21 January 2016
Week in Brief: International
BURKONO FASO: Four militants from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb attacked a café and a hotel in Ougadoudou with bombs and firearms. At least 28 people from nine countries (including Canada, the US, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France) were killed. The militants were killed when local troops and French special forces stormed the hotel after a twelve hour siege.
Militants kidnapped an elderly Australian couple in the north of the country. Dr Eliot and his wife have lived in the country since 1977, building and running a hospital.
EU: A European parliament report on EU spending on foreign aid and development has revealed that the EU’s offices across the world have run up massive spending deficits which may have to be paid for by extra contributions from member states. It also concluded that half the money spent (£11.5 billion out of £23 billion) fails to reach its target, due to poor management or local corruption, and is thus wasted.
FRANCE: The wasteland around its Calais terminal has been turned into an artificial lake by Eurotunnel’s operator in the latest effort (clearing shrubland, erecting 4m high barbed wire fencing) to keep migrants out.
Two teenager skiers died when an avalanche in the French Alps hit a party of ten pupils and a teacher on a black piste which had been closed due to avalanche risk.
Five soldiers in the French Foreign Legion on a training exercise in the French Alps were killed by an avalanche.
The clinical trial of a new painkiller in Rennes has left three participants with brain damage. A fourth has died.
GERMANY: Finance minister Wolfgang Schauble suggested a tax on petrol sales throughout the EU to pay for the migrant crisis.
DNA tests indicate that a failed attempt to rob a security van near Bremen last June was the work of three members of the Red Army Faction terrorist group, apparently dormant for the last sixteen years.
GREECE: Syriza has been criticised for alleged nepotism; Mr Tsipras has hired a cousin as a foreign ministry advisor; and the brother, mother and girlfriend of the party’s youth movement Jason Schinas have all been given government jobs.
INDIA: A comedian has been arrested and imprisoned for offending religious sentiments by mimicking a castration guru on TV.
The state of Sikkim has declared itself fully organic. Pesticides and fertilisers were banned twelve years ago.
INDONESIA: Heavily-armed Isis bombers launched an attack in central Jakarta. Security forces killed all five of them after a four-hour fight. Two other people were killed and twenty wounded; the casualties were Canadian, Algerian, Austrian, German and Dutch as well as Indonesian.
IRAN: Iran released the ten US sailors detained last week when their boats strayed into Iranian water in the Gulf.
Sanctions against Iran were officially lifted when the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that Iran is complying with the deal it signed last September with the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China (P5+1) to abandon its nuclear ambitions. An estimated $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets around the world will be unlocked, and Iran will be able to sell its oil. A prisoner exchange saw five Americans released from Iranian jails, and seven Iranians released from US jails. Fourteen Iranians had their names removed from international wanted lists. Iran’s enemies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, remain opposed to the deal and angry with their ally the USA for negotiating with Iran.
The US nevertheless imposed new sanctions against Iran’s ballistic missile programme for test-firing a nuclear-capable missile last year.
ISRAEL: An Israeli woman was stabbed to death, allegedly by a Palestinian, near Hebron on the occupied West Bank.
JAPAN: Girl pop-singers can now have boyfriends. Contracts often forbid members of girl-bands from having relationships, but a judge threw out a compensation claim from a manager whose client had broken the rule.
NORTH KOREA: Relations with South Korea are now in the hands of a hard-line spy chief, after his predecessor (who was respected in the South for his constructive diplomacy) was killed in a car accident last month.
PAKISTAN: A Taliban suicide bomber murdered 14 people and wounded over 20 others in an attack on a medical centre vaccinating children against polio in the city of Quetta.
POLAND: The EU has mobilised its previously-unused “rule of law mechanism” to supervise Poland’s constitution and threaten sanctions following the country’s new media laws and political appointment of judges.
RUSSIA: A library in Komi republic has reportedly burned dozens of book donated by the Open Society Foundation, George Soros’s democracy programme. Russia banned two Open Society Foundation organisations two months ago.
Protests by unpaid workers in both the public and private sector are spreading across the country.
SIERRA LEONE: In the same week that the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak of ebola to be at an end, one person died of the disease and over 100 others were quarantined in Sierra Leone.
SOMALIA: Al-Shabaab militants claim to have killed over 60 Kenyan soldiers and taken others prisoner when they overran an African Union army base.
SOUTH KOREA: Protestors rallied around the Young Girl statue commemorating the thousands of ‘comfort women’ – Korean women and girls forced into sex slavery by the Japanese army during World War II – outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul. The Japanese government considers the removal of the statue as part of last month’s final ‘apology and compensation’ deal.
SPAIN: A moderate Socialist MP, Patxi Lopez, has been named as the new speaker of Parliament’s lower house. Coalition negotiations remain deadlocked after last year’s inconclusive elections left no party with a majority.
SYRIA: The British foreign secretary Philip Hammond, visiting President Erdogan in Turkey, accused Russia of targeting schools, hospitals and ambulances in Syria. He also accused President Assad of transporting Isis fighters through regime-held territory to fight against rebels.
A UN report states that 3500 Yazidi women and children are being held by Isis as slaves, and claims that the murder of Yazidi men and the rape and sex-trafficking of women amounts to genocide.
Turkey has vetoed the presence of the Syrian Kurdish PYD on the rebel side for peace talks due to start in a few days time. Turkey says that the PYD is backed by Assad and Russia and so should not have representation among the rebels but among the regime and its partners. Turkey also claims the PYD has connections with the Kurdish PKK, a group regarded as terrorists in the west and which has launched an insurgency inside Turkey.
Isis has cut its fighters’ pay by half, from $400 a month to $200 a month for Syrians and from $800 a month to $400 a month for foreigners, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
TAIWAN: The opposition Democratic Progressive party won the general elections with a majority of over 50%. Its leader, Dr Tsai, becomes Taiwan’s first female president.
THAILAND: Former prime minister Yingluck Shiawatra went on trial accused of mismanaging a rice-subsidy programme.
TURKEY: The first civilian casualties fell victim to the PKK when a bomb, rocket and rifle attack on a police compound in Cinar killed a mother and two children among six fatalities and 39 injured. The PKK has avoided civilian targets and concentrated on attacking police and military targets since the end of its ceasefire last June.
USA: During his final State of the Union address, President Obama declared a new initiative against cancer.
The Qatar-based TV network Al Jazeera is to close its news channel in the US after trying to establish itself there for nearly three years.
YEMEN: Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said British officers were helping Saudi and its allies to direct the bombing campaign against Houthi rebels. The bombing campaign has caused a humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
