Category Archives: News

Mediterranean capsized migrants’ boat’s captain charged

BBC News reports: The Tunisian captain of a boat that capsized off Libya on Sunday, killing hundreds of migrants, has been charged with reckless multiple homicide, Italian officials say.

He has also been charged along with a Syrian member of the crew with favouring illegal immigration.

The two were among 27 survivors who arrived in Sicily late on Monday.

A UNHCR spokeswoman has told the BBC the migrants’ boat capsized after merchant vessels came too close to it.

Carlotta Sami of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy was at the Sicilian port of Catania to meet the survivors. Some 800 people are thought to have died in the disaster, she said.

There were nationals of Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Mali, Sierra Leone and Senegal on board, kept in three different layers in the boat. [Continue reading…]

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Italy cracks down on human trafficking

The Daily Beast reports: Mered Medhanie and Ermias Ghermay are businessmen who apparently take pride in their work. Too bad their jobs are heading up two of the most lucrative and deadly human trafficking rings to ever operate in the waters between Libya and Sicily.

They are now Italy’s most wanted men and prosecutors in Palermo are vowing to find them.

On Monday, police in Palermo said overnight Sunday they issued arrest warrants for 24 men, including Medhanie and Ghermay, and were able to pick up 14 of them in Rome, Milan, Bari, and in refugee camps in Sicily.

In a separate investigation based in Catania, Sicily, authorities there have asked for three Egyptian men to be extradited to Italy to face trafficking charges. Among the arrested and wanted were recruitment specialists who infiltrated large refugee camps looking for new clients who either wished to travel further into Europe or who might have family back in Africa who want to come over, too.

Police had pinpointed the 24 men more than a year ago and have been intercepting their telephone conversations, following their moves and studying the trafficking business ever since. Italy has arrested 976 men involved with trafficking in the last year. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has promised to bring them to justice. This week, he called on European countries to make fighting trafficking a priority, likening it to a “modern slave trade in which people are bought and sold like merchandise.” [Continue reading…]

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Mohammad Javad Zarif: A message from Iran

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, writes: We made important progress in Switzerland earlier this month. With the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany, we agreed on parameters to remove any doubt about the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program and to lift international sanctions against Iran.

But to seal the anticipated nuclear deal, more political will is required. The Iranian people have shown their resolve by choosing to engage with dignity. It is time for the United States and its Western allies to make the choice between cooperation and confrontation, between negotiations and grandstanding, and between agreement and coercion.

With courageous leadership and the audacity to make the right decisions, we can and should put this manufactured crisis to rest and move on to much more important work. The wider Persian Gulf region is in turmoil. It is not a question of governments rising and falling: the social, cultural and religious fabrics of entire countries are being torn to shreds. [Continue reading…]

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Iran and Australia pledge cooperation on fighting ISIS

Reuters: Australia and Iran have reached a tentative intelligence sharing agreement to combat Islamic State militants fighting in the Middle East, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported on Monday.

Australia has sent hundreds of soldiers to Iraq to help train forces fighting the Islamic State group, heightening concerns about reprisal attacks at home.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop this week became the first top diplomat from Australia to visit Iran in a decade. She said the two countries had a common purpose in defeating Islamic State extremists.

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Stranded Americans in Yemen get little help from their government

CNN reports: “My son served in the army for four years. In Iraq. He served because we love our country. As we should. Now look at us?”

Muna Mansour is gesturing around her at the slatted cargo hold she and her family — all nine of them — are trying to get comfortable in. They’re squeezed in with two other families. On the ground by my feet, Muna’s middle grandchild is sleeping, curled up beside an oil drum.

“There’s nowhere to sleep, there’s no food — you can see how people are just thrown around all over the place,” she says.

Muna is from Buffalo in upstate New York. Her family is among the dozens of Americans caught in the crossfire of warring parties in Yemen. And although many other countries evacuated their citizens, India most notably ferrying out around 5,000, the United States has said it is too dangerous for them to directly evacuate American nationals.

“I was there when the Indians picked up 200 of their people from the port. It was embarrassing. We were just sitting there waiting for someone to come and say ‘OK where are the Americans, let’s pick them up,'” she says. [Continue reading…]

McClatchy reports: The Obama administration so far has declined to organize a rescue mission for the estimated 3,000 to 4,000 U.S. citizens in Yemen. U.S. officials have said they believe it is too dangerous for U.S. military assets to enter Yemeni waters and air space. They’ve also suggested that organizing Americans to meet at a single departure point would put them at risk of attack from al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or other terrorist groups seeking American hostages.

That, however, has left Americans largely on their own to find a way out of the country. The U.S. Embassy in Sanaa has been closed for months, and the last American troops in the country were evacuated last month, a few days before the Saudi bombing campaign began.

In a message posted on its website, the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa advises that an Indian naval vessel will be leaving Hodeidah for Djibouti and that it had been informed that Americans would be welcomed. But the embassy also noted that “unfortunately, we don’t have information on who to contact to board this ship.” [Continue reading…]

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Yemen Houthi leader defiant in face of Saudi airstrikes

The New York Times reports: More than three weeks after Saudi Arabia began a bombing campaign aimed at crippling his movement, the leader of Yemen’s Houthi rebels responded with defiance on Sunday in a televised speech, saying that Saudi attempts to “humiliate” his country were doomed.

“Those who want the people to give in are just dreaming,” the leader, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, said in a long, fuming address that was also sharply critical of the United States. “Our Yemeni people have the right to fend off the aggression, and to confront the aggressor with all possible and available means,” he said on a Houthi news channel.

Mr. Houthi gave no indication that he was willing to negotiate with the Saudis or to agree to their conditions for a cease-fire, including that the Houthis withdraw from cities they have captured. His defiance suggested a prolonged war and raised further questions about the Saudi government’s military strategy, which has been centered on pounding the Houthis and their allies from the air. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s leading environmentalist flees to Estonia

The Associated Press: Russia’s leading environmentalist whose fierce campaigning once threatened the interests of some of the country’s richest men has moved to Estonia to ensure she is not separated from her children.

Yevgenia Chirikova, 38, is best known for a 2010 campaign opposing the construction of an $8bn road linking Moscow and St Petersburg. Chirikova’s investigations shed light on some of the murkier aspects of a project that is partly owned by president Vladimir Putin’s childhood friend.

As her allies and environmentalists from other Russian regions face increasing government pressure, Chirikova has opted to leave her homeland.

“It is difficult to work in Russia because they can come for you at any moment like they blackmailed me once with my children,” she told The Associated Press on the phone from the Estonian capital of Tallinn. “Now I’ve eliminated my biggest vulnerability by leaving for Estonia.”

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Thousands of Iraqis flee as ISIS makes gains in Sunni heartland

The Washington Post reports: Thousands of families fleeing Iraq’s western city of Ramadi choked checkpoints leading to Baghdad on Friday, after an Islamic State advance spread panic and left security forces clinging to control.

A column of traffic several vehicles wide snaked for miles at a checkpoint in Sadr al-Yusufiyah, on the edge of Baghdad province, as minibuses, cars and trucks picked up families who crossed by foot carrying their possessions in bags and wheelbarrows. Suhaib al-Rawi, the governor of Anbar province, of which Ramadi is the capital, described it as a human disaster on a scale the city has never witnessed.

U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned that the city is at risk of falling to the Islamic State despite seven months of airstrikes by U.S. planes in Anbar. Such a loss would be a serious blow to Iraq’s government, which recently announced a military campaign for the province after retaking the militant stronghold of Tikrit, and to the international effort to push back the militant group, whose gains in Ramadi have demonstrated an ability to create chaos even while under pressure. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: More than 90,000 people have fled their homes in Iraq’s western province of Anbar where Islamic State militants have been gaining ground over the past week, the United Nations said on Sunday.

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Purported ISIS video shows militants killing Ethiopian Christians

Bloomberg: At least two dozen Ethiopian Christians appear to have been executed by the Islamic State Group in Libya, a newly released video shows.

The footage posted on al-Menbar al-E’lamy al-Jihady, a website that reports jihadi news, shows two groups of captives. One was beheaded on a beach said to be in the Barqa region in eastern Libya. The others were shot at point blank range in an area said to be in the southwest. The video said the victims were Christians belonging to “the hostile Ethiopian Church.”

“Muslim blood that was shed under the hands of your religion is not cheap,” an armed masked man said in an American accent. “You will not have safety even in your dreams until you embrace Islam.”

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Hundreds more migrants feared drowned in the Mediterranean

The Wall Street Journal reports: As many as 700 migrants are believed to have died in a shipwreck about 70 miles from the Libyan coast, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

According to statements from survivors given to the UNHCR, a fishing boat carrying more than 700 people capsized during the night from Saturday and Sunday.

The 20-meter-long fishing boat, which was heavily overcrowded, launched a distress call during the night, the Italian Coast Guard said. The Italians sent a Portuguese mercantile vessel, the King Jacob, to help the boat, but when the migrants saw the ship approach, they rushed to one side, forcing the boat to capsize. Rescue teams saved 28 people and have recovered 24 bodies so far.

The Italian Coast Guard has dispatched 17 ships, including Maltese vessels, Italian fishing boats and other private vessels, to the area to search for other survivors.

Antonino Iraso, an officer with the Italian tax police, whose ships are involved in the search-and-rescue operation, told Italian television that the effort is now aimed at finding bodies, rather than other survivors. He said that the teams have sighted an oil slick, floating life jackets and fragments of wood in the area where the boat sank.

The route from Libya to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa has become the deadliest migrant route in the world.

If the deaths are confirmed, it would bring to about 1,600 the number of migrants who have died since the start of the year in attempting to make the passage from Libya to Italy. For all of 2014, nearly 3,200 died attempting the passage, according to figures from the International Organization for Migration. According to the IOM, if the 700 deaths are confirmed, it would be one of the highest-ever migrant death tolls in a single incident.

Last year, about 170,000 African and Middle Eastern migrants arrived in Italy using that passage, with a total of nearly 300,000 arrivals in all since the start of 2011.

Yesterday, The Observer reported: Anti-immigrant rhetoric from politicians across Europe, including Britain, is blocking attempts to introduce large search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean that would save large numbers of migrant lives, a senior UN official has warned.

In comments that reveal the growing frustration within the UN Refugee Agency over Europe’s response to the growing migration crisis in the Mediterranean, Laurens Jolles said political expediency was preventing measures being taken to reduce migrant deaths.

Jolles, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) representative in Italy, said: “In many countries in Europe at the moment, the [political] dialogue and the rhetoric is quite extreme and very irresponsible.”

On Friday, Anders Lustgarten wrote: The EU’s de facto policy is to let migrants drown to stop others coming. Last year nearly four thousand bodies were recovered from the Med. Those are just the ones we found. The total number of arrivals in Italy in 2014 went up over 300% from the year before, to more than 170,000. And the EU’s response, driven by the cruellest British government in living memory, was to cut the main rescue operation, Mare Nostrum.

The inevitable result is that 500 people have already died this year. The figure for the equivalent period in 2014 was 15. There are half a million people in Libya waiting to make the crossing. How many more deaths can we stomach?

Migration illustrates one of the signal features of modern life, which is malice by proxy. Like drones and derivatives, migration policy allows the powerful to inflict horrors on the powerless without getting their hands dirty. James Brokenshire, the minister who defended cutting Mare Nostrum on the nauseatingly hypocritical grounds that it encouraged migration, never has to let the deaths his decision helped to cause spoil his expensive lunch with lobbyists. It doesn’t affect him.

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Wedge of warm Pacific seawater known as ‘the blob’ blamed for marine havoc

The Los Angeles Times reports: It’s called “the blob,” and some blame it for the thousands of dead seabirds and emaciated sea lion pups that have washed ashore on California beaches since late last year.

Ever since an unusually warm mass of seawater began spreading along the Pacific Coast of North America a year ago — wreaking havoc on the marine food chain — scientists have struggled to explain its presence.

In recent months, however, some experts have argued that this 500-mile-wide, 300-foot-deep wedge of warm seawater may in fact signal an epic cyclical change in the Pacific Ocean — a change that could possibly bring soaking rains to Southern California this winter but also accelerate the rise in global temperatures.

Though researchers disagree over just what this blob portends, the phenomenon is drawing intense scrutiny from climate scientists and oceanographers.

At the center of this debate is a poorly understood pattern of wind, ocean current and temperature variations that some scientists call the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. [Continue reading…]

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The terror strategist: Secret files reveal the structure of ISIS

Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi aka Haji Bakr

Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi aka Haji Bakr

Christoph Reuter reports: Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: “We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from.”

In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself “Islamic State” (IS). The fact that this could have happened at all was the result of a rare but fatal miscalculation by the brilliant planner. The local rebels placed the body into a refrigerator, in which they intended to bury him. Only later, when they realized how important the man was, did they lift his body out again.

Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the real name of the Iraqi, whose bony features were softened by a white beard. But no one knew him by that name. Even his best-known pseudonym, Haji Bakr, wasn’t widely known. But that was precisely part of the plan. The former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years. Former members of the group had repeatedly mentioned him as one of its leading figures. Still, it was never clear what exactly his role was.

But when the architect of the Islamic State died, he left something behind that he had intended to keep strictly confidential: the blueprint for this state. It is a folder full of handwritten organizational charts, lists and schedules, which describe how a country can be gradually subjugated. SPIEGEL has gained exclusive access to the 31 pages, some consisting of several pages pasted together. They reveal a multilayered composition and directives for action, some already tested and others newly devised for the anarchical situation in Syria’s rebel-held territories. In a sense, the documents are the source code of the most successful terrorist army in recent history. [Continue reading…]

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Horrifying videos shown at UN display carnage of suspected chlorine attacks in Syria

Vice News: Hours after doctors from Syria offered testimony about a chlorine gas attack in the country’s northwest to the United Nations Security Council on Thursday, reportedly bringing its members to tears, they informed VICE News that their hospital had just received victims of what appeared to be another chemical weapon strike.

At the meeting, the doctors showed council members footage taken by a field hospital in Sarmin, in Idlib Province, on the night of March 16. The video, which was provided to VICE News, depicted frenetic efforts to resuscitate three young children exhibiting symptoms of chemical exposure. The children were inside their basement home along with their parents and grandmother when a crude barrel bomb landed on the building’s air shaft, trapping them inside a cloud of toxic vapor. All members of the family died.

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Top Saddam Hussein aide reported killed in northern Iraq

The New York Times reports: An Iraqi provincial governor said Friday that militiamen had killed Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the highest-ranking official from Saddam Hussein’s government who was still on the loose, in clashes in a mountainous region of northern Iraq.

News of Mr. Douri’s death has been announced several times by different authorities over the years, and officials cautioned that confirmation would not come until DNA testing had been conducted.

The announcement was made by the governor of Salahuddin Province. Its capital is Tikrit, Mr. Hussein’s hometown, which was recently liberated from the Islamic State. A representative for one of the militias involved in the fighting on Friday, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, said a body that fighters believed was Mr. Douri’s was on its way to Baghdad on Friday evening for DNA testing. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq: ISIS escapees describe systematic rape

Human Rights Watch: The extremist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS) has carried out systematic rape and other sexual violence against Yezidi women and girls in northern Iraq. Human Rights Watch conducted research in the town of Dohuk in January and February 2015, including interviewing 20 women and girls who escaped from ISIS, and reviewing ISIS statements about the subject.

Human Rights Watch documented a system of organized rape and sexual assault, sexual slavery, and forced marriage by ISIS forces. Such acts are war crimes and may be crimes against humanity. Many of the women and girls remain missing, but the survivors now in Iraqi Kurdistan need psychosocial support and other assistance.

“ISIS forces have committed organized rape, sexual assault, and other horrific crimes against Yezidi women and girls,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Those fortunate enough to have escaped need to be treated for the unimaginable trauma they endured.”

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The unpromised land for African refugees

Meron Rapoport writes: Two weeks ago, almost all Jews in Israel celebrated the first day of Passover by reading and singing the Hagada, the centuries-old text which tells the story of the miraculous exodus of the Jewish slaves from the hands of their oppressors in Egypt.

But in a strange coincidence, just one day before Passover, Israel announced its intention to initiate a new exodus: a forced removal of some 40,000 asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan back to Africa, dangerously close to the hands of their former oppressors. A reversed Hagada.

This new policy became known almost by chance. Dozens of Eritrean asylum seekers were summoned to the Population and Immigration Authority where they were given a letter saying that “after working hard” during the last few months, Israel has found “a country which will host you”.

Without naming it, the letter promises that this country “is in the process of economic development” and that it will provide them with residence and working permits. These Eritreans were given a simple choice: either accept this generous offer – which includes a $3500 grant – and leave Israel within 30 days or face an open-ended imprisonment in an Israeli jail.

In a court hearing a few days later, the Israeli authorities agreed to name these benevolent host countries – Rwanda and Uganda – but still refused to reveal the content of the agreements signed with them. A minister in the Rwandan government confirmed the existence of such an agreement, while the Ugandan government flatly denied it agrees to host refugees deported from Israel.

Using Rwanda and Uganda as target countries is not new in the ongoing attrition war between Israel and those tens of thousands of Eritreans and Sudanese who crossed its borders illegally in search of a safer and better life than the one they experienced in their war-torn countries.

Despite being one of the first signatories on the UN convention on refugees and despite the fact that most European countries view asylum seekers from Eritrea and Sudan as entitled to refugee status, Israel never welcomed them and refused to allow them any official status. At most, it granted them the right not be deported. [Continue reading…]

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Al Qaeda in Yemen using chaos of war to carve out terrorism haven

The Los Angeles Times reports: A brazen territorial grab by Al Qaeda militants in Yemen — together with a $1-million bank heist, a prison break and capture of a military base — has given the terrorist group fundraising and recruitment tools that suggest it is following the brutal path blazed by Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was long forced into the shadows by U.S. drone strikes and commando raids, has taken advantage of the growing chaos in Yemen’s multi-sided war to carve out a potential haven that counter-terrorism experts say could help it launch terrorist attacks.

After seizing a regional airport and a coastal oil terminal this week, Al Qaeda militants consolidated their gains Friday in Mukalla, an Arabian Sea port. Fighters stormed a weapons depot and seized armored vehicles and rockets after apparently forging a truce with local tribes and forcing government troops to flee. [Continue reading…]

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Congress to introduce last-ditch bill to reform NSA spying

National Journal reports: Backed up against a rapidly approaching do-or-die deadline, bipartisan lawmakers are poised to introduce legislation next week that would roll back the National Security Agency’s expansive surveillance powers.

The legislation could land as soon as Tuesday in the House, congressional aides and privacy advocates said, who would only speak on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.

The bill, known as the USA Freedom Act, would effectively end the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone metadata — the numbers, time stamps, and duration of a call but not its actual content — by instead relying on phone companies to retain that data. The program is the first and one of the most controversial spying programs exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks that began nearly two years ago.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte and Rep. John Conyers, the panel’s top Democrat, are expected to back the bill, as is Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, the author of the original Freedom Act that first emerged in the fall of 2013, and Rep. Jerry Nadler. All four have been intensely involved in negotiations since the measure fell apart in Congress late last year.

But as the House barrels ahead, it remains unclear what strategy the bill’s advocates in the Senate, led chiefly by Sen. Patrick Leahy, intend to deploy. That question is complicated by the implications a fractious national security debate could have for the Republican caucus, whose three presidential aspirants — Sens. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio — have adopted increasingly divergent positions on NSA surveillance. [Continue reading…]

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