Six In The Morning

Obama urges North to seek peace

In speech at HUFS, U.S. president says ‘No rewards for provocations’

JoongAng Ilbo Mar 27,2012
Amid heightened security ahead of the Nuclear Security Summit which runs until today, United States President Barack Obama spoke to Korean students yesterday morning on a Seoul campus, the first incumbent U.S. president to do so. In his third visit to the South Korean capital, Obama addressed some 700 students of the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS), several hundred of its faculty and press in the school’s Minerva Complex auditorium in Imun-dong, Dongdaemun District, northern Seoul. He spoke of South Korea’s role in the global community, calling Korea “one of the world’s most dynamic economies,” and the “urgent work of preventing nuclear terrorism by securing the world’s nuclear materials” that needed to be addressed at the summit.

Asylum claims 'at highest since 2003'
The number of refugees seeking sanctuary in the world's richest countries rose 20% last year, says the UN, with many from Afghanistan, China and Iraq

Associated Press in Geneva guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 27 March 2012 08.28 BST
Afghans topped the list of asylum claimants to the world's richest countries in 2011, followed by Chinese and Iraqis, the UN refugee agency has reported. The number of Tunisians, Libyans and people from Ivory Coast saw the biggest annual rise, while the number of Pakistanis and Syrians applying for asylum also jumped noticeably. Overall, asylum applications to the 44 industrialised countries surveyed rose 20% in 2011, to 441,300 from 368,000 the previous year. The office of the UN High It is a gun battle people in the Shubra district in central Cairo still talk about six months after it happened. In a dispute over a piece of land he had seized amid the small shops and densely crowded streets, Mohammed Shaban, who had escaped from prison during the revolution, challenged the police to a fight. He told one policeman who tried to evict him "to get out or we will kill you". When other police arrived, two of them were wounded by gunshots and Shaban was killed along with a local plumber, shot dead by police who mistook him for a gunman. "Mohammed Shaban's family consider him a martyr but nobody else around here does," says Abu Hatem, a taxi driver living in Shubra

The true price of Egypt's freedom
Mubarak is long gone – but in place of brutality and cronyism, fear of crime and poverty have soared. In Cairo, Patrick Cockburn finds a nation on a knife-edge

Cairo Tuesday 27 March 2012
It is a gun battle people in the Shubra district in central Cairo still talk about six months after it happened. In a dispute over a piece of land he had seized amid the small shops and densely crowded streets, Mohammed Shaban, who had escaped from prison during the revolution, challenged the police to a fight. He told one policeman who tried to evict him "to get out or we will kill you". When other police arrived, two of them were wounded by gunshots and Shaban was killed along with a local plumber, shot dead by police who mistook him for a gunman. "Mohammed Shaban's family consider him a martyr but nobody else around here does," says Abu Hatem, a taxi driver living in Shubra.

'I Am the Last Free Man in This Country'
Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili has taken on President Mikheil Saakashvili by establishing an opposition movement. Many of his supporters were recently questioned in what Amnesty has called an intimidation attempt.


Just days after German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle had called for freedom of the press and "respect for the rights of the opposition" during a visit to Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashvili has mounted a major campaign against his political adversaries. More than 100 supporters of opposition leader and oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili were summoned for questioning earlier this month. The interrogations, which went on for hours, prompted the human rights group Amnesty International to accuse Saakashvili of conducting a deliberate campaign of intimidation.

'Red terror' adds to Bo scandal


SHARON LaFRANIERE March 27, 2012 - 1:19PM
BEIJING: As Bo Xilai, the dismissed Chongqing party chief, becomes immersed in an ever-more tangled scandal, disturbing new details are emerging about one of his best-known initiatives, a crusade against organised crime on which he built a national reputation. Since Bo was fired last month after a scandal involving his police chief, a starkly different picture of his sweeping campaign to break up organised gangs — called da hei, or smash black — is coming into focus. Once hailed as a pioneering effort to wipe out corruption, critics now say it depicts a security apparatus run amok: framing victims, extracting confessions through torture, extorting business empires and visiting retribution on the political rivals of Bo and his friends while protecting those with better connections.

Iran not keen to walk Turkey's red carpet
Middle East

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts - In a major setback for Turkey's self-promotion as a pivot of regional diplomacy, Tehran could rebuff Ankara's bid to hold the next round of multilateral nuclear talks in Istanbul. As a result, unless Ankara sends Tehran some reassuring signals, it is a sure bet that the talks will be held elsewhere. Although no official announcement has been made, reports from Tehran indicate that compared to two years ago, when Iran trusted Turkey enough to consider inking an agreement with it, together with Brazil, that called for Turkey's safekeeping of Iran's enriched uranium, today a good deal of that trust has disappeared, replaced with a growing Iran disquiet about Turkey's perceived ill intentions toward Syria and, indirectly, Iran.