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Found 12 results

  1. Three Americans and Briton who ‘gave a lesson in courage, in will, and in hope’ hailed as suspect’s father casts doubt on accusations of terrorism Angelique Chrisafis in Paris and Ashifa Kassam in Madrid Monday 24 August 2015 12.09 BST Three young American tourists and a Briton who tackled a heavily armed gunman on a high-speed train from Paris to Amsterdam have been awarded France’s highest honour by François Hollande, who praised them as an example of the need for action when faced with terrorism. The French president said the men showed that “faced with terror, we have the power to resist” and that they “gave us a lesson in courage, in will, and therefore in hope”. He added that their actions had averted a tragedy and massacre by a determined gunman carrying multiple weapons and 300 bullet rounds. Two off-duty American soldiers, Spencer Stone and Alek Skarlatos, and their childhood friend, student Anthony Sadler, were travelling in the first-class carriage on Friday night when Ayoub el-Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan national, reportedly burst out of the toilet carrying an AK-47 and ran into their carriage, firing. Stone and his friends tackled and subdued him. Chris Norman, 62, a British IT consultant living in France, helped restrain the man and tie his hands using his necktie. The train was carrying about 500 passengers. Awarding them the Légion d’honneur, Hollande said: “The whole world admires your sangfroid. With your bare hands, unarmed, you were able to overcome a heavily armed individual, resolved to do anything.” Hollande praised the soldiers, saying: “In France you behaved as soldiers but also as responsible men. You put your life in danger to defend the idea of freedom.” Referring to the bravery of Sadler and Norman, he said they did not have military training and had “doubtless never seen a Kalashnikov in their life”. He added: “They stood up and fought, they refused to give in to fear or terrorism.” Leaving the ceremony, Norman told TV crews: “I just did what I had to do.” With France still reeling from the terrorist attacks on the magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Paris kosher grocery store eight months ago, the Socialist president, who has been battling poor poll ratings, used the ceremony to send a political message of resolve, saying: “Our societies will never be weak when they’re united.” Hollande also praised three Frenchmen who intervened, particularly a young banker who was the first to tackle the gunman. The banker, who has asked for anonymity, is to receive the Légion d’honneur in a private ceremony. Mark Moogalian, a 51-year-old dual French-US national who teaches English at the Sorbonne university in Paris, also attempted to intervene and was badly injured by a bullet. He is being treated in Lille. He will also be honoured at a later date alongside a French train driver who was travelling in the carriage off-duty when he also helped subdue the gunman. The suspect, who lived legally in Spain until last year, is still in the custody of French anti-terrorism police who can question him until Tuesday night. The French interior minister has said several European intelligence services had flagged up the suspect’s links to “radical Islamist movements”. Khazzani has denied terrorism, telling investigators he wanted to rob the train. In an interview on Sunday, Khazzani’s father cast doubt on the accusations facing his son. “I wasn’t on the train, but I don’t think he would be capable of doing something like that,” Mohamed el-Khazzani told El Mundo from his home in the southern Spanish city of Algeciras. “They’re saying that Ayoub is a terrorist, but I simply can’t believe that.” He said he had not spoken to his son since March 2014, but his wife, who is in Morocco visiting family, had spoken to their son about a month ago. Despite reports that his son had been flagged by intelligence services in at least four European countries and had previous drug convictions in Spain, he said he had no knowledge of his son taking drugs. “He’s very religious, and doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol.” He loved fishing and playing football, he added. He said his son had travelled to France in 2014 for a six-month contract with telecommunications company Lycamobile but within a month of starting work was let go. “He went there because there wasn’t any work here. The only terrorism that he’s guilty of is terrorism for food, he didn’t have enough money to feed himself properly,” said the 64-year-old father of five, who works as a scrap merchant. “Why would he want to kill someone? It doesn’t make sense.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/24/legion-dhonneur-for-men-who-prevented-carnage-on-french-train France train attack heroes: 'It feels unreal – like a dream' One of three men who disabled suspected terrorist aboard Amsterdam-Paris train says decisive action is essential in high-jeopardy situations Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Sunday 23 August 2015 20.47 BST Last modified on Monday 24 August 2015 07.39 BST US ambassador to France Jane Hartley with Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler and Alek Skarlatos. Photograph: Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/23/france-train-attack-heroes-in-time-of-crisis-do-something
  2. Police investigating incident near Arras, France, in which three Americans – two of them soldiers – prevented an attack by a suspect reportedly armed with AK-47 Angelique Chrisafis in Paris Saturday 22 August 2015 10.01 BST A heavily armed gunman opened fire on a high-speed train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris before being overpowered by three Americans, two of whom were soldiers. Two people were injured in the attack, including one of the Americans – who was hospitalised with serious injuries to his hand and needed surgery. The US president, Barack Obama, described the men as “heroic” following the attack on Friday. A British passenger, Chris Norman, helped the Americans tie up the suspect. French anti-terrorist police are now questioning the gunman, who was arrested after the train made an emergency stop at the station of Arras, near the French-Belgian border. The motive behind the attack was not immediately known, although French prosecutors said an inquiry was being launched by counter-terrorism investigators. According to early briefings, the gunman, 26, was known to French intelligence services and was Moroccan or of Moroccan origin. The shooting happened just before 6pm in the last carriage of the TGV train, which was carrying 554 passengers. The man had several weapons in his luggage, including a Kalashnikov, an automatic pistol and razor blades. Two of the Americans were in the military, their travelling companion and childhood friend Anthony Sadler, a senior at Sacramento State University, told Associated Press. The injured American was named as Spencer Stone, from Sacrame nto, California, and the other man with them was Alek Skarlatos, of Roseburg, Oregon. “We heard a gunshot and we heard glass breaking behind us and saw a train employee sprint past us down the aisle,” Sadler said. The trio then saw a gunman entering the train car with an automatic rifle, he added. “As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells, ‘Spencer, go!’ and Spencer runs down the aisle,” Sadler said. “Spencer makes first contact, he tackles the guy, Alek wrestles the gun away from him, and the gunman pulls out a box cutter and slices Spencer a few times. And the three of us beat him until he was unconscious.” Skarlatos, who had recently returned from a tour of Afghanistan with the National Guard, told Sky News that the gunman’s AK-47 had jammed and he did not know how to fix it. “If that guy’s weapon had been functioning properly, I don’t even want to think about how it would have went,” he said. “We just did what we had to do. You either run away or fight. We chose to fight and got lucky and didn’t die.” Norman helped tie the gunman up while Stone helped another passenger who had been wounded in the throat and was losing blood. “I just applaud my friends for being on point,” Sadler told Sky News. “If Alek didn’t yell ‘Go!’ and Spencer didn’t get up straight away, who knows how many people he would have shot.” Norman, a 62-year-old consultant who lives in France, sad he had initially ducked down in his seat when he saw the man enter the carriage carrying a gun. “I came in at the end and I guess just helped get the guy under control at the end of it all,” he told French reporters. “We ended up by tying him up, then during the process the guy actually pulled out a cutter and starting cutting Spencer. “He cut Spencer behind the neck, he nearly cut his thumb off too. Spencer held him and we eventually got him under control. He went unconscious, I think.” The French actor Jean-Hugues Anglade, who appeared in the 1986 cult film Betty Blue with Beatrice Dalle, was also lightly injured in the incident. He was reportedly hurt while breaking the glass to activate the train alarm. The suspect is believed to have boarded the train in Belgium and the shooting took place as the train was travelling through Belgian territory. The Belgian prime minister Charles Michel tweeted his condemnation of what he called the “terrorist attack”. France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, who rushed to Arras, said the American passengers “were particularly courageous and showed great bravery in very difficult circumstances”. “Without their sangfroid, we could have been confronted with a terrible drama,” he said. He described the incident as an act of “barbaric violence”. The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, also expressed his gratitude to the soldiers. A White House official told reporters that Obama was briefed on the shooting and said: “While the investigation into the attack is in its early stages, it is clear that their heroic actions may have prevented a far worse tragedy.” The French president, François Hollande, said: “All is being done to shed light on this drama.” He had spoken to the Belgian prime minister and the two countries were cooperating on the investigation. “The passengers are safe, the situation has been brought under control,” said the train operator Thalys, jointly owned by the national rail companies of Belgium, France and Germany. Passengers in other carriages described on French TV how the train braked several times before pulling into the station, where the man was arrested. Train alarms had gone off on board and passengers in other carriages had heard staff communicating with each other by loudspeaker about an ongoing incident just before the train pulled in. The passengers were taken to a gymnasium in Arras, where several were treated for shock, French media reported. One, Patrick Arres, 51, told AFP that when the train pulled into Arras station, he saw more than 30 armed police on the tracks. “They were looking for someone. People were scared.” Passengers arrived early on Saturday at Paris’s Gare du Nord station and were greeted by a large group of SNCF staff with water and meals and help finding hotels and taxis. France remains on high alert after January’s terrorist attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris, in which gunmen killed 17 people. And in May last year, four people, including two Israeli tourists, were killed when a French gunman opened fire at the Jewish museum in Brussels. 1 2 Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Briton Chris Norman after the attack on the train. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images 2 2 A police officer stands by as a passenger receives medical attention at Arras train station. Photograph: Rafael Benamran/AFP/Getty Images Warning: The following embedded Twitter videos are of a graphic nature and may upset some readers. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/21/amsterdam-paris-train-gunman-france
  3. A busboy at the Koi Soho restaurant, which leases space inside one of Donald’s Trump’s New York hotels, took part in a video hitting back at the candidate Ellen Brait in New York Thursday 20 August 2015 20.01 BST A Mexican immigrant who works in one of Donald Trump’s hotels and took part in a video hitting back at the Republican frontrunner over his statements on immigration has said he wanted to “defend my community”. In , Ricardo Aca, a Mexican immigrant and a busboy at the Koi Soho restaurant, which leases space inside the Trump Soho hotel in New York, explains that although he is a Mexican, he is a not a criminal or a drug dealer, and “definitely not a rapist”. The comments are a reference to the speech Trump made opening his campaign, in which he attacked Mexican immigrants and promised to build a great wall along the US’s southern border. Aca said he was shocked and angered when he first heard Trump’s speech, and immediately began brainstorming ways to respond. “At first, I was really in shock,” Aca told the Guardian. “You know this person, you’ve seen them in TV shows like The Apprentice or you know them because they’re a very successful businessman, so at first you can’t believe it.” Eschewing Trump’s favored methods, Aca wanted to respond “without necessarily attacking or insulting” him. He decided to shoot a photo series entitled “Not A...” showing individual Mexicans and families holding signs saying “I’m not a criminal”, “I’m not a rapist”, and “I’m not a drug dealer”. He wanted his work to “be able to defend myself, my co-workers, my family, and everyone in the Mexican community”. When he was approached by Chase Whiteside from documentary web series New Left Media about the idea of a video highlighting his photography and life, he readily agreed. “I wanted to send this message and I knew I wanted to defend my community,” he said. He did not anticipate it going viral so quickly. Only 24 hours after its release, it had more than 300,000 views on Facebook and 79,000 on YouTube. Aca crossed the border with his family 10 years ago and currently lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He attended high school in Queens and received an associate’s degree in photography at LaGuardia Community College. He works three jobs: as an assistant in a photography lab, as a runner at a restaurant Cherry Izakaya in Williamsburg, and at Koi Soho. “This is where I went to high school. This is where all of my friends are. It’s home to me,” he says in the video. Trump has been vocal about his thoughts on Mexican immigrants. If elected president, he plans to build a wall along the Mexican border and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. Although Aca labels himself an “undocumented immigrant” in the video, he does have authorization to work in the US. He was granted deportation deferrals and work permits under a 2012 program, but still considers himself undocumented since he must reapply every two years. Trump opposes the program that allows Aca to stay in the US and work. After the video was released at approximately 11am on Monday, the Koi payroll department called him before his shift at 4pm that day inquiring about the renewal of his work permit. He had forgotten to submit it and did so that day. “They mentioned that they had seen the video and that they just wanted to make sure that my employment authorization card was up to date,” Aca told the Guardian. “At first I was really shocked because I knew at some point it was going to get to my job, but I didn’t know it was going to be the same day in a couple of hours.” Aca was ready for negative backlash. Despite the job at Koi Soho being his “main income”, he was prepared to lose it in order to get his message out. “I really wanted to stand up for what I believe in and defend my community,” Aca said. “I know that whatever happens, if they fire me ... I know I will be fine in looking for another job.” In an interview with the New York Times, Trump responded to the video: “He’s got a legal work permit. I’ve heard he does a good job. We thought he was an illegal immigrant at first.” But he added: “I want to check his file.” http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/20/trump-hotel-employee-mexican-immigrant-video
  4. Suspected traffickers arrested by Italian police after boat tragedy allegedly threatened those on board with knives and beat them with belts Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome Friday 7 August 2015 16.12 BST Five men have been charged with multiple counts of murder by Italian authorities after survivors named them as the traffickers in charge of a vessel that capsized in the Mediterranean, killing an estimated 200 people. According to witness accounts gathered by police, the suspected traffickers – two Libyans, two Algerians and a Tunisian aged 21 to 24 – threatened the migrants on board with knives and beat them with belts to control them. About 100 African migrants now presumed dead were allegedly held in the hull of the doomed boat, survivors told police. The traffickers allegedly said those passengers, who had paid less for their crossing than others, could be kept there for three days. When the hull started filling with water, the traffickers beat them back and ordered other passengers to sit on the hatch of the hull to stop them getting out. The suspects, who were being questioned by police on Thursday night, were named as Imad Busadia, Abdullah Assnusi, Ali Rouibah, Suud Mujassabi and Shauki Esshaush. According to police, the suspects, thought to be part of a Libyan-based trafficking ring, used their knives to cut marks on the heads of migrants who disobeyed their orders – especially the sub-Saharan Africans – while Arabs were beaten with belts. According to Italian newspaper La Stampa, the cost of the trip ranged between $1,200 and $1,800 (£775-£1,160), with life jackets costing extra. The men were arrested after 373 survivors of the tragedy, including small children, were brought to Sicily on Thursday and more information emerged about the traffickers on board. Up to 700 people were thought to be on board the wooden boat, which is believed to have capsized after passengers rushed to one side when they saw the approach of two small rescue boats dispatched by the Irish rescue vessel LÉ Niamh. Migrant Report noted on Thursday that the Italian coastguard vessel, Mimbelli, then sent a helicopter to drop life rafts at the site, a quick response that saved hundreds of lives. The traffickers were not the first to be arrested by police in Italy, where the surge in migration and illegal activity has turned prosecutors more accustomed to mafia cases into experts in human trafficking. In April, police in Sicily arrested 15 people for allegedly throwing 12 migrants overboard in what appeared to be a Muslim assault against Christians. Weeks later, police arrested two other smugglers who survived a deadly sinking – the worst incident of its kind in the Mediterranean – which killed 800 people. The two suspects, Tunisian Mohammed Ali Malek, believed to be the captain of the vessel, and Syrian national Mahmud Bikhit, 25, were among 28 survivors of the shipwreck. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/07/italy-migrant-boat-capsize-five-men-accused-murder
  5. Debris found on beach in Réunion sent to defence laboratory for confirmation that it belonged to Boeing 777, which went missing in March 2014 Angelique Chrisafis in Paris, Oliver Holmes in Bangkok and Gillian Parker in Réunion Friday 31 July 2015 16.09 BST Investigators in Toulouse are hoping to unlock the mystery of the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 as the piece of plane wreckage found washed up on a beach in the Indian Ocean island of Réunion is transferred to France for official identification. The two-metre, barnacle-encrusted chunk of metal debris which emerged from the sea this week has raised hopes of discovering what happened to the Kuala Lumpur-Beijing flight which mysteriously disappeared from radars in March 2014, vanishing without trace with 239 people on board. The piece of debris – known as a flaperon – is to leave the island on Friday night and arrive on Saturday morning at a special French defence laboratory in Toulouse, the hub of Europe’s aerospace industry. There, investigators are expected to start work on confirming whether or not it was from the missing Boeing 777 that has confounded an international search mission for over a year. The Malaysian government said on Friday that Malaysia Airlines had confirmed that the debris was from a Boeing 777 and that investigators were now “moving close to solving the mystery of MH370”. Abdul Aziz Kaprawi, the deputy transport minister, said the debris could be “the convincing evidence that MH370 went down in the Indian Ocean”. Earlier, Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian transport safety bureau, had said that if the wing piece did prove to be from a 777, MH370 was the only known possible source. He said authorities were “increasingly confident” the debris came from MH370. “We are still working with our French and Malaysian colleagues to analyse all the information so we don’t have certainty yet, but we hope that within the next little while we’ll be able to get to that level of confidence. We’re hoping within the next 24 hours,” he said. The wing component bears the part number 657 BB, according to photographs of the debris, which Abdul Aziz said identified it as coming from a 777. “From the part number, it is confirmed that it is from a Boeing 777 aircraft. This information is from MAS [Malaysia Airlines]. They have informed me,” he said. Definitive confirmation of its origin could, however, only come from Boeing, he said. The aircraft manufacturer performed modifications to the flaperon that would make it easy to identify. Before the flaperon was discovered by beach cleaners on the island of Réunion on Wednesday, the search for the missing passenger plane had gone cold. Planes and ships from more that 20 countries had scoured the Indian Ocean for the aircraft, which had been carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew, in vain. An Australian taskforce spent more than a year combing the submarine depths of the ocean for wreckage. But the first tangible evidence may have washed up thousands of miles west. Warren Truss, the deputy prime minister of Australia, which has led the ocean search, said the discovery of the flaperon was “being treated as a major lead”. But he warned it would not solve the mystery of where the plane crashed or point to where other debris might be. “After 16 months, the vagaries of the currents, reverse modelling is almost impossible,” Truss told reporters in Sydney. “And so I don’t think it contributes a great deal in as far as our knowledge of where the aircraft is located at the present time.” For the families of the missing, the grey metal object has brought fresh grief but also the prospect of closure. “Sometimes I hope that this is it and at times, I hope that this isn’t the plane,” Elaine Chew, wife of steward Tan Size Hiang, told the Straits Times. “I would fall asleep, then wake up again. I just kept thinking of the plane and Size Hiang,” she said. “It’s starting all over again.” Relatives of many of the 153 Chinese passengers of MH370 said they wanted authorities to be completely certain the part was from the missing plane. A statement said: “We want [the information] to be 100% positive. We care more about where our families are rather than where the plane’s wreckage is.” French police on Réunion have carried out a further search of the island’s coastline by helicopter in an effort to spot more debris but found nothing more. Islanders had discovered part of a suitcase not far from the plane wreckage but Australian search chiefs were cautious about any link when they spoke on Friday. “From what we understand so far there’s much less reason to be positive about the suitcase,” Dolan told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “There’s no obvious indication it’s been in the water a long time and so on.” James Record, a professor of aviation at Dowling College in the US, and former commercial airline pilot, said the long wait to find a part of the plane was not surprising. “It is a big ocean and we always knew that eventually debris from the crash would either be found by passing ships or be washed ashore somewhere,” he told the Guardian in an email. “Every piece of equipment on a plane has inventory markings of some sort. Authorities will be able to cross-reference the numbers on the piece of debris and if it belonged to 370, as we expect it did, have the evidence needed to confirm that.” French gendarmes and local authorities check the debris on Réunion. Photograph: ZINFOS974/EPA http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/31/search-truth-about-mh370-switches-france-flaperon-flown-toulouse
  6. • Texas police accused of editing video before its release • Authorities say jail death being investigated in same way as murder case Tom Dart in Prairie View, Texas Wednesday 22 July 2015 09.01 BST Dashcam video from the officer who arrested Sandra Bland – a black woman who later died in Texas police custody – shows him threatening to drag her out of her car and “light her up” with a Taser after their encounter escalates from a routine traffic stop into an angry confrontation where she is forced to the ground and handcuffed. The Texas public safety department released the footage on Tuesday amid continuing questions surrounding her arrest and subsequent death in a county jail. As the video circulated on Tuesday night, attention was being drawn to a number of abrupt breaks in what was thought to have been an original, uninterrupted recording – leaving the impression it had been edited before its release. A Texas department of public safety spokesman told the Guardian he did not have an immediate explanation as to why. In the supplied video, trooper Brian Encinia’s police car, pulling away from an earlier traffic stop, does a U-turn and follows Bland’s car for about 30 seconds, stopping her after her car changes lanes to the right without signalling. After telling Bland why she has been stopped, asking some questions and then walking away, apparently to complete paperwork or make inquiries, the officer returns. “You seem very irritated,” he says at one point after returning. “I am, I really am,” she replies, “because I feel like it’s crap is what I’m getting a ticket for, I was getting out of your way, you were speeding up, tailing me so I moved over and you stopped me so yeah, I am a little irritated but that doesn’t stop you from giving me a ticket, so.” The stop escalates into an aggressive confrontation when Encinia asks her: “You mind putting out your cigarette please, if you don’t mind.” She replies: “I’m in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?” The officer tells her: “Well, you can step on out now.” When she refuses, Encinia becomes irate and leans into her car, apparently trying to pull her out. “I’m going to yank you out of here,” he says. “I’m going to drag you out of here.” He pulls what appears to be a Taser out of a holster and shouts: “Get out of the car. I will light you up. Get out. Now.” They then walk off camera. The officer tells her to put her phone down. “For a failure to signal! For a failure to signal!” she says. “You know this is straight bullshit … Oh I cannot wait until we go to court.” A few seconds later they are briefly visible again and Bland’s wrists are behind her back. She is heard screaming and sobbing: “You’re about to break my wrist, stop! … You’re a real man now, you just slammed me, knocked my head into the ground, I got epilepsy, you motherfxxxer.” Encinia replies: “Good.” Bland says: “You just slammed my head into the ground. Do you not even care about that? I can’t even hear.” On Tuesday Texas politicians demanded transparency and state officials pledged a full and fair investigation after a meeting of elected representatives arranged amid continuing questions surrounding her arrest and subsequent death in a county jail. “We want the Department of Justice, we want the FBI and every agency like it to look at it to make sure that no one in America can say this was whitewashed,” Royce West, a Texas state senator, said on Tuesday after a more than two-hour meeting at Prairie View A&M University, near where Bland was arrested and where she had been about to start a new job. “We want to make certain that there’s transparency. We know what’s going on in America,” he said, referring to the context of violent encounters across the country between African Americans and law enforcement. “We believe there are questions that need to be answered as relates to the arrest,” West said. “She did not deserve to be placed in custody.” Shortly after the press conference ended the Texas department of public safety (DPS) released the 52 minutes of dashcam footage of her arrest taken from the state trooper’s car. “There’s a rush to judgment too often in America … but here in Texas I can tell you we believe in total transparency and we will find the truth wherever that leads,” said Dan Patrick, the state’s lieutenant governor. “We have to look at our procedures when people are taken into custody.” The treatment of Bland at what had initially been a routine traffic stop and her death in custody three days later has sparked national outrage and widespread scepticism about the official account that she killed herself in her cell. Encinia was placed on desk duty after the DPS said he violated traffic stop procedures and the department’s courtesy policy. “There’s no excuse for any instance where we don’t conduct traffic stops in a professional manner,” said Steven McCraw, the DPS director. The 30-year-old became a trooper last year and previously worked as a firefighter and an ingredient processing supervisor at an ice cream factory, according to his LinkedIn profile. He stopped Bland’s silver Hyundai Azera in Prairie View, near Houston, on the afternoon of 10 July, supposedly for failing to signal a lane change. The Waller county district attorney’s office released Bland’s arrest warrant on Tuesday. Encinia writes: “I had Bland exit the vehicle to further conduct a safe traffic investigation. Bland became combative and unco-operative. Numerous commands were given to Bland ordering her to exit the vehicle. Bland was removed from the car but became more combative. Bland was placed in handcuffs for officer safety. “Bland began swinging her elbows at me and then kicked my right shin. I had a pain in my right leg and suffered small cuts on my right hand. Force was then used to subdue Bland to the ground to which Bland continued to fight back. The 28-year-old was placed under arrest for Assault on Public Servant.” Waller county officials released video from inside the jail on Monday after a news conference. It appears to show that no one entered her cell in the 90 minutes before her body was found, but there is no camera footage that shows the inside of the cell, according to the district attorney, Elton Mathis. He said that it was too soon to make definitive conclusions as to whether her death was suicide or murder. Mathis pledged that the investigation would be carried out as thoroughly as if it were murder because “there are too many questions that need to be resolved”. The trash bag with which Bland allegedly hanged herself would be examined for DNA and fingerprints, he said, adding that her phone had been handed to the FBI to see if it contained any useful information. “It has not been determined at this point that this is a murder,” he said on Tuesday. “Whenever you have a suspicious death, that is treated as a homicide.” He said the results of the investigation would be presented to a grand jury that would decide if there is a criminal case to answer. West said that he had asked Mathis to ensure that the jury is ethnically diverse. Waller county’s long history of racism and recent high-profile cases of fatal encounters between police and African Americans have seen the case gain attention on social media, especially given her family’s contention that there is no reason to believe she would take her own life. She had just driven from her home in Illinois to Texas to take up a job at Prairie View A&M University, her alma mater, and friends said she was in good spirits. Activist groups have called for the US Justice Department to conduct an investigation. A media conference where LaVaughn Mosley, a friend of Bland, will demand Sheriff Smith’s resignation is scheduled for tomorrow. A memorial service was held on the campus on Tuesday evening. Bland’s funeral is set for Saturday at a Chicago-area church, the Chicago Tribune reported. “They will have justice in Texas,” Patrick said. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/21/sandra-bland-dashcam-video-arrest-released
  7. Obama vows to veto any Republican attempt to undermine deal as Iran hails ‘win-win solution’ Julian Borger in Vienna Tuesday 14 July 2015 13.54 BST Iran and six world powers have concluded an agreement that will lift sanctions on Iran but place strict limits on its nuclear programme for more than a decade, in a historic compromise designed to stop the spread of atomic weapons and avert a major new conflict in the Middle East. The deal, concluded in a Vienna hotel after prolonged talks between foreign ministers, binds Iran, the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China to a series of undertakings stretching over many years. Iran will dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure, while the UN, US and EU will take down a wall of sanctions built around Iran over the past nine years. Barack Obama said the agreement was the best available option to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear bomb, and promised to veto any attempt by Republican opponents to undermine it. His Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, said a new phase had begun in Iran’s relations with the rest of the world. Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, described the agreement as among the most complex and consequential of the nuclear age: “[The agreement follows] nearly two years of intense negotiations involving seven nations, including two long-time adversaries, after more than a decade of false starts and missed opportunities. “The deal is a major nuclear nonproliferation breakthrough that promises to prevent the emergence of another nuclear-armed state and head off a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region.” Among the conditions of the agreement are: Iran will reduce its enrichment capacity by two-thirds. It will stop using its underground facility at Fordow for enriching uranium. Iran’s stockpile of low enriched uranium will be reduced to 300kg, a 96% reduction. It will achieve this reduction either by diluting it or shipping it out of the country. The core of the heavy water reactor in Arak will be removed, and it will be redesigned in such a way that it will not produce significant amounts of plutonium. Iran will allow UN inspectors to enter sites, including military sites, when the inspectors have grounds to believe undeclared nuclear activity is being carried out there. It can object but a multinational commission can override any objections by majority vote. After that Iran will have three days to comply. Inspectors will only come from countries with diplomatic relations with Iran, so no Americans. Once the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has verified that Iran has taken steps to shrink its programme, UN, US and EU sanctions will be lifted. Restrictions on trade in conventional weapons will last another five years, and eight years in the case of ballistic missile technology. If there are allegations that Iran has not met its obligations, a joint commission will seek to resolve the dispute for 30 days. If that effort fails it would be referred to the UN security council, which would have to vote to continue sanctions relief. A veto by a permanent member would mean that sanctions are reimposed. The whole process would take 65 days. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who has been leading his country’s delegation in Vienna, described the agreement as a “win-win” solution but not perfect. “I believe this is a historic moment,” he said. “We are reaching an agreement that is not perfect for anybody but is what we could accomplish. Today could have been the end of hope, but now we are starting a new chapter of hope.” Francis Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said the agreement would “open the way to a new chapter in international relations” and show that diplomacy can overcome decades of tension. “This is a sign of hope for the entire world,” she said. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who has faced mounting criticism at home over his handling of the diplomacy around Iran, moved pre-emptively to denounce the deal even before the details had emerged. Heading a chorus of condemnation from Israeli politicians – including many members of his rightwing coalition – he said the agreement was a capitulation and a mistake of historic proportions. The deal was also denounced by the hardline former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman as “a total surrender to terror”. Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid party, said Netanyahu’s campaign over Iran had been a “colossal failure”. Later this month, the UN security council will pass a resolution incorporating the agreement and its five annexes as an attachment, but it will be 90 days before it enters into force, to allow for it to be reviewed domestically in the US and Iran. At that point, Iran will carry out its part of the bargain, dismantling nuclear infrastructure. Western officials say that might take several months, but a senior Iranian official said his government was ready to act much faster. “We think that in a matter of weeks not months we will be able to finish what we have committed to,” the official said. A trial by fire under the highly sceptical scrutiny of the US Congress will be the biggest challenge to the deal’s survival. The deal will enter a period of limbo for up to 82 days: 60 for Congress to review it and a further 22 for a first vote and possibly a second in the event of a presidential veto. On Tuesday Obama promised to use his veto on any domestic attempts to undermine the deal. “I am confident that this deal will meet the national security needs of the United States and our allies, so I will veto any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this deal,” he said. “We do not have to accept an inevitable spiral into conflict, and we certainly shouldn’t seek it.” The president said the agreement was not based on trust with Tehran, which he acknowledged is a longtime enemy of the United States, but rather “built on verification”. He added: “This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring. Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off. And the inspection and transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in place.” Iran’s Majlis will also take time to debate the deal, but without a fixed timetable. Only if and when the agreement survives both processes will it start to be implemented. Iran will start dismantling centrifuges, shipping out or converting its stockpile of low enriched uranium (LEU), removing the core from its heavy water reactor in Arak and start intensive work with the International Atomic Energy Agency on resolving unanswered questions about possible past work on nuclear weapons design. At the same time, Obama will issue presidential waivers suspending US economic and financial sanctions, and the EU will vote to lift its oil embargo and banking sanctions. The UN resolution would lift six layers of international sanctions, except for an arms embargo and restrictions on missile technology. None of the sanctions relief measures will take immediate effect, but will be conditional on the IAEA verifying that Iran has carried out all its promised steps. The aim is to have this done by the end of the year. At that point, $100bn in Iranian assets around the world will be unfrozen. Ordinary Iranians, however, will have to wait several months before feeling the economic benefits. Rouhani will hope the influx of money into the ailing economy will come in time for the voters to reward reformists at the parliamentary elections in 2016, and help further change the country’s course. “Today is an end and a beginning … an end to baseless claims and a beginning for a new phase in international relations,” he said on Tuesday. “Today we are at an important juncture in the history of our country and revolution. A new chapter has begun … it shows problems in the world can be solved through less costly ways.” A preliminary outline of the deal was agreed in principle in Lausanne in April, but it left many of the details unresolved and Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said his country would only recognise a full and comprehensive agreement. Iran has also pledged to cooperate with an IAEA investigation into evidence of past experiments in nuclear weapons design, mostly dating back over 12 years. The agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, signed an understanding with Iran’s nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, on Tuesday morning, in which both undertook to complete the investigation by the end of the year. The IAEA has not committed itself to coming to definite conclusions in that period. It describes the agreement as a “road map” that Amano said “provides for technical expert meetings, technical measures and discussions”. A separate arrangement would be agreed for the IAEA to visit a particularly controversial site, a military base called Parchin. Within a few months, the IAEA verification that Iran has shrunk its nuclear programme will trigger the third phase of the agreement, in which multiple layers of economic and financial sanctions are lifted, and about $100bn in Iranian assets abroad will be unfrozen. There are still many things that can go wrong. The deal could be repudiated by the US Congress with enough Democratic defectors to override a presidential veto. That domestic battle will draw in America’s allies on either side. Netanyahu’s Israeli government is lobbying heavily for the deal to be rejected, as are the Gulf Arab monarchies. The western Europeans will try to counter their influence on US public opinion and Congress. The agreement could also fall apart over the question of Iranian cooperation with the IAEA inquiry into past weaponisation studies, or stumble over a disagreement over whether IAEA inspectors can enter a site run by the Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. But the deal’s supporters believe that if it can survive, the agreement has the potential to redraw Iran’s relations with the US, dampen the likelihood for another war in the Middle East and set a new standard for negotiated non-proliferation, stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and beyond. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/14/iran-nuclear-programme-world-powers-historic-deal-lift-sanctions
  8. Appalled by migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Chris Catrambone bought a boat and launched his own rescue mission. But as he discovered, there are pitfalls to going it alone Giles Tremlett Wednesday 8 July 2015 07.15 BST In late June 2013, Christopher Catrambone, a garrulous 31-year-old American entrepreneur who had spent almost a decade travelling the world to build a multimillion-dollar company, decided to take a break. Tangiers Group, which Catrambone runs with his Italian wife Regina, provides insurance in conflict zones – to US military subcontractors, NGO workers, journalists and missionaries, among others. The business, rooted in such war-wrecked countries as Iraq and Afghanistan, was flourishing. But that summer, Catrambone decided, the company could take care of itself for three weeks. Catrambone and Regina, along with Regina’s teenage daughter Maria Luisa, set off from their home on the Mediterranean island of Malta, aboard a glistening white 24-metre chartered motor yacht with Burmese teak decking and varnished Tanganyika walnut joinery. As they motored out of Valetta’s spectacular Grand Harbour – past the Che Guevara 2, a sleek 30-metre super-yacht that belonged to the family of the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – a Maltese armed forces veteran, Marco Cauchi, was at the wheel, and an old friend of Catrambone’s, the Texan chef Simon Templer, was there to cook and have a holiday. “I love going out on these yearly cruises with my family,” Catrambone said. “We can’t escape each other and get on our iPhones.” Malta, one of the European Union’s most southerly points, was an ideal starting place for a three-week cruise to Tunisia and along the coast of Sicily, not far from Calabria, the southern toe of Italy. This is where Catrambone met Regina nine years ago. He had gone to search for his family roots in the place his great-grandfather left for America in the early 19th century, and ended up living down the road from Regina’s mother. On 7 July, they sailed away from Lampedusa, a small Italian island south-west of Malta that lies even closer to North Africa. A business meeting in Tunisia prevented them staying to see Pope Francis celebrate a mass on the island, devoted to the migrants who made the dangerous crossing to southern Europe from Libya in cheap inflatable motorboats and rickety fishing vessels. Some 500 had drowned en route in 2012 alone. Pope Francis lambasted the rich world for its indifference to other people’s suffering: “It doesn’t affect us. It doesn’t interest us. It’s not our business.” As they headed south, Regina spotted a beige winter jacket bobbing in the water. Cauchi, who had once run Malta’s maritime search and rescue operations, told her it may have come from a sunken migrant boat. Such tragedies were not new, and only a few months later, the pope’s warnings would be confirmed yet again, when 380 refugees – many from Syria and Eritrea – drowned over the course of only eight days, most within a quarter-mile of Lampedusa. Migrant deaths became an obsessive topic of conversation on the yacht, and Catrambone, typically, found himself looking for a solution. “It makes you think like: ‘Wow! Look at me out here cruising on my boat, at the same time people are out there dying,” he said. “So our heaven is their hell, right? Our paradise is their hell.” Catrambone’s business includes, he says, both caring for “heroic” wounded conflict-zone workers (including multiple amputees) and being part of the “financial arm of war”. He is coy about his worth, but Bloomberg reports he made his first $10m by the age of 30. His company covers everything from healthcare to emergency evacuations to kidnapping, while Catrambone styles himself “a humanitarian, entrepreneur and adventurer”. Friends describe him as a compulsive, energetic and tenacious producer of ideas and solutions, who enjoys the drama and challenge of working in some of the world’s toughest spots. A former Roman Catholic altar boy in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Catrambone once considered becoming a priest. Growing up, he tracked natural disasters, coups and the movements of his oil engineer father on a large world map pinned to his bedroom wall. After graduating from a local university, McNeese State, at the age of 20, he was hired and trained by a company that investigated insurance claims. By 26, he had worked as a private eye, a political campaign manager for a Louisiana court official, as an aide in Congress, and as the co-owner of a Cajun riverboat bar serving high-octane bloody marys, jambalaya and gumbo in the US Virgin Islands. On the yacht, Cauchi – an amiable, stocky, sun-weathered 48-year-old – told Catrambone stories of rescues. Bodies fished out of the sea can haunt you. Martin Xuereb – a former brigadier who had been Cauchi’s boss as head of Malta’s armed services, and would later work with the Catrambones – still recalls watching a body bag being unzipped on a patrol boat several years ago. “It was this child, maybe seven or eight, with his fists clenched next to his face and his eyes wide open,” he told me. But what could one individual, or one wealthy family, do? Money buys many things, but can it stop people drowning in their hundreds and thousands? By the end of the cruise, Catrambone had decided to set up his own search and rescue operation. “I said: ‘Chris, this cannot be done. This is impossible’,” Cauchi recalled. “But he kept persisting.” As Catrambone saw it, he was already in the business of saving lives in conflict zones: “I rescue people for money in my other job,” he told me. “I know what to do.” His Tangiers Group is privately owned, making it hard to check his claim that it gives “the best medical treatment in the world”; he brushed off questions regarding a few old complaints I had found on the internet from employees of US defence contractors about his company’s investigative methods, citing confidentiality. But there is certainly nothing phoney about Catrambone’s passion for saving migrants. He, too, once lost a home in a natural disaster, when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans’ Ninth Ward in 2005, flooding the building beside the St Charles Avenue tram line where both he and Templer lived. (The two men used their compensation money to open the Cajun riverboat bar, but Catrambone still laments the disappearance of the bohemian, racially mixed lifestyle he once enjoyed in his old neighbourhood.) Catrambone saw the migrants as either desperate, entrepreneurial, or both – not too different from his own great-grandfather. He also knew many of the places they were escaping from. “Every major economy has had their hands in Africa, and they have had their hands in the Middle East as well,” he told me. “Our policies have an equal and opposite reaction. You go in. And now they come in.” But Catrambone is not interested in politics or advocacy. For him, the problem is saving lives, based on a simple and typically candid analysis. “If you are against saving lives at sea then you are a bigot and you don’t even belong in our community. If you allow your neighbour to die in your backyard, then you are responsible for that death.” On a warm afternoon in June 2014, Cauchi steered a 40-metre, steel-hulled boat called Phoenix out of Portsmouth, Virginia, for his first ever Atlantic crossing. Built in 1973 to pull trawler nets off the coast of Canada, it had been chartered as a US military training vessel, but for the previous 18 months it had been laid up and colonised by rats. (Someone had left food in the ship’s freezers.) The vessel needed a major overhaul, which would be finished off in Malta. Catrambone was on board for the rough crossing: as Atlantic gales stirred up the ocean, the Phoenix proved how tough it was, even surviving a collision with an unidentified object that took a chunk out of its propeller. Catrambone was determined to start rescuing people in 2014 and had set a hectic repair schedule. “It cost a crazy amount of money,” said Cauchi. The boat was bought and repaired, for a total of $5.2m, by the Tangiers Group (and still sits on the company’s books) but would be operated by a foundation Catrambone named Migrant Offshore Aid Station (Moas). He hired Martin Xuereb as director in February 2014, after cold calling to invite him for coffee. “I am not in the habit of meeting for coffee with someone I don’t know,” Xuereb, now 47, told me, but he and Catrambone ended up talking for five hours. “I wasn’t expecting him to be so young. What hits you straight away is his vision, his perseverance and his determination.” No volunteers had done anything similar since 1979, when a group of Germans chartered a freighter named Cap Anamur to rescue migrants fleeing Vietnam. An attempt by the same group to rescue 37 people off Italy in 2003 ended with crew members put on trial for facilitating illegal entry into the country; they were found not guilty, and the migrants were deported. As he attempted to raise funds for Moas, Catrambone found donors sceptical. The Italian navy had launched the Mare Nostrum operation, at a cost of €9m per month, after the October 2013 shipwrecks, to pick up migrants as they left Libyan waters. (“Italians are frickin’ heroes, man,” Catrambone told me.) This, at least, made it unlikely that Catrambone would be prosecuted for doing the same. Still, no NGO had become involved at sea, and many European governments complained rescue operations were a “pull factor” that would increase both migration attempts and deaths. Setting up Moas was not cheap, with monthly operating costs of up to €600,000. Two rigid-hulled inflatable speedboats with twin 70-horsepower engines were bought to ferry migrants to the Phoenix. Catrambone hired an experienced search and rescue crew as well as leasing two helicopter drones and their operators from the Austrian company Schiebel. He was determined to get out to sea, however, and Regina agreed that they could cover the 10-week operation in 2014 with a further $2.3m of their own money. With Catrambone on board, the Phoenix left on its first mission late in August 2014, heading for international waters close to Libya. The migrant crisis was continuing to intensify. That year, mostly during the migration “high season” that runs from March to October, 100,000 people squeezed into the overcrowded vessels that pushed off almost daily from the shores of Libya; at least 3,419 died en route. Moas was planning to act under the instructions of the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome, which covers the zone crossed by migrant boats from Libya and can order any vessel to undertake a rescue. Given how well suited to the task the Phoenix was, it was inevitable that MRCC would eventually ask it to help. Cauchi was a recognised search and rescue expert, and the Phoenix’s 1.2-metre freeboard (the space from the waterline to the open deck) made it a far safer vessel to scramble on to than the lumbering tankers and cargo carriers that sometimes lower long rope ladders to already exhausted migrants, some of whom are pregnant or too young to even walk. A doctor was on board and the vessel was equipped to look after 400 people. The first call came through after four days, on 30 August. The Moas team quickly found itself involved in the simultaneous rescue of two migrant boats, including a wooden fishing vessel with 350 people – many of them families from Syria – that was slowly sinking. By the end of the rescue, water was flooding onto the main deck of the fishing boat, and many of the migrants were in the sea. So many small children were rescued that the Phoenix almost ran out of baby formula. “That was a shock for most of the crew,” Catrambone recalled. “We were a bit overwhelmed with the thought that this was really happening. These children and mothers were at the hands of the sea, at the hands of death.” The Phoenix rescued 1,462 people in 10 weeks and helped a further 1,500 onto Italian navy vessels. (There were also lulls when the crew fished for bluefin tuna.) The Phoenix operates in international waters that start just 12 nautical miles from the shores of Libya – now one of the world’s most violent places, where two separate governments have only tenuous control over their territories. An American consultant hired to advise on security fretted that the ship’s unarmed crew was too close to Libyan waters, but Catrambone decided he was overreacting – after long periods working in Iraq and Afghanistan (and a narrow brush with death during a missile strike in Israel), Catrambone felt he knew how to calibrate risk; the success of his own business, he says, is based in part on the tendency of others to exaggerate danger. “We are not afraid to go where others are [afraid],” he told me. “We don’t need a military convoy to take us.” While Catrambone joined the speedboat crew on rescue missions, Regina and her daughter Maria Luisa helped care for the migrants when they arrived on the Phoenix. One night Maria Luisa found herself talking to a fellow 18-year-old – a cultured, English-speaking Syrian girl named Rasha, who was travelling on her own after both her parents were killed. “I looked at her and I looked at me, and I said: ‘What if I was Rasha? What if I had to see people being killed by snipers every day, seeing my parents killed right before my eyes?’ I would want to leave,” she explained. “She was so brave. She travels, she gets on a boat. And she says: ‘Either I am going to make it, or I am going to die trying.’” The more the rescues went on, and the more stories they heard, the deeper the family and crew found themselves bound to the mission. “You might not get on the Phoenix as a humanitarian,” Catrambone said. “But you are one when you get off.” In October, a few days after their final mission of 2014, I met Catrambone at a small restaurant in Malta. He appeared on a Vespa scooter, looking distinctly unlike a millionaire. (There are expensive cars in his driveway, I later found, but he is still taken to the airport in a tiny old Peugeot 106 by a retired Maltese taxi driver named Charlie.) In the photographs I had seen, Catrambone sported a spiv’s moustache, though he was starting to add what would become a thick, tightly curled beard. Passionate, single-minded, and slightly unnerved by the press attention Moas had just begun to receive, Catrambone talked up his business but was disarmingly modest. (“He says he is the thinker, and I am the doer,” Regina told me later. “Everything that we have done together has been successful,” he added.) He larded his conversation with colourful Louisiana slang, which he then apologised for. He delivered riffs about the millennial generation being tired of huge corporations, excess and greed. He worried that capitalism had lost its soul by eliminating trust. “Wealth can be very short-term,” he said. “We are not trying to be crusaders. We’re just being humans, keeping hold of our dignity.” At the time, Catrambone was worried that the “pull factor” lobbyists had won the argument over European migrant policy. Italy, under pressure from the rest of Europe, had announced the end of Mare Nostrum. Yet the pressures pushing people out of places such as Syria and Eritrea had not disappeared, while Libya remained a perfect operating base for smugglers. When the winter winds settled in the spring, and the sea calmed, migrants would set out once more, he told me; on fine days, that would mean more than a thousand people in numerous boats. The Phoenix, with space for just 400, was set to be the only dedicated rescue vessel. It took the Mediterranean’s worst modern marine disaster, and some 850 deaths, to finally discredit the “pull factor” theory. On 18 April, as the Catrambones were preparing Phoenix to sail again in May, a large Portuguese cargo boat called the King Jacob was sent to rescue a smaller, steel-hulled cargo vessel carrying up to 900 migrants about 17 miles off Libya. The King Jacob stopped 100 metres from the marooned boat, whose captain – believed to be a Tunisian – manoeuvred clumsily in the dark, ramming the Portuguese boat. The migrant vessel rapidly sank, taking those below decks with it and tipping the rest into the black night sea. Only 28 people survived. The two dozen corpses pulled from the sea were sent to Malta, where on 23 April, the Catrambones sat at an interfaith funeral before rows of dark wooden caskets, and a single white child’s coffin marked “Body No 132”. Within days, a few wilted flowers on an anonymous common grave at the Addolorata cemetery were the only sign that the dead had ever existed. A few days later, I sat with Catrambone on the quay in Marsa, Malta as the Phoenix was loaded for its first mission of this year. Individual bags of emergency rations and basic clothing were being prepared by their new partners from the Dutch branch of Doctors without Borders, who would care for the migrants on board. One cardboard box was marked “body bags”. Catrambone was angry about the King Jacob tragedy, but it had shamed Europe’s politicians and he was hopeful that something was changing. Naval vessels, including the Royal Navy’s HMS Bulwark, were on their way. He had even heard Jean-Marie Le Pen, the rabidly anti-immigrant founder of France’s Front National, praise the Phoenix’s work. Some still disagreed. “We will only encourage more and more people to set sail in upturned bath-tubs and patched-up lilos,” Rod Liddle wrote in the Spectator a few weeks later. “Among them will be maniacal jihadis and assorted criminals, all expecting to be rescued by the countries which, in some cases, they wish to destroy.” Catrambone fretted that Moas was overstretching family resources – both time and money – and, with only €1m pledged, he could not understand why there had been so few donations from rich individuals, especially in the Middle East. “It is mostly Muslims who are coming, and there should be help from these rich Arab people that are sitting there, that don’t know what to do,” he said. But separating politics from rescuing migrants is tough: after announcing they would join the Phoenix this year, Doctors Without Borders in Holland lost some of its donors, who were apparently happy to help mitigate damage from war, famine, or Ebola, but did not want their money spent on rescuing people heading for Europe. By the time I stepped on board the Phoenix to join a week’s mission on 14 June, it looked like 2015 was set to be another record-breaking year for Mediterranean migration. We sailed out past the ancient forts overlooking Valletta’s Grand Harbour and into a two to three-metre swell that pushed the short, sharp Mediterranean waves above the height of a man. It was hard to imagine any migrant boat daring to launch in such conditions. But several days of bad weather, when the smugglers rest, were coming to an end. That same evening, as we were heading south towards Africa, Robel Buzuneh and Misgina Tsigay sat in a warehouse, in what they believed was the Libyan navy’s dockyard in Misrata – a space shared by two smuggling gangs. Like them, most of the 620 people there were Eritreans fleeing a 20-year-old dictatorship known for torture, extrajudicial killings, and forced military service. Buzuneh, a 27-year-old former business student, and Tsigay, 30, were both deserters and, for different reasons, traumatised by the trip. Buzuneh thought he would die in the desert after having been abandoned by his traffickers and running out of food and water. Tsigay had witnessed two of his party, and three Libyan drivers, being shot by an Egyptian border patrol. In the warehouse they ate a monotonous diet of pasta, while men with guns watched over them. As the Phoenix’s reinforced steel bow ploughed through the swell towards the Libyan coast, the Eritreans were shepherded into groups of 50 to 100 and put into motor skiffs that carried them through the dark towards two fishing boats that, to their dismay, were both very old and very small. “We did not know the captain and did not know what the boat would be like,” Buzuneh said. The Libyans distributed them around the boat, trying to keep it even. Buzuneh ended up stuffed – his knees against his ears – in a space below deck that was just over a metre high. Further along the coast, Bakory Jobe, a 20-year-old from Gambia, in west Africa, was part of a group of 109 who took turns carrying a large inflatable boat with a Libyan smuggler sat atop, “like on a throne”. Fifty minutes after setting out from a forest clearing where several hundred sub-Saharan Africans were gathered, they reached the sea and pushed off in the packed rubber vessel, heading for international waters where they expected to be rescued. “My legs were trembling and I was praying the whole night,” Jobe said. Both boats yawed and rolled in the swell. In Buzuneh’s overstuffed fishing boat, people vomited over each other. Heat from bodies packed tightly together and from the engine added to the fear, thirst and claustrophobia. “Everyone was very frightened,” said Buzuneh. “They told us we would be rescued in six hours … After 11 hours we were very scared. With this small boat it is impossible to go for a long period of time, or for a long distance.” The next morning, below deck on the fishing boat, Buzuneh had a small satellite phone thrust into his hands. The smugglers’ men on the boat had called MRCC Rome, and ordered him, as one of the few English speakers, to transmit their coordinates. Soon a call came through to the Phoenix, directing it to find the boat, which was 30 nautical miles away. Catrambone’s team had already launched a camcopter drone, which now headed towards the location Buzuneh had specified, and soon the drone was close enough to make out a blue fishing boat packed with people, doing the characteristic drunken zig‑zag of a small boat struggling to maintain a steady course in a big sea. “They just move like ants out there, being pummelled by the waves,” Catrambone told me later. With the position and direction of the boat established by the drone, the Phoenix set out to intercept it. Soon a small yellow dot appeared on the radar screen; Cauchi peered through his binoculars to see the blue hull appear on the horizon. The boat sat low in the water, a sign that it was bearing the weight of hundreds of people. Cauchi directed the rescue operation from the bridge of the Phoenix, which stopped about a mile away from the overladen fishing boat. He ordered the speedboat lowered and it soon sped off with three crewmen, a doctor and a huge sack of life jackets on board. “Every time we are sent to an operation, I think sooner or later I will have a heart attack, because you are always thinking what will go wrong,” Cauchi said. “It needs to be done carefully.” The speedboat approached from the back, to prevent people lurching to one side and capsizing their boat. They were ordered to sit down and to allow the women and children off first. A group of teenage girls, alternately smiling nervously and grimacing with fear, were lowered onto the speedboat. The Phoenix’s deep hull acted as a barrier, calming the waves on the lee side, where the girls were pulled aboard. On a second run, smaller children appeared, as young as three, dwarfed by their orange life jackets and clinging to their mothers. A smooth routine followed: the speedboat went back and forth, carrying 15 people at a time. The fishing boat rose slowly in the water as it was emptied, though the upper deck kept filling as the cramped human cargo below deck crept out of the narrow, square hatches. I joined the speedboat crew as they bumped across the open sea to pick up another group of migrants. When I clambered onto the fishing boat after the last men left, it occurred to me that an armed smuggler might be hiding below deck, waiting to sail the boat back to Libya. But nobody was there. (Catrambone later told me he had once experienced the same sensation, and ended up hollering through the hatch, telling anyone still there to come out or face his wrath.) Water was pooling beside the still-throbbing Hyundai engine. Both decks were a mess of water bottles, discarded scarves and shoes, half-eaten packs of cheese triangles and little drawstring bags with pictures of Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. Plastic bags and other rubbish floated around the stinking lower deck. A small plastic bag can easily block the pump. “If the bilge pump stops, you are done,” said Cauchi. The smugglers had also put in new unpainted wooden struts to ensure the upper deck did not give way under the weight of 150 people. Empty boats are valuable, and during a recent rescue, three Tunisian fishing boats approached while Catrambone was helping get the last men off. “They were signalling for us to come over and talk,” Catrambone recalled. “Our thought was that either they wanted to kidnap us or take the boat. It’s better not to talk to them.” Back on the Phoenix, one girl, her trousers covered in vomit, collapsed as soon as she got on board. Mostly there was quiet relief as energy snacks, water bottles, blue towels, woollen socks and thin white, wind-blocking protective overalls were handed out. After a few minutes of stunned silence the small children, miraculously, began playing. Later in the day, when 106 survivors from Jobe’s inflatable boat were transferred onto the Phoenix from a rescue boat chartered by the Belgian branch of Doctors Without Borders, it became clear how successful our first rescue had been. On Jobe’s boat, which had called the MRCC on a satellite phone that morning, the rescue effort had gone badly wrong: three people drowned at the last moment, and as air leaked out of the inflatable boat, he had watched a panic break out as five or six people fought to grab the rope ladder lowered to them. Unable to swim, he decided to sit still, but more than a dozen people fell into the sea. Another Gambian, Abubacarr Gibba, aged 27, fought to get onto the ladder, fell in the water, climbed out and then fell back in. “I can’t swim. I always said I was like a big stone,” he said. But the sea refused to drag him down and when he broke surface a second time and began vomiting gasoline-tanged sea water, a friend urged him to reach a life jacket that had been hurled into the water. “I managed to swim, which I had never done in my whole life.” The inflatable boat, he thought, would not have lasted another hour. For the next 48 hours, a small sample of 21st-century African migrants to Europe – with the addition of a few Bangladeshis – lived squashed together on the Phoenix’s two outside stern decks, telling their stories. For some, the sea had been a minor hardship compared to what happened before. “Libya is hell for black people,” said Jobe, who still had wounds on his knee from a beating. On his first day in Libya, 40 of his group were kidnapped by armed men who robbed them. “They shot a friend in the leg,” he said. Buzuneh and the other Eritreans had each paid $4,000 to travel via Khartoum, in Sudan. “I didn’t think it would be this difficult,” he said. “People think Europe is heaven.” The teenage girls remained quiet about their ordeal. Jobe knew why. “Every night Libyans come with their guns and take three or four of our women,” he said. “If you cry he will beat you. Then maybe after he will give you one packet of biscuits.” On deck a couple of teenage girls – no older than 15 – saw Maria Luisa as a confidant. “Men not good,” one explained, pointing at her own body. After two summers of regular missions and taking professional seafarer’s exams, Maria Luisa has matured beyond her years and learned to hide her own horror at the stories she hears. “Sometimes it is too overwhelming, and you just want to say: ‘I can’t believe they are really doing this to you.’ But you can’t say this because they need to talk, and they need to be heard.” The Phoenix’s upper deck was packed. Men trod on each other, argued briefly over the tiny spaces available to stretch out, and continued to vomit. Mostly, though, they slept, ate the freeze-dried Adventure Food vegetable hotpot that had been heated up with boiling water, and wondered about the future. “I don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” said Gibba “But we think we will feel safe in Europe.” Some wanted to go to Britain, because they knew the language. “It will be easier, because we in Gambia were colonised by England,” reasoned one man with a brother in Leicester. Others wanted to go to Germany, or Switzerland, or simply did not care. After the second night, they awoke to see the low coastline of Sicily before the Phoenix entered the harbour at Augusta. A dizzying array of Italian organisations waited on a cargo dock beside a mountain of scrap metal. The migrants stepped down the gangplank to touch European soil and walked on to a tented processing camp with doctors, fold-out beds, food and tents proudly bearing the name of Italy’s “Ministero Dell’Interno”. UNHCR officials were ready to help process asylum petitions, which Eritreans can expect to have accepted. They were moved on to permanent camps by the morning, though many flee these immediately, knowing that EU rules mean that if they were to be fingerprinted by Italian police, other European countries could send them back there. Further along the coast, Eithne, an Irish naval service patrol boat, was delivering a similar number of people. Another thousand migrants had made it to Europe in a single, not very remarkable, day. We sailed back to Malta through rough sea, the white-tops occasionally dumping their froth on the deck, while Cauchi stared out of a window and marvelled at how stable the boat remained. By the time we docked in Malta again, the European Union had adopted a more aggressive stance, agreeing to establish a €12m military operation to sink boats used by smugglers. Catrambone likens military and law enforcement attempts to stop migration to the war on drugs. The problem will not go away, he says, until there are no users. “It just don’t look like there’s any fricking chance of any alternative happening right now,” he said. “There is no easy answer. That is why I am saying you really have to focus in on saving people’s lives first.” Catrambone says he would close Moas’s Mediterranean operation if Europe had something better to offer, but that does not seem likely to happen soon. He once told me that he could have replaced the whole Mare Nostrum operation with something similar for a third of the cost, and he continues to think in ever bigger terms. He would like to have $10m a year to charter a new boat, a 45-knot Australian-built catamaran ferry named HSV-2 Swift, which is two and half times the size of the Phoenix. It could make the trip from the rescue zone to Sicily in just five or six hours. That may seem fantastical - but it is no more so than the idea of MOAS seemed less than a year ago. Catrambone did not rule out the possibility that Moas would operate elsewhere – a similar migrant tragedy, after all, is occurring off Myanmar, as the Muslim Rohingya minority flees persecution. All that will require more money. While we were out at sea, a fundraising drive by the activist organisation Avaaz reached $500,000, slightly less than a month’s costs. Moas will now just about cover running costs from donations this year, though the Catrambones continue to plug holes. Catrambone knows one of his problems is that, unlike many other wealthy individuals, he is at the action end of the philanthropy chain. Most set up foundations to finance political advocacy or donate to existing NGOs, many of which have large memberships. He and Regina are wary of Moas being seen as an eccentric millionaire’s hobby, making it harder to raise money and awareness. “We are not bored, we are not old, we have a lot to do,” said Regina, who has increasingly turned her attention away from their business and towards Moas. And with a large, well-organised NGO like Doctors without Borders sending its own boats this year, there is now an element of competition for raising funds. Cooperation, Catrambone says, is the future. Catrambone has also thought of seeking funding from the merchant marine industry, which loses money every time a cargo vessel or oil tanker is ordered to a rescue. Whatever the future holds, nothing can change the fact that the Catrambones – initially self-financed, freelance operators – have set both a precedent and, having never lost a life, a standard. Those who care about migrants drowning, Catrambone insists, no longer have to wait for governments to act. They can turn, instead, to Moas or other NGOs. He had already told me that if the family business ever went down, he and Regina would have no regrets about spending so much time and money on Moas. “A lot of people say: ‘Oh, look at the millionaires! They’ve spent a lot of money’,” he said. “I’ve invested my life into this and my family has invested our savings. This is important for us and we believe in it. And you know what, if I am poor one day and I’m out in the street, well so be it. But we did this. And we are proud of it. I will never take anything back.” Many pics and 2 videos in link http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/08/millionaire-who-rescues-migrants-at-sea
  9. Businessman directs wrath at Mexico, which he accuses of ‘bringing their worst people’ to America, including criminals and ‘rapists’ Rupert Neate in New York @RupertNeate Tuesday 16 June 2015 18.08 BST Donald Trump, the 69-year-old businessman best known for his “You’re fired” catchphrase on The Apprentice, announced he was running for president on Tuesday with an eccentric speech attacking Mexican immigrants and promising to build a great wall along the US’s southern border. Trump has flirted with the idea of standing for the country’s highest office for decades, but on Tuesday made it official on a stage in the basement of his Trump Tower building in Manhattan, in front of eight American flags. “Sadly the American dream is dead, but if I get elected president I will bring it back,” he said. “Bigger, better and stronger than ever before.” Trump took to the stage as speakers bellowed out Neil Young’s 1989 song Rockin’ in the Free World, and went on to attack most of the rest of the world as he blamed Barack Obama for letting the country collapse to the level of “a third world country”. Most of his wrath was directed at Mexico, which he accused of “bringing their worst people” to America, including criminals and “rapists”. “They’re sending us not the right people,” he said, adding: “The US has become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing their problems,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some I assume are good people but I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting.” He promised that as President Trump, one of his first actions would be to build a “great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall”. Trump said that Obama, and previous administrations, had allowed Mexico, China and other countries to take American jobs and prosperity. “China has our jobs, Mexico has our jobs,” he said. “Our enemies are getting stronger and stronger by the day, and the US as a country is getting weaker and weaker. How stupid are our leaders, how stupid are our politicians to let this happen? Our president doesn’t have a clue.” Trump said the Chinese leadership was much smarter than Obama and his team. “It’s like the New England Patriots and Tom Brady [playing] a high school team.” He added: “Politicians are all talk and no action. They will not bring us, believe me, to the promised land.” Also at the top of his to-do list as president would be scrapping Obamacare, the current president’s signature healthcare legislation, and drastically cutting spending on education. He described Obamacare as a “disaster” and “a big lie”. “Obamacare is going to be amazingly destructive,” he told the crowd beside a banner reading TRUMP: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Trump said he would replace Obamacare with a new system that would be “much better and much less expensive”. He also called for a radical reduction on education spending, saying “people are tired of spending more money on education per capita than any other country”. He accused Republican rival Jeb Bush of being weak on education, saying: “How the hell can you vote for this guy?” Trump also pledged that “nobody will be tougher on Isis than Donald Trump”, and that he would be “the greatest jobs president that God ever made”. He told the crowd not to believe government statistics showing unemployment had fallen to 5.4%. “Our real unemployment is 18-20%, don’t believe their 5.6% [in fact the official figure is 5.4%]. China has our jobs, Mexico has our jobs. I’ll bring back our jobs and bring back our money.” Trump, who has long flirted with the idea of standing for president, said he knew that standing for office would be a “tough” job but somebody had to stand up to stop the country “dying”. “We’re dying, we’re dying,” he said. “We need money, and we need the right people.” As required by campaign finance law, Trump revealed his net worth before a crowd holding what looked like homemade Trump for president banners which were actually handed out by Trump campaign staff. “I don’t need anyone else’s money, I’m really rich,”he said. “I have total net worth of $8.73bn. I’m not doing that to brag. I’m doing that to show that’s the kind of thinking or country needs.” Trump enters an increasingly crowded presidential race, punctuated by such big names as former Florida governor Bush, who is the son and brother of two former US presidents, and former secretary of state H-illary Clinton. Based on guidelines recently announced by the television networks, Trump could play a prominent role in the upcoming nationally televised Republican debate in August. Those who rank in the top 10 in national polls – and Trump currently does, although he’s close to the bottom – will earn a place on the debate stage. That could place Trump in a debate alongside some leading candidates. “Selfishly, the networks would put me on because I get great ratings,” Trump said in a recent interview with the Associated Press. The Associated Press contributed to this report http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/16/donald-trump-announces-run-president
  10. Roommate says 21-year-old had been ‘planning something like that for six months’ after massacre that killed nine black churchgoers in South Carolina Michael Safi, Jessica Glenza and Amanda Holpuch Friday 19 June 2015 07.48 BST The 21-year-old accused of killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, had been “planning something like that for six months”, his roommate has revealed, as friends recalled Dylann Roof’s tirades against African Americans “taking over the world” and his desire to ignite “a civil war”. The killings have sent shockwaves across the US, as the nation confronts a breaking point over race and gun violence following yet another mass shooting. Hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects outside the Emanuel AME Church – the scene of the shooting – on Thursday evening, with more prayer services held throughout Charleston. A day after the massacre – labelled a “hate crime” by South Carolina police – a portrait of Roof as an apparently committed racist is building from interviews with associates of the young man, shown in Facebook photos wearing a jacket bearing the flags of the former white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia. Joseph Meek Jr, a childhood friend who saw Roof the morning of the shooting, said the pair had never discussed race growing up. But when they recently reconnected, Roof told him “blacks were taking over the world [and] someone needed to do something about it for the white race”, he told the Associated Press. “He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. I said, ‘That’s not the way it should be.’ But he kept talking about it.” Meek said that when he woke up on Wednesday morning Roof was at his house, sleeping in his car outside – its license plate bearing the confederate flag. Later that day, Meek said he and some friends had gone to a nearby lake but Roof stayed behind, deciding he’d rather see a movie. The next time he saw Roof was in surveillance-camera photos distributed by police in the aftermath of the killing. “I knew it was him,” Meek said. A roommate, Dalton Tyler, said Roof had been “planning something like that for six months”. “He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler told ABC News. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.” He said Roof had been “on and off” with his parents, but they had previously bought him a gun. He hadn’t been allowed to take it with him until this week, Tyler said. Roof’s uncle Carson Cowles said the gun, a .45-caliber pistol, had been a gift for the introverted young man’s 21st birthday. “I said he was like 19 years old, he still didn’t have a job, a driver’s license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time,” Cowles said. “I don’t have any words for it. Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming.” A high school contemporary, John Mullins, told the Daily Beast: “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.” But now, he said, it seemed that “the things he said were kind of not joking”. Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Roof was not known to his organisation, which tracks hate crimes across the US, but based on his Facebook page he appeared to be a “disaffected white supremacist”. Others expressed surprise at Roof’s crimes. “I never thought he’d do something like this,” a high school friend, Antonio Metze, told AP. “He had black friends.” Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny, described him as a “sweet kid”. “He was quiet. He only had a few friends,” she said. Though police say Roof lived in Columbia, South Carolina, he apparently had ties to the nearby Lexington area. Roof had a mixed educational record in the Lexington school district, attending White Knoll high school in both the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. Roof previously had at least two run-ins with the law. The Lexington county district attorney’s office confirmed that Roof had been charged with possession of a controlled substance in March but the circumstances surrounding that arrest remain unclear. He was also arrested in April for misdemeanour trespassing in Lexington county. On Thursday, police released Roof’s mugshot and moved him from police custody in North Carolina on his way back to face charges in South Carolina. Reuters reports that Roof had lived with his older sister Amber and their father part-time until his father and stepmother divorced. A profile on TheKnot.com shows that Amber Roof is scheduled to be married on Sunday in Lexington, South Carolina, according to Reuters. After his capture in Shelby, North Carolina, on Thursday morning – after a florist spotted and tailed his car – Roof was extradited to Charleston, where he is being held in isolation at a detention centre facing nine counts of murder, according to Live5 news. On Thursday, President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the White House, expressing heartache at the killings and saying American communities have had to endure such tragedies too many times. “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” Obama said. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency – and it is in our power to do something about it.” The Charleston mayor, Joseph P Riley Jr, said at a press conference: “In America, you know, we don’t let bad people like this get away with these dastardly deeds.” The streets outside of Emanuel church were crowded with people on Thursday night who wished to pay their respects to the dead: Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Clementa Pickney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Daniel Simmons, 74; Sharonda Singleton, 45, and Myra Thompson, 59. “It’s just mind-boggling, I don’t have the right words to say it. Just shock,” said Marymargaret Givens, a 60-year-old housekeeper who works a few blocks away. “The way it happened. They were just innocent people. They were godly people.” She gazed back towards the church, said a prayer for the dead and then walked away. “It was an evil that was incomprehensible,” said Pastor Cress Darwin, who had earlier led a prayer session at the Second Presbyterian Church next door to Emanuel AME. As throngs of worshippers poured out on to the streets, many in tears, Darwin continued: “But this community is coming together. Because of it we will be more vigilant in terms of our security. But because of who we serve, we will not stop welcoming in the stranger, because death is not the last word.” Fifty-seven-year-old Marilyn Martin had attended school with Myra Thompson and had known Tywanza Sanders. She described Sanders as a “strong man with a good head on his shoulders”. The 26-year-old, she said, had just graduated college and “couldn’t wait to be a productive citizen”. Vigils were also held across the US, including in Nebraska, New York and Florida. The African American community in Charleston and throughout the US is still reeling from the murder just 10 weeks earlier of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man shot dead by a North Charleston police officer just miles away from the site of Wednesday’s shooting. The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church traces its roots to 1816 and is one of the largest black congregations south of Baltimore. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr addressed the church in 1962. Police lead suspected shooter Dylann Roof, 21, into the courthouse in Shelby, North Carolina. Photograph: Jason Miczek/Reuters An undated handout photo of Dylann Roof wearing flags of white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia. Photograph: Berkeley County/Handout/EPA Members of Congress hold a prayer circle in front of the US Capitol to honour those gunned down at the Emanuel church. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/dylann-roof
  11. Pontiff’s 180-page intervention in climate change debate casts blame for ‘ecological crisis’ on the indifference of the powerful Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Vatican City Thursday 18 June 2015 14.28 BST Pope Francis has called on the world’s rich nations to begin paying their “grave social debt” to the poor and take concrete steps on climate change, saying failure to do so presents an undeniable risk to a “common home” that is beginning to resemble a “pile of filth”. The pope’s 180-page encyclical on the environment, released on Thursday, is at its core a moral call for action on phasing out the use of fossil fuels. But it is also a document infused with an activist anger and concern for the poor, casting blame on the indifference of the powerful in the face of certain evidence that humanity is at risk following 200 years of misuse of resources. Up to now, he says, the world has accepted a “cheerful recklessness” in its approach to the issue, lacking the will to change habits for the good of the Earth. “Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods,” the papal statement says. “It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.” The encyclical, which can now be considered the church’s official position on the environment, includes practical guidance. Pope Francis rejects “simple solutions” to climate change such as cap and trade systems, which he says give rise to harmful speculation. He also dismisses any suggestion that population increases harm to the environment and should therefore be controlled, and resists making any judgment on genetically modified foods. The essay was released following months of intense speculation about how far the pontiff would delve into a scientific realm that is still considered controversial in some countries such as the US, where views on climate change are divided along political lines. Cardinal Peter Turkson, the pope’s top official on social and justice issues, flatly rejected arguments by some conservative politicians in the US that the pope ought to stay out of science. “Saying that a pope shouldn’t deal with science sounds strange since science is a public domain. It is a subject matter that anyone can get in to,” Turkson said at a press conference on Thursday. In an apparent reference to comments by Republican presidential contender Jeb Bush, who said he did not take economic advice from the pope, Turkson said that politicians had the right to disregard Francis’s statement, but said it was wrong to do so based on the fact that the pope was not a scientist. “For some time now it has been the attempt of the whole world to kind of try to de-emphasise the artificial split between religion and public life … as if religion plays no role,” he said. Then, quoting an earlier pope, he said the best position was to “encourage dialogue between faith and reason”. “Reason does have blind spots, but at the same time, reason can also challenge religion to become practical,” he said. Francis, who was elected in 2013 and has put social justice and reform of the church at the heart of his papacy, said on Thursday that his text should not be read as a “green” manifesto, but instead as a “social” teaching. “The foreign debt of poor countries has become a way of controlling them, yet this is not the case where ecological debt is concerned,” Francis wrote. “In different ways, developing countries, where the most important reserves of the biosphere are found, continue to fuel the development of richer countries at the cost of their own present and future. “The developed countries ought to help pay this debt by significantly limiting their consumption of non-renewable energy and by assisting poorer countries to support policies and programmes of sustainable development.” The question now is whether the pope’s sweeping statement will shake-up climate talks. Turkson said on Thursday that the pope considered it imperative that “practical proposals not be developed in an ideological, superficial or reductionist way”. “For this, dialogue is essential,” he said. The release of the statement was timed with the pope’s upcoming trip to the US, where he will speak before the UN and seek to nudge climate change negotiators ahead of their December meeting in Paris. He will also speak before a joint session of the US Congress. While much of the encyclical is a spiritual reflection on the biblical story of creation and humanity’s God-given role in caring for the Earth, both the statement and the presentation preceding it were infused with science, representing a rare locking of arms between the church and scientific community. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a top climate scientist and scientific adviser to the Vatican, said the impact of global warming would be “abrupt, surprising, and irreversible”, and that it would shutdown parts of the earth much in the same way that the body dies of a fever. “The vital organ’s of the world’s body will collapse,” he said in opening remarks before a press conference. The encyclical – a statement of papal teaching – describes an “ecological crisis” and includes a section devoted to the latest scientific findings. It argues that climate change is not just a “global problem with serious implications”, but has an impact felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest people. Francis writes: “Those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms”. The failure to respond, he says, points to the loss of a “sense of responsibility for our fellow men and women upon which all civil society is founded”. He calls access to safe water a “basic and universal human right” and says depriving the poor of access to water is akin to denying the right to a life. The Argentinian pontiff heaps praise on efforts made by scientists to find solutions to man-made problems, and lashes out at those who intervene in the service of “finance and consumerism”. “It is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, even more limited and grey,” he says. The pope did not speak at the press conference on Thursday, but earlier in the week he said he hoped his message would be received with an “open spirit”. The pope has previously expressed disappointment over the lack of an effective global plan to tackle climate change. But he faces an uphill battle to convert those who doubt human influence. Even among Catholics in the US, views on global warming are sharply divided along political lines. A recent survey by Pew Research showed that Catholic Republicans view the nearly universally accepted scientific facts with deep scepticism. Overall, the survey found that 71% of US Catholics believe the earth is warming, and about half (47%) believe humans are the cause and that it is a serious problem. But while eight in 10 Catholic Democrats say that there is solid evidence that global warming is real, only about half of Catholic Republicans agree. Far fewer – just one quarter of Catholic Republicans – believe that global warming is caused by humans. The UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres, said the church’s newly unveiled teaching on the environment underscored the “moral imperative for urgent action”. “This clarion call should guide the world towards a strong and durable universal climate agreement in Paris at the end of this year,” she said in a statement. “Coupled with the economic imperative, the moral imperative leaves no doubt that we must act on climate change now.” Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank president, agreed: “Today’s release … should serve as a stark reminder to all of us on the intrinsic link between climate change and poverty.” He said the impact of climate change was most devastating for the “unacceptably high number of people living in extreme poverty”. Extreme weather events had taken the lives of more than 2.5 million people and resulted in $4tn in damages, he said. “We must now seize this narrow window of opportunity and embark on ambitious actions and policies to help protect people and the environment,” he added. Francis has been sending his encyclical to church officials around the world over the last few days, Federico Lombardi, the Holy See’s head of communications, said. The pontiff included a personal handwritten note in his communication, ending with a plea for help: “United in the lord, and please do not forget to pray for me.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/18/popes-climate-change-encyclical-calls-on-rich-nations-to-pay-social-debt
  12. Pressure mounts on Athens as eurozone finance ministers gather in Luxembourg following warning Greece is heading for possible exit from the euro Phillip Inman Economics correspondent Thursday 18 June 2015 06.30 BST International Monetary Fund boss Christine Lagarde has ruled out any further delay to €1.6bn of loan repayments due from Greece by the end of the month, raising the pressure on Athens as eurozone finance ministers gathered in Luxembourg to discuss the growing crisis. Lagarde said there would be “no grace period or possibility of delay” to loan payments that are due on 30 June. It follows a series of threats by the debt-stricken Greek government that it would be unable to pay without a deal with Brussels and the IMF to provide extra funds. Lagarde said the leftist Syriza administration would need to concede over making further reforms to its pension system to get a deal, something prime minister Alexis Tsipras has refused to countenance. Writing in German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, Tsipras said pensioners had become the main breadwinners in many families, meaning cuts in pension payments would increase poverty. “The social security system is the institutionalised mechanism of intergenerational solidarity, and its sustainability is a main concern for society as a whole,” he said. “Traditionally, this solidarity has meant that young people, through their contributions, fund the pensions of their parents. But during the Greek crisis, we’ve witnessed this solidarity being reversed as the parents’ pensions fund the survival of their children.” But the IMF and Brussels want further cuts to bring down the cost of pensions, which account for 13% of GDP, with further restrictions on early retirement and lower supplementary pension payments. Greek negotiators, who head into talks with eurozone finance ministers on Thursday, have ruled out cuts in pensions, saying there is a reform plan that reduces costs dramatically over the next 10 years. The meeting is expected to be short, with little likely to be decided, despite warnings that Greece is heading for a possible exit from the euro without an extension of its current bailout deal. The gathering of finance ministers from the currency bloc’s 19 member states is due to discuss the gulf between Athens and its creditors, but is expected to delay any decisions to a summit of EU leaders next week, officials in Brussels said. With no fresh proposals on the table, the ministers have indicated that there is little point in a prolonged debate about a potential deal at the meeting. The Greek government said it remained ready to join talks to secure an agreement, but could not accept the current proposals to cut pensions or achieve a 1% budget surplus in the middle of a recession. Chief negotiator, Euclid Tsakalotos, warned on the BBC’s Today programme on Radio 4 this morning that “If Greece goes out, the euro might break down.” He said: “Once one country has left, you change a monetary union into a fixed exchange rate system, where it’s a cost-benefit analysis whether another country leaves. “My greatest fear is that the break-up of the euro will return [us] to the competitive devaluations, and the nationalisms, and the kind of politics we had in the 1930s.” He added: “If we have don’t [have a deal], we have to go to the Greek people because we have no mandate to leave the euro, and that would be a very bad eventuality.” EU commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, who has voiced some sympathy for Athens, said: “Today is an important date and I have no desire to see us return to the age of Waterloo when the Europeans were all lined up against a single state.” The Greek stock market has slumped 17% in a week after the country reached an impasse with its troika of lenders – the European commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and European Central Bank (ECB). A war of words between the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and the troika has become further inflamed after he accused the IMF this week of “criminal responsibility” for the situation and said lenders were seeking to “humiliate” his country. Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, responded that he had “sympathy for the Greek people but not the Greek government”. Juncker was until recently viewed as one of Tsipras’s few allies. Informal talks could take place over the weekend ahead of next week’s summit after the ECB threw Athens a lifeline by raising the maximum emergency funding that Greek banks can obtain by €1.1bn (£790m...$1.25B). The increase, which brought the overall ceiling on emergency liquidity assistance to €84.1bn, came after a stark warning from the Bank of Greece that the country could crash out of the eurozone in an “uncontrollable crisis” unless it can conclude loan talks with its creditors by the end of the month. Yannis Stournaras, the bank’s governor, used his annual report to the Greek parliament to warn that failure to reach a deal would “mark the beginning of a painful course that would lead initially to a Greek default and ultimately to the country’s exit from the euro area and – most likely – from the European Union”. Stournaras, a finance minister in the previous rightwing and pro-bailout New Democracy administration, was roundly criticised by the government for undermining the negotiating position of elected officials. Zoe Konstantopoulou, the president of the parliament, said the governor had not only breached his constitutional role but actively attempted to limit the room the government had for manoeuvre in its negotiations with creditors. She said in a statement: “With his report today, the governor of the Bank of Greece not only exceeded the boundaries of his institutional role, he is attempting to contribute to the creation of an asphyxiating framework in the moves and negotiating abilities of the Greek government.” The governor’s remarks came before Greece’s Syriza-led government confirmed it will run out of money by the end of the month unless its creditors agree to release €7.2bn ($8.2B) in bailout funds. Tsakalotos has conceded that the country does not have the funds to make a €1.6bn payment due to the IMF on 30 June. Athens delayed a payment to the IMF earlier this month, saying it would take advantage of a technical loophole allowing it to bundle four tranches due this month into the single €1.6bn ($1.8B) sum. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/18/greece-eurozone-finance-ministers-talks-austerity-protests-athens
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