ISB 27 11 2011_Layout 1 11/27/2011 2:32 AM Page 17
Sunday, 27 November, 2011
Foreign News 16
indian communists demand probe into Maoist killing NEw DELhI afp
India’s communists and a human rights group condemned Saturday the killing of a top Maoist rebel and suggested that the shoot out in which he was killed was staged by security forces. Indian police has been in the spotlight over “fake encounters” or staged killings in the recent past. In 2009, New York-based Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 80 police officers and said nearly all believed illegal detention, torture and even killing were legitimate tools for law enforcement. Police said Maoist military commander Koteshwar Rao, also known as Kishnenji, died Thursday in a gunbattle in a forest in the eastern state of West Bengal, striking a major blow to extreme leftwing fighters who control impoverished but mineral-rich swathes of the country. “The story of the encounter appears to be fake,” Gurudas Dasgupta of the Communist Party of India said, asking for a government probe into whether the rebel leader had been killed in “cold blood”. The government released photographs of the slain 58-year-old rebel commander lying in a pool of blood next to a machine-gun while bullet marks on trees and nearly 100 spent cartridges marked the scene of the shootout.
Putin awaits Russia’s presidential nomination MoSCow
SANAA: yemeni anti-government protesters march during a demonstration demanding the trial of yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Saturday. AfP
16 killed in Iraq attacks
afp
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be nominated to run in Russia’s March presidential polls Sunday in a ruling party congress that hopes to ride its leader’s coattails into next week’s legislative polls. The United Russia gathering in Moscow is expected to offer plenty of pomp and patriotic fervor but little suspense after Putin in September accepted a well-choreographed proposal to swap jobs with President Dmitry Medvedev. Russia’s ruling tandem has since been busy rallying support for its party ahead of December 4 elections to the State Duma in which United Russia is expected to lose some of its current dominance while still coming in first. And the focus Sunday will be squarely on Putin — an ex-KGB man who has been Russia’s most popular figure since his 2000-2008 presidency — as United Russia tries to absorb his charisma and associate itself more closely with his name. “With a candidate like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, we are confident of our victory,” United Russia party secretary Sergei Neverov said on the eve of Sunday’s meeting. The Luzhniki stadium event will be broadcast live across the nation and attended by some 11,000 delegates who besides Medvedev and the top ministers will include famous sports figures and members of Russia’s cultural elite. United Russia will hope to get a boost from the festivities after the publication of two pre-election polls showing the party losing Duma seats for the first time since it stormed the lower house of parliament in 2003. The independent Levada centre showed United Russia’s support slipping from the 64.3 percent it enjoyed in the 2007 elections to just 53 percent today. This would leave Putin’s party holding 253 of the Duma’s 450 seats — well down on the current 315 figure and below the two-thirds constitutional majority needed for the Kremlin to change Russia’s basic law without outside support.
BAghDAD
B
afp
OMB and gun attacks in central Iraq killed at least 16 people and wounded more than 20 others on Saturday, security officials and a doctor said. The latest attacks came two days after triple blasts killed 19 people in the south-
ern port city of Basra. At the launch of Saturday’s violence, bombs on each side of the main road from Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, to Fallujah hit a truck carrying construction workers, First Lieutenant Omar Zawbai of the Abu Ghraib police told AFP. Dr Omar Delli of Fallujah Hospital said “the hospital received seven bodies and seven wounded,” two of whom later died. An interior ministry official put the casualty toll at eight dead and 13 wounded
from the Abu Ghraib attack. The official also said three bombs exploded in the Baab al-Sharqi area of central Baghdad, killing seven people and wounding 28 others. A defence ministry official put the toll from the Baghdad blasts at eight dead and 16 wounded. The interior ministry official also said an employee of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s administration was shot dead by gunmen using silencers near Nisur Square in central Baghdad.
Ukraine claims Tymoshenko firm linked to murder KIEV afp
A top Ukrainian prosecutor claimed that Kiev had firm evidence linking a company once controlled by jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko to the 1996 airport slaying of a parliament deputy. The allegations, which aired late Friday on Ukraine’s Inter television, piled still more pressure on Tymoshenko following her conviction and seven-year jailing on abuse of authority charges while in office as prime minister. She has accused President Viktor Yanukovych of prosecuting her as part of a vendetta that followed last year’s bitter national elections she lost. The case has hurt Ukraine’s hopes of signing a cooperation agreement with
the eU. But Western condemnation has done little to help the former Orange Revolution leader and Tymoshenko now faces new charges relating to financial crimes allegedly committed by her and ex-premier Pavlo Lazarenko in the 1990s. The string of firms named in the new case include one Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin said had transferred money to the accounts of the killers of deputy Yevhen Shcherban and his wife along with an airport official in 2003. Lazarenko was jailed in the United States in 2006 on money laundering charges and has already been named as the prime suspect in the deputy’s murder. The prosecutor said the new evidence linking the Somali enterprises firm that Lazarenko and Tymoshenko were be-
lieved to have jointly controlled in the 1990s to the murder currently remained in the United States. “All of this has been proven. With documents. There is no doubt about that,” said the prosecutor. “We would like some help from the Americans in this matter. We have been trying to question Lazarenko for the past year on various issues including this one,” Kuzmin said. “But we have been unable to travel to the United States to interrogate these people.” A lawmakers in Tymoshenko’s parliamentary part told Moscow echo radio that the 1996 murder investigation has long concluded and could hardly produce new leads at this stage. “What Kuzmin is saying is pure fantasy,” parliament deputy Serhiy Vlasenko told the Moscow radio station.
Violence, pepper spray mar US Black friday shopping g
Rush for bargains turns violent g woman uses pepper spray in swarm for Xboxes g Videos become a youTube sensation NEw YorK reuTerS
Black Friday turned into a black mark against American shoppers as riotous crowds brawled over video games, waffle irons and towels, drawing international condemnation and even raising questions about the state of humanity. One of the most outrageous incidents of the day was in the Los Angeles area, where up to 20 people were injured after a woman at a Walmart used pepper spray to get an edge on other shoppers in a rush for Xbox game consoles. Walmart seemed to have a worse day than many other retailers as shoppers screamed, shoved and elbowed each other to save a few bucks. Incidents across the country included a man shot by robbers in the parking lot outside the San Leandro, California store and shoppers pepper sprayed by security at a store in Kinston, North Carolina. A fight for
bath towels, purportedly recorded at a Michigan store, has become a YouTube sensation. Cheap towels also caused mayhem at a Walmart in Oregon, Ohio. “They were fighting over bath towels on sale for $1.88, as ridiculous as that sounds,” Police Sergeant Jason Druckenmiller said. “A woman tried to get her hands on some towels when she was pushed from behind, and that’s when she came out swinging.” Company spokesman Greg Rossiter said violence at a handful of stores marred an otherwise safe start to the holiday shopping season at thousands of Walmart stores. COMMENTARY ON HUMANITY? Videos of shopping pandemonium crowded YouTube by late Friday. One clip showed a crowd crushing and tearing apart boxes in a free-for-all for inexpensive cell phones. Another showed people flooding into a store as the gates were raised. “This is what the human race has come to huh??” asked one person who commented online. Another said it “looked like a piranha feeding
frenzy.” The instant classic of the day was a video of an Arkansas melee over a $2 waffle iron. The shaky, 48second clip shows a mass of squealing and shouting men, women and children climbing over each other, grabbing and tossing boxes, with one woman seemingly unaware that her pants were sliding down her backside. “Oh my God!” a woman screamed in the only sentence discernible among the high-pitched shrieks. One person commenting on the video wrote: “The pinnacle of Western Civilization has arrived.” A Walmart in Cave Creek, Arizona, was evacuated Thursday night after a suspicious package was found in an employee break room, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Christopher Hegstrom said. A police robot retrieved the package, and bomb-sniffing dogs searched the store before it was reopened. A video of a grandfather injured when he was knocked down by police at an Arizona Walmart went viral on YouTube. The video showed the man unconscious and bleeding
from his face as police rolled him over and mopped up blood. Witnesses screamed at the police, accusing them of brutality and shouting for someone to call “911” for emergency medical assistance. According to reports, the man was knocked down by police after putting a video game in his belt to free his hands so he could pick up his grandson as the crowd surged around them. In the Manhattan borough of New York City, shoppers unhappy that Hollister’s flagship store was not opening at midnight, as other locations were, broke into the store and stole clothing, police said. Black Friday drew bad press and mockery outside the United States. In Toronto, a headline on the website of the Globe and Mail proclaimed: “Pepper-spray, shootings and other Black Friday madness.” Dutch state television showed an overhead shot of hundreds of people camped outside a west coast store. “No tents from the Occupy movement here in California, but clients waiting hours until the stores open,” the anchor said.
Three bombs exploded in Basra on Thursday, killing 19 people, including high-ranking army and police officers, and wounding at least 65. Basra provincial council sacked three top security officers the next day. Violence has declined nationwide since its peak in 2006 and 2007, but attacks remain common. A total of 258 people were killed in October, according to official figures.
New zealand PM John Key wins second term wELLINgToN afp
New Zealand Prime Minister John Key won a second term Saturday, with voters in no mood for change after a tumultuous year marked by a devastating earthquake and glory in the Rugby World Cup. Key’s centre-right National Party fell just short of an outright majority but lifted its vote by more than three points to 48.1 percent, its highest in 60 years, and will form government in coalition with minor parties. “What an awesome night, and what a wonderful night to be the leader of the National Party,” he told cheering supporters at Auckland’s upmarket SkyCity Casino. The election followed a turbulent 12 months for New Zealand, which was rocked by February’s Christchurch earthquake, in which 181 people died, and buoyed by last month’s victory in the Rugby World Cup. Key, 50, won plaudits for his leadership through the quake, as well as a colliery explosion in which 29 miners died, and much of National’s campaign was based around his personal popularity. “In the worst of times you see the very best of New Zealanders and I’m proud to be prime minister of this great country,” the former investment banker said. The main opposition Labour Party secured only 27 percent of the vote, its worst result since New Zealand adopted a proportional voting system in 1996. Labour leader Phil Goff said he accepted the electorate’s decision but his party would hold the government to account and rebuild for the next election. “It might not be our time this time, but our time will come again and we will be ready to take New Zealand forward,” he said, refusing to say if he would stay on as leader. “We’re a bit bloodied but we’re not defeated.” However former Labour Party president Mike Williams: “It’s an an unmitigated disaster.” The result gives National 60 seats in a 121 seat parliament but support from existing coalition partners ACT and United Future, with one seat each, gives it the required 61-seat threshold in the proportional representation parliament.