SIx In The Morning Tuesday January 28

Illiteracy persists among Afghan troops despite US education drive

Watchdog says $200m project to teach basic reading and writing has reached only about half of the police and army

• Emma Graham-Harrison
• The Guardian, Tuesday 28 January 2014

A $200m US aid project designed to make sure the largely illiterate recruits to Afghanistan's security forces can manage basic reading and writing has reached only about half of the police and army, a US government watchdog has said.

This means tens of thousands of men on the frontline of the battle against the Taliban cannot read or prepare notes about their enemy, fill in orders for supplies and ammunition or send written reports of battles to headquarters.

Nearly 400,000 soldiers and police have attended some form of literacy classes funded by Nato or the US.

Too many deaths in paradise: Jamaica is awash with police shootings and has brought in a British commissioner to investigate

Aurdia McCallum heard a group of police officers questioning her boyfriend just before the first shot rang out. According to her account, she had been bundled into one room while three officers from the Jamaica Constabulary Force took Dean Christie to the bedroom where they had been sleeping until the early morning knock.

“I shouted for Dean and the police officer slapped me in the face and said: ‘shut up, stop your noise’ but I kept on screaming,” she said. “After that I heard a gunshot explosion and I shouted for Dean, but I didn’t hear a response. They’ve ripped my heart out and there’s nothing they can do to fix it.”

Mr Christie, 25, was just one of 40 people to die at the hands of the Jamaican police in a single month of mayhem, sparked by an announcement of a harsh crackdown on gang crime by the force hierarchy.

Ukrainian prime minister resigns

Mykola Azarov steps down to help bring an end to more than two months of deadly street protests

Ukraine’s prime minister Mykola Azarov has resigned to help bring about an end to more than two months of street protests that turned deadly last week and have paralyzed government buildings across the nation.

“In order to create additional possibilities for compromise for the sake of the peaceful regulation of the conflict, I’ve taken a personal decision to ask the president accept my resignation,” Mr Azarov said today in a statement on the cabinet’s website.

“The conflict in Ukraine is threatening the country’s social and economic development.”

President Viktor Yanukovych, who must approve Mr Azarov’s exit, is struggling to contain unrest that’s spread from the capital to other cities across the country of 45 million people, a key transit route for Russian energy supplies to Europe.

Syria's Bodies: 'The Stench Was Unfathomable'

By Christoph Reuter and Christoph Scheuermann

Photos released last week show that the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad tortures, starves and murders its prisoners. The images provide grisly evidence to support what witnesses have been telling SPIEGEL for months.

He says he was never witness to executions, nor did he see torture taking place. That wasn't his job. His task was that of taking photos of the corpses afterwards. He would snap four or five images per body -- of the face and other parts of the person -- documenting the cause of death, insofar as it was possible to determine. He did so tens of thousands of times between March 2011 and August 2013 -- when he finally fled Syria, taking some 55,000 photos with him on a USB stick. The images are of starved, strangled and tortured men, primarily young and mostly naked. Some have no eyes. The defector, who has been cited under the alias "Caesar," worked for Syrian security, and says that he and his colleagues were called on up to 50 times a day to photograph corpses, each of which was given a number for documentation purposes.

War tops talks as African leaders gather for summit

Jenny VAUGHAN | 28 January, 2014 07:40

War in Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan are key priorities, Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom said, ahead of the two-day African Union meeting that opens Thursday.

Conflict and humanitarian crises rather than growing economies and development top the agenda for African leaders this week, as they meet for a summit of the continental bloc.

The controversial role on the continent of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is also expected to be addressed.

"The fact that these humanitarian tragedies are unfolding in the two countries at a time when we are talking about 'African renaissance' must be painful to all of us," Tedros added, speaking at a ministerial-level meeting on Monday.

Who 'wins' in Peru-Chile maritime border ruling?

A new maritime border drawn by the International Court of Justice ended decades of debate about how to carve up 38,000 square kilometers of fish-rich waters off the coasts of Chile and Peru.

By Mike Corder, Associated Press 

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS

The United Nations' highest court drew a new maritime boundary between Peru and Chile on Monday, awarding Peru parts of the Pacific Ocean but keeping rich coastal fishing grounds in Chilean hands.

The line drawn by the International Court of Justice ended decades of debate about how to carve up some 38,000 square kilometers (14,670 square miles) of fish-rich waters off the coasts of the Latin American neighbors. Peru's fishing industry estimates the annual catch in the region to be worth some US$200 million.

Peru wanted a maritime border heading roughly southwest, perpendicular to the point where the two countries' land border meets the ocean. Chile insisted the border should extend from the coast parallel to the equator.