable factors outside human control.

The study found that there were a greater number of icebergs than normal that year, and weather conditions had driven them further south, and earlier in the year, than was usual.

Titanic, a British passenger liner, sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton, UK to New York City, US.

The disaster caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people.

Researchers also note that iceberg discharge from glaciers is increasing, with more heavy iceberg years since the 1980s than before, and increasing global warming will likely cause this trend to continue.

"As use of the Arctic increases in the future with declining sea-ice, and as polar ice sheets are increasingly losing mass as well, the iceberg risk is likely to increase in the future, rather than decline," said co-author Professor Grant Bigg from the University of Sheffield in UK.

The study was published in the magazine Significance.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Imran Khan to march towards Islamabad's Red Zone

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan was on the edge on Tuesday after opposition leader Imran Khan called on his supporters to march on the heavily-guarded 'Red Zone' in the capital and cleric Tahir-ul Qadri said he will set up an alternate Parliament to force Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign and hold fresh elections.

"Today InshaAllah a peaceful non-violent Azadi March will move on 2 Constitution Ave.I will lead the March myself. Defining moment 4 Pakistan," Khan tweeted.

"Our Azadi March is constitutional & democratic," the cricketer-turned-politician, who spent the night in a shipping container at the site of the sit-in, said.

The government has so far forbidden protesters from breaching the Red Zone housing key state buildings like Supreme Court of Pakistan, Parliament House, the President and the Prime Minister's residences and other important buildings including embassies of various countries.

Khan accuses Sharif's PML-N party of vote-rigging in the 2013 election and has called on him to stand down. Sharif's party won that election by a landslide in what was Pakistan's first peaceful transfer of power between two civilian democratic governments.

In the 2013 polls, Sharif's PML-N had won 190 out of 342 seats. Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf got 34 seats in the 342-member National Assembly, the third largest bloc in the legislature.

Security has been tightened in the area after Khan called on marchers to enter it to stage a peaceful protest in the 'fake' (National) assembly and 'fake' Prime Minister House.

More than 40,000 security personnel have been deployed to protest the sensitive areas.

Khan's party on Monday decided to withdraw its lawmakers from the National Assembly and all provincial assemblies except Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, There are fears that any attempt by marchers to breach the Red Zone could lead to confrontation.

Khan has been demonstrating along with thousands of his supporters in the capital since Friday to demand the government's resignation. Thousands of anti-government protesters are occupying two Islamabad highways.

Meanwhile, Qadri also announced that he will set up 'Awami Parliament' (People's Parliament) on Tuesday and refused to meet the PML-N government-appointed committee of lawmakers to hold talks with him.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

'No' from one Iraq villeger triggered ISIS mass killings

DOHUK: When Islamic State militants stormed into a northern Iraqi village and ordered everyone to convert to Islam or die only one person refused. But that did not satisfy the Sunni insurgents who are even more hardline than al-Qaida.

The militants, who have seized much of northern Iraq since arriving from Syria in June, wasted no time after the village's leader, or sheikh, stood up for his ancient Yazidi faith.

Khalof Khodede, an unemployed father of three who escaped with his life, recalled how 80 men in the village of Kocho were killed and all the women and girls were kidnapped.

His account, one of the first eyewitness reports of last Friday's killings, could not be independently verified but other Yazidis and Iraqi officials have given details of Islamic State's attack on the village.

"First they wanted us all to convert to Islam and we said yes just to save our lives. We were all very afraid," said Khodede from a hospital bed in the town of Dohuk in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

Dohuk is now home to thousands of refugees from Iraq's minority Yazidi community which has paid the heaviest price for Islamic State's ambition to redraw the map of the Middle East.

"Then our sheikh said 'I won't convert to Islam'. And then they gathered us inside the village school," he said.

The men were taken to the first floor and the women to the second after the villagers' money and gold jewellery were seized, probably to fund the group made up of Iraqis and other Arabs as well as foreign fighters.

Then the Yazidis were loaded onto minibuses in groups of 10 to 20 and transported outside the village after being told they would be taken to Sinjar, the ancient homeland of the sect.

The vehicles stopped abruptly and the militants opened fire without warning. "They started shooting at us randomly. They had heavy guns like machine guns. I was hit in my leg and on my pelvis," said Khodede, showing where he had been wounded.

The Yazidis, followers of an ancient religion derived from Zoroastrianism who are part of Iraq's Kurdish community, are not strangers to oppression.

OPPRESSION ON A NEW LEVEL

Many of their villages were destroyed when Saddam Hussein's troops tried to crush the Kurds. Some were taken away by the executed former dictator's intelligence agents.

But nothing could have prepared them for the wrath of the Islamic State, which has declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria it controls.

To survive, Khodede had to hide under the dead bodies of friends and neighbours, people who had practised the mysterious Yazidi faith with for a lifetime — beliefs that Islamic State fighters condemn as "devil worship".

After trying to stay motionless for about an hour, Khodede saw Kurdish fighters in the distance, peering through gaps in the bodies.

They were not Iraqi Kurdish fighters who had held towns and villages in the north for years after the fall of Saddam in 2003.

The Kurdish fighters had come from Syria after hearing that fellow Kurds were being routed in neighbouring Iraq by Islamic State militants who seized several towns, a fifth oilfield, as well as the country's dam for some time in recent weeks.

Like many Yazidis, Khodede felt abandoned by the Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters who acquired a reputation for being fierce warriors mainly because they challenged Saddam's troops.

The Syrian Kurdish fighters cleaned up his wounds, took him to a hospital in Syria and then brought him back to Iraq.

Others were not so lucky.

"Islamic State kidnapped about 400 to 600 people in our village and the majority of those people are women and children. They killed most of the men," said Khodede, in the emergency room of a teaching hospital where he arrived on Monday night.

His uncle and sister are by his side as blood drips into a bag hanging from his bed.

In the chaos and panic after the latest Islamic State offensive, rumours swirled about the fate of kidnapped Yazidi women, usually referred to as "slaves" for Islamic State.

Some Yazidis believe Islamic State holds hundreds of people at a detention centre near the town of Tal Afar.

Khodede wonders if his family is there. His three children, wife and mother were taken away along with hundreds of others just because the village sheikh was defiant.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Deng Xiaoping's biography highlights China's ordeals in Mao era

BEIJING: China has published the official biography and collected works of Deng Xiaoping which for the first time throw light on trials and tribulations the reformist leader underwent during Mao Zedong's leadership.

The Collected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1949-1974) presents the leader's thoughts on the development of the country and the Communist Party of China (CPC).

The Biography of Deng Xiaoping (1904-1974) records his experience until 1974 when he served as vice premier after being purged by Mao Zedong for several years during the decade-long disastrous Cultural Revolution from 1966.

Deng who was born in 1904 in China's Sichuan Province and was banished to a tractor factory by Mao for diluting the Marxist ideology by advocating economic reforms. It was only after Mao's death in 1976 that he took charge of the party and country.

His sweeping economic reforms which brought in copious flows of FDI has changed the face of China in over two decades from one of the poorest countries to world's second largest economy next only to the US.

His biography will be followed by a new TV series. The 48-episode drama whose title roughly translates "Deng Xiaoping during a historic turning point" tells the story of Deng who had to grapple with the "gang four", led by Mao, for the control of power paving the way for transformation of China.

The TV series, which took five years to make, began airing on prime time Friday for state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) in commemoration of the Deng Xiaoping's 110th birthday to be celebrated on August 22.

The timing of the biography and TV series are regarded as politically significant as Chinese President Xi Jinping is being projected as new Deng of China.

An editorial on Xi's leadership published last week by People's Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), said Xi identified with the political legacy of Deng.

The commentary said Xi regarded Deng as his role model and identified with his reform policies.

"The problems left by reforms can only be solved by further reforms," the editorial said.

Xi also agreed with Deng's defence of the legacy of Mao Zedong, it said citing Xi's statement on 120th birth anniversary of Mao that the former leader was a great revolutionary who made mistakes in his later years.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Kurdish forces 'take control' of Iraq's Mosul dam

BAGHDAD: Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Iraqi counterterrorism forces have pushed Islamic State militants out of Mosul dam, state television reported on Monday.

The television station quoted Lieutenant-General Qasim Atta, a military spokesman, as saying the forces were backed by a joint air patrol. He did not give details. An independent verification was not immediately possible.

A Twitter account belonging to a media organisation that supports the Islamic State said the dam was still under the group's full control.

On Sunday, a Mosul dam engineer who has been in close contact with Islamic State militants holding the dam said they had been placing roadside bombs along roads leading in and out of the complex in anticipation of an assault.

The latest northern Iraq offensive by Islamic State militants has rattled the Baghdad government and its Western allies, prompting the United States to mount the first airstrikes in the country since it withdrew in 2011.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Kurdish peshmerga fighters,Kurdish forces,Islamic State militants

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

Strong quake hits west Iran, 250 injured

TEHRAN: A strong 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck the province of Ilam in western Iran today, injuring at least 250 people and causing extensive damage to buildings, Iranian media said.

The US Geological Survey, reporting the magnitude of the quake at 6.3, said it struck 36 kilometres (22 miles) southeast of the city of Abdanan, near the border with Iraq.

According to state television, the quake occurred at 7:02am (local time) near the town of Mour-Mouri.

"Fortunately there have been no reports of deaths so far but there have been injuries and a great deal of material damage," a Red Cross official told the television.

The chief of the crisis committee for the area, Ahmad Karami, later said 250 people had been injured in the quake.

In the village of Mour-Mouri, a number of homes and public buildings were damaged, according to the official IRNA news agency.

It added that damage also occurred in eight nearby villages.

A number of people spent the night outside their homes after at least 44 smaller tremors struck the area yesterday, media reported.

Iran stands on several seismic fault lines. In April last year, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Iran and neighboring Pakistan, killing 40 people.

A massive quake in December 2003 struck the southern city of Bam, killing 26,000 people and destroying its ancient mud-built citadel., 250 injured: media

Tehran, Aug 18 (AFP) A strong 6.1 magnitude earthquake struck the province of Ilam in western Iran today, injuring at least 250 people and causing extensive damage to buildings, Iranian media said.

The US Geological Survey, reporting the magnitude of the quake at 6.3, said it struck 36 kilometres (22 miles) southeast of the city of Abdanan, near the border with Iraq.

According to state television, the quake occurred at 7:02 am (local time) near the town of Mour-Mouri.

"Fortunately there have been no reports of deaths so far but there have been injuries and a great deal of material damage," a Red Cross official told the television.

The chief of the crisis committee for the area, Ahmad Karami, later said 250 people had been injured in the quake.

In the village of Mour-Mouri, a number of homes and public buildings were damaged, according to the official IRNA news agency.

It added that damage also occurred in eight nearby villages.

A number of people spent the night outside their homes after at least 44 smaller tremors struck the area yesterday, media reported.

Iran stands on several seismic fault lines.

In April last year, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck southeastern Iran and neighboring Pakistan, killing 40 people.

A massive quake in December 2003 struck the southern city of Bam, killing 26,000 people and destroying its ancient mud-built citadel.

21.50 | 0 komentar | Read More

85 killed, 139 missing in Nepal landslide, floods

KATHMANDU: At least 85 persons have been killed and 139 gone missing in the last three days in floods and landslides triggered by incessant rainfall in various districts across Nepal.

As many as 73 people have lost their lives in the mid-western region, while 131 are still missing. The number of missing might go up, officials said.

Floods have completely damaged more than 7,000 households in the mid-western region. More than 12,000 households have been inundated in Bardiya alone. The swollen Karnali River has swept away three suspension bridges, Himalayan Times reported.

Surkhet district has been hit the worst. About 26 people have been killed and 97 had gone missing in the district, according to the regional police office at Surkhet.

Floods have killed 17 persons in Bardiya and 15 went missing. Likewise, 14 lost their lives in Dang and three went missing. In Banke district, floods have killed four and five have gone missing, Deputy Superintendent of Police Nareshman Shrestha said.

Likewise, four persons have lost their lives in the landslide in Salyan district, while eight are missing. Two have died in Jajarkot and two are missing.

"One person in Kalikot, four in Rolpa and three in Rukum have died. The death toll and the number of missing persons might go up," said Shrestha.

About 300 families are trapped in forests and an island were rescued by helicopters, another official Tej Prasad Paudel said.

Seven persons died in seven districts, one is missing and five have been injured in the central region. According to central regional police, Hetauda, five persons and one died in Chitwan and Makawanpur respectively. Landslide has killed one in Sindhuli.

Regional police office said floods and landslides had damaged 115 households in Rautahat, Bara, Parsa, Makawanpur, Mahottari and Sindhuli.

Three women were killed after a landslide buried a primary school building in Gorkha district of the western region.

Eleven persons were injured in the incident. Rain-fed rivers in the far west have killed one person and six have gone missing.

According to far-west regional office, one person died after a local stream swept him away in Kailali district. Three persons in Dadeldhura and one each in Kailali, Bajura and Bajhang have gone missing.

Landslides in Ramechhap district rendered 53 families homeless. As many as 30 houses are at risk of being buried by landslip.

India has announced a relief assistance of NRs 48 million for the victims of floods and landslide in different parts of Nepal. India has also arranged three helicopters and one airplane on standby at the border for disaster relief operation on call by government of Nepal.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Nepal landslide,Nepal floods

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More

S Arabia, Kuwait to abide by UN blacklisting of citizens

DUBAI: Saudi Arabia and Kuwait agreed to comply with a United Nations resolution aimed at stopping financing for Islamist militant groups in Syria and Iraq after four of their nationals were named among a group blacklisted by the international body.

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on Friday intended to weaken the Islamic State — an al-Qaida splinter group that has seized swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate — and al-Qaida's Syrian wing, Nusra Front.

Western officials believe that wealthy Gulf Arabs, in countries that include Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, have been a main source of funding for Sunni Islamist militants fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

While Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia is a main backer of the rebellion against Assad, a member of the Alawite sect of Shia Islam and an ally of Riyadh's rival Shiae Iran, it says it is careful to direct state support to moderate groups.

Riyadh this year declared the Islamic State group and the Nusra Front terrorist organizations, imposing prison terms for giving them moral or material support, and has mobilised its clerics to preach against private donations to militants.

The Islamic State has long been blacklisted by the Security Council, while Nusra Front was added earlier this year. Both groups are designated under the UN al-Qaida sanctions regime.

Gulf media said that two of the blacklisted men were Saudis wanted by Riyadh for links to Islamist militants, while two others were Kuwaitis, including Sheikh Hajjaj Bin Fahd Al Ajmi, a prominent cleric accused of links to Syria's al-Qaida branch, the Nusra Front.

"Kuwait will abide by the UN Resolution 2170 and implement all its terms," Kuwait's UN ambassador Mansour Ayyad al-Otaibi said in a statement carried by state news agency KUNA on Saturday.

Wanted

Under Friday's resolution, the six people will be subject to an international travel ban, asset freeze and arms embargo. It asks UN experts — charged with monitoring violations of the council's al-Qaida sanctions regime - to report in 90 days on the threat posed by Islamic State and Nusra Front, and on details of their recruitment and funding.

The London-based Asharq al-Awsat said the two Saudis, Abdul Mohsen Abdallah Ibrahim al-Charekh and Abdelrahman Mouhamad Zafir al Jahani, were on two lists of wanted militants issued in 2009 and in 2011.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors casualties in fighting in Syria, has said that Charekh was killed near the Syrian coastal city of Latakia in March. Jahani was believed to be at large somewhere outside Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United Nations, Abdullah al-Mualami, also said Riyadh was "committed to implementation" of the resolution.

Both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have recently tightened laws aimed at preventing citizens from involvement in foreign conflicts and instructed mosque preachers to abide by government policies during their sermons.

The Kuwaiti government last month ordered non-governmental public welfare associations to refrain from involvement in politics and shut down branches of some associations.

Kuwait's justice and Islamic affairs minister resigned in May after a senior US official said he had called for jihad in Syria and promoted the funding of terrorism.

In Saudi Arabia, Muslim Sharia courts have issued a series of verdicts jailing people for going to fight abroad or collecting funds for Islamist militants.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=United Nations resolution,UN blacklisting of citizens

21.51 | 0 komentar | Read More