23 July 2015
Week in Brief: INTERNATIONAL NEWS
BAHRAIN: A man accidentally blew himself up during a failed bomb attack on police in a Shia village.
CAMEROON: The wearing of burkas and veils has been banned in the Far North region, following a suicide attack by women bombers which killed 14 people.
CHINA: The state media reported that Ling Jihua, who was former President Hu Jintao’s chief of staff, has been arrested for alleged corruption.
20 tourists (including 6 Britons) were arrested in Inner Mongolia region for allegedly watching terrorist propaganda material in their hotel. 11 of them have been released.
CUBA: Cuba has re-opened its embassy in the USA more than 50 years after diplomatic relations were broken off.
EGYPT: An Egyptian navy gunboat anchored off the Sinai coast was destroyed in a rocket attack claimed by Isis militants.
FRANCE: In Calais, ferry workers halted traffic on the motorway leading to the Eurotunnel entrance with a barricade of burning tyres. They were protesting against Eurotunnel’s plans to sell its ferries to DFDS of Denmark.
GAZA: Explosions destroyed five cars from Hamas and Palestinian armed brigades. No one has claimed responsibility and no one was killed.
GERMANY: Oskar Groening, 94, a former SS guard and book-keeper at Auschwitz, was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of 300,000 Jews in 1944 and sentenced to four years in prison.
A hostel to be used by asylum seekers was burnt down. Other refugee hostels have been attacked by arsonists in recent months.
The Bundestag voted in favour of the bailout proposal agreed between Greece and the EU leaders last week, in spite of a revolt by a fifth of Chancellor Merkel’s own backbenchers.
GREECE: The parliament passed the austerity measures signed by prime minister Tsipras. Many of his own Syriza MPs voted against it, and he had to rely on the support of opposition parties.
Greece has begun to repay the 3.5 billion euros due to ECB and sums overdue to the IMF.
The banks reopened, though some capital controls remain in place.
IRAQ: A car bomb killed more than 100 people in an Isis suicide attack in the town of Khan Bani Saad on the day of the Eid-al-Fitr feast that ends the month of Ramadan.
JAPAN: A parliamentary committee passed legislation which will allow Japanese soldiers to fight overseas. The Diet will now vote on it. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has faced intense public opposition over this measure, but it is welcomed by Japan’s allies.
MALI: Fourteen mausoleums in the city of Timbuktu have been restored by the UN after being destroyed by Islamic extremists.
OUTER SPACE: The Breakthrough Listen project has begun a ten-year search for intelligent life beyond Earth. The project was launched by Professor Stephen Hawking and has been devised and funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian scientist and internet businessman.
SAUDI ARABIA: A bomb exploded in a car stopped at a security check-point in Riyadh. The driver was killed and two policemen injured.
SENEGAL: Hissene Habre, president of Chad from 1982-1990, is being tried by the Extraordinary African Chambers for war crimes, torture and 40,000 murders.
SPAIN: The mayor of Ador, a village in Valencia, has introduced a by-law to make a three-hour siesta compulsory every day between 2pm and 5pm.
SYRIA: Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed Shia groups are attacking the rebel-held town of Zabadani close to the Lebanese border in an attempt to consolidate the Assad regime’s grip on the country’s western rump and the corridor from Damascus to Beirut. The prominence of non-Syrian troops fighting for Assad reflects the large-scale desertion of officers and the demoralisation of troops in the government army.
TURKEY: A bomb attack on Kurdish aid workers killed 31 people and injured 100 others in the town of Suruc. The victims were due to leave Turkey on a humanitarian mission to Kobane in Syria. It is believed that an Isis female suicide bomber was responsible.
USA: A Kuwait-born US citizen, Mohammad Youssef Abdulaziz, attacked a military recruiting office and a naval reserve centre in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Armed with a number of semi-automatic weapons, he murdered four marines and injured a police officer and a Marine recruiter before he was shot dead.
James Holmes, who killed 12 people and injured another 70 during the screening of a Batman film in a cinema in Colorado three years ago, has been found guilty of murder. The court will decide on his sentence – death or life imprisonment – next week.
President Obama visited El Reno prison in Oklahoma, the first US president to visit a federal prison. He called for the scrapping of mandatory minimum sentences and for other reforms to the criminal justice system. Imprisonment in the US has increased in spite of a fall in crime; the US has five percent of the world’s population but its prisons have twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population.
One year after Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over east Ukraine, Washington has drawn up proposals to increase financial sanctions against Russia and to investigate accusations of corruption in Putin’s present regime and past positions.
The US re-opened its embassy in Cuba, more than 50 years after diplomatic relations were broken off.
Donald Trump’s controversial campaign for the leadership of the Republican party stalled when he attacked the war hero status of John McCain, Senator from Arizona. Senator McCain served in the air force during the Vietnam War; he was shot down, captured, tortured and held in a prisoner of war camp for five years, refusing to be released before his fellow prisoners. Mr Trump was given a number of deferments from service in the Vietnam War.
VENEZUELA: President Maduro is ordering private companies to deliver stock of basic foodstuffs to state-run supermarkets at state-set prices, according to Pablo Baraybar, head of the country’s Food Industry Chamber, in what could be seen as an attempt to nationalise the country’s food production. Food shortages and rationing are common in oil-producing Venezuela, especially since the recent plunge in the price of oil.
YEMEN: Forces loyal to President Hadi’s exiled government claim to have re-captured the city of Aden from the Houthi rebels loyal to the former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. The government is backed by a coalition of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia; the Shia rebels are allegedly backed by Iran. The nearby town of Dar Saad is suffering heavy casualties from rebel bombardments.
