Monday, February 11, 2013
National Mirror www.nationalmirroronline.net
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World News
“First and foremost, most Afghans unfortunately do regard this bribery as a fact of life”
JEAN-LUC LEMAHIEU, REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVE FOR UNODC
Tunisian president’s party quits cabinet PAUL ARHEWE,
WITH AGENCY REPORTS
T
he secular party of Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki has withdrawn its three ministers from the country’s government, saying that its demands for changes in the cabinet have not been met. The decision yesterday by Marzouki’s Congress for the Republic Party deals a further blow to Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali’s government, already weakened by last week’s assassination of secular opposition leader Shokri Belaid. “We have been saying for a week that if the foreign and justice ministers were not changed, we would withdraw from the government,” Samir Ben Amor, a Congress for the
Moncef Marzouki, President of Tunisia, showing his Liberty passport he was given when he was living in exile in France years ago PHOTO: AP
Republic Party official, told Reuters news agency. “This decision has nothing to do with the prime minister’s decision to form a government of technocrats,” he said, referring to Jebali’s declared intention to name
a non-partisan cabinet to run day-to-day affairs until elections can be held. Jebali has himself threatened to resign unless his Ennahda party and other parties accept his proposals for an interim government of
technocrats. Jebali, who is in dispute with his party over his proposal for a new government, said on Saturday he would present his new cabinet “by the middle of next week by the latest,” the official TAP news
agency reported. If the team was accepted by parties represented in the country’s constituent assembly without being put to a vote, he would remain on as prime minister, Jebali said. Otherwise, he said, he would resign. Jebali first made the announcement on Wednesday, hours after the Belaid’s assassination outside his home by an unknown assailant. Ennahda rejected that idea soon afterwards. Jebali said on Friday that he was confident he could gain his party’s support. It remains unclear how he plans to pull enough support to his side. “I am convinced this is the best solution for the current situation in Tunisia,” Jebali said late on Friday.
South African police arrest Congo’s rebel ringleader Islamist insurgents attack
P
olice in South Africa said yesterday they arrested the “ringleader” of a group of 19 Congolese rebels who now face charges of allegedly plotting a war to unseat Congolese President Joseph Kabila. The leader, who police declined to identify before his arraignment this week in a Pretoria court, was arrested Friday in Cape Town, said Capt. Paul Ramaloko, a spokesman for South African Police Service. Ramaloko said the man didn’t fight his arrest, though he declined to offer any other details. “He cooperated with us,” the captain said. Ramaloko identified the man as the “ringleader” of the alleged rebel group, making it likely the man is Etienne Kabila, who prosecutors identified last week as being in charge of the group. Kabila claims to be a son of Congo’s assassinated president Laurent Kabila, something the Kabila family denies. Laurent Kabila’s son, Joseph Kabila, is Congo’s current president. On Feb. 5, police arrested
the 19 suspected rebels in South Africa’s north-eastern Limpopo Province. Prosecutors later said the men thought they had been on their way to a training camp, where they would learn the tactics they’d need to “wage a full-scale war” against the Kabila government. Instead, prosecutors said those that the group first contacted in September were actually undercover police officers. The suspected rebels asked the undercover officers for thousands of machine guns and grenades, as well as missiles, cash, radios and satellite phones, prosecutors said. In return, the group offered the officers mining rights for eastern
Congo, where experts estimate there mineral deposits worth trillions of dollars, prosecutors said. One of the arrested suspects is James Kazongo, a U.S. citizen who lives in Middletown, Delaware. Kazongo has denied the charges against him and has been in contact with the United States Embassy in South Africa. The 19 men face charges of violating South Africa’s Foreign Military Assistance Act, which bars people from plotting coups or mercenary activities in foreign nations. The men will appear at a bail hearing scheduled for Feb. 14, where prosecutors could present more evidence against them.
Unidentified suspects being led out of court after appearing in Pretoria, South Africa on Thursday. PHOTO: AP
Malian troops in Gao
B
lack-robed Islamic extremists armed with AK-47 automatic rifles penetrated the most populous city in northern Mali on Sunday, engaging the Malian army in combat in a surprise attack two weeks after French and Malian troops ousted the jihadists. The attack in Gao shows the Islamic fighters, many of them well armed and with combat experience, are determined and daring and it foreshadows a protracted campaign by France and other nations to restore government control in this vast Saharan nation in northwest Africa. The Islamic radicals fought against the Malian army for more than two hours and were seen roaming the streets and on rooftops in around the police headquarters in the center of Gao. Gunfire echoed across the city. Families hid in their homes. One family handed plastic cups of water through the locked iron gate to others hiding on their patio. Piles of onions lay unattended where market women fled when the Islamists arrived. The fighting appeared to centre near the police headquarters, where Malian soldiers with rocket propelled grenades traded fire with the combatants believed to be from the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, or MUJAO. The only sound was gunfire and the bleating of goats. Soldiers were positioned at every corner in the neighbourhood of mud-walled buildings.
WORLD BULLETIN
I’ll talk with US if pressure stops –Ahmadinejad Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday that he is ready to have talks with United States if the West stops pressuring his country, the latest in a series of hints from leaders in both Washington and Tehran about the prospect of direct bilateral negotiations over the Islamic Republic’s controversial nuclear program. However, Washington is highly unlikely to relax sanctions on Iran — and Tehran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on key state decisions, says that his country won’t negotiate under threat. This makes it hard to envision how talks could take place. Ahmadinejad is in his final months of his term of office and his followers are weakened by a feud with the Islamic Republic’s clerical establishment. His latest statement, which implies that he is an equal player with Khamenei in foreign policy matters, may simply be an attempt to appear as though he is still politically relevant. “You pull away the gun from the face of the Iranian nation, and I myself will enter the talks with you,” Ahmadinejad said at a ceremony marking the 34th anniversary of the 1979 revolution that toppled a Westernbacked monarch and ushered in the Islamic Republic.
German education minister quits in plagiarism case Germany’s education minister has resigned after a university decided to withdraw her doctorate, finding that she plagiarized parts of her thesis — an embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government as it prepares for elections later this year. Merkel said she had accepted “only with a very heavy heart” the resignation of Annette Schavan, who has been her education and research minister since 2005 and was considered close to the chancellor. Schavan’s resignation, which occurred Saturday, comes only two years after then-Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg lost his doctorate and quit when it emerged that he copied large parts of his doctoral thesis. Schavan said at the time she was “ashamed” of that affair. On Tuesday, an academic panel at Duesseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University voted to revoke Schavan’s doctorate following a review of her 1980 thesis, which dealt with the formation of conscience. The review was undertaken after an anonymous blogger last year raised allegations of plagiarism, which the minister denies.