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Pedro Gonçalves

Beirut hit by double rocket attack | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • It was the first attack to apparently target Hezbollah's stronghold in the south of the Lebanese capital since the outbreak of the two-year conflict in neighbouring Syria, which has heightened Lebanon's own sectarian tensions.
  • The rocket strikes came hours after the Hezbollah leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, a powerful supporter of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, said his fighters were committed to the conflict whatever the cost.
  • Syria's two-year uprising has polarised Lebanon, with Sunni Muslims supporting the rebellion against Assad and Shia Hezbollah and its allies standing by Assad. The Lebanese city of Tripoli has seen frequent explosions of violence between majority Sunnis and its small Alawite community.
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  • Until recently, Nasrallah insisted Hezbollah had not sent guerrillas to fight alongside Assad's forces, but in his speech on Saturday he said it had been fighting in Syria for several months to defend Lebanon from radical Islamist groups he said were driving Syria's rebellion.
  • At least 25 people have been killed in Tripoli in the north of Lebanon over the past week in street fighting, which has coincided with the battle for Qusair across the border.
Pedro Gonçalves

White House admits four US citizens were killed by drone strikes | World news | guardia... - 0 views

  • admitting for the first time that four American citizens were among those killed by its covert attacks in Yemen and Pakistan since 2009.
  • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that between 240 and 347 people have been killed in total by confirmed US drone strikes in Yemen since 2002, with a further 2,541 to 3,533 killed by CIA drones in Pakistan.
Pedro Gonçalves

Ad of the Day: Coca-Cola Tries to 'Open Happiness' Between India and Pakistan | Adweek - 0 views

  • Cola diplomacy runs the risk of coming across as painfully naive by oversimplifying a complex issue that's tangled up in a long history of imperialism, religious conflict and nuclear stand-off, to name a few factors. Coke frames this powder keg of a problem as, on some level, simply one of miscommunication—because that's small enough that the brand can then frame itself as the solution. Sure, more understanding and common ground isn't a bad thing, and Coke takes some pains to temper the portrayal of its own success, erring on the side of aspirational everyman/everywoman voiceover platitudes throughout the spot (e.g., "We are going to take minor steps so that we are going to solve bigger issues.") But really, what the brand is taking minor steps toward is selling more sugar water in a way that isn't explicitly about selling more sugar water, and has at least the veneer of a higher purpose.
  • the social-media zeitgeist holds that doing good is good for business. Yes, a warm-and-fuzzy video like this has some entertainment value, and it's is certainly more palatable—and arguably more effective—than a hard-sell product spot. But doesn't distilling a geopolitical conflict into short-form branded content do more harm than good by trivializing it? Or if everyone just drank a Coke, would they really get along?
Pedro Gonçalves

Chinese Army Cyberunit Apparently Attacking U.S. Targets Again - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • The New York Times is reporting that Unit 61398 has resumed operations and is actively engaged in hacking into any U.S. systems that might hold information considered to be of use for the People's Republic of China.
Pedro Gonçalves

David Cameron offers olive branch on EU referendum as Ukip soars | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The poll findings, showing Ukip on a record high in an ICM poll of 18%
  • The poll shows that support for the three main parties has drained away to Ukip, with each of them down four points on last month – Labour dropping to 34%, the Tories 28%, and the Liberal Democrats 11% – as Nigel Farage's party gained nine points.
  • For all three established parties to be falling back in the polls at the same time is unprecedented in the 29-year history of the Guardian/ICM series. The Tories are plumbing depths they have not experienced in over a decade.
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  • The president first described Britain's EU membership as an "expression of its influence" around the world, but then offered measured praise for the prime minister's plan to renegotiate Britain's EU membership terms after the next election. He said: "You probably want to see if you can fix what is broken in a very important relationship before you break it off – that makes some sense to me."
  • Earlier Cameron – in danger of looking as weak as John Major at the height of the Maastricht crisis – took comfort from the broad endorsement of his European strategy by Barack Obama at a joint White House Press conference.
  • But Obama said he would wait to see if the negotiations succeeded before making a final judgment, and repeatedly stressed the need for the UK to be engaged.
  • The Guardian/ICM poll is remarkable because barring a single month in 2002, the Conservatives have not dropped below 28% since Tony Blair's long honeymoon in 1997-98. The Lib Dems have not fallen below today's 11% in the series since September of 1997, the immediate aftermath of Blair's first victory. Labour's 34% score is its lowest since the immediate aftermath of Gordon Brown's ejection from power, in July 2010.
  • The poll also shows that there is a clear "Farage factor" in the personal leadership ratings. Last month voters were split down the middle on his performance with 28% saying Nigel Farage, the Ukip leader, was doing a good job, and 29% a bad job, giving a net negative score of –1. Today, the balance of opinion is running 40%:23% in his favour, a net positive of +17.
Pedro Gonçalves

David Cameron faces EU cabinet crisis as ministers break ranks | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

  • David Cameron is struggling to maintain Tory discipline over Europe after cabinet loyalists Michael Gove and Philip Hammond said on Sunday they would vote to leave the European Union if a referendum were to be held now.
  • Gove, the education minister, confirmed for the first time that he believes that leaving the EU would have "certain advantages", while Hammond, the defence secretary, later said he too would vote to leave if he was asked to endorse the EU "exactly as it is today".
  • Hammond, interviewed for Pienaar's Politics on BBC radio, later said: "If the choice is between a European Union written exactly as it is today and not being a part of that then I have to say that I'm on the side of the argument that Michael Gove has put forward."
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  • The prime minister says that, if elected with a majority in 2015, he would hold a referendum by 2017. This would take place after a renegotiation of Britain's membership terms.
  • The remarks, which follow similar calls by Lord Lawson and Michael Portillo last week for Britain to leave Europe, are particularly significant because they are the first cabinet ministers to say they would vote to quit if an immediate referendum were held.
  • Theresa May, the home secretary, said she too would abstain. But she declined to say whether she would vote to leave the EU if a referendum were held now. The prime minister will be in the US when the Commons vote is held.
  • Boris Johnson backed Tory backbench demands for an EU referendum bill and warned Cameron he must make it clear Britain is "ready to walk away" unless its relationship is fundamentally reformed,
  • But the mayor of London also suggested that leaving the EU would expose the idea that most of Britain's problems are self-inflicted. "If we left the EU, we would end this sterile debate, and we would have to recognise that most of our problems are not caused by 'Bwussels', but by chronic British short-termism, inadequate management, sloth, low skills, a culture of easy gratification and underinvestment in both human and physical capital and infrastructure," Johnson wrote in his Daily Telegraph column."Why are we still, person for person, so much less productive than the Germans? That is now a question more than a century old, and the answer is nothing to do with the EU. In or out of the EU, we must have a clear vision of how we are going to be competitive in a global economy."
  • The prime minister's decision to highlight the benefits of EU membership is likely to be welcomed by Obama, whose advisers expressed concern in the runup to Cameron's EU speech in January, when he outlined his referendum plan.
Pedro Gonçalves

Free Syrian Army rebels defect to Islamist group Jabhat al-Nusra | World news | The Gua... - 0 views

  • "No one should blame us for joining al-Nusra. Blame the west if Syria is going to become a haven for al-Qaida and extremists. The west left Assad's gangs to slaughter us. They never bothered to support the FSA. They disappointed ordinary Syrian protesters who just wanted their freedom and to have Syria for all Syrians."
Pedro Gonçalves

Tories call for rapid Europe vote to halt Nigel Farage surge | Politics | The Observer - 0 views

  • Ukip's surge to 23% of the vote – just 2% behind the Tories – reinforced their fear that Farage and his team could emerge as the largest party from next year's European elections.
  • Tories are increasingly concerned that, if they fail to act, Farage could go on to inflict serious damage on their prospects of keeping Labour out of power at the 2015 general election.
  • In the first referendum, people would be asked to give Cameron authority to renegotiate the terms of UK membership on issues such as employment policy, co-operation over police and justice policy, and immigration. A second in/out referendum would be held, as is planned in the next parliament, in which people would be asked if they wanted to remain in the EU after a deal was reached with the UK's EU partners.
Pedro Gonçalves

Ukip makes huge gains in local government elections | Politics | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • Ukip has delivered its strongest performance in local elections
  • In the biggest surge by a fourth party in England since the second world war, Ukip averaged 26% of the vote in council wards where it stood, according to a BBC estimate
  • Hilary Benn, the shadow communities secretary, played down the Ukip threat. He told the BBC: "It is a protest party and not a party of government. Its economic policy does not add up."
Pedro Gonçalves

The European dream is in dire need of a reality check | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free... - 0 views

  • In every one of the big European states, trust has gone into "a vertiginous decline". Five years ago, no country, not even Britain, showed more than half its voters hostile to Europe, and most were strongly supportive. Now, according to the EU's own Eurobarometer, distrust runs at 53% in Italy, 56% in France, 59% in Germany, 69% in the UK and 72% in Spain. The EU has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens. Does it matter?
  • "Anti-Europeanism" was growing across Europe even before the credit crunch – witness the Lisbon treaty referendums. It is reflected in the rise of nationalist parties and is rampant even among such one-time EU loyalists as Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany. As the head of the European Council on Foreign Relations, José Ignacio Torreblanca, said of yesterday's poll, "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor or debtor country … citizens now think their national democracy is being subverted."
  • Dreams make dangerous politics, and when they require the imposition of "yet more Europe" against the run of public opinion, they are badly in need of a reality check. The new requirement that the EU (in this case Germany) imposes budgets on indebted states goes far beyond anything domestic voters seem likely to tolerate.Barroso's dream is becoming the vision espoused by the Columbia professor of European history István Deák, who demanded last year in the New York Times "a new imperial construct" as the only alternative to save the continent from a "revival of tribalism". To Deák this new empire was "a sacred task … an almost religious goal: a new European faith that belongs to no church".
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  • Even a majority of Germans are now anti-EU, and a third want the deutschmark back.
  • Cameron and the sceptics therefore need to be constructive to be plausible. They need to argue for a European Bretton Woods, to write off bad debts and recalibrate regional economies by returning to revalued regional currencies. They need to propose European institutions that respect national politics and character, not just grab more power to the centre. There needs to be a sceptics' vision of Europe.Closer European union was an answer to war. After that it offered an answer to communist dictatorship. In both it could claim success. Finally, at Maastricht in 1992, it flew too near the sun. It pretended that one currency traded within a single politico-economic space could overcome economic diversity and yield a common wealth. It overreached itself. In refusing to recognise this failure, Barroso and his colleagues now risk jeopardising even Europe's earlier successes.
Pedro Gonçalves

Crisis for Europe as trust hits record low | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off," said José Ignacio Torreblanca, head of the ECFR's Madrid office. "Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted."
  • The most dramatic fall in faith in the EU has occurred in Spain, where the banking and housing market collapse, eurozone bailout and runaway unemployment have combined to produce 72% "tending not to trust" the EU, with only 20% "tending to trust".
  • In Spain, trust in the EU fell from 65% to 20% over the five-year period while mistrust soared to 72% from 23%.
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  • The data compares trust and mistrust in the EU at the end of last year with levels in 2007, before the financial crisis, to reveal a precipitate fall in support for the EU of the kind that is common in Britain but is much more rarely seen on the continent.
  • Five years ago, 56% of Germans "tended to trust" the EU, whereas 59% now "tend to mistrust". In France, mistrust has risen from 41% to 56%. In Italy, where public confidence in Europe has traditionally been higher than in the national political class, mistrust of the EU has almost doubled from 28% to 53%.Even in Poland, which enthusiastically joined the EU less than a decade ago and is the single biggest beneficiary from the transfers of tens of billions of euros from Brussels, support has plummeted from 68% to 48%, although it remains the sole country surveyed where more people trust than mistrust the union.In Britain, where Eurobarometer regularly finds majority Euroscepticism, the mistrust grew from 49% to 69%, the highest level with the exception of the extraordinary turnaround in Spain.
  • "Overall levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy [declined] across much of Europe, but this varied markedly between countries. It was significant in Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Finland, particularly notable in France, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain, and reached truly alarming proportions in the case of Greece," it said.
  • Aart de Geus, head of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German thinktank, also warned that the drive to surrender more key national powers to Brussels would backfire. "Public support for the EU has been falling since 2007. So it is risky to go for federalism as it can cause a backlash and unleash greater populism."
Pedro Gonçalves

MI6 and CIA heard Iraq had no active WMD capability ahead of invasion | World news | gu... - 0 views

  • Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
  • British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.
  • Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally fabricated".
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  • three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq's head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.
  • Butler says of the use of intelligence: "There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages."
Pedro Gonçalves

Latvia to apply for eurozone membership within weeks | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Poland is the only EU country not to have fallen into recession since the Lehman Brothers crash. Increasingly it sees its future in being as closely integrated in the EU as possible, playing the regional leader and usurping Britain's position in policy-making influence.
  • For that to succeed, euro membership is essential as the zone binds itself into closer political and economic regimes and becomes the key decision-taking forum. The Polish president recently established a high-powered committee to examine and foster eurozone membership. Warsaw is now talking of a 2017 deadline.
  • whatever happens to the euro happens to us anyway. Our economy is completely euro-ised: 80% of borrowing, households and businesses, is in euros. This will help financial and economic stability."Similar arguments are made in Lithuania, while in Poland the impetus is less economic than political and geo-political. Warsaw appears resolved to hitch itself to Germany, and deems it a national security imperative, worried about Vladimir Putin's Russia, to embed itself utterly in the EU. It increasingly sees the eurozone as the safest of havens, despite the volatility.
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