Kerry Begins 2nd Day of Negotiations on Syria’s Chemical Arsenal
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and STEVEN LEE MYERS
Published: September 13, 2013
GENEVA — Starting a second day of negotiations on Syria’s chemical weapons, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry had a three-way meeting Friday morning at the Palais de Nations here with his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, and Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy on the Syria issue.
At the start of the meeting, Mr. Kerry said his talks Thursday with Mr. Lavrov had been “constructive.” But there was no way to tell if the United States and Russia had made any substantive headway on what Mr. Kerry had previously called the “exceedingly difficult” task of developing a credible plan to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stocks.
Mr. Kerry set an early test for Syria by insisting on quick disclosure of data on the country’s chemical arsenal. His demand came as he began talks with Mr. Lavrov on a plan to secure and dispose of Syria’s poisonous gas.
China sentences three men to death over attack blamed on Islamists
Another man is sentenced to 25 years for role in violence that left 24 police and civilians dead in restive Xinjiang region
China has sentenced three men to death over a June attack in the restive north-western region of Xinjiang blamed on Islamic extremists in which 24 police and civilians were killed.
The official Xinhua news agency said on Friday that another man was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his role in the violence on 26 June in which 13 militants were also killed. All four were found guilty of murder and being members of a terrorist organisation and sentenced on Thursday by the intermediate court in the city of Turfan at the end of a one-day trial.
All were identified by names common among Xinjiang's indigenous Turkic Uighur minority group, some members of which have pursued a long-simmering insurgency against Chinese rule in the vast region bordering on Central Asia.
Dutch media work together on leaks site
Specialist web platform will allow whistleblowers to leak confidential documents
Peter Cluskey
Media organisations in the Netherlands, normally in cutthroat competition with one another, have become the first in the world to co-operate to create a specialist web platform which will allow whistleblowers to leak confidential documents securely.
Prompted by the controversy over Edward Snowden, the former CIA and NSA contractor who leaked details of top-secret US and British government mass surveillance programmes, the Dutch media outlets say Publeaks.nl will be sophisticated enough to defy even professional state hackers.
After the Islamists: Fearing for the Future in Northern Mali
Residents of the battered northern Mali city of Gao are attempting to rebuild after French troops helped drive out jihadists early this year. Now local leaders are hoping the world won't forget them.
The same annoying woman is rattling the glass door again. She's come several times today already, and each time the governor of Gao sends her away again. It's the same every day, from morning to night -- petitioners line up at his door and Mamadou Adama Diallo, 55, has to turn them away. Diallo is the highest government representative in this dusty city of 90,000, but that doesn't mean he's able to help people here, because the government doesn't exist anymore -- at least not here in northern Mali.
Jordan-based MIT startup helps those in developing world build savings
Bluelight, a savings program for low-income individuals, aims to fill a gap created by the Middle East's low access to financial services.
As fresh graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Mass., R. Blaize Wallace and Mustafa Khalifeh could have taken highly lucrative positions in the business world.
Instead, they are launching a start-up from a few spare desks at Jordan’s Oasis500 accelerator. Their idea, which won the $50,000 grand prize in social enterprise at Harvard Business School’s New Ventures competition this spring, aims to help low-income citizens save up for large purchases – such as a washing machine, which could free up women’s time and thus advance opportunities for women in the developing world.
So why Jordan? Well, it is Mr. Khalifeh’s home country, where he helped found three companies before going to Sloan, but he also made a convincing sales pitch to Mr. Wallace and their two other partners, Hoda Eydgahi and Manoah Koletty.
Voyager 1 becomes first human-made object to leave solar system
At the edge of the heliosphere, you wouldn't know by looking whether you left the cradle of humanity behind and floated out into interstellar space. You would just see unfathomably empty space, no matter which side of the invisible line you were on.
But scientists now have strong evidence that NASA's Voyager 1probe has crossed this important border, making history as the first human-made object to leave the heliosphere, the magnetic boundary separating the solar system's sun, planets and solar wind from the rest of the galaxy.
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