Six In The Morning

17 December 2012 Last updated at 07:42 GMT

Newtown shootings: Obama says tragedies must end

Mark MardellNorth America editor

President Barack Obama has said the US must do more to protect its children in the wake of Friday's shootings at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Speaking at an inter-faith vigil in Newtown, Mr Obama said he would use the powers of his office to prevent a repeat of the tragedy.

He told residents that the nation shared their grief.

Twenty children and six women died in the assault on Sandy Hook school by a lone man who then took his own life.

The gunman has been identified by police as Adam Lanza, 20.

He shot dead his mother before driving to the school in her car.




ROBERT FISK

Finucane, Sami al-Saadi and Khaled el-Musri: will we once again just 'move on' from the murky conduct of MI6 and the CIA?

Torture, rendition, sodomy: with ‘protectors’ like these, who needs ex-friends?

Last week was a bad week for our Protectors. It kicked off with the shameful details of the De Silva report, which concluded that the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane had been murdered with British state collusion. It’s something that all who knew Finucane had long suspected. Sir Desmond de Silva concluded that “a series of positive actions by employees of the state (ie MI6) actively furthered and facilitated his murder” and that there was afterwards “a relentless attempt to defeat the ends of justice”.

In other words, it was a set-up.

Our Protectors helped the Protestant UDA “loyalist” militia to knock off this troublesome lawyer just after a Tory Home Office minister – the very same Douglas Hogg who years later thought he could get the taxpayer to clean his moat – was used as a patsy in Parliament where he announced, three weeks before the Finucane murder, that a number of Northern Ireland solicitors were “unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA”. There is no suggestion that Mr Hogg was involved in the Finucane case.

IDDLE EAST

Tunisia descends into turmoil

Two years after the 'Arab Spring' revolution in Tunisia, the country is in turmoil. The economy is paralyzed, and the political, religious and social gulf between Islamists and the secular opposition is growing wider.

Hundreds of people have been hurt in protests since the end of November. In the Northern town of Siliana supporters of Tunisia's largest trade union UGTT protested against police abuse and social grievances. In the course of several days, more than 300 people were hurt in clashes with security forces.

In the Tunisian capital Tunis, radical Islamists attacked members of the UGTT, who were gathered outside the union's headquarters on December 4 to mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination of its founder.

The Irish Times - Monday, December 17, 2012

Opposition to a Berlusconi return gains momentum

PADDY AGNEW, in Rome

“I will be a candidate only if it is necessary.”

The man to utter those words in Brussels last week was, of course, former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Even the mercurial Berlusconi must have noticed, however, that the general feeling among his EU peer group was one of “Don’t worry, Silvio, it definitely is not necessary”.

At the end of a topsy-turvey week in the wonderland of Italian politics, a certain reservation about the spectre of Berlusconi’s return was hardly surprising. After all, in a matter of days, he had managed to generate a tsunami of confusion.

First, he brought down the 13-month-old technocrat government of Mario Monti. Second, and more alarming for some, he suggested himself as the man to replace Monti. That alarm became tangible when the markets opened last Monday with the infamous “spread” between Italian and German 10-year government bonds immediately rising 28 basis points.

Mass rape, amputations and killings -- why families are fleeing terror in Mali

16 DEC 2012 11:34 - MARK TOWNSEND

At refugee camps, reports are flooding in of horrific human rights abuses in a country once famous for its music and joyous lifestyle.

They were told to assemble in Gao's market place at dusk. A man accused of using tobacco was escorted before the crowd by several members of the al-Qaeda splinter group Movement for Tawhid and Jihad in West Africa.

"Then they chopped off his hand. They wanted to show us what they could do," said Ahmed (39) a meat trader from the town in northern Mali.

That was not the end of it. The severed hand was tossed into a vat of boiling water. Then, according to Ahmed, the man was pinned down and over the next hour the bent, misshapen hand was sewn crudely back onto his stump. Ahmed, too terrified to disclose his full name, fled Gao the next day, November 8: "I had to go. I could not live my life."

Southeast Asia

More war than peace in Myanmar

By Bertil Lintner 

LAIZA - Helicopter gunships hover in the sky above a battlefield. The constant sound of explosions and gunfire pierce the night for an estimated 100,000 refugees and internally displaced people. Military hospitals are full of wounded government soldiers, while bridges, communication lines and other crucial infrastructure lie in war-torn ruins. 

The images and sounds on the ground in Myanmar's northern Kachin State shatter the impression of peace, reconciliation and a steady march towards democracy that President Thein Sein's government has bid to convey to the outside world. In reality, the situation in this remote corner of one of Asia's historically most troubled nations is depressingly normal. 

Along the dirt road that snakes through the forests and over the

  
mountains to Laiza, the headquarters of the rebel Kachin Independence Army (KIA), civilians who have fled the fighting eke out a living by growing whatever they can and from the meager provisions provided by the rebels.