Friday, March 7, 2014
National Mirror www.nationalmirroronline.net
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World News
“Protecting the secrecy of private conversations is ... one of the founding principles of a democratic society.” –FORMER FRENCH PRESIDENT, NICOLAS SARKOZY
Niger extradites Gaddafi’s son to Libya PAUL ARHEWE
WITH AGENCY REPORTS
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he Libyan government says former leader Col Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saadi, has been extradited from Niger and is now in custody in Tripoli. Pictures posted on the internet showed him having his head and beard shaved. Saadi Gaddafi, the former head of Libya’s football federation, fled after his father was killed in the 2011 revolution. The 40-year-old is best known for a brief career in Italian football as well as his playboy lifestyle. Saadi, one of Col Gaddafi’s seven sons, is accused of shooting protesters and other crimes committed during his father’s rule. “The Libyan government received today Saadi Gaddafi and he arrived in Tripoli,” the Libyan government said in a statement early yesterday. Two security sources later confirmed to the BBC’s Rana Jawad that Saadi Gaddafi had been returned and was now in the hands of the Libyan judicial authorities. Lawyer Nick Kaufman, who has previously represented Saadi and other Gaddafi family members, criticised the move, calling it a “rendition”. “I don’t think that Saadi Gaddafi was afforded any form of legal process in Niger before his rendering to Libya,” Kaufman said.
Saadi Gaddafi before and after his head was shaved following his extradition
Niger had previously refused Libyan requests to extradite him, with the justice minister saying he was “certain to face the death penalty”. In 2012, Interpol issued a “red notice”, obliging member countries to arrest him. Saadi Gaddafi had reportedly resided in a state guesthouse in Niger’s capital, Niamey, after fleeing across the Sahara desert. Since the 2011 uprising, Libya’s new government has sought the extradition of several Gaddafi family members and ex-offi-
cials, with mixed success. Niger extradited Abdallah Mansur, a former top intelligence official, to Libya on 14 February. He was one of 15 other officials sent back to Libya after Niger accused them of plotting against the new Libya govt Mauritania also extradited Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, in January 2013. Libya’s deputy prime minister at the time was forced to deny that Mauritania had been paid to extradite Senussi.
Ukraine crisis: Crimea votes to join Russia
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rimea’s parliament voted to join Russia yesterday and its Moscow-backed government set a referendum on the decision in 10 days’ time in a dramatic escalation of the crisis over the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula. The sudden acceleration of moves to bring Crimea, which has an ethnic Russian majority and has effectively been seized by Russian forces, formally under Moscow’s rule came as European Union leaders held an emergency summit groping for ways to pressure Russia to back down and accept mediation. U.S. President Barack Obama took the first steps to punish Russians and Ukrainians involved in what he called “threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine”, ordering the freezing of their U.S. assets and a ban on travel to the United States.
A woman walking past a Bulgarian communist-era monument painted by unknown people in Sofia Photo: AP
The names on the blacklist were not immediately made public but a U.S. official said they did not include Russian President Vladimir Putin. The crisis in Ukraine began in November when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, under Russian pressure, turned his back on a trade deal
with the EU and accepted a $15 billion bailout from Moscow. That prompted three months of street protests leading to the overthrow of Yanukovich on February 22. Moscow denounced the events as an illegitimate coup and refused to recognize the new Ukrainian authorities.
Pistorius prayed over his shot girlfriend
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s the girlfriend he shot lay dead or dying in his home, a weeping, praying Oscar Pistorius knelt at her side and struggled in vain to help her breathe by holding two fingers in her clenched mouth, a witness testified Thursday at the doubleamputee runner’s murder trial. “’I shot her. I thought she was a burglar. I shot her,’” radiologist Johan Stipp recalled Pistorius saying in the minutes after the fatal shooting for which the celebrated athlete is on trial for murder. A few minutes later, Stipp said, Pistorius went upstairs — the area where he had shot Reeva Steenkamp — and then returned. At that point, Stipp said he was concerned that the gun used in the shooting had not been recovered and that a distraught Pistorius was going to harm himself. The testimony did not address what Pistorius did when he went upstairs. The testimony in a Pretoria court was the first detailed, public description of the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model, by the Olympian in the pre-dawn hours of Feb. 14 — Valentine’s Day — last year. At his bail hearing last year, Pistorius said in a statement read by lawyer Barry Roux that, after he realized he had shot Steenkamp, he pulled on his prosthetic legs and tried to kick down the toilet door before finally giving up and bashing it in with a cricket bat. Inside, he said he found Steenkamp, slumped over but still alive.
WORLD BULLETIN Clinton again blasts Putin after her Hitler remark Russian President Vladimir Putin is a tough but thin-skinned leader who is squandering his country’s potential, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, a day after she likened his actions on the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine to those of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Clinton, a potential 2016 presidential contender, warned during her a speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, that “all parties should avoid steps that could be misinterpreted or lead to miscalculation at this delicate time.” Putin has said he was protecting ethnic Russians by moving troops into Crimea. Clinton said Tuesday at a closed fundraising luncheon in Long Beach that Putin’s actions are similar what happened in the Nazi era in Czechoslovakia and Romania. “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ‘30s,” Clinton said, according to the Press-Telegram of Long Beach. “Hitler kept saying, ‘They’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people.’ And that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”
Tunisia lifts state of emergency, three years after revolt Tunisia has lifted a state of emergency three years after it was imposed, in a largely symbolic move to show security is improving in the North African state. Since the 2011 uprising that ousted autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisian security forces have been battling militants from the hard-line Islamist movement Ansar al-Sharia, one of the radical groups to emerge after Ben Ali’s fall. “The President of the Republic issued a decree to lift the state of emergency beginning on March 5, 2014,” a statement from the presidency said yesterday. The state of emergency had kept security forces on alert across the country and given troops and police authority to intervene in protests. Troops have arrested dozens of militants and killed others during raids over the past few months. It has also affected tourism, which is a major part of Tunisia’s economy. Almost 7 million tourists came to the country in 2010, a few months before the uprising. Last year, that was down to about 6 million in 2012. Attracting more tourists will help Tunisia to stabilize its economy. Then it can carry out reforms demanded by international lenders, who want to see the state reduce its budget deficit and trim public spending.