Saudi FM: Vienna talks to test if Iran serious on Syria
Saudi foreign minister's comments come after Tehran accepts invitation by US and Russia to attend meeting over Syria.
29 Oct 2015 07:37 GMT
International talks in Vienna this week will test whether Russia and Iran are "serious" about finding a political solution to the war in Syria, the Saudi foreign minister has said.
Adel al-Jubeir's comments on Wednesday came after Iran announced it was accepting an invitation by the US and Russia to attend the talks in the Austrian capital.
"If they're serious we will know, and if they're not serious we will also know and stop wasting time with them," Jubeir said at a news conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, with visiting British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.
The two-day talks, which are expected to talk place on Friday, will also "test the intentions of the Syrians and the Russians," Jubeir said.
Hammond said the meetings will be a chance to see if it is possible to "bridge the gap" between Iran and Russia on one side, and other countries against Bashar al-Assad, on the opposite side, on the role of the Syrian president.
Arab states pose 'critical' risk of defence corruption
Watchdog says Middle Eastern governments involved in arms dealing are continuing threat to regional security and stability
Arab states that buy billions of dollars worth of weapons are at high risk of corruption and pose a continuing threat to regional security and stability, according to a new report by watchdog Transparency International.
As foreign secretary Philip Hammond continues a Gulf tour, the organisation warns that 16 of 17 Middle Eastern governments are graded as posing either a very high or critical risk of defence corruption. Only Tunisia performs better, although is still classed as high risk.
Hammond is meeting the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to discuss regional security and the crisis in Syria, ahead of talks in Vienna on Friday.
Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest arms market. It bought £4bn of British defence equipment in the last five years and is categorised as a very high risk, as are Jordan and the UAE, which are also both close allies of the US and UK.
Australia rejects Amnesty's bribery allegations as 'slur' on border police
Australia has denied a report by Amnesty International that it secretly paid off people-smugglers. The report cites two instances of arranging payments to ensure migrants stay out of Australia's territorial waters.
Amnesty's findings, based on interviews with crew members in prison, appeared to support earlier news reports of the May incident, but the government, then led by Tony Abbott, has persistently refused to comment.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton rejected Amnesty International's Thursday report -- which follows previous accusations Australian authorities had paid off people-smugglers -- as a "slur" and said Australia would not change its hard-line policies.
The minister told commercial radio 2GB that Amnesty did not like the government's policy "and the fact we've stopped the boats, but we are not going to stop our resolve."
Physical beatings still a daily reality for Afghan schoolchildren
Shafigh Shargh
A video showing an Afghan child getting beaten at school has given the issue much-needed attention after it began circulating on social media networks. Corporal punishment is officially forbidden in schools in Afghanistan, but the law is rarely enforced, and our Observer says that physical beatings are still a daily reality for schoolchildren across the country.
Although the video is short, it clearly shows a teacher beating a student with prayer beads. The child can be heard crying and yelling for it to stop. Our Observers say the incident was filmed in a school in Kotal Kheyr Khane, a suburb of the capital Kabul. Despite the efforts of activists who went so far as to reveal the teacher’s identity, Afghan officials have yet to react to the video.
Although corporal punishment has officially been banned in Afghanistan, children are still physically beaten in classrooms. The Afghan government ratified the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) back in 1994. But it declared its “right to express (…) reservations on all provisions of the Convention that are incompatible with the laws of Islamic Shari’a and the local legislation in effect.” The practice was also expressly forbidden under article 39 of the 2008 Education Act. But the Global Initiative to End Corporal Punishment, a London-based NGO, claims that in the same year, research showed that corporal punishment was still being used against boys in 100 percent of the classes observed. For girls, the figure was 20 percent.
'Dehumanisation and stigmatisation' of Rohingya Muslims based on Nazism: report
Lindsay Murdoch
Bangkok: Nazi ideology and Islam-phobia are being used to stoke hatred of more than a million Rohingyas in Myanmar's western Rakhine state, according to the findings of an 18-month investigation.
The country's military-backed government, state-level officials and Buddhist monks are orchestrating the mass annihilation of the Rohingya, say researchers at Queen Mary University of London.
Drawing on leaked government documents, researchers say they have uncovered evidence that the persecution of the stateless Rohingya - including corralling them into ghettos, sporadic massacres and restrictions on movements - amounts to a longer term strategy by Myanmar's government to isolate, weaken and eliminate the group.Researchers said they found Nazi and SS paraphernalia such as t-shirts and helmets in official documents of the Arakan National Party, a Rahkine party.
North Korea believed to earn a fortune from forced labor overseas, U.N. says
Updated 0608 GMT (1408 HKT) October 29, 2015
North Korea's catalog of abuses against its own people within the secretive country's tightly controlled borders has been widely reported. But Kim Jong Un's regime is also believed to be pocketing huge sums from tens of thousands of its citizens who are sent abroad to toil in forced labor conditions, the United Nations says.
The laborers are made to work as long as 20 hours a day without enough food and under constant surveillance, according to a new report from Marzuki Darusman, the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea.
He told a news conference Wednesday that the practice has become more visible in recent years and that "the numbers have grown."
"I think it reflects the really tight financial and economic situation in the North," Darusman said.
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