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BBC News - Libya's Gaddafi urges 'holy war' against Switzerland - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8537925.stm Lybia Switzerland Muammar Gaddafi EU
shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 26 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Libya's Muammar Gaddafi has called for a jihad, or holy war, against Switzerland, as an ongoing diplomatic row between the two nations heats up.He criticised a recent Swiss vote against the building of minarets and said Muslims must boycott the country. There have been tensions between the nations since 2008, when one of Mr Gaddafi's sons was arrested in Geneva, accused of assaulting two servants.
  • "Let us wage jihad against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression," he said. "Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against Muhammad, God and the Koran."
  • In a referendum last November, 57.5% of Swiss voters approved a constitutional ban on the building of minarets. An appeal against the ban has been submitted to the European Court of Human Rights.
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  • Earlier this month, Libya stopped issuing visas to citizens from many European nations, prompting condemnation from the European Commission.
  • Libya's move came after Switzerland allegedly blacklisted 188 high-ranking Libyans, denying them entry permits. The Swiss ban is said to include Mr Gaddafi and his family. The row began after the arrest of Mr Gaddafi's son Hannibal and his wife, Aline Skaf, in Geneva in July 2008. They were accused of assaulting two servants while staying at a luxury hotel in the Swiss city, though the charges were later dropped. Libya retaliated by cancelling oil supplies, withdrawing billions of dollars from Swiss banks, refusing visas to Swiss citizens and recalling some of its diplomats. In the same month that the Gaddafis were arrested, Libyan authorities detained two Swiss businessmen, in what analysts believe was a retaliatory move.
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BBC News - EU deplores Libya visa ban for Europeans - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8517642.stm Libya EU Switzerland
shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 16 Feb 10 - Cached
  • The European Commission has condemned Libya's decision to stop issuing visas to the many Europeans whose countries are in the Schengen border-free zone.
  • The Swiss ban is said to include Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and his family.
  • The Libyan-Swiss row dates back to July 2008, when Col Gaddafi's son Hannibal and daughter-in-law were arrested in Switzerland. The charges, of mistreating two domestic employees, were later dropped. Libya then halted oil exports to Switzerland, withdrew billions of dollars of assets from Swiss banks and put two Swiss businessmen working in Libya on trial for visa violations and other offences.
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David Cameron warned off 'opportunism' over Europe | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...eron-warned-opportunism-europe UK EU
shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 16 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • David Cameron risks making "premature" and "opportunistic" demands in Europe and weakening Britain's power in Washington and other major capitals, the most senior diplomat to leave government in recent years has warned.Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Britain's ambassador to Washington until last year and before that the senior British diplomat in Brussels, said in a Guardian interview that recent warnings by the US administration urging Britain against staging a distracting referendum was "a conscious decision by the Obama administration to intervene in the UK debate", reflecting a long-standing view that it wanted its closest political ally closely involved in Europe.
  • Sheinwald said: "If Britain is active and influential in Washington that makes us more influential in Brussels, Delhi and elsewhere. Equally if we are influential in Europe, then we have a bigger impact in Washington and the other power capitals of the world. These things are mutually reinforcing.
  • "I just cannot see any logical basis for thinking a move to the sidelines, or particularly a move out of Europe, would be anything other than diminishing to UK's capacity, standing, influence, ability to get things done and capacity to build coalitions internationally."
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  • Sheinwald, who was ambassador to Washington between 2007 and 2012, is the most senior diplomatic figure to urge caution on Cameron. He was also the UK diplomatic lead in Brussels between 2000 and 2003, as well as chief foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair between 2003 and 2007. He is now a member of the thinktank and advocacy group Business for New Europe.
  • "We have sold investment in the UK on the basis that the UK is the best gateway into the single market. That is the way we have presented ourselves. American firms and firms from the far east have based themselves in London for that reason. That has been such a success over the past decade or 15 years."
  • "Investors are worried by the thought that we are going to end up outside the EU by mistake, or without thinking through the economic consequences or end up with an inferior model like Norway or Switzerland."
  • Such a move would exclude many foreign owned financial services from Britain, he said.
  • Philip Gordon, the US under-secretary for European affairs, last week used a briefing in the UK to urged Cameron not to hold a referendum.Sheinwald said the White House regard "another dose of uncertainty on top of the euro crisis as deeply unwelcome".
  • "They know it affects the pace of the recovery of the European economy. But they also know it will affect the ability of Europe to focus on other things so it will contribute to a weakening of European resolve for example in the middle east and whether Europe has a capacity in the area of security and defence. It will affect our ability to project our power and work with America on world problems."He added: "The idea, if there were an idea, of going it alone being somehow appealing to our traditional partners or to our future partners in Asia or elsewhere in the world has been undermined very significantly by the comments made by the Obama administration."
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BBC News - Turkish anger at US Armenian 'genocide' vote - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8550928.stm Turkey US Armenia
shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 05 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Turkey has reacted angrily to a US congressional panel's resolution describing as genocide the killings of Armenians in World War I.PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country had been accused of a crime it did not commit, adding the resolution would harm Turkish-US relations. Ankara has recalled its ambassador to Washington for consultations and says it is considering other responses.
  • The BBC's Jane O'Brien in Washington says Turkey must be hoping that, as with a similar resolution two years ago, the issue will not come to the floor of the House for a full vote. In 2007, it passed the committee stage, but was shelved after pressure from the George W Bush administration.
  • Turkish President Abdullah Gul responded angrily to the committee's vote, saying it was "an injustice to history" to take such a decision with "political concerns in mind". "Turkey will not be responsible for the negative results that this event may lead to," he said.
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  • Talks between Turkey and Armenia helped defer a US congressional vote after 2007. The two countries signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations on 10 October 2009 in Switzerland.That deal has since faltered. Turkish PM Tayyip Erdogan has repeated his promise to Azerbaijan not to fix ties with Armenia until the the conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is settled. Turkey feels ethnic kinship with Azerbaijan and relies on it for gas supplies.
  • US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had urged the House committee not to vote on Thursday on the grounds that it would damage reconciliation efforts between Turkey and Armenia, and said she hoped it would go no further.
  • "We do not believe that the full Congress will or should act upon that resolution, and we have made that clear to all the parties involved," she said. During his campaign for the 2008 election, Mr Obama promised to brand the mass killings genocide.
  • In October last year, Turkey and Armenia signed a historic accord normalising relations between them after a century of hostility.
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Millionaire Mullahs - Forbes.com - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...056_2.html Iran Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani Hezbollah Iranian Revolutionary Guards
shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 25 Jun 09 - No Cached
  • The 1979 revolution transformed the Rafsanjani clan into commercial pashas. One brother headed the country's largest copper mine; another took control of the state-owned TV network; a brother-in-law became governor of Kerman province, while a cousin runs an outfit that dominates Iran's $400 million pistachio export business; a nephew and one of Rafsanjani's sons took key positions in the Ministry of Oil; another son heads the Tehran Metro construction project (an estimated $700 million spent so far). Today, operating through various foundations and front companies, the family is also believed to control one of Iran's biggest oil engineering companies, a plant assembling Daewoo automobiles, and Iran's best private airline (though the Rafsanjanis insist they do not own these assets).
  • The gossip on the street, going well beyond the observable facts, has the Rafsanjanis stashing billions of dollars in bank accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg; controlling huge swaths of waterfront in Iran's free economic zones on the Persian Gulf; and owning whole vacation resorts on the idyllic beaches of Dubai, Goa and Thailand.
  • Rafsanjani's youngest son, Yaser, owns a 30-acre horse farm in the super-fashionable Lavasan neighborhood of north Tehran, where land goes for over $4 million an acre. Just where did Yaser get his money? A Belgian-educated businessman, he runs a large export-import firm that includes baby food, bottled water and industrial machinery.
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  • Until a few years ago the simplest way to get rich quick was through foreign-currency trades. Easy, if you could get greenbacks at the subsidized import rate of 1,750 rials to the dollar and resell them at the market rate of 8,000 to the dollar. You needed only the right connections for an import license. "I estimate that, over a period of ten years, Iran lost $3 billion to $5 billion annually from this kind of exchange-rate fraud," says Saeed Laylaz, an economist, now with Iran's biggest carmaker. "And the lion's share of that went to about 50 families."
  • One of the families benefiting from the foreign trade system was the Asgaroladis, an old Jewish clan of bazaar traders, who converted to Islam several generations ago. Asadollah Asgaroladi exports pistachios, cumin, dried fruit, shrimp and caviar, and imports sugar and home appliances; his fortune is estimated by Iranian bankers to be some $400 million. Asgaroladi had a little help from his older brother, Habibollah, who, as minister of commerce in the 1980s, was in charge of distributing lucrative foreign-trade licenses. (He was also a counterparty to commodities trader and then-fugitive Marc Rich, who helped Iran bypass U.S.-backed sanctions.)
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Al-Qaida group demands release of Abu Qatada or British hostage will be killed | World ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...alqaida-north-africa-hostages Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Abu Qatada
shared by Argos Media on 27 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Al-Qaida's North African wing has threatened to kill a British tourist taken hostage in the Sahara unless the radical cleric and terrorism suspect Abu Qatada is released within 20 days.
  • Qatada, once described by a Spanish judge as "Osama bin Laden's righthand man in Europe", is being held in Britain pending deportation to his native Jordan, where in 1999 he was convicted in his absence of conspiracy to cause explosions and sentenced to life imprisonment. The charges related to bombings at the American school and the Jerusalem hotel in Jordan. He was convicted a second time in 2000 over a plot to bomb tourists.
  • "We demand that Britain release Sheikh Abu Qatada, who is unjustly [held], for the release of its British citizen. We give it 20 days as of the issuance of this statement," the group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) said in a posting on an Islamist website yesterday. "When this period expires, the mujahideen will kill the British hostage."
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  • The threat comes after AQIM last week released two of the hostages, Marianne Petzold, from Germany, Gabriella Greitner, from Switzerland. Greitner's husband would be held "until we have achieved our legitimate demands", the group said yesterday. Two Canadian diplomats - Robert Fowler, the UN special envoy for Niger, and his aide, Louis Guay - who were kidnapped in a separate incident near Niger's capital, Niamey, in December, were also freed on Wednesday.
  • AQIM had demanded the release of 20 of its members detained in Mali and other countries. Details of the deal reached over the four victims freed so far remain murky, but there has been speculation that a ransom was paid. Canada has denied making any payment to the kidnappers, but said it could not speak for other governments.
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BBC NEWS | Americas | World 'well prepared' for virus - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...8019566.stm Health Swine Flu
shared by Argos Media on 27 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The international community is better prepared than ever to deal with the threatened spread of a new swine flu virus, a top UN health chief has said
  • As the UN warned the outbreak might become a pandemic, Dr Keiji Fukuda said years of preparing for bird flu had boosted world stocks of anti-virals. Canada is the latest country to confirm cases after as many as 81 deaths in Mexico and 20 cases in the US. Washington has warned the flu may yet claim American lives.
  • Eight cases have been confirmed among New York students, seven in California, two in Texas, two in Kansas and one in Ohio. Several countries in Asia and Latin America have begun screening airport passengers for symptoms. There is currently no vaccine for the new strain of flu but severe cases can be treated with antiviral medication.
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  • Officials said most of those killed so far in Mexico were young adults - rather than more vulnerable children and the elderly. It is unclear how effective currently available flu vaccines would be at offering protection against the new strain, as it is genetically distinct from other flu strains.
  • Only a handful of the Mexican cases have so far been laboratory-confirmed as swine flu, while in the US confirmed cases had only mild symptoms. Health experts want to know why some people become so seriously ill, while others just get a bit of a cold, the BBC's Imogen Foulkes reports from Switzerland.
  • Speaking in Geneva, an expert from the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN's health agency, expert said the swine flu virus could be capable of mutating into a more dangerous strain but that more information was needed before raising the WHO's pandemic alert phase.
  • H1N1 is the same strain that causes seasonal flu outbreaks in humans but the newly detected version contains genetic material from versions of flu which usually affect pigs and birds.
  • It is spread mainly through coughs and sneezes.
  • Ten New Zealand students from a group which visited Mexico have tested positive for Influenza A, making it "likely" they are infected with swine flu In France, a top health official told Le Parisien newspaper there were unconfirmed suspicions that two individuals who had just returned from Mexico might be carrying the virus Spain's health ministry says three people who returned from a trip from Mexico with flu symptoms are in isolation and being tested In Israel, medics are testing a 26-year-old man who has been taken to hospital with flu-like symptoms after returning from a trip to Mexico Two people in Queensland, Australia, are being tested in hospital after developing flu-like symptoms on returning from Mexico
  • Officials in Mexico confirmed that 20 people had died from the virus while another 61 deaths were suspected cases of swine flu. More than 1,300 people have been admitted to hospital with suspected symptoms since 13 April. With Mexico City apparently the centre of infection, many people are choosing to leave the city, the BBC's Stephen Gibbs reports.
  • Dr Fukuda said on Sunday there was no proof that eating pork would lead to infection. "Right now we have no evidence to suggest that people are getting exposed, or getting infected, from exposure to pork or to pigs, and so right now we have zero evidence to suspect that exposure to meat leads to infections," he said.
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Delegates Walk Out of Racism Conference as Ahmadinejad Speaks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21geneva.html Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Israel Zionism UN Ban Ki-moon Navi Pillay
shared by Argos Media on 21 Apr 09 - Cached
  • President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran on Monday used the platform of a United Nations conference in Geneva on combating racism to disparage Israel as a “cruel and repressive racist regime,” prompting delegates from European nations to desert the hall and earning a rare harsh rebuke from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
  • As Mr. Ahmadinejad began to speak, two protesters wearing rainbow-hued clown wigs — their statement on the tenor of the proceedings — pelted him with red foam noses. Hustled out the door by security agents, they were soon followed by lines of stony-faced diplomats from the 23 European nations attending the conference. They walked out to the sound of some other delegates applauding Mr. Ahmadinejad.
  • The United States and more than a half-dozen other nations had already boycotted the gathering out of concern that it would focus on maligning Israel rather than on the global problems of discrimination, replaying the disputes that marked the first United Nations conference on combating racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.
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  • Member states, who wrangled for months over the draft document for the Geneva conference, had ultimately removed controversial statements about Israel; about what constitutes defamation of religion, a position pushed by Muslim states; and about compensation for slavery.
  • Besides the United States, the countries staying away included Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia. Canada and Israel announced months ago that they would not attend.
  • “Following World War II they resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said, grinning as he spoke, his remarks coincidentally falling on the day that Jewish communities mark the Holocaust. “And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine.”
  • The speech prompted the normally mild-mannered Mr. Ban and other top United Nations officials to voice uncommon criticism of the leader of a member state. “I have not experienced this kind of destructive proceedings in an assembly, in a conference, by any one member state,” Mr. Ban said.“I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian president to accuse, divide and even incite,” he said, urging members to “turn away from such a message in both form and substance.”
  • Navi Pillay, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad for “grandstanding” from a United Nations dais and said his performance should not be an excuse to derail the important topic of the conference. She also made a not-so-subtle dig at Iran’s treatment of its own minorities, after noting that the president’s remarks were outside the scope of the conference. “This is what I would have expected the president of Iran to come and tell us: how he is addressing racial discrimination and intolerance in his country,” Ms. Pillay said.
  • Israel recalled its ambassador to Switzerland to protest both the conference and meeting Sunday between the Swiss president, Hans-Rudolf Merz, and Mr. Ahmadinejad.
  • Not everyone at the conference was critical of the speech, which also wandered through topics like the economic collapse and Iraq and Afghanistan. “If we actually believe in freedom of expression, then he has the right to say what he wants to say,” the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Zamir Akram, told The Associated Press. “There were things in there that a lot of people in the Muslim world would be in agreement with, for example the situation in Palestine, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, even if they don’t agree with the way he said it.”
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BBC NEWS | Americas | WHO fears pandemic is 'imminent' - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/8025931.stm Health Swine Flu Margaret Chan WHO
shared by Argos Media on 30 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The UN's World Health Organization has raised the alert over swine flu to level five - indicating human-to-human transmission in at least two countries. It is a "strong signal that a pandemic is imminent", the WHO says.
  • In Mexico, at the epicentre of the outbreak, people have been urged to stay at home over the next five days. There are numerous cases elsewhere - the highest number outside Mexico in the US - and Europeans have been told it is certain there will be deaths.
  • New cases were confirmed in Switzerland, Costa Rica and Peru European health ministers were set to meet for emergency talks to co-ordinate national efforts to contain the spread of the virus Ghana has become the latest country to ban pork imports as a precaution against swine flu, though no cases have been found in the West African country.
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  • Already, schools across Mexico have closed, public gatherings are restricted and archaeological sites have been placed off-limits.
  • Meanwhile in Mexico, President Felipe Calderon has announced the partial suspension of non-essential work and services from 1 to 5 May - a holiday period there. In a TV address, he urged people to stay in with their families - saying there was "no place as safe as your own home".
  • Ms Chan stressed on Wednesday that there was no danger from eating properly cooked pork. She advised hygiene measures such as hand-washing to prevent infection and said it was important "to maintain a level of calm".
  • Mexico is already being hit hard by the global economic slowdown, and the country's finance minister says swine flu could cut a further half-percent of GDP.
  • Officials have put the number of suspected deaths from swine flu in Mexico at 168, although just eight deaths have been confirmed, with 26 infections positively tested.
  • In Europe, the director-general of health and consumer protection, Robert Madelin, said the continent was well prepared but nonetheless deaths from the disease were expected. "It is not a question of whether people will die, but more a question of how many. Will it be hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands?", he said, speaking to Reuters news agency.
  • Spain has seen the first case of a person contracting swine flu without having travelled there.
  • After Mexico, the US has recorded the next highest number of confirmed cases, with 91 - and the first death of swine flu outside Mexico, after a visiting Mexican child died in Texas.
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Clinton doesn't rule out Iran talks at Afghanistan conference - CNN.com - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html US Iran Afghanistan
shared by Argos Media on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Obama on Friday announced his decision to send an additional 4,000 troops to Afghanistan to increase training for the Afghan army and police force. They will be joined by hundreds of civilian specialists, such as agricultural experts, educators and engineers. The increase comes on top of an earlier announcement to send 17,000 additional troops to battle a re-energized Taliban insurgency.
  • The U.S. strategy also emphasizes the need to combat extremism in western Pakistan. On Friday, Obama called for legislation authorizing "$1.5 billion in direct support to the Pakistani people every year over the next five years -- resources that will build schools, roads and hospitals and strengthen" the Pakistani government.
  • "It is absolutely essential that we look at Afghanistan in conjunction with Pakistan," Clinton said.
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  • Although Clinton tried to keep the focus on Afghanistan, her attendance at the conference with a senior Iranian official marked the first such meeting involving the two countries as the Obama administration seeks greater engagement with Iran. Senior U.S. officials have said cooperation on Afghanistan could provide such an opening. Clinton noted Iran's history of cooperating with the United States on Afghanistan since the U.S. invasion in 2001. In 2003, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad held talks with Iranian officials in Geneva, Switzerland, about how the two countries could work together. She cited border security and counternarcotics efforts as two specific issues that "have a direct effect on Iran's well-being."
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