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  1. Islamic State claims responsibility for attack as details emerge about gunmen who opened fire at event near Dallas Staff and agencies Tuesday 5 May 2015 10.03 BST US federal agents had for years monitored Elton Simpson, one of the two gunmen who were shot dead after opening fire with assault rifles at a heavily guarded Texas exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Government sources said the gunmen were roommates Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi of Phoenix. Court documents show Simpson had been under surveillance since 2006 and convicted in 2011 of lying to FBI agents over his desire to join violent jihad in Somalia. Islamic State says it was behind Sunday’s attack – the first time it has claimed responsibility for an attack in the US. FBI agents and police on Monday searched the two men’s home at the Autumn Ridge Apartments in north-central Phoenix, cordoning off the complex and evacuating residents for several hours in the early morning. The incident on Sunday unfolded when a car drove up behind an indoor arena in Garland, where 200 people were attending an event featuring caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Two men jumped out and fired at a police car standing guard. A police officer returned fire, killing both of them, while a security guard was wounded. As the investigation continued, details of the men involved began to emerge. Simpson, described as quiet and devout, had been on the radar of law enforcement because of his social media presence, but authorities did not have an indication that he was plotting an attack, said one federal official familiar with the investigation. Less was known about Soofi, who had no criminal record, according to a search of federal court records. Simpson had worshipped at the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix for about a decade but quit showing up over the past two or three months, the president of the mosque told the Associated Press. He had been convicted in 2011 of lying to FBI officials over discussions he had with an informant about his desire to travel to Somalia to engage in violent jihad. According to court records Simpson waived his right to a jury trial and was tried before US District Judge Mary Murguia, who found him guilty of making a false statement. She said there was insufficient evidence to conclude the false statement involved international terrorism. He was sentenced to three years’ probation and ordered to pay $600 in fines and penalties. The court documents say federal authorities began monitoring Simpson in 2006 because he was associated with an individual the FBI believed was trying to set up a terrorist cell in Arizona. At one point, according to the documents, the FBI tried “unsuccessfully” to put Simpson on a US government no-fly list. Simpson’s father told ABC News his son was “always a good kid” but said they had “some very serious differences”. “We are Americans and we believe in America,” Dunston Simpson told ABC News. “What my son did reflects very badly on my family.” A convert to Islam, Simpson first attracted the FBI’s attention because of his ties to Hassan Abu Jihaad, a former US navy sailor who had been arrested in Phoenix and was ultimately convicted of terrorism-related charges, according to court records. Jihaad was accused of leaking details about his ship’s movements to operators of a website in London that openly espoused violent jihad against the US. In the fall of that year the FBI asked one of its informants to befriend Simpson, pose as a recent convert to Islam and ask for advice about the religion. Over the next few years the informant would secretly record his conversations with Simpson, accumulating more than 1,500 hours of audio, according to court records. “I’m telling you, man, we can make it to the battlefield,” Simpson is recorded saying on 29 May 2009. “It’s time to roll.” In court prosecutors presented only 17 minutes and 31 seconds during Simpson’s trial, according to court documents. Simpson’s attorney, Kristina Sitton, told the Associated Press: “I have to say that I felt like these charges were completely trumped up, that they were just trying to cover up what had been a very long and expensive investigation and they just couldn’t leave without some sort of charges.” Sitton described Simpson as so devout that he would not shake her hand and would sometimes interrupt their legal meetings so he could pray. She said she had no indication that he was capable of violence and assumed he just “snapped”. Soofi appeared to have never been prosecuted in federal court, according to a search of records. Sharon Soofi, his mother, who lives in a small town south-west of Houston, told the Dallas Morning News that she had no idea that he would turn to violence. She said her son was “raised in a normal American fashion” and “was very politically involved with the Middle East. Just aware of what’s going on.” “I don’t know if something snapped,” she said. She said the last time she had communicated with her son was last month, sending a text to wish her grandson a happy birthday. “He put his son above everything, I thought,” she told the newspaper. “The hard thing is to comprehend is why he would do this and leave an eight-year-old son behind.” In Phoenix policed searched the men’s apartment and a white van that was parked outside with its side windows broken. Bob Kieckhafer, 54, who lives one floor above and across from the apartment that was searched, said FBI and other law enforcement in Swat gear evacuated people in the building at 11pm late on Sunday and did not let them back until 4am on Monday. He said two men lived in the apartment that was being searched. He described the men as “just like your next-door-neighbour type of guys”. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement on its radio station on Tuesday. “Two of the soldiers of the caliphate executed an attack on an art exhibit in Garland, Texas, and this exhibit was portraying negative pictures of the Prophet Muhammed,” the group said. “We tell America that what is coming will be even bigger and more bitter, and that you will see the soldiers of the Islamic State do terrible things,” it added. The statement did not provide details and it was unclear whether the group was opportunistically claiming the attack as its own. US government sources close to the case said investigators were scouring electronic communications sent and received by the dead suspects to look for evidence of contacts between them and militant groups overseas, most notably Isis. The shooting incident in the Dallas suburb of Garland was an echo of past attacks or threats in other western countries against images depicting Muhammad. In January gunmen killed 12 people in the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in what was said to be revenge for its cartoons. Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report Picture thought to be of Elton Simpson Photograph: Obtained By ABC News Law enforcement officers at the Autumn Ridge apartment complex where Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi lived. Photograph: Nancy Wiechec/Reuters http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/05/elton-simpson-fbi-had-monitored-texas-gunman-since-2006
  2. Tensions boil over in central Tel Aviv on Sunday after footage emerged last week of an Ethiopian Israeli in an army uniform being beaten by police Agencies Monday 4 May 2015 04.36 BST Police on horseback charged at hundreds of ethnic Ethiopian citizens in central Tel Aviv on Sunday as an anti-racism protest descended into one of the most violent demonstrations in Israel’s commercial capital in years. The protesters, who included several thousand people from Israel’s Jewish Ethiopian minority, were demonstrating against what they say is police brutality after the emergence last week of a video clip that showed policemen shoving and punching a black soldier. Demonstrators overturned a police car, smashed shop windows, destroyed property and threw bottles and stones at officers in riot gear at Rabin Square in the heart of the city. Tensions subsided after midnight and police said they would be far less accommodating of similar demonstrations. At least 56 officers and 12 protesters were injured, some requiring hospital treatment, police and an ambulance service official said. Forty-three people were arrested. Police used water cannons and stun grenades to try to clear the crowds. Israeli television stations said teargas was also used, something the police declined to confirm. “I’ve had enough of this behaviour by the police. I just don’t trust them any more ... When I see the police I spit on the ground,” one female demonstrator who was not identified told Channel 2 before the mounted police charge. “Our parents were humiliated for years. We are not prepared to wait any longer to be recognised as equal citizens. It may take a few months, but it will happen,” another demonstrator told Channel 10. Thousands of Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, many of them secretly airlifted into the country in 1984 and 1990 after a rabbinical ruling that they were direct descendants of the biblical Jewish Dan tribe. But their absorption into Israeli society has been difficult. Ethiopian community members complain of racism, lack of opportunity in Israeli society, endemic poverty and routine police harassment. The community, which now numbers about 135,500 out of Israel’s population of more than eight million, has long complained of discrimination, racism and poverty. Tensions rose after an incident a week ago in a Tel Aviv suburb where a closed-circuit video camera captured a scuffle between a policeman and a uniformed soldier of Ethiopian descent. Two policemen were suspended on suspicion of using excessive force. Israeli politicians, stung by community leaders’ comparison of the incident to police violence against blacks in the US, have tried to defuse tensions. The public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovich, told Channel 2 the officers caught in the footage were “a disgrace” and were being investigated. He said Israel’s police force “needs to examine itself” and more needs to be done to help the Ethiopian community. The prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, called for calm. Taking time out from the final days of negotiations to form a coalition government, he said he would meet Ethiopian activists and the soldier on Monday. “All claims will be looked into but there is no place for violence and such disturbances,” he said in a statement. Some protest organisers told Israeli media that sections of the crowd had been incited to violence despite their peaceful intentions and police said the organisers had lost control of the demonstration. The police chief, Yohanan Danino, told Channel 10 TV that “the use of violence by a small minority of the many protesters does not serve their struggle”. He added: “Whoever harms police or civilians will be brought to justice.” At a protest on Thursday in Jerusalem, police used water cannons to keep angry crowds away from Netanyahu’s residence, and at least 13 people were injured. Ethiopian Jews have joined the ranks of legislators and the officer corps in the country’s melting-pot military but official figures show they lag behind other Israelis. Ethiopian households earn 35% less than the national average and only half their youth receive high school diplomas, compared with 63% for the rest of the population. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Israeli man from the Ethiopian community is wounded after clashes with Israeli police in Tel Aviv on Sunday. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/04/ethiopian-israelis-clash-with-police-as-anti-racism-rally-turns-violent
  3. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is being treated in hideout two months after attack while deputy leader Abu Alaa al-Afri runs terror group intent on revenge Martin Chulov in Irbil Friday 1 May 2015 15.52 BST The leader of the Islamic State (Isis), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remains incapacitated due to suspected spinal damage and is being treated by two doctors who travel to his hideout from the group’s stronghold of Mosul, the Guardian has learned. More than two months after being injured in a US air strike in north-western Iraq, the self-proclaimed caliph is yet to resume command of the terror group that has been rampaging through Iraq and Syria since June last year. Three sources close to Isis have confirmed that Baghdadi’s wounds could mean he will never again lead the organisation. Isis is now being led by a long-term senior official, Abu Alaa al-Afri, who had been appointed deputy leader when his predecessor was killed by an air strike late last year. Details of Baghdadi’s condition, and of the physicians treating him, have emerged since the Guardian revealed he had been seriously wounded on 18 March in an air strike that killed three men he was travelling with. The attack took place in al-Baaj, 80 miles (128km) west of Mosul. The Pentagon subsequently denied that Baghdadi had been killed and, while it acknowledged that it had carried out the attack, claimed to be unaware that the world’s most wanted man had been among the casualties. Sources within Mosul, who refused to be named, said a female radiologist from a main Mosul hospital and a male surgeon had treated Baghdadi. Both, along with their extended families, are strong ideological supporters of the group. “The women’s sons work in the hospital,” said one Mosul resident with knowledge of Baghdadi’s wounds. “They dress like Kandaharis and even carry guns inside. Both are on the regional health board. “The man is not a renowned surgeon, but he is absolutely with them [isis]. His daughter married a Salafist and said she was going to have as many children as she could to fight the enemies of Islam.” Only a small clique of Isis leaders know the extent of Baghdadi’s injuries, or where he is being treated. Fewer still have visited him. However, word of his wounds has started to spread to the group’s second-tier leadership, where talk is rife of avenging the most serious blow to Isis since the group overran half of Iraq. Afri is a professor of physics and a long-term member of Isis. He was touted as successor to the group’s previous leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who was killed in a US-led raid near Tikrit in April 2010. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi assumed the mantle of leader in the days following his predecessor’s death, but has dramatically risen to prominence since early 2013, when the group first made its presence felt in Syria’s civil war. In June last year, less than 1,000 Isis fighters ousted the Iraqi army from the north of the country, and took control of Mosul, Tikrit as well as Anbar and Nineveh provinces. Since then, Isis has menaced Baghdad and Irbil and drawn the US military back to a country it had left in 2011. “They have a lot of confidence in al-Afri,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, senior adviser on Isis to the Iraqi government. “He is smart, and a good leader and administrator. If Baghdadi ends up dying, he will lead them.” Two Isis insiders told the Guardian that the US-led air strikes, which have also involved Jordanian and GCC fighter jets, have taken a heavy toll on the organisation’s numbers, and increasingly its morale. “They are planning to fight back against Europe,” one member said. “They want to take revenge for Baghdadi.” Though proving to be a potent threat to the group’s leaders, intelligence surrounding air strikes has often been imprecise. In April, the White House was forced to apologise after the US military killed an American and an Italian citizen, as well as al-Qaida’s spokesman, Adam Gadahn, in a drone strike in Waziristan in January. Pentagon officials took more than three months to establish whom the strike had killed. While boasting technical skills that can monitor telephone calls and internet traffic, the US and its allies have limited access to on-the-ground sources within Isis – a fact well understood by the group’s senior members, who largely avoid using technology. Baghdadi in particular had proved difficult to track. His appearance in the al-Noori mosque in Mosul to anoint himself as caliph was the only time he had been seen publicly since the Isis campaign began, and yielded the only images of him since he was jailed by the US military in the infamous Camp Bucca prison in 2004. An Isis insider told the Guardian in December that Baghdadi had begun positioning himself to eventually lead the organisation as early as then. By the time he eventually took over in 2010, the group was known as the Islamic State of Iraq, and had suffered several years of setbacks, which appeared to stymie its goals. However, the outbreak of the Syrian civil war gave Isis a new platform, on which it began to capitalise in early 2013, two years into the conflict. Aided by a porous border with Turkey, which saw at least 15,000-20,000 foreigners cross to join its ranks, and the capitulation of the Iraqi army around Mosul, the group was by last June operating outside of state control and threatening the entire regional order. Baghdadi sought legitimacy as caliph in a family ancestry that traces back to the Prophet Muhammad and from post-graduate training in Islamic studies. However, he has been regarded within Isis as more than a figurehead, contributing to strategic decisions taken by the group. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/01/isis-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-incapacitated-suspected-spinal-injuries-iraq
  4. Gentrified cities, the fall of manufacturing, the filling of jails with black men - all fuelled the violence that followed the killing of Freddie Gray Ed Vulliamy Saturday 2 May 2015 20.54 BST For Baltimore to be the setting for the latest in a recent spate of high-profile police murders and riots in America – after Ferguson, New York and North Charleston – is especially compelling in the public imagination because the city was also the location for David Simon’s brilliant TV series The Wire. Baltimore is the city from which Simon wrote for this newspaper in 2013 about “two Americas” in the “horror show” his country has become, one crucial element of which is that the US is “the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we’ve put in American prisons”. The Wire, he said, “was about people who were worthless and who were no longer necessary”, most of them black, and who become the assembly-line raw material for “the prison-industrial complex”. At an event hosted by the Observer that year, Simon said: “Once America marginalised the black 10% of the population it no longer needed, it set out to make money out of them by putting them in jail.” The Baltimore Sun last year documented a litany of police abuse of black people – mostly but not entirely men (one was a grandmother in her 80s) – as routine as it was savage, and compensation payouts of $5.7m since 2011 for the few cases pursued and vindicated. This in the city where Wells Fargo paid millions to settle a lawsuit claiming it steered black people in particular into subprime mortgages they could not afford. But these events are variations on old themes that have not gone away since segregation, across time and across America. Read the Kerner commission’s report into the race riots of 1967 and it seems to describe much of what has recently happened in Ferguson and Baltimore, where angry protests followed the death in police custody of a young black man, Freddie Gray. “What white Americans have never fully understood, but what the ***** can never forget,” the report said, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.” A leader in the New York Times last week cited the prescient work of the sociologist William Julius Wilson, which explained how deindustrialisation and reduced demand for low-skilled labour created “poor, segregated neighbourhoods in which a majority of individual adults are either unemployed or have dropped out of or never been part of the labour force” and why most were black. Black writers since Wilson have set out to develop his labour-based research to examine the wholesale exclusion and criminalisation of black people. One of the foremost, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, put it this way in a recent lecture: “The US is more segregated by race and income now than in 1960.” Gilmore is a professor of geography at City University of New York, and her book The Golden Gulag was awarded a prize by the American Studies Association; it is set in California, which has America’s largest prison population and has pioneered much of the punitive legislation adopted by other states. She charts the engineered progression of a multibillion-dollar boom she calls a “prison-fix” to four entwined surpluses: capital, land, labour and state capacity. Recommending the work, writer Mike Davis calls this “the political economy of super-incarceration”. Despite declining crime in California, the state’s prison population has at its peak increased by 500% since, in 1982, the state embarked on building a massive system of prisons, many the size of large towns, better hidden from view than they are from the state’s annual budgets and legal manoeuvres designed to increase sentencing. “Your innocence will not save you,” was Gilmore’s starting point. “If an injury to one is an injury to all, then the criminalisation of one is the criminalisation of all.” Speaking to the Observer on Saturday from Milwaukee, Gilmore explained her view that “black people are profoundly marginalised politically, and the fact of the guy in the White House obscures that marginalisation. More marginalised socially and more marginalised spatially, because of the organised processes of capital flight. The legacy of federally enforced residential segregation for both home ownership and social housing from the late New Deal forward underlies today’s situation. “However, one change that has happened over the past 55 years is that poor people are more and more concentrated with other poor people – either isolated by capital flight in cities or deported by gentrification and moving into the old inner-ring suburbs. Detroit is the most famous case of isolation, but there are countless others that share both qualities, including Baltimore.” One of the measurements Gilmore uses to illustrate extreme inequalities is premature death: in her writing she defines racism as “the state-sanctioned or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Premature does not refer exclusively to the untimely deaths of young people, but to any preventive death occurring in people of all ages, including the elderly – whether from treatable disease, neglect, accident, self-inflicted harm, or homicide.” Entwined with – and crucial to – these measures of marginalisation is the criminalisation that is the body of Gilmore’s work: “Two-thirds of the 2.5 million people imprisoned in America,” she says, “are people of colour: black, brown, yellow, red.” But in the southern state of Louisiana, for instance, “that’ll be about 95%, and most of them are black. Such criminalisation has become so normalised in the United States that the ideology seems to have turned a policeman’s line from Melvin Van Peebles’ bitter 1970 satire Watermelon Man from comedy to commonsense: ‘He did something. We don’t know what it is’.” Gilmore is eager, she says, to emphasise that the “prison-fix” described in her book is not – “as it is commonly seen” – an encroachment by the private sector into a public sphere, but “the policy of the state: mass devastation, mass criminalisation and mass deportation into jails. Of all those in American jails, 92% are in publicly administered institutions. The public money turns through the system in the salaries of public employees, and falls into the hands of the private sector selling food, services and utilities, because these prisons are cities… Fundamentally, this is the state reverting to a default legitimacy in the age of austerity: the state saying: ‘What else can we do?’” Gilmore charts the shaping of sentencing legislation in California which, as she puts it “makes it harder for judges not to put people in prison”. She recalls: “I was here in Milwaukee, promoting the book after it was published, and a sheriff who had read it declared: ‘We live in an age of legislated criminality’ – and I said: ‘You’ve put it in straighter terms than I do’.” Asked about the targeting of the black American male, Gilmore said: “As far as we can tell, there’s no really good data, because forces are not required to gather and report it systematically to the United States department of justice. Is it every 28 hours? Is it only twice a week? “There’s some truth in the apparent fact that the cases we learn about are most usually men, that the police are pulling their guns on, shooting or assaulting in a deadly way, black men. But there are cases and cases of other kinds of people. Take a city like Albuquerque, New Mexico, where one in five homicides is a police killing: most of those are Native Americans. Elsewhere, it’s probably somebody else – it’s whoever’s poor, whoever’s down and out, marginalised.” She also points out that “whoever is on the receiving end of organised violence and criminalisation, the forefront of the struggle against it has long been women, black women”, as related in the final third of her book. She says that “these things don’t happen because a bunch of white people wake up one day and say, ‘let’s start chattel slavery so we can oppress black people’; and now slavery has gone, ‘we’ll have the Jim Crow laws’; and now they’ve gone, ‘we’ll have a prison-industrial complex’. These things have to do with how capitalism works. In my view, the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore and beyond are uprisings against austerity, sparked by police murder and about all of the relationships and conditions that made the murder possible.” She concludes: “I think many people respond to these high-profile police killings by thinking: ‘They can kill us because they can lock us up’. But I think it goes the other way: they can lock us up because they know they can kill us, because they can kill with impunity.” Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalising California, is published by the University of California Press, 2007 CRIMINAL DIVIDE ■ According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2010 an African-American male born in 2001 had a 32% chance of going to jail during his lifetime, compared with 17% of Latino males, and 6% of whites. ■ African-Americans make up 13% of the US population and 14% of drug users, but comprise 37% of those arrested for drug-related offences. ■ African-Americans account for 57% of people in state prisons for drug offences. ■ In 2009, two-thirds of life sentences were given to non-whites. ■ In 2010, the US Sentencing Commission found that African-Americans received 10% longer sentences than whites for the same crimes. ■ In New York City, 80% of people stopped by police are black or Latino, and 85% of those stopped are searched, compared with 8% of whites. ■ African-Americans are 33% more likely than whites to be detained while facing a criminal trial. ■ In 2009, African-Americans were 21% more likely than whites to receive mandatory minimum sentences and 20% more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offences. Source: DoSomething.org Demonstrators celebrate the announcement that six officers have been charged over the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Photograph: David Goldman/AP http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/02/baltimore-rebellion-is-uprising-against-austerity-freddie-gray
  5. Priest who counselled Rodrigo Gularte – who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder – says he tried in vain for three days to explain to the inmate he was about to die Michael Safi @safimichael Thursday 30 April 2015 00.43 BST A Brazilian man executed by firing squad along with seven other prisoners in Indonesia on Wednesday had no idea he was about to be killed until his final minutes, the priest who counselled him has said. He also revealed that Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipino woman who won a dramatic reprieve, had been aware a new suspect in her case had surrendered to police but was only removed from the prison about an hour before the killings. Rodrigo Gularte, 42, was shot dead alongside seven others, including four Nigerians, two Australians and an Indonesian, for smuggling cocaine into Indonesia in 2004. Doctors had diagnosed the Brazilian with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A second diagnosis, commissioned by Indonesia’s attorney general, has not been made public. Father Charlie Burrows, a priest who ministers to prisoners in Cilacap, said he had tried in vain to explain to Gularte for three days that he was about to be killed. “He was hearing voices all the time,” Burrows told Irish radio. “I talked to him for about an hour and a half, trying to prepare him for the execution. I said to him, ‘I’m 72 years old, I’ll be heading to heaven in the near future, so you find out where my house is and prepare a garden for me.’ “But when they took [the prisoners] out of the cells … and when they put these bloody chains on them, he said to me, ‘Am I being executed?’ ” Burrows said. “I said, ‘Yes, I thought I explained that you.’ He didn’t get excited – he’s a quiet sort of a guy – but he said, ‘This is not right.’ “He’s lost because he’s a schizophrenic. He asked if there was a sniper outside ready to shoot him, and I said no, and whether somebody would shoot him in the car, and I said no,” Burrows said. After Gularte was strapped to a wooden plank, Burrows was permitted to see him again: “He said, ‘This is not right, I made one small mistake, and I shouldn’t have to die for it.’ So he was annoyed more than anything else, because he’s a soft-spoken, quiet and sensitive man.” Burrows told Guardian Australia that guards on Nusa Kambangan, the prison island where Indonesia executes convicts, had broken down crying when 30-year-old Mary Jane Veloso said goodbye to her two children for what was thought to be the final time. He said Veloso had shown “a false sense of joy” during her final visit with her family and sons, aged 12 and six, but broke down at 2pm on Tuesday when told it was time to say goodbye. “She begged for more time, ‘Will I not get longer with my children? They’ll never see me again, I’ll never see them again,’” Burrows said. “The whole place broke down in tears. The warden and attorneys felt real bad about it. They said to me they didn’t agree with the thing, they just had to do their job, that there should be a moratorium.” He said some of the guards had asked him: “Are we responsible for the suffering of this poor woman and the families?” Veloso, sentenced to death after arriving in Yogyakarta in 2010 with 2.6kg of heroin in her suitcase, has claimed she was set up by a human trafficker. She was granted a reprieve late on Tuesday after the suspected trafficker surrendered to Philippine police. Veloso was told of the development on Tuesday afternoon, Burrows said, but her fate seemed sealed. It was between 10pm and 11pm, when the prisoners were locked in their cells for the final time, that she was taken away. “We were in the cells, just the time they give to the spiritual companions, and they took her out,” Burrows said. “In the last minute she was actually in the cell with the police, there was three police, and they took her out back to Yogyakarta.” Just after 11pm the prisoners were taken individually from the cells and driven to the execution site. They would not have been aware Veloso had been spared until they assembled at the firing range, he said. He said the two Australians, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, led hymns among the prisoners as they waited to be killed, joined by their spiritual advisers 30 metres away. “They were all trying to be strong because it was uppermost in their minds that they had made a mistake and that mistake has had a devastating effect on their families,” he said. Nigerians Raheem Agbaje Salami (also known as Jamiu Owolabi Abashin), Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, Martin Anderson and Okwuduli Oyatanze were also executed on Wednesday morning, along with an Indonesian, Zainal Abidin. The Indonesian attorney general, HM Prasetyo, said on Wednesday the eight men, all drug offenders, had been executed simultaneously at 12.35am local time. They were declared dead three minutes later. “The result of the second execution was better, more orderly and more perfect than the last,” he said, referring to executions carried out in January and noting the bodies were treated more “humanely” this time. “Out of the eight executed, four, according to their last requests, are to be buried in their home countries,” Prasetyo said. “Two in Australia, one in Brazil, and one in Nigeria.” Abidin, the only Indonesian among the eight, was buried in Cilacap, near Nusa Kambangan, on Wednesday morning. Salami was to be buried in Madiun, East Java, and Anderson in Bekasi, West Java, he said. The bodies of Chan and Sukumarun were expected to arrive back in Australia for burial on Friday. The coffin of executed Brazilian drug convict Rodrigo Gularte is placed at the hospital morgue in Jakarta on Wednesday. Photograph: Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/brazilian-executed-by-indonesia-was-hearing-voices-all-the-time
  6. Water handed out to travellers stuck on crowded trains for hours as electricity supply problem causes chaos for thousands of London commuters Nadia Khomami, Jessica Elgotand Gwyn Topham Thursday 30 April 2015 16.00 BST More than 900 people have been evacuated from a train after a major power supply problem caused chaos for thousands of commuters at Clapham Junction, the UK’s busiest rail station. The problem, which started at 9am on Thursday morning between Clapham Junction and Wandsworth Common, is expected to cause disruptions for the rest of the day. Some passengers who began their commute to London from Brighton and other south coast cities in the early morning were stranded for up to five hours. British transport police (BTP) had to evacuate stranded passengers outside the south London station, with conditions on board described as a “nightmare” by one commuter. The Press Association reported that 904 passengers were taken off one train stuck between stations. Water was handed out to travellers stuck on board for hours in sweltering temperatures. One had to be treated by ambulance staff on a stationary train, while firefighters used a short-extension ladder to evacuate travellers from another held-up service. No Southern train company trains were able to get in or out of Victoria station and services were suspended on the Gatwick Express. Passengers heading for London from southern England were forced to disembark well ahead of their destinations and seek alternative routes. One commuter, Anna Roberts, who works in Victoria, south-west London, was stuck on a Brighton-to-London train well after 11am. She said: “It’s been nearly four hours now. Police and paramedics boarded our train because there is no air conditioning. They said they were bringing water but not enough for everyone to have one bottle each. “Eventually we got water in plastic containers, which we are passing around the carriage. We were told that was all that was available. With the power off, it’s like an oven in here. Police have said it’s too dangerous to walk down the track.” Another commuter, Jonjo Buster Lowe, said it took him two and a half hours to get from East Croydon to Clapham Junction. “People were fighting each other to get on to the train. But within five minutes the train stopped between Streatham and Balham, and it was literally the most packed train I’ve ever been on. “Everyone was squashed against the walls of the carriage, faces against the window. We were standing there for 45 minutes before the driver let us know what was happening. He was apologetic, I don’t think he really knew what was going on.” Lowe’s train left East Croydon at 8.52am and eventually stopped at Balham at about 10.45am. “What was annoying was that there was clearly such a lack of communication between rail staff in Clapham and East Croydon, they shouldn’t have let us get on the train because they knew they weren’t letting any trains into the station. It was a waste of everyone’s time.” He added that the mood among the passengers on his train was “pretty frantic”. “I felt like if we’d stayed there an hour longer, people would have started to argue, there were already disagreements building – a couple of people were complaining about the situation and others were chipping in saying: ‘It’s crap for everyone, you moaning isn’t going to make it any better.’” Jamie Ivory boarded a 7.53am train at East Grinstead and did not arrive at Victoria until around midday. “We were going along and then the train powered down and the lights went out, and there was an announcement that the driver needed to check the tracks because he thought we’d hit something. The first update came quite quickly and after that there were three or four more updates,” he said. “At first everyone was quite tired, they were huffing and puffing, but actually the longer it went on, the more everyone started chatting to each other and the mood seemed to get better. “It was a strange environment. Normally those trains are silent, but people were befriending each other, sharing water, things like that. I made quite a few friends with people who were on the same train and messaged me on Twitter.” Ivory said his train was evacuated by police and the fire service. “We got off and headed towards Clapham. We didn’t have too far to walk.” Farid Rahman was on his way to university when his train from London Victoria to Clapham junction stopped for three hours. He said the mood among commuters started off as “fairly annoyed”, specially among those who had exams or meetings to get to but added: “No one panicked as the driver and conductor were keeping us informed every 20 minutes. The conductor was walking up and down the carriages to make sure everyone was all right or [to check] if anyone needed medical attention.” Rahman said the fire brigade came and cleared a path on the tracks, after which commuters were evacuated one by one and walked out from a public footpath to the station. “People were generally remaining calm,” he said. “At first they were quiet, but near the end everyone was talking to each other and calming others.” Other commuters told of their delays. Lara Tyler, an interior designer from East Grinstead, said: “I’ve been delayed an hour today, this morning it took 30 minutes more because I was diverted to London Bridge and I’ve been delayed 30 minutes here already. The police here are lovely, but they don’t know what’s going on at all. It’s fine if you aren’t in a hurry, but not when you have to collect children from school.” Aidan Tyghe, a student from Lingfield, said he was initially told it was signal problems and said claiming refunds should be easier than at present: “All they tell you to do is send off for a partial refund, which is a lot of extra paperwork, when you should just be able to go to the cashier. Tickets are expensive and you should get money back easier.” Eva Sliz, a hotel worker who was waiting at Norwood Junction, said: “I’ve been waiting half an hour. But this happens almost every day, and it’s annoying when you pay for a train ticket – I keep ending up getting the bus, which should be much slower but ended up being quicker a lot of the time because of delays. And then it’s a waste of money for the train ticket. It’s especially annoying to be delayed today when the sun is shining.” Network Rail said on Thursday afternoon that three of the four tracks used by Southern trains through Clapham Junction were now open. Engineers had been unable to start work to fix the supply outage on the electrified rail, which powers the trains, until passengers had been evacuated near Battersea Rise and the two trains stuck on the affected track removed. A Network Rail spokesman said the evacuated passengers, some of whom had been aboard the 07.02am East Grinstead to Victoria service for more than four and a half hours, were incredibly patient, understanding and cooperative, adding: “Getting people off the train on to tracks is not something we do lightly.” The second train was moved with passengers aboard back to Wandsworth Common station by a diesel engine. Four other trains were stuck elsewhere on the line, before passengers could be disembarked at other stations. The cause of the power failure has yet to be identified by Network Rail, which said it expected to have all lines working before the evening rush hour but warned that the earlier disruption would have knock-on effects for the rest of the day. Southern, which operates all the affected trains, advised people to still avoid using Victoria on Thursday afternoon if possible and to use alternative routes, with passengers’ tickets valid on other services. A spokesperson said: “We expect there to be some delays, cancellations and short notice alterations for this evening’s peak as there will be some trains and train crews out of place.” Commuters on the service are used to delays: one of Southern’s daily Brighton-London services failed to run on time for an entire year. London’s transport commissioner, Sir Peter Hendy, last week described the trains of Southern’s sister company, Southeastern – also run by Govia – as “****” but on Wednesday retracted the comments as “unjustified”. There had also been delays involving Clapham Junction on Thursday morning due to a lineside fire which caused holdups to services on the London Overground. Commuters waiting on a platform at Clapham Junction. Photograph: Josh Russell/@joshr/PA http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/30/more-than-900-people-rescued-from-train-after-clapham-junction-power-cut
  7. Pastor describes how the offenders, who refused to wear blindfolds, were ‘excited to meet their God’ as they waited to be executed for drug crimes Kate Lamb in Jakarta Wednesday 29 April 2015 14.12 BST Strung to a pole and staring down at the weapons pointed over their hearts, prisoners defiantly sang Amazing Grace in the moments before they were executed on Indonesia’s Nusa Kambangan prison island on Wednesday. After months of desperate legal and diplomatic appeals, Indonesia executed eight convicted drug traffickers – citizens of Australia, Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil and Indonesia – in the early hours of the morning. Pastor Karina de Vega described to the Sydney Morning Herald the extraordinary scenes of the prisoners “praising their God”. “It was breathtaking,” said De Vega, “This was the first time I witnessed someone so excited to meet their God.” They reportedly refused to wear blindfolds so they could look their executioners in the eye, and as they sang in unison the bond between them was visceral, said the pastor. “They bonded together,” she said. “Brotherhood. They sang one song after another. Praising God. They sang a few songs together, like in a choir.” After singing Amazing Grace they moved on to Lord O My Soul. The order to shoot was issued before they finished. In their last days in the isolation cells, Australian prisoner Myuran Sukumaran painted a series of haunting self-portraits – the final painting depicted a human heart. Together with Andrew Chan, who was ordained as a Christian priest during his almost-decade in jail, the two members of the Bali Nine heroin-smuggling ring told their families they would hold strong until the end. According to the husband of pastor Christie Buckingham, who provided spiritual counsel to the two men before they faced the firing squad, the prisoners were deeply dignified in their final moments. “She told me the eight of them walked out onto the killing field singing songs of praise,” Rob Buckingham told 3AW radio in Australia. From the port at Cilacap, the closest point to cross over to the maximum-security prison on the island, prayers were offered by candlelight as the gunshots rang out just after midnight. Some family members, after years of begging for mercy and receiving none, broke down and wailed. Only one family had reason to be grateful. After the Indonesian president postponed the scheduled execution of Filipina migrant worker Mary Jane Veloso just hours earlier, the family offered prayers for their miracle. Veloso’s scheduled execution was postponed after a woman believed to have recruited her turned herself into the Manila police. Veloso has consistently insisted she was duped into carrying 2.6kg of heroin into Indonesia. Photographs of convicts Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, two members of the Bali Nine, are displayed at the hospital morgue in Jakarta. Photograph: Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images Top row from left: Australians Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, Nigerian Okwuduli Oyatanze and Nigerian Martin Anderson. Bottom row from left: Nigerians Raheem Agbaje Salami, Silvester Obiekwe Nwolise, Brazilian Rodrigo Gularte, and Frenchman Serge Atlaoui, who has been given a temporary reprieve. Photograph: Composite Photograph: Composite/Getty http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/29/indonesia-executions-prisoners-bali-nine-sang-amazing-grace-last-moments
  8. Lynch, the first African American woman to hold the country’s top law enforcement position, is sworn in after historically lengthy confirmation process Associated Press in Washington Monday 27 April 2015 18.38 BST Loretta Lynch was sworn in Monday as the 83rd US attorney general, the first African American woman to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official. Speaking before family members, Justice Department lawyers and supporters, Lynch said her confirmation as attorney general showed that “we can do anything” and pledged that the agency would “use justice as our compass” in confronting terrorism, cyber-attacks and other threats facing the country. “We can imbue our criminal justice system with both strength and fairness, for the protection of both the needs of victims and the rights of all. We can restore trust and faith both in our laws and in those of us who enforce them,” Lynch said, an apparent reference to ongoing efforts to repair relations between police departments and minority communities that they serve. Vice-President Joe Biden administered the oath of office to Lynch at a Justice Department ceremony, calling Lynch an “incredibly qualified” selection. He said Lynch had shown grace during the months-long confirmation process, in which her nomination became caught up in Congress a dispute over human trafficking legislation. The 55-year-old Lynch was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday. She replaces Eric Holder, who left the position on Friday after serving as attorney general for six years. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s about time – it’s about time this woman is being sworn in,” Biden said to applause. She was previously the US attorney for the eastern district of New York, which encompasses much of New York City, and is expected to serve as the top federal law enforcement official for the remainder of the Obama administration. Lynch isn’t expected to make radical departures from Holder’s agenda, but has said she hopes to have a productive relationship with Congress. Holder frequently clashed with Republicans on Capitol Hill and was held in contempt during a document dispute arising from the Fast and Furious federal investigation into gun trafficking. The Harvard-educated Lynch grew up in North Carolina during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the daughter of a librarian and a fourth-generation Baptist preacher who Biden said would take his child to the courthouse to observe important cases. “I am here to tell you, if a little girl from North Carolina who used to tell her grandfather in the fields to lift her up on the back of his mule, so she could see ‘way up high, Granddaddy,’ can become the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America, then we can do anything,” Lynch said. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/27/loretta-lynch-sworn-in-us-attorney-general
  9. Families visit as Indonesian prosecutors insist there will be no reprieve for Bali Nine gang members Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan Tracy McVeigh, Guardian Australia staff and agencies Sunday 26 April 2015 04.42 BST Hopes of a last-minute reprieve for two men on death row in Indonesia have all but faded after it became apparent the country’s authorities are planning an execution by firing squad for early in the week. Families and embassy officials have been given notice by prosecutors that the men, Myuran Sukumaran, 34, and Andrew Chan, 31, are likely to be shot, and lawyers say the men have been given 72 hours’ notice. It is expected an execution will take place of a total of 10 people, nine of them foreigners, who are on Indonesia’s death row for drug offences. Sukumaran and Chan were ringleaders of the so-called “Bali Nine” – Australians convicted of conspiring to smuggle 8kg of heroin from the Indonesian island to Australia in 2005. They are the only two of the group to have been sentenced to death. The remaining seven were given life sentences. On Saturday Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, said she feared the worst. Australia has come under fire for its part in what was a joint investigation between the two countries into the drug plot. Allowing the Indonesian authorities to make the arrest, instead of the Australian federal police, left the door open for the possibility of Australian citizens to face the death penalty. The families were rushing to the island where the condemned prisoners had all been moved into isolation cells, said Sukumaran’s cousin Niranjela Karunatilake. “Most of the family is now in Australia so they are heading to Indonesia now. It’s a desperate time and we don’t really know what else we can do to try and stop this, if there is anything left we can do. “The death penalty is never the answer, but in Myu’s case, when he has done so much to repent and improve prison conditions, it would be a real tragedy if his life was cut short,” said Karunatilake. “We are not asking for Myu to be freed, all we ask is for mercy, that he keeps his life.” Lawyers are pleading with Jakarta to respect legal proceedings that several are still pursuing and international pressure for mercy has grown. France has pledged to work with Australia to halt the executions; the prime minister, Tony Abbott, is due to meet the French president, Francois Hollande, on Monday. Hollande has warned that the execution of Atlaoui could damage relations with Indonesia. The foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, said on Saturday the government would continue to seek clemency from the Indonesian president, Joko Widodo, for both men. “It is not too late for a change of heart,” she said. Chan and Sukumaran’s lawyers have lodged a challenge with the constitutional court but the attorney general does not acknowledge it, and says the pair have exhausted their appeals. But his office is yet to respond to moves by lawyers for a Filipina, Mary Jane Veloso, who filed a second request for a judicial review late on Friday. Veloso’s lawyer, Edre Olalia, is pleading for Indonesia to pause its execution plans or risk executing an innocent woman. Veloso, 30, a single mother, has always pleaded innocent to drug smuggling charges but was not able to properly defend herself at trial, where she did not have a qualified Tagalog translator. Her lawyers were denied a chance to appeal this in a judicial review but with 10 minutes to spare on Friday, they lodged a new, stronger appeal. This time they have evidence from Philippines narcotics investigators and a timeline that shows for long periods Veloso did not have custody of the baggage that drugs were hidden inside when she arrived in Indonesia in 2010. Veloso refused to sign the notice of her execution on Saturday but is set to face the firing squad alongside Chan and Sukumaran on Tuesday regardless of the new appeal. An Indonesian, Zainal Abidin, has an appeal before the courts due to be decided on Monday but has been moved in preparation for execution. Atlaoui apparently won a reprieve based on an administrative matter. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, has added to global calls for Indonesia to halt its execution plans. “The secretary-general urges president Joko Widodo to urgently consider declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in Indonesia, with a view toward abolition,” a spokesman for Ban said. Australia’s acting Labor leader and opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman, Tanya Plibersek, said: “I believe it seriously damages the ability of Indonesia to plead for its own citizens internationally when it is ignoring the pleas of countries such as Australia for the lives of our citizens.” She said it was vital Abbott and Bishop contact their Indonesian counterparts. Both are in Europe on official business. “It is unacceptable that while there are still legal processes under way that this sentence should be carried out,” Plibersek said. She said it was not the time to speculate on what might happen if the executions went ahead: “I think the time now is to focus on what we might do to delay the application of this sentence.” Amnesty International has been campaigning for the men and is calling for a stay of execution. Last week an exhibition was held in its London offices of paintings by Sukumaran, who was born in London. He has become well known in Indonesia for his work helping other inmates with rehabilitation and has been praised by the prison’s warden for being key to reducing drug use inside the jail. In Indonesia, a prisoner has the choice of standing or sitting and whether to have their eyes covered by a blindfold or a hood. Firing squads are made up of 12 people, three of whose rifles are loaded with live ammunition, while the other nine rifles contain blanks. The squad fires from a distance of between five and 10 metres. Fionna Smyth, Amnesty UK’s head of campaigns, said efforts would continue until the last possible moment. “Where there’s life there’s hope. The eyes of the world are on Indonesia,” she said. “Does it really want to be a country associated with ‘execution island’ rather than the exotic beaches it was once famed for?” Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan have been moved to special cells as they await execution. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/26/australian-drug-smugglers-face-firing-squad
  10. Officials say more than 700 died in Kathmandu alone, and at least 17 killed by an avalanche on Mount Everest’s base camp Anna Codrea-Rado, Pete Pattisson and Ishwar Rauniyar in Kathmandu, Jason Burke in Delhi, Justin McCurry, Robin McKie and agencies Sunday 26 April 2015 09.19 BST The death toll from the devastating earthquake in Nepal climbed above 1,900 on Sunday and was continuing to rise as officials struggled to gauge the full scale of the disaster and the world rushed to provide desperately needed aid. Dozens of aftershocks jolted Nepal on Saturday and Sunday as people sheltered where they could. Nepalese authorities continually revised the number of dead upwards a day after the Himalayan country was shaken by a magnitude 7.8 quake that wrecked houses, flattened centuries-old temples and triggered avalanches on Mount Everest. More than 5,000 people had been injured, with the number of dead and injured expected to rise in the coming days. Nepalese police officials said more than 700 people died in Kathmandu alone. An avalanche triggered by the quake struck a section of Everest’s base camp, killing at least 17 people and injuring 61 others, local reports said. Further up the mountain, about 100 climbers were safe but facing difficulty getting down as the route back to safety was damaged, with the situation of more people on other other routes on the mountain still unknown and rescue efforts under way. Saturday’s earthquake, which originated outside Kathmandu, was the worst to hit Nepal, a landlocked nation sandwiched between India and China, in more than 80 years. Thousands of residents in the capital, Kathmandu, and other regions struck by the quake spent an uncomfortable night sleeping in the open, too scared to return to homes that are vulnerable to strong aftershocks. Forecasts were for rain and thunder storms on Sunday, with temperatures around 14C adding to the difficult conditions for the displaced. “We hardly slept through the night. It was cold and it rained briefly and it was uncomfortable but I am glad I brought my family out to the open,” said a Kathmandu resident, Ratna Singh, a vegetable vendor who was huddled under a blanket with his wife and son. “At least I knew my family was safe. Every time the ground shook at night I thanked God my family was there with me, and safe. I don’t think I am going to be sleeping inside the house any time soon. We are all petrified.” Sundar Sah, another resident of the capital, said: “There were at least three big quakes at night and early morning. How can we feel safe? This is never-ending and everyone is scared and worried. “I hardly got any sleep. I was waking up every few hours and glad that I was alive.” The quake destroyed the old, historic part of Kathmandu, and was strong enough to be felt all across the northern part of India, Bangladesh, China’s region of Tibet and Pakistan. International efforts to get search and rescue teams on the ground while there is still a chance of retrieving people alive from the rubble were gaining momentum on Sunday. The US pledged $1m to the aid effort and said it would send a disaster response team, and Sri Lanka said it would contribute a plane with doctors, engineers and other supplies. Britain was sending a team of experts and a 68-strong search and rescue team from China was due to arrive later on Sunday. India sent in military aircraft with medical equipment and relief teams. The Australian government pledged a $5m aid package. Many areas were without power and water on Sunday but when Kathmandu airport reopened the first planes loaded with aid arrived. Workers were sending out tents and relief goods in trucks and helicopters, said a disaster management official, Rameshwar Dangal, adding that government and private schools had been turned into makeshift shelters. Although there were signs that aid was beginning to get through, medical staff warned it was becoming increasingly difficult to treat the injured. Hospitals were overloaded and short on supplies. Kumar Thapa, the head of Alka hospital in Lalitpur, said they were finding it difficult to cope with the numbers of injured people. “Shops are closed; it’s even difficult to manage food, water for the injured,” Thapa said. Officials, families and aid agencies from Britain, Australia, New Zealand and other countries were trying to determine the whereabouts of their nationals in Nepal. The full scale of the destruction was becoming apparent on Sunday. There were reports that the Gorkha district in west Nepal, close to the quake’s epicentre, had been hit particularly hard. Roads to the district were blocked by landslides, hampering rescue efforts, said the chief district official, Prakash Subedi. Rescue teams were having to trek along mountain trails to reach remote villages, he said, adding that helicopters would be deployed as soon as possible. The administrative chief of the western development region, Dinesh Kumar Thapaliya, said: “So far 107 people have died in the district and we haven’t been able to send more support to three village development committees. We haven’t even started to count numbers of houses as there are hundreds of houses collapsed in the district.” Thapaliya added, however, that there had been no reports of fatalities in the Annapurna base camp area, a popular trekking destination. Survivors of the Everest avalanches were desperate to leave, a climbing guide, Pemba Sherpa, said. At least 300 tourists were waiting at Lukla, the gateway to the mountain. “Many injured are being ferried to Lukla from Feriche and are getting treatment here,” Sherpa said. “Tourists are quarrelling with the airport officials for plane tickets as they want to go back.” One climber, Alex Gavan, told how he had to run for his life after an avalanche struck Everest’s base camp. He said that many had died and many more were badly injured, and he called for urgent help to save those hurt. Mohan Krishna Sapkota, a government official, also appealed for help. “We are facing a tremendous crisis here and it is hard to even assess what the death toll and the extent of damage could be,” he said. Relief efforts were being hampered by a collapse in communications, raising fears that a widespread humanitarian disaster was unravelling across the impoverished Himalayan nation of 28m. “This is a very large earthquake in a significantly populated region with infrastructure that has been damaged in past earthquakes,” said a US Geological Survey seismologist, Paul Earle. The earthquake occurred a few minutes before noon on Saturday and rumbled across the densely populated Kathmandu valley, rippled through the capital and spread north towards the Himalayas and Tibet, and west towards the historic city of Lahore, in Pakistan. A magnitude 6.6 aftershock struck an hour later and there were smaller jolts in the region for hours. Residents ran out of buildings in panic when the initial earthquake struck. Walls tumbled, large cracks opened on streets and walls, towers collapsed and clouds of dust began to swirl around. “Our village has been almost wiped out,” said Vim Tamang, a resident of Manglung, near the epicentre. “Most of our houses are either buried by landslide or damaged by shaking.” He said that half the village’s population was missing or dead. “All the villagers have gathered in the open area. We don’t know what to do.” An Indian tourist, Devyani Pant, was in a Kathmandu coffee shop when “suddenly the tables started trembling and paintings on the wall fell to the ground. I screamed and rushed outside.” Later she reported that she could see three bodies of monks who had been trapped in the debris of a collapsed building. “We are trying to pull the bodies out and look for anyone who is trapped,” she said. At Bir emergency hospital in Kathmandu, staff were fighting to treat the wounded and save the lives of dozens of badly injured victims. Gajendra Mani Shah, a doctor, said he was dealing mainly with head traumas and limb injuries from falling rubble. He said the hospital had treated about 400 patients so far and that at least 50 had died. People were lying in rows on mattresses, surrounded by blood-soaked tissues, and lined the corridors hooked up to intravenous drips. Pushpa Das, a Kathmandu labourer, was injured when a wall collapsed on him as he ran from his house. “It was very scary. The earth was moving,” he told reporters as he waited for treatment outside one hospital. As he spoke dozens more showed up with injuries, mostly from falling bricks. At the main hospital in Kathmandu, volunteers formed human chains to clear the way for ambulances to bring in the injured. Across the city rescuers scrabbled through the rubble of destroyed buildings, among them ancient wooden Hindu temples, in search of victims. Thousands in Kathmandu bedded down in the open air after Nepal’s national radio warned people to stay outdoors because of the danger of more aftershocks. “Everyone is scared of a repeat,” said 29-year-old Rabin Shakya. “I rushed outside when I felt the earthquake. I was terrified. I’ve stayed outside all day.” On one patch of ground in Kathmandu three children huddled under a blanket. Ragan Karki, 16, said he and his siblings had come there to seek shelter for the night and were waiting for their parents to join them. They had been in their third-floor flat when the earthquake struck. Ragan’s 12-year-old brother, Ryan, added: “I was scared but I didn’t cry.” While the full scale of the disaster has yet to be ascertained, the earthquake is likely to put a huge strain on the resources of a poor country best known for the highest mountain in the world and its rich Hindu culture. The economy of Nepal is heavily dependent on tourism, principally trekking and Himalayan mountain climbing. Among the buildings destroyed by the earthquake was the Unesco-listed Dharahara tower. The 60m tower was built in 1832 for the queen of Nepal. All the earthquake left of the lighthouse-like building was a jagged stump 10 metres high. Sujata Thapa, 22, said he was passing Dharahara when the earthquake struck. “I stood still. In a few seconds I saw Dharahara falling down. People were screaming.” The tower had been a popular tourist destination and every weekend hundreds of people paid to go up to the viewing platform on its eighth storey. It is not immediately clear how many tourists were on the tower when it collapsed, though reports indicated that several bodies were later extracted from the ruins. The earthquake was felt in India’s capital, New Delhi, and several other Indian cities. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, called a meeting of top government officials to review the damage and how to respond in parts of India that felt strong tremors. The states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Sikkim, which share a border with Nepal, reported building damage. Pakistan’s prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, offered “all possible help” that Nepal may need. “The earthquake is the nightmare scenario which we have long discussed and wondered if we could make major improvements before a catastrophe occurred,” said Dr Ilan Kelman, of the institute for risk and disaster reduction, at University College, London. “Nepal has some of the world’s best people and initiatives for community-based seismic risk reduction and earthquake education. But the country has also suffered terrible conflicts, poor governance and heart-wrenching poverty, all of which created and perpetuated the vulnerability which has been devastatingly exposed during the shaking. “The pictures and reports emerging do not bode well for other earthquake-prone cities with similar vulnerabilities.” An injured person is helped to a landing area to be loaded on to a rescue helicopter at Everest base camp on Sunday. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images A child is carried from the rubble of collapsed buildings in Kathmandu on Sunday. Photograph: Narendra Shrestha/EPA A woman mourns the death of a family member in Bhaktapur on Sunday. Photograph: Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/26/nepal-earthquake-death-toll-climbs-towards-2000-as-world-responds
  11. Accidental deaths of American and Italian hostages overshadows president’s talk to intelligence chiefs as former adviser calls on officials to release further details Dan Roberts in Washington and Alan Yuhas in New York Friday 24 April 2015 21.11 BST Barack Obama has insisted the US was not “cavalier” in its assessment of the risks to civilians as the accidental deaths of two hostages in a drone strike against al-Qaida overshadowed a planned pep talk for intelligence chiefs. “Today, like all Americans, our thoughts and prayers continue to be with the families of Dr Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto,” the president told a group of intelligence officers gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the office of the director of national intelligence. “We are going to review what happened,” he added. “We are going to identify the lessons that can be learned and any improvement and changes that can be made and I know those of you who are hear continue to share our determination to continue to do everything we can to prevent the loss of innocent lives.” But the president appeared keen to reassure those who may blame themselves for the incident that he felt their pain too. “I was asked by somebody: ‘How do you absorb news like we received the other day?’ and I told the truth: it’s hard. “We all grieve when we lose an American life; we all grieve when any innocent life is taken. We don’t take this work lightly and I know that each and everyone of you understand the magnitude of we do and the stakes that are involved. These aren’t abstractions; we are not cavalier. And we understand the solemn responsibilities that are given to us.” Meanwhile one of the architects of Obama’s legal rationale for drone strikes called on the administration to release the full details behind the CIA’s decision to attack two sites in Pakistan resulting in the accidental deaths of the two hostages. “I left the administration in January 2013 and know nothing about how this recent case unfolded,” Harold Koh, a former legal adviser to the State Department, told the Guardian in an email, “but yes, plainly, the Obama administration should release the factual record regarding the January 2015 strikes that killed two hostages.” A controversial figure for his role in devising the US justification for the targeted killing of an American member of al-Qaida, Koh is now a law professor at New York University. As Obama grapples with his role in the deaths revealed on Thursday of Weinstein and Lo Porto, both killed by drones in Pakistan this January, his administration faces renewed questions about “signature strikes” and what could be fundamental flaws in its legal justification for them. The “factual record” Koh refers to could be the difference between legal strikes and violations of the administration’s rules or worse, said Christopher Swift, a professor of national security studies at Georgetown University. Swift and many others agree the strikes appear legal. “This looks like it’s in the realm of a horrible mistake rather than the violations of the Geneva Conventions,” he said. “It’s not the platform; it’s whether it was unlawful killing. “If it’s completely accidental, as it appears, then it’s a horrible tragedy; it’s not necessarily an unconstitutional undertaking. There’s no clear law that’s going to tell you right or wrong here.” But he noted that it was exceedingly difficult to judge the legality of such strikes because of the secrecy surrounding operations. Obama has ordered the episode declassified, but Swift noted that “all the facts are subject to the CIA’s black highlighter”. “We have hundreds of hours of surveillance prior to the strike and we have continuous surveillance in the days afterward,” he said. “It doesn’t look like the administration knew the particular identities of the people they were hitting, so to the extent there was a failure it seems less a matter of the legal justification as it is on the intelligence side.” On Thursday, the White House conceded it did not specifically know whom it had targeted in the “al-Qaida compounds” where US drones killed Weinstein and Lo Porto, as well as American-born militants Adam Gadahn and Ahmed Farouq and two others. The admission suggests that “signature strikes” – lethal strikes launched without necessarily knowing who is in the crosshairs – have continued despite the president’s 2013 announcement that new rules would govern strikes. The order mandates that the CIA can authorize strikes only if it knows with “near certainty that the terrorist target” is present. “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set,” Obama said in a 2013 speech. A Guardian analysis of what drone strike data is available found that, although only 41 men were targeted between January 2006 and November 2014, an estimated 1,147 people had been killed by strikes. According to estimates by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 415 strikes have killed at minimum 2,500 people, 423 of whom were civilians, and at maximum nearly 4,000 people, including 962 civilians. Koh has defended the administration’s standards in the past, saying in 2010: “Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust.” The administration follows rules of distinguishing between civilians and combatants “rigorously” and “in accordance with all applicable law”, he said. In theory, the rule should have curbed signature strikes, which by definition cannot justify the killing of a “high-value target” since they do not necessarily target a specific person. Instead the administration deems some people “associated forces” of al-Qaida targets by dint of their behavior or other details gleaned through surveillance – where they congregate, who they meet, etc – and it is here that facts become key. “It’s the idea that anyone in al-Qaida is going to be caught up in the same circumstances [as its leaders],” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame. “That they might in some point in the future be part of an attempt to attack.” The CIA had “fallen back” to signature strikes, O’Connell said: “Not knowing who the people were they were killing doesn’t meet their own criteria of facts, and facts must be present to kill even under their own very loose set of rules.” Another argument made by the Department of Justice (DoJ) also raises lawyers’ hackles: that associated forces and high-value targets both constitute an “imminent threat” to the US. The administration laid out this argument in a 2013 white paper justifying the killing, without trial, of American al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki. “The DoJ memorandum’s approach to imminence makes a mockery of the concept,” Swift said. “If you don’t have imminence, you’d have to show that you’d have due process,” he continued, adding that while the administration could have a legitimate due process procedure, secrecy clouds the process from public view. A former chairwoman of the Use of Force Committee of the International Law Association, O’Connell takes issue with the entire scope of the drone program. “They cobbled together its own set of international law rules,” especially for the al-Awlaki case, she said. “They didn’t want to live in the real house of rules, so they built their own house of cards, and now they’ve started to knock it down.” The Weinstein family released a statement to Buzzfeed addressing the issue of whether a ransom was paid to his captors. “Over the three-and-a-half-year period of Warren’s captivity, the family made every effort to engage with those holding him or those with the power to find and rescue him,” they wrote. “This is an ordinary American family and they are not familiar with how one manages a kidnapping.” Obama’s talk to US intelligence chiefs also came after two years of public criticism following surveillance revelations to the Guardian by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, but Obama said he trusted them to do right thing and was committed to persuading the public of their value. “Our first job is to make sure that we protect the safety of the American people but there is not a person who I talk to who is involved in the intelligence community who doesn’t understand that we have to do so while upholding our values and our ideals, and our laws, and our commitment to democracy,” the president said. “This is hard stuff. Everyone here is committed to doing it the right way. I am absolutely committed to making sure the American people understand all that we do to make sure we do it right.” Giovanni Lo Porto (L) and Warren Weinstein, the Italian and American hostages killed in the US attack on al-Qaida in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Photograph: Agencies http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/24/obama-drone-strikes-killed-hostages
  12. Rolling coverage of developments in Himalayan nation following 7.9 magnitude quake near Kathmandu The aftermath – in pictures Quake topples buildings and triggers avalanche in Himalayas Everest base camp left damaged Ancient Dharhara tower collapses Martin Williams Saturday 25 April 2015 14.59 BST Live Feed http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/apr/25/nepal-earthquake-nation-worst-tremor-80-years-kathmandu-live-updates
  13. Further marches in Baltimore as detail emerges of possible protocol breach when 25-year-old was bundled into van and died of broken neck Oliver Laughland in Baltimore and agencies @oliverlaughland Friday 24 April 2015 03.54 BST Freddie Gray had no seatbelt on in the police van where he was placed in handcuffs and later put in leg irons, police said as they confirmed the possible breach of protocol forms part of their investigation into his death. Protesters have marched in West Baltimore for the fifth night in a row following the death in custody of 25-year-old Gray. Despite two arrests, tensions seemed to have eased on Thursday night compared with the previous demonstrations. Six officers involved in the incident have been suspended. On Thursday an attorney working for the officers said he did not believe Gray had been wearing a seatbelt when he was placed in the van. Baltimore police confirmed on Thursday it was policy to provide proper seatbelts during the transport of prisoners but declined to release photographs from inside the van carrying Gray. Gray was not belted in, said attorney Michael Davey, who represents at least one of the officers under investigation. But he took issue with the rules. “Policy is policy, practice is something else,” particularly if a prisoner was combative, Davey told the Associated Press. “It is not always possible or safe for officers to enter the rear of those transport vans that are very small, and this one was very small.” Commissioner Anthony Batts said there were no circumstances under which a prisoner should not be wearing a seatbelt during transport. “He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and that’s part of our investigation,” Batts told the Associated Press. On Thursday, a group of up to 200 marchers set off from Baltimore’s City Hall, which was heavily guarded by police. The Baltimore transport department had advised those working in the city centre to leave before 3pm ahead of the protests. Protesters only briefly shut down intersections and remained peaceful as they marched through the opulent Inner Harbor area and towards the Western District police station several miles away. Two were arrested for disorderly conduct and destruction of property, before the marchers met with another group outside the police station a few blocks from the site of Gray’s arrest on 12 April. The 25-year-old died on Sunday after his neck was broken at some point in the immediate aftermath of the arrest. Eyewitness video showed at least one of Gray’s legs hanging limp as he was placed in a police van during after his arrest. Gray asked for an asthma inhaler two minutes after he was apprehended and senior officials have acknowledged a delay in providing medical assistance. The van stopped twice: once so Gray could be placed in leg shackles and a second time to pick up a second prisoner, before medical assistance was called for, around half an hour after the arrest. Batts also said another man who was in the van during the tail end of Gray’s ride told investigators that Gray was “was still moving around, that he was kicking and making noises”, up until the van arrived at the station. But Batts was careful to say that the investigation includes “everything the officers did that day”. At the Western District police station on Thursday, protesters were met by a long line of officers two deep and fences encircling the perimeter of the building. Barricades that on Wednesday night kept the protesters from crossing the street to the station were gone. One or two bottles were thrown at police before protesters shouted: “Don’t throw anything, don’t throw anything.” Maryland state police were also present as reinforcements at the initial stage of the march. Donald Smith, 29, a local resident and hospital worker, arrived at the protests clutching a copy of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. “It’s going on today – if they’re not incarcerating us they’re killing us. This goes back to the Jim Crow era. “What you see out here is real,” he said, pointing to the assembled crowds. “We’ve been dealing with it for hundreds of years.” John Goins, 57, stood close to the police line and said: “Most of the Baltimore police officers are not from here. They’re from Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They don’t recruit from this city because they don’t want the people who live here to be part of it.” Goins, a retired corrections officer, said that while still working he was once beaten by a police officer when walking home from work out of uniform. His grandson Darion, 13, added: “They beat me, too, when I was 12 years old. I was just riding my bike.” Damien Jones, 22, said he had been out every night since Gray died. He knew him for 10 years and lives in the Gilmore public housing project, which is on the corner of the street where Gray was taken into custody. “I want justice for Freddie. Prosecute all the police officers. All six. We’ll be here all night and all day,” he said. Protesters display a flag as demonstrations continue over Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore police custody. Photograph: JM Giordano /Guardian Police stand guard in Baltimore during continued protests over the death of Freddie Gray. Photograph: JM Giordano /Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/23/protesters-march-baltimore-freddie-gray
  14. Though the containment of Islamic State within Iraq is not impossible, it will require sound governance, strong institutions and an end to sectarian polarisation Wednesday 22 April 2015 12.46 BST The leader of so-called Islamic State (Isis), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has reportedly been seriously wounded and is no longer in control of the jihadi organisation following an air strike in western Iraq. The development, once confirmed, should be welcomed. But the international community’s efforts to defeat Isis still have some way to go. Eliminating Baghdadi will, above all, undermine Isis’s aura of invincibility, something that has allowed it to recruit local and international jihadis, helping it bring down borders at will and seize control of large swaths of territory across eastern Syria and western Iraq. In addition, the wounding of Baghdadi comes at a time when the momentum is turning against the group. Since launching its offensive in Iraq last year, Isis has not made any significant territorial gains. Baghdad and southern Iraq is secured, as is the Kurdistan region. Two weeks ago Iraqi forces liberated Tikrit and they are expected to retake additional towns and cities from Isis in due course. In other words, the group’s battlefield prowess and discipline is being matched by local indigenous forces backed by the US, Iran and the broader international community. Isis’s efforts to mobilise local populations, its resources and its general capacity to repair and rebuild are taking a hit. In Iraq it is largely on the defensive, while in Syria Isis is facing increasing local resistance. That said, the military campaign is only part of the solution, not least because Isis functions on the basis of a strong leadership hierarchy that, potentially, could render Baghdadi redundant. It also remains entrenched within local populations. There is some resistance but support for those actors taking a stand against the group has so far been insufficient. The rise of Isis can be attributed to the lack of institutions, weak or failed states and a volatile and polarised region as much as to its own capability and ambition. Isis is a product of civil war in Syria and instability in Iraq. It is, essentially, a rebranded version of Iraq’s Sunni insurgency that was comprised of a range of disparate actors including al-Qaida in Iraq, remnants of the Ba’ath regime and local as well as international jihadis. While this means Isis can be contained and forced to disintegrate in the way the insurgency was after 2007, as a result of the US troop surge and the co-opting of Sunni Arab tribes, it also means that long-term measures will be needed to defeat and prevent it from re-emerging. This will require good governance, institution-building and remedying the sectarian polarisation that has provided Isis with an environment conducive to its brand of radical Islam. In Iraq, for example, Isis thrives on dissatisfaction within the Sunni Arab community, which resents the post-2003 political order and the empowerment of the country’s majority Shia. Stabilising Iraq and containing Isis there might be a realistic prospect. But in Syria, where the civil war shows no sign of abating and where Isis’s main apparatus is located, it is less so. Lastly, tensions between regional powers Iran and Saudi Arabia are on the increase, exacerbating problems. Baghdadi’s wounding could mark a turning point – but it is far from being enough to deal Isis a fatal blow. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/22/abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-wounding-isis-islamic-state-iraq
  15. DNA tests prove Alondra Luna Núñez, 14, is not woman’s daughter Dorotea García claimed girl had been taken by her father years ago Luna said she was ‘happy to be home’ after her ordeal Jo Tuckman in Mexico City Thursday 23 April 2015 01.59 BST A 14-year-old Mexican girl, who was dragged screaming from her secondary school by federal agents last week and flown to Houston to be with a woman who claimed to be her mother, was repatriated to Mexico on Wednesday. The repatriation of Alondra Luna follows DNA tests showing that she is not the daughter of Dorotea García, who had obtained a judge’s order to get her forcibly brought to Houston. “We are all very happy,” Luna’s mother Susana Núñez told Milenio TV, adding that she had received a phone call at dawn telling her that her daughter would be on the first flight home today. “They stole my daughter,” Núñez said. The moment when federal agents seized Alondra in the central city of Guanajuato last Thursday was captured in a shocking video in which the girl is seen screaming and struggling as she is forced into a waiting vehicle. Núñez said she had never heard of García’s claim on her daughter until then. In the video, Luna can be seen struggling with police as they pull her out of the school and bundle her into the back seat of a vehicle. She screams: “I am not your daughter,” at a woman already sitting in the car, presumably García, who later gets out. Luna also calls for her father, who appears to be filming the scene. A man’s voice, presumably his, tries to calm her. “Daughter, we are going to do something else,” he says. According to a statement released by the Mexican foreign ministry on Wednesday, the order to seize Luna stemmed from a trip García made to Mexico this year in which she identified the girl as the daughter she had lost when her father, Reynaldo Díaz, kidnapped her in 2007. Garcia, speaking to a Houston television station, said the first time she saw the girl, “I saw my daughter.” She gave few details about how she ended up leaving Mexico with the girl, although she said she knows many would not look kindly on her actions. “The people who know me don’t need me to give an explanation for what happened,” she said later to the Associated Press. “Whatever explanation I give won’t change the minds of people in Mexico or here.” Luna’s father, Gustavo Luna, told Grupo Imagen that the mistaken identity appeared to hinge on the fact that both girls share the name Alondra, and that he had met Díaz, who was his sister’s brother-in-law, several times when in Houston over a decade ago. The case has raised questions about the protocols used in such cases, and why DNA tests were not performed on Luna before she was taken to Houston. Her father also stressed that Luna suffers from a disability that limits her control of one side of her body that should have made it immediately obvious that she was not García’s daughter, even without blood tests. A statement released by the Mexican attorney general’s office on Monday, before the results of the tests were known, appeared to rule out a case of mistaken identity despite the fact that the parents had been vocally questioning the operation and had organised a blockade of a motorway outside Guanajuato accompanied by fellow pupils at their daughter’s school. “The girl, who had been taken illegally from her family, was claimed by one of her parents who resides in the United States,” the statement had said. The statement said Luna’s father was present during the operation to take her to Houston that it insisted was carried out in accordance with international conventions and had at all times “protected the physical, psychological and emotional wellbeing of the girl”. The judge who ruled on the case said it was not within her duties to have ordered a DNA test before the girl was taken across the border. “We as judges are only responsible to resolve the case with respect to recovering the minor,” Judge Cinthia Elodia Mercado told the AP. “We don’t do investigations or make inquiries.” Luna and Garcia went by bus to Houston, crossing at Laredo, Texas, with the birth certificate of Garcia’s daughter and the court order, according to the foreign ministry. The ministry later intervened to request the DNA test because of the commotion the video was causing. Local media reported that Luna arrived in Guanajuato airport on a flight from Dallas at around 11am on Wednesday, and was immediately taken for a medical exam after which she was expected to go home with her parents. She later spoke to reporters in her hometown of Guanajuato, saying she was happy to be home. “She took me from my parents,” Luna said. “I didn’t know her or Mr. Reynaldo,” she added, referring to the father of Garcia’s missing daughter. Luna’s uncle, Ruben Nunez, said that she returned in good condition and that the family is sure to seek some kind of legal damages. “In whatever form, they will try to sue whoever is found to be responsible,” Nunez told reporters in the airport in Leon, Mexico, after the girl’s arrival. “It’s not right what they did, take the girl just because they could.” Meanwhile, Alondra Diaz Garcia remains missing. Reynaldo Diaz is suspected of abducting her from Houston in 2007, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A felony warrant has been issued for his arrest. Alondra Luna Nunez, left, after a press conference with her parents Gustavo Luna and Susana Nunez following her return to Mexico. Photograph: Mario Armas/AP http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/22/mistaken-identity-girl-screaming-mexican-school-texas
  16. UK government backed decision in October to scale back search and rescue operations, arguing they encouraged migrants to board perilous boats Rowena Mason Political correspondent Wednesday 22 April 2015 13.05 BST David Cameron and Nick Clegg have acknowledged that the EU’s decision to scale back search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean has not worked after two disasters in which hundreds of migrants died trying to reach Italy. The UK government strongly backed the EU’s decision in October last year to move from routine search and rescue to a coastguard service, arguing that the old system was creating an “unintended pull factor” that meant migrants were boarding perilous boats in Africa in the hope of being rescued before reaching Europe. However, the prime minister has now admitted the EU’s operations that replaced search and rescue have not been successful, as the number of migrant deaths has risen substantially since the EU took over responsibility for sea patrols from the Italians. Heads of state will attend a summit in Brussels on Thursday aiming to resolve the growing crisis, with hundreds of people already drowned in the Mediterranean this year. Writing for the Guardian, Clegg also said the decision was taken with good intentions but it “now looks to have been wrong”. When the EU took over from the old Italian Mare Nostrum operation, it decided only to patrol within 12 miles of the coast, rather than conducting routine search and rescue missions. Britain strongly defended this move at the time, with Foreign Office minister Lady Anelay saying: “We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.” She said the government thought it was “encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths”. Last year, in response to the EU’s appeal to member states for resources for the new mission, Britain said it would provide one debriefer – a single immigration officer, an offer it later increased to five. However, two disasters – killing 400 and 800 people respectively – in the past week appear to have changed Cameron and Clegg’s positions. The prime minister is attending the EU summit on Thursday, where he will be asked to support an expanded search and rescue operation. He told ITV’s This Morning: “It was a decision that was made by the EU and Italy as well. They found at some stage it did look like more people were taking to boats. So they, the EU, decided to end that policy and have a coastguard policy. That hasn’t worked either. “Now we need to make sure we do more to save lives. That will involve more search and rescue and there is a contribution I’m sure we can make to that. But that alone won’t be enough. We’ve got to go after the real causes of the problem. So far many of the things that have been done haven’t worked.” He brushed off any personal responsibility for the disasters after the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said the Conservatives had “left people to die in the Med” and the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, said it was Cameron’s fault for taking part in military action in Libya. “We need to do better and Europe needs to do better,” he said. “I will go to this meeting on Thursday with a British contribution about what more we can do. But no one should pretend there are easy answers here.” In his Guardian article, Clegg said the Liberal Democrats want an “urgent review of the EU’s policy and the funding available for search and rescue”. But he said the solution to the problem ultimately lies on land and not solely in a more comprehensive search and rescue mission or a war on the people smugglers. “While conditions in Libya and elsewhere remain so desperate, there will be many thousands of people who judge that the chance of a better life in Europe – however slim – is a risk worth taking,” he wrote. “We need to change the minds – and the lives – of the people who feel they have no choice but to flee. This is where we should be asking much, much more of our partners in the EU. We need a level of coordinated ambition that frankly we rarely see from the EU these days.” He also suggested the language used about those who have died has been damaging. “The language the media and politicians use to describe them (not ‘people’ but ‘migrants’) has the effect of making them seem less human. A problem without a solution. We have failed these people again and again, and we desperately need to rethink our approach,” he said. Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, the London mayor, suggested on LBC Radio that the UK could even send in special forces to Libya to stop the people traffickers. “I think you need to choke off the problem at source – you need to stop these people being put into boats.” Told the only way to do this was by putting troops into Libya, Johnson said: “Isn’t the tradition you don’t discuss the use of special forces but you need to do something? … I’m a long way away from the discussions about this but there are clearly some very highly organised and ruthless people who are sending people to their deaths in the Mediterranean. It seems to me that is something that should be the subject of concerted European response led by Britain.” Pressed again on the use of the SAS, Johnson said: “I don’t see why not, I don’t see why not.” An officer feeds a baby as rescued migrants disembark from an Italian navy vessel in Augusta, Sicily. Photograph: Francesco Malavolta/AP Italian coast guard personnel rescue shipwrecked migrants off the coast of Sicily Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/22/cameron-and-clegg-admit-axeing-search-and-rescue-in-mediterranean-has-failed
  17. Cairo court’s sentence over killing of hundreds of protesters in 2012 comes as ousted leader faces two other trials Jared Malsin and agencies in Cairo Tuesday 21 April 2015 11.08 BST Egypt’s former president Mohamed Morsi has been sentenced to 20 years in prison over the killing of demonstrators outside his palace in 2012, the first verdict to be issued against the country’s first freely elected leader. Morsi, who was elected president the year after Egypt’s 2011 revolution, was removed by the military in 2013 after an acrimonious year in office. Tuesday’s verdict stemmed from deaths during violent clashes between Muslim Brotherhood supporters and protesters who opposed Morsi in December 2012. The verdict and sentence were issued during a brief hearing in a crowded courtroom in a police academy on the outskirts of Cairo. The defendants included several senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the same verdict, Morsi and 14 co-defendants were acquitted of a murder charge for which they could have faced the death penalty. The former president was convicted of inciting his supporters to use violence and detain and torture opposition demonstrators. His supporters were outraged. “His trial has been a travesty of justice, which has been scripted and controlled by the government and entirely unsupported by evidence,” Amr Darrag, a senior figure from the Muslim Brotherhood and a former minister under Morsi, said in a statement in Istanbul reported by Reuters. “They want to pass a life sentence for democracy in Egypt.” Amnesty International’s deputy director for the Middle East and north Africa, Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, said: “This verdict shatters any remaining illusion of independence and impartiality in Egypt’s criminal justice system … Convicting Mohamed Morsi despite fundamental flaws in the legal process and what seems to be at best flimsy evidence produced in court under a gag order, utterly undermines this verdict.” The prisoners appeared inside a metal and glass cage in the courtroom, dressed in white and blue jumpsuits. Throughout the short proceedings, they made the four-finger salute used by Islamists to commemorate the 2013 killings of hundreds of Morsi’s supporters in Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, Cairo. Those deaths took place during a clampdown on Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in the weeks after the military takeover. Thousands of Islamists and other opponents of the new government have been jailed in the nearly two years since Morsi was forced from power. As the verdicts were read, the defendants shouted, but their words could not be heard because of the thick panes of glass installed after a defiant Morsi declared himself the rightful president during earlier sessions. An appeal against Tuesday’s verdict is expected. Morsi is also on trial separately for escaping from prison during the 2011 popular uprising, espionage and conspiring to commit terrorism. Verdicts in two of the cases are expected in May. Morsi is being held at a high-security prison near Alexandria. His incarceration there followed four months of detention at an undisclosed location. In past sessions, Morsi and most of the defendants turned their backs on the court when the judge, Ahmed Youssef, played video recordings of the clashes outside the palace in 2012. They took place during protests against decrees granting Morsi expanded powers and an Islamist-backed draft constitution. On 5 December 2012, hundreds of Brotherhood supporters broke up a protest camp outside the Ittihadiya presidential palace in Cairo. In the violence that followed, at least 10 people died, most of them Brotherhood supporters. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/21/egypts-ex-president-mohamed-morsi-jailed-protest-deaths-muslim-brotherhood
  18. Oskar Gröning, charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Holocaust victims, expresses remorse during trial in Germany Kate Connolly in Lüneburg Tuesday 21 April 2015 12.28 BST A former SS guard expressed remorse for the role he played in the Holocaust when he went on trial charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews. In a lengthy speech, Oskar Gröning, 93, referred to as the “accountant of Auschwitz”, recounted the two years he had spent at the extermination camp after volunteering for the SS, the Nazi party’s protection squadron. Survivors of the Holocaust, many of whom have travelled from the US, Canada and Hungary in the hope of seeing justice done for their relatives who were murdered after a wait of 70 years, listened intently as Gröning spoke in court in Lüneburg, northern Germany. “It is without question that I am morally complicit in the murder of millions of Jews through my activities at Auschwitz,” the retired bank clerk said, clutching his notes and looking directly at the bench. “Before the victims, I also admit to this moral guilt here, with regret and humility. To the question as to whether I am criminally culpable, that’s for you to decide.” His statement came at the end of a detailed 50-minute account of his time at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which included how he was initially sent there and his attempts to get transferred elsewhere because of the atrocities he had seen, including seeing an SS colleague bashing a baby to death against the side of a lorry. What will be one of the last Nazi trials in Germany is being watched closely by historians, Holocaust experts and human rights lawyers around the world. Judge Frank Kom Pisch said for everyone present it was “anything but an easy event”. “Without exaggeration … this trial will attract a lot of attention and cause many emotions to be released, but we must remember that it is a criminal trial, albeit one with its own historical context,” he said. The trial marks the second attempt to bring Gröning to court. An investigation that began in 1978 collapsed seven years later with prosecutors ruling that unless it could be proven that Gröning was directly responsible for the deaths of prisoners, he could not be put on trial. But since the 2012 conclusion of the trial of John Demjanjuk in Munich, in which judges ruled he was an accessory to mass murder simply by working at the Sobibor extermination camp, a change of practice has taken place, in which an individual’s mere presence at a concentration camp coupled with the knowledge they knew what was happening there, is sufficient to secure a conviction. Gröning, who entered court pushing a walking frame, appeared calm and to take an active interest in the proceedings. Clutching a black battered briefcase containing his notes and wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a sleeveless pullover, he initially spoke to acknowledge his name, date of birth, that he was widowed, and a pensioner. Asked how old his children were, there was a long pause, before he answered: “Sixty-five and 70”. He appeared deeply concentrated as Jens Lehmann, the state prosecutor, read from the 85-page indictment, in which he detailed Gröning’s tasks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including taking the suitcases from prisoners as they arrived at the camp and were selected into groups of those who would work and those who would be sent to their deaths. He said he had also been responsible for collecting the money in an array of currencies that was found in prisoners’ clothing and luggage, for recording it in a ledger, keeping it in a steel safe, and at various intervals taking the money to the Reich headquarters in Berlin. “Already on his first day the accused was informed by a colleague that those who were not chosen to work would be sent to their deaths,” Lehmann said. Prosecutors have concentrated the charge on the period between May and July 1944, the time of the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish community during which 137 trains brought 425,000 people to Auschwitz, of whom at least 300,000 were killed in the gas chambers. Members of the media gather for the start of the trial. Photograph: Getty t Prosecutors Jens Lehmann and Marcus Preusse. Photograph: Getty http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/21/accountant-auschwitz-oskar-groning-trial-nazi-germany
  19. Hundreds more people are believed to have drowned when a fishing boat smuggling migrants to Europe capsized off Libya, UN’s refugee agency says Patrick Kingsley in Tripoli, Alessandra Bonomolo in Palermo, and Stephanie Kirchgaessner Sunday 19 April 2015 11.52 BST A major rescue operation is under way in the Mediterranean after as many as 700 migrants are feared to have drowned just outside Libyan waters, in what could prove to be the worst disaster yet involving migrants being smuggled to Europe. Italian coastguards have retrieved 49 survivors so far and about 20 bodies, according to the interior ministry, after the boat went down overnight about 60 miles (96km) off the Libyan coast and 120 miles (193km) south of the Italian island of Lampedusa. The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, told the Guardian that up to 700 may remain in the water, according to numbers supplied by a survivor. The accident happened after the migrants saw a merchant ship in the distance and scrambled to attract its attention, over-balancing the fishing boat in which they were travelling. Barbara Molinario, a spokeswoman for UNHCR in Rome, said: “They wanted to be rescued. They saw another ship. They were trying to make themselves known to it.” If confirmed, Sunday morning’s accident means that at least 1,500 migrants have died so far in 2015 while on route to Europe – at least 30 times higher than last year’s equivalent figure, which was itself a record. It comes just days after 400 others drowned last week in a similar incident. The deaths prompted fresh calls for Europe to reinstate full-scale search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. Last October, the EU opted not to replace the Italian-run operation Mare Nostrum, which saved about 100,000 lives last year, amid fears that it was encouraging smugglers and migrants to organise more trips to Europe. Pope Francis, an outspoken advocate for greater European-wide participation in rescue efforts, reiterated his call for action during mass on Sunday after learning of the latest disaster. “They are men and women like us – our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war,” he said from St Peter’s Square. Save the Children, one of the primary aid agencies working with migrants arriving in Italy, called on EU leaders to hold crisis talks in the next 48 hours and to resume search-and-rescue operations. “It is time to put humanity before politics and immediately restart the rescue,” the organisation said in a statement. “Europe cannot look the other way while thousands die on our shores.” Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, called for an emergency meeting at Palazzo Chigi with top government ministers, including foreign minister Paolo Gentiloni, on Sunday to discuss the crisis. The EU commission for migration, Dimitris Avramopoulos, is due in Italy on Thursday. But the huge rise in deaths in 2015, and the largely similar levels of arrivals in Italy, suggest the tactic has not worked. In Tripoli on Saturday, a smuggler told the Guardian he was not aware of Mare Nostrum in the first place, nor knew that it had finished. “I’ve not heard of that. What is that – from 2009?” said the smuggler, who says his network organises 20 trips a week during the busy summer months. “Many people would go on the boats, even if they didn’t have any rescue operations.” Migrants interviewed this week in Libya, the main launching pad for those seeking to reach Europe, say the demand will continue despite the deaths. Mohamed Abdallah, a 21-year-old from Darfur who fled war at home to find another war in Libya, said he could not stay in Libya, nor return to Sudan. “There is a war in my country, there’s no security, no equality, no freedom,” Abdallah said. “But if I stay here, it’s just like my country … I need to go to Europe.” In Misrata, a major Libyan port, coastguards told the Guardian that the smuggling trips would continue to rise because Libyan officials were woefully under-resourced. In all of western Libya, the area where the people-smugglers operate, coastguards have just three operational boats. Another is broken, and four more are in Italy for repairs. Libyans say they have been told they will not be returned until after the conclusion of peace talks between the country’s two rival governments. “There is a substantial increase this year,” said Captain Tawfik al-Skail, deputy head of the Misratan coastguard. “And come summer, with the better weather, if there isn’t immediate assistance and help from the EU, then there will be an overwhelming increase.” Save the Children has been on the front lines in the migrant crisis, and said it was growing increasingly worried about an expected increase in children making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. On Friday, it reported that nearly two dozen badly burned Eritreans had landed in Lampedusa that morning, the victims of a chemical fire in the Libyan factory where they were held before their departure. According to witness accounts, five people, including a baby, died in the blast – which occurred after a gas canister exploded – and the rest of the victims were not brought to a hospital by the smugglers holding them. Instead, the injured were put on a ship bound for Italy a few days later. The victims were airlifted to hospitals across Sicily on their arrival. The story was confirmed by UNHCR, which also interviewed survivors. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/19/700-migrants-feared-dead-mediterranean-shipwreck-worst-yet
  20. Human rights organisations call for collective European effort to prevent further disasters after 400 lives lost in latest incident Julian Borger Diplomatic editor Wednesday 15 April 2015 16.42 BST uropean states have come under renewed pressure from human rights and refugee organisations to mount large-scale search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean after the latest migrant boat disaster led to the drowning of an estimated 400 people. Critics say that the cancellation last year of an Italian-run sea rescue mission, Mare Nostrum, and the launch in November of Triton, a much smaller border surveillance operation by the EU, created the conditions for the higher death toll. They point to the figure of 900 dead so far this year, far greater than in the same period in 2014, as proof that the end of Mare Nostrum failed to deter migrants while leaving far fewer safeguards in place to rescue victims of frequent shipwrecks. “It is time to bring back the search-and-rescue capacity of the Mare Nostrum operation, this time as a collective European effort,” said Jan Egeland, a former UN head of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, and now secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “The Mediterranean is now the world’s most dangerous border between countries at peace. European nations have completely run out of excuses. They have to act now in order to prevent even bigger tragedies than those we have already witnessed.” Michael Diedring, the secretary general of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, said: “Our calls for EU search-and-rescue efforts in the Mediterranean have fallen on deaf ears. Apart from the outstanding efforts of the Italian navy, the EU continues to fail to act.” The Triton operation is run by Frontex, the EU’s border management agency, with a monthly budget of €2.9m (£2.1m....$3.1M)), less than a third of what was spent on Mare Nostrum. “Operation Triton and Mare Nostrum are two very different operations: the first was run by the Italian navy and was taking place close to Libya. Operation Triton is run by Frontex, whose mandate focuses on border control. This is why our operation takes place closer to the Italian coasts,” said Izabella Cooper, a spokeswoman for Frontex. “Because of the different mandate, Operation Triton was never intended to replace Mare Nostrum.” Cooper added: “While our primary focus is border control, saving lives is an absolute priority. Since the beginning of 2015 about 18,000 migrants arrived in Italy of which 16,000 were rescued during in search-and-rescue operations. Out of these over 5,000 – a third of the total – were rescued by Frontex vessels in Triton.” She said the vast majority of Triton search-and-rescue operations actually took place far from the Italian coastal area and very close to Libya. By comparison, the Italian Mare Nostrum operation rescued 100,000 shipwrecked migrants over its year-long existence. The European commission has drawn up a broad policy document, the European Agenda on Migration, due to be presented to member states next month. It is aimed at establishing a concerted European asylum policy and more clearly defining conditions for legal migration, while formulating “a clear plan to fight smuggling and trafficking of migrants and an effective return policy”. Human Rights Watch warned that some of the proposals being circulated, including the possible establishment of offshore processing centres in north African countries, as well as outsourcing border control and rescue operations in order to prevent departures, raised human rights concerns. “It’s hard not to see these proposals as cynical bids to limit the numbers of migrants and asylum seekers making it to EU shores,” said Judith Sunderland, HRW’s acting deputy Europe and central Asia director. “Whatever longer-term initiatives may come forth, the immediate humanitarian imperative for the EU is to get out there and save lives.” The British charity Save the Children said it would launch a campaign on Thursday calling on British political parties to press for search-and-rescue operations to be included in the European agenda on migration, and “develop a long-term plan to tackle the drivers of children on the move and ensure these children are protected.” Justin Forsyth, the head of the charity, said: “Our political leaders cannot ignore the fact that without search and rescue we are allowing thousands of innocent children and their families to drown off the coast of Europe. “Whoever makes up the next government has a moral obligation to work with the EU to restart the rescue. Every migrant child’s death is a stain on Europe’s conscience. How many thousands must die this summer before Europe acts?” Death ( by quarter, by month) charts on link http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/15/eu-states-migrant-rescue-operations-mediterranean
  21. Leftwingers hold back their endorsements for Hillarious Clinton until she presents a clearer campaign ‘vision’ as the only Democrat in the running so far Dan Roberts in Washington @RobertsDan Monday 13 April 2015 20.47 BST H-illary Clinton is already under pressure from voices on the left of American politics to establish her policy credentials for tackling issues such as economic inequality and Wall Street reform at the outset of her campaign. As the former secretary of state rolls out her run for president in 2016, several of the most prominent figures on the so-called progressive wing of the Democratic party are refusing to offer their support without a clearer vision from Clinton on a clutch of liberal cause célèbres, ranging from climate change to trade and back again. Many top leftwingers have previously supported figures such as senator Elizabeth Warren with a more explicit vision of this agenda. But as hopes for a meaningful primary challenge from her side of the party fades, liberal focus is quickly switching toward an effort to convince Clinton into shifting her own position instead. “It has to include progressive taxation,” said New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, Clinton’s former campaign manager during her run for US senate, in an NBC interview shortly before Sunday’s announcement. “It has to include increases in wages and benefits. It has to include the willingness to tax the wealthy so we can invest in infrastructure, so we can invest in education again.” “I think it’s important that [Clinton] come out with her vision as soon as possible,” he added, pointedly refusing to endorse Clinton until she does. While Clinton’s team has stressed patience in campaign rollout that they say will get more specific in the coming weeks, outspoken progressives were disappointed in the lack of policy detail contained in the website and video that came with Clinton’s Sunday announcement. “I was not particularly impressed with it,” said Zephyr Teachout, a New York Democrat who ran for governor in 2014, warning on Twitter it was “surprisingly free of content, lacking autobiography, policy [and] vision”. Teachout said she had not given up on the chance of more progressive candidates entering the race – or of Clinton taking a more populist approach on issues such as free trade and banking reform, on which Democratic leadership has tended to be more economically liberal in the past. “There is a hunger for open repudiation of the financial deregulation of the first Clinton era,” Teachout told the Guardian. Others believe there is plenty of time to flesh out Clinton’s progressive credentials in what they hope will be a “synthetic primary” to make up for the lack of serious opposition for the Democratic nomination. “H-illary Clinton’s campaign launch begins an important stage of the national conversation,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has been most active championing the agenda of Warren, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who has repeatedly insisted she will not stand against Clinton. “On most issues of concern to voters, the debate inside the Clinton campaign and across the nation will not be about going left versus right, but rather going big versus small,” Green added. De Blasio, who ran Clinton’s 2000 campaign, echoed the view that such pressure may help shape a bolder Clinton agenda, even without the formal entry of more radical opponents like Warren. “Clearly what’s happening in the progressive [wing] of the Democratic party is a demand for our candidates to come forward with a vision,” he said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That’s creating some of the same positive pressure you see in the primary process.” For their part, Clinton’s campaign team insist her message is very much about promoting social mobility and challenging vested interests. “The core purpose of this campaign is to create a better economic future for everyday Americans,” said one senior adviser during a conference call with reporters on Monday. “We understand one thing: we have to earn this,” he added. Whether Clinton’s policies prove as bold as some hope is another matter, however, and she is likely to face a primary challenge from at least one Democratic opponent – former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley – who made clear again on Monday that he intends to run to her left. Warren, though ruling herself out as a 2016 candidate, has also been more vocal in recent days, calling on Clinton to make clear where she stands on issues such as the minimum wage and equal pay legislation. Nevertheless, other voices on the progressive side of the party have been encouraged by early hints of a strong focus on inequality as well other key issues such a climate change – something Clinton’s current campaign chairman, John Podesta, said was also “top of the agenda”. “She has been as specific as most other candidates,” said retired US congressman Barney Frank in an interview on Monday. “She has several times now reaffirmed her position on something that is going to be an important issue next year, which is financial reform,” added the architect of post-crash banking reforms. “She’s been very clear that she wants to stick with financial reform.” H-illary Clinton’s team said campaign specifics would be revealed in the coming weeks when some progressives criticized that her campaign video lacked details on policy initiatives. Photograph: Niu Xiaolei/Xinhua Press/Corbis http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/13/Hillarious-clinton-presidential-candidate-democrat-progressives-reaction
  22. After facing questions over his behavior in interviews with female journalists, presidential candidate says women are ‘intelligent’ Martin Pengelly in New York @MartinPengelly Sunday 12 April 2015 16.53 BST Rand Paul, one of two declared candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, on Sunday answered criticism of his behaviour towards female interviewers by saying such women “have come a long way”, are “intelligent” and “should be equal to their counterparts and treated equally”. Paul was appearing on CNN after a week in which he announced his candidacy, following the Texas senator Ted Cruz, and was criticised for a subsequent interview with NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie. Speaking to CNN host Dana Bash in an interview filmed in Iowa City after he ended an interview with the Guardian early, causing further widespread comment, Paul was asked if he would “pull his punches” with women interviewers from now on. “I think women have come a long way,” he said. “Women are in these positions not because they’re women but because they’re intelligent and they should be equal to their counterparts and treated equally. “But I can tell you that the interviewers in the last couple of days, I think, probably got it easier than what I gave to [former New York governor] Eliot Spitzer on your programme here.” Paul added: “I would not come into our interview thinking, ‘OK, it’s a woman versus a man kind of interview.’ I just think she’s going to have tough questions, I’m going to have tough questions, and I’ve got to be prepared.” Asked by NBC’s Guthrie about his changed positions on some foreign policy points, Paul had said: “Why don’t we let me explain instead of talking over me, OK? Before we go through a litany of things you say I’ve changed on, why don’t you ask me a question: ‘Have I changed my opinion?’” The senator also accused Guthrie of “editorialising” his views, in an exchange which reminded some critics of a February interview with CNBC in which he “shushed” host Kelly Evans and told her to “calm down”. On CNN, Paul repeated his complaint about “editorialising” by journalists. “I’m unwilling to let people characterise things unfairly, and if someone’s going to write an op-ed on me ... that’s fair for them to try to do it, but it’s also fair for me to try to set the record straight and say they’re editorialising in the question,” he said. Asked about how he would approach a debate with one potential Democratic opponent for president, H-illary Clinton, who is due to declare her candidacy today, he said: “I’m always polite, and even in all the interviews when I’m accused of being too aggressive, I’ve never yelled or got out of control … “I would treat her with the same respect I would a man, but I wouldn’t lay down and say, ‘I’m not going to respond … ’ That would be a sexist response, to say: ‘Oh, my goodness, she deserves to be treated less aggressively because she’s only a woman.’ I would never say that about anybody.” http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/12/rand-paul-women-interviews
  23. Eric Harris: ‘I’m losing my breath.’ Second officer: ‘**** your breath’ Reserve officer Bob Bates has said he thought was using his Taser Martin Pengelly in New York @MartinPengelly Sunday 12 April 2015 20.37 BST Video has been released of the moment a reserve police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, shot and killed a man by mistake. The reserve officer, Bob Bates, a 73-year-old insurance executive, told police he had thought he was firing his Taser stun gun at Eric Courtney Harris, 44, a convicted felon who a police report on the incident said was being arrested after having sold a gun to an undercover officer. The video, which came from a police officer’s body camera, was released by police on Friday. It shows Harris running down a suburban street, away from his pursuers. The officer catches up with him and Harris is brought to the ground. A shot is heard and Harris gasps in pain. A voice, presumably that of Bates, says: “I shot him. I’m sorry.” A gun is dropped on the road and then picked up. Harris cries out, repeatedly, “He shot me!” and says: “Oh my God, I’m losing my breath.” As officers continue to subdue Harris, one officer is heard to say: “**** your breath.” Medical help was called to the scene, but Harris died in hospital. Later, Bates told the Tulsa World: “It was me,” and added: “My attorney has advised me not to comment. As much as I would like to, I can’t.” Harris’s death is one of a number involving black men at the hands of white police officers to have occurred across the US in recent months. Last year, protests broke out after the officers who killed Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Missouri and 43-year-old Eric Garner in New York City were not indicted. Last week, an officer in North Charleston, South Carolina shot and killed Walter Scott, a 50-year-old man who ran away from a routine traffic stop. The shooting was captured on camera by a bystander with an iPhone. Scott’s funeral took place on Saturday; the officer, Michael Slager, has been fired from the force and charged with murder. The intensity of the protests over such deaths – which gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and the use of Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe”, as a campaign slogan – has stoked intense national debate about the policing of African American communities and the state of civil rights in the US. Like the death of Walter Scott, Garner’s death was captured on video by a bystander. Bates was assigned to the violent crimes task force of the Tulsa County sheriff’s office. Reserve deputies “have [the] full powers and authority” of a deputy while on duty, Major Shannon Clark told the Tulsa World, saying their use in such cases was not unusual. Oklahoma police have said they do not intend to investigate Harris’s death any further, unless requested to do so by the sheriff’s office. Eric Harris is shown in an undated photo provided by the Tulsa County sheriff’s office. Photograph: Handout/Reuters http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/12/video-shows-tulsa-police-pursuing-and-shooting-man-killed-in-alleged-mistake
  24. Pope Francis delivers powerful message by recognising atrocities between 1915 and 1922 as genocide in speech at Vatican on eve of centenary Ian Black in Yerevan and Rosie Scammell in Rome Sunday 12 April 2015 18.12 BST Armenia’s efforts to promote greater awareness of the massacre of 1.5 million of its people by Turkey during the fall of the Ottoman empire were given a dramatic boost on Sunday by the pope’s description of the atrocities as “the first genocide of the 20th century” – days ahead of the centenary of the event. Pope Francis used a special mass in St Peter’s Basilica to mark the anniversary, and referred to “three massive and unprecedented tragedies” of the last century. “The first, which is widely considered the first genocide of the 20th century, struck your own Armenian people,” the pontiff said. “Bishops and priests, religious women and men, the elderly and even defenceless children and the infirm were murdered.” Historians estimate that as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in state-organised violence between 1915 and 1922. Russia, France and about 20 other countries recognise it as genocide. The US and Britain do not, however, most likely to avoid angering their Nato ally. The Turkish government rejects the term and emphasises wartime conditions, although in recent years it has acknowledged Armenian suffering. Turkey immediately summoned the papal ambassador to Ankara to express its displeasure and later recalled its ambassador from the Vatican. The foreign ministry said the pope had contradicted his message of peace and dialogue during a visit to Turkey in November. Expressing “great disappointment and sadness”, it called the message discriminatory because it only mentioned the pain suffered by Christian Armenians, and not Muslims and other religious groups. The fate of the Armenians and impunity for their killers has come to be seen as foreshadowing the Nazi extermination of six million Jews 25 years later. The concept of genocide was recognised by the UN in 1948. Armenia hopes wider international recognition will increase pressure on Turkey, though their relations are complicated by other factors, including the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. Strictly speaking, it was not the first such announcement. In 2001 Pope John Paul II and Kerekin II, the leader of the Armenian Apostolic church, used identical language that Pope Francis on Sunday. The original statement, however, was issued in Echmiadzin, the Armenian equivalent of the Vatican, rather than in Rome. Analysts said the timing was also highly significant, coming so close to the 24 April commemoration event in Yerevan and around the world. Turkey has infuriated Armenians by choosing to mark the centenary of the wartime Gallipolli landings on exactly the same date, a move deliberately designed to overshadow the genocide. Gallipolli has never before been commemorated on that day. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also ignored an invitation from the Armenian president, Serž Sargasyan, for to him to come to Yerevan. The Armenian government is expected to welcome the statement when Sargasyan, who attended the mass, returns from Rome. “This is the first time a mass was dedicated to the Armenian genocide victims in St Peter’s,” said commentator Ara Tadevosyan. “The pope’s acknowledgement that ours was the first genocide of the 20th century is very important. It’s another sign that the civilized world is accepting what happened to us despite all the pressure from Turkey.” The pontiff’s decision to bracket the mass killing of Armenians with the crimes perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism gives the Vatican’s “highest sanction” to genocide recognition, said Theo van Lint, a professor of Armenian studies at the University of Oxford. “I think it’s very important to realise he gave space to the leaders, the heads of the Armenian church and Armenian Catholics, to fully give their view of events. It’s very clear that the pope accepts that it is a genocide.” The pope was joined by Kerekin II, Sargasyan and other dignitaries. Allowing Armenian leaders to speak in St Peter’s Basilica was described as a “strategic move” by Van Lint. Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev, a researcher on Armenian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said the ceremony also demonstrated the pope’s efforts to put peripheral Christian groups at the centre of the Catholic church. “This is the first time that Armenia is the centre of attention of Catholic life and the Christian world,” he said. “It’s meant to draw attention to the Christian east.” Pope Francis also declared a 10th-century Armenian monk, St Gregory of Narek, a “doctor of the church”. The mystic and poet is celebrated for his writings, some of which are still recited in Armenian churches. Britain will be represented at the Yerevan genocide centennial by the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, the chairman of the British-Armenian all-party group. The UK representation at the Gallipolli anniversary will be led by Prince Charles. The Associated Press in Ankara contributed to this report Pope Francis and the head of Armenia’s Orthodox church, Karekin II, greet each other during an Armenian-rite mass in St Peter’s Basilica. Photograph: Gregorio Borgia/AP http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/12/pope-boosts-armenias-efforts-to-have-ottoman-killings-recognised-as-genocide
  25. Pick-up truck explodes in carpark of shopping mall, leaving an Italian girl and six Thais with injuries, say police Agence France-Presse in Bangkok Saturday 11 April 2015 05.57 BST A car bomb wounded seven people, including an Italian girl, when it exploded in the parking area of a shopping mall on the Thai tourist island of Koh Samui, police said. The bomb was packed inside a Mazda pick-up truck and exploded late on Friday in the car park of the Central Festival mall on the island while late-night shoppers were inside the building. Police said the car had been stolen from Yala, one of Thailand’s three southernmost Muslim-majority provinces where a 10-year insurgency has killed more than 6,300 people. “It’s a car bomb but we cannot confirm what type of explosive materials they used,” said Lieutenant-General Prawut Thavornsiri, spokesman for the Thai national police. “The car used was Mazda pick-up truck stolen from Yala,” he added, without specifying whether the blast was believed to be linked to the conflict hundreds of miles away. Poonsak Sophonsasmorong of the island’s disaster prevention office said: “Six Thais and a 12-year-old Italian girl were treated for minor injuries,” adding that they had all been released from hospital. Thai police are often accused of leaping to conclusions in the immediate aftermath of high-profile incidents. The Thai force came under fire for bungling the initial investigation and leaking erroneous information to the media during the probe into the murder of two British backpackers on Koh Tao island last year. A second policeman at the scene also said Friday’s blast was caused by a car bomb. Bomb squad experts scoured the debris early Saturday in the underground car park for clues about who might be behind the attack, which comes as Thailand’s junta tries to reassure tourists about the kingdom’s safety as a holiday destination following a coup last May. Samui is a popular tourist island in the Gulf of Thailand. The roughly 20 million visitors flock to the country each year are vital to the economy. Although the military lifted martial law last week, it maintained sweeping security powers citing the threat of political unrest. Thailand’s southern province bordering Malaysia, 250 miles (400km) south of Samui, are home to a simmering insurgency pitting Muslim rebels against security forces. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/11/koh-samui-car-bomb-seven-people-hurt-on-thai-tourist-island
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