9 July 2015
Week in Brief : INTERNATIONAL NEWS
AFGHANISTAN: Four men sentenced to death for leading a mob which murdered a woman accused of burning a Koran have had their sentences reduced. An appeal court in Kabul sentenced three of the men to twenty years in jail and the fourth to ten years.
AUSTRIA: Austria has begun a legal action before the European Court of Justice claiming that the European Commission should not have approved the agreement between the UK Government and EDF for the construction/refurbishment of a nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point, saying that the UK Government has agreed to pay EDF twice the current market price for electricity for 35 years.
CHINA: New satellite photographs taken and published by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank, show a 3000m runway, helipads, docking piers and communications antennae on a new, man-made, one mile square island built over Fiery Cross Reef, one of seven Chinese land-creation projects among the Spratley Islands in the disputed waters of the South China Seas.
FRANCE: There was continued chaos in Calais as ferry workers stageing more wildcat strikes in protest against possible job cuts and migrants attempting to smuggle themselves to Britain disrupted Channel Tunnel traffic.
A court has ruled that the National Front broke its rules when it suspended its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and has ordered its leader, Marine Le Pen, to reinstate him as a member and as honorary chairman. Next week the party will vote on a move to abolish the position of honorary chairman.
President Hollande rejected an application for asylum in France from Julian Assange, the Wiki-Leaks founder who has spent more than three years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London sheltering from an order for his extradition to Sweden to face alleged sex crimes.
41 of the famous ‘red collar’ porters of the Hotel Drouot, the well-known Paris auction house, are facing trial for the theft of thousands of art works worth millions of euros, including paintings by Picasso, Chagall and Courbet. Six prominent Parisian auctioneers are accused of aiding and abetting the thefts.
EGYPT: Isis militants attacked security forces in the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 50 and capturing soldiers, weapons and vehicles.
GERMANY: A computer-operated, production-line robot picked up and killed a man who was installing a machine at a Volkswagon factory near Kassel. Worldwide, 34 people have been killed in robot-related incidents over the last 30 years.
GAZA: Militant groups connected to Isis have fired rockets into Israel and attacked Hamas camps, in an attempt to destabilise Gaza by undermining the Hamas/Fatah government and provoking Israeli counter-attacks.
GREECE: Greece rejected Europe’s bail-out deal (offering further loans in return for economic reform) by voting ‘no’ in last Sunday’s referendum.
The prime minister Alexis Tsipras is now demanding a huge write-off (up to 53 billion euros) of the country’s debts, an immediate increase of 3 billion euros in the European Central Bank’s emergency liquidity aid, and a period of up to 20 years before paying back debts. His only concession has been to accept the resignation of Iannis Varoufakis, his finance minister whose refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations made him unpopular with his European partners.
Most European leaders had made it plain that a ‘no’ vote would lead to an exit from the euro, if not from Europe; now President Hollande of France is seeking a more conciliatory approach, while Chancellor Merkel and Germany remain determined on a robust approach.
Greek banks remain closed. Without even more emergency liquidity aid from the European Central Bank, they are in danger of collapsing. If Greece fails to pay back the 3.5 billion euros due to the ECB on July 20, the ECB will have to discontinue all liquidity aid, which will lead to collapse. Having rejected the bail-out deal, it is unlikely Greece will be able to make that payment – but the banks may have collapsed by July 20 anyway.
INDIA: Heavy rain in Darjeeling has caused landslides which have killed at least 30 people and damaged the colonial-era British-built Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, a Unesco world heritage site.
Two policemen are accused of killing a woman by pouring petrol over her and setting fire to her because she refused to pay a bribe. The woman’s husband was in police custody.
INDONESIA: A Hercules C-130 military transport plane crashed into a residential area in Medan, the country’s fourth biggest city. More than 140 people were killed.
IRAN: Iran and world powers meeting in Vienna to negotiate a deal to cancel international sanctions in return for Iran abandoning its nuclear ambitions have given themselves another week to reach an agreement. In the meantime, they agreed on the return of 13 tonnes of Iran’s gold reserves (worth over 400 million dollars) from South Africa, where they have been held for the last two years under international sanctions.
IRAQ: At least twelve people were killed when an Iraqi plane, returning from an unsuccessful bombing raid against Isis forces northwest of Baghdad, accidentally released its bombs over the city.
JORDAN: Security forces arrested a man armed with 45kg of explosives in Jerash, north Jordan. He is accused of being a member of Iran’s elite al-Quds force on a terror mission against Jordanian targets. Jordan and Iran are on opposing sides in the conflict in Syria; Jordan opposes the Assad regime, Iran supports it.
KENYA: al-Shabaab terrorists operating from Somalia murdered at least 14 workers when they attacked a quarry with explosives and gunfire.
KUWAIT: A new law requires all residents to submit a DNA sample to the police. Kuwait will be the only country in the world to have a compulsory database of the DNA of the whole of its population. The law is part of new anti-terrorist measures taken in the aftermath of last week’s suicide bomb attack on a Shia mosque which killed 30 people. The attacker has been identified as a Saudi Arabian, and three Saudi brothers have been arrested as suspects.
LIBERIA: Three cases of Ebola have been diagnosed in Monrovia, almost two months after Liberia was declared free of the deadly disease.
MALAYSIA: The prime minister, Najib Razak, is facing calls to resign after The Wall Street Journal claimed that he received over six million dollars from a government investment fund.
MOROCCO: Two young women have been arrested and put on trial for wearing skirts above the knee. They could be jailed for up to two years. The case has sparked public protests and internet campaigns across the country.
NEW ZEALAND: A new law, the harmful digital communications act, could see authors and publishers of on-line insults and abuse fined or jailed. The act – the world’s first anti-troll law – has triggered debates about free speech in New Zealand.
NIGERIA: Attacks by Boko Haram on villages in north east Nigeria killed 150 people, and a suicide bomb killed at least 25 people in a local government office in the city of Zaria.
SYRIA: A new alliance of Islamic rebel groups has begun a big offensive on the city of Aleppo, held by the Assad government.
Airstrikes led by the US have been launched against Raqqa, the Isis capital. Kurdish YPG forces have surrounded the Isis-held town of Sarrin, northwest of Raqqa.
UKRAINE: A report given to the US government by Ukrainian officials names five Russian generals and a Russian colonel as commanders of rebel forces fighting in east Ukraine and says that there are 9000 regular Russian soldiers inside Ukraine, claims the Bloomberg View.
In an anti-corruption operation, security services raided the homes of a deputy chief of the investigations arm of the general prosecutor’s office and a deputy prosecutor for the Kiev region. They found diamonds, a Kalashnikov rifle and $400,000 dollars in cash.
USA: The US is to open an embassy in Havana this month, and Cuba is to open an embassy in Washington.
A bill proposing the “permanent removal of the South Carolina Infantry battle flag of the Confederate states of America” from outside the statehouse passed its second reading in the South Carolina Senate. It will go to the lower house after its final reading. The flag of the Confederate Army of the slave-owning southern states in the Civil War has hung outside the statehouse since 1961, but its endorsement by Dylann Roof, who killed nine members of a black church in Charleston last month, has recently high-lighted its racist associations.
A judge in Philadelphia has released testimonies made by Bill Cosby ten years ago in which he admits that he drugged women to have sex with them. The testimonies could lead to criminal charges; in recent years, a number of women have accused the actor of drugging and raping them.
