Colombia's President Santos says Farc deal must rebuild country
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos says peace with the Farc rebel group will boost economic growth and enable the country to rebuild its social fabric.
"War is always more costly than peace," he said in an interview with the BBC.
Mr Santos and Farc leader Timoleon Jimenez, known as Timochenko, will sign a historic peace deal later on Monday.
But it will take a long time for Colombian society to recover from more than five decades of conflict, he said.
The Farc will be relaunched as a political party as part of the deal, which is due to be put to Colombian voters in a popular vote on 2 October.
"We could have grown between 2% and 3% more per year for the past 23 years," Mr Santos told the BBC's Lyse Doucet, adding that the conflict had also had a profound impact on Colombian society.
"We have even lost our compassion, which is the ability to feel some kind of pain for others.
Pakistan police accused of illegally killing hundreds of suspects a year
Senior police were happy to admit the practice of ‘encounter killings’, in which about 2,000 people died in 2015, Human Rights Watch says
Police in Pakistan may be illegally executing hundreds of people each year in fake “encounter killings”, human rights investigators have warned.
The term “encounter” is a widely understood euphemism for extra-judicial killings in Pakistan. Police accounts often say that criminal or terrorist suspects were shot after they resisted arrest or tried to ambush officers.
In reality many are killed in police custody, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday.
The group said it was concerned that many, “if not most”, of the 2,108 people reported by the media to have been killed in encounters in 2015 died in circumstances that were “faked and did not occur in situations in which lives were at risk”.
Swiss voters pass expanded surveillance law
Latest update : 2016-09-26
Swiss voters approved a new surveillance law on Sunday, in a victory for the government that argued the security services needed enhanced powers in an increasingly volatile world.
The proposed law won 65.5 percent support across the wealthy alpine nation, final results showed.
Switzerland's police and intelligence agencies have had limited investigative tools compared to other developed countries: phone tapping and email surveillance were previously banned, regardless of the circumstances.
But the new law will change that.
The government insisted it was not aiming to set up a vast data-gathering apparatus, similar to the one developed by the US National Security Agency that came into the public eye in part through former contractor Edward Snowden's revelations.
The African migrants giving up on the Chinese dream
Updated 0633 GMT (1433 HKT) September 26, 2016
Guangzhou, China The heart of Little Africa -- or Chocolate City, as it has been dubbed by some -- is not easy to locate without a tip-off.
At the foot of an unremarkable tunnel, peeling off the busy Little North Road, in Guangzhou, stands a place that just two years ago was totally unlike the rest of China.
Angolan women carried bin bags of shopping on their heads, Somali men in long robes peddled currency exchange, Uygur restaurateurs slaughtered lamb on the street, Congolese merchants ordered wholesale underwear from Chinese-run shops, Nigerian men hit the Africa Bar for a Tsingtao and plate of jollof rice.
Facebook 'blocks accounts' of Palestinian journalists
Account suspensions come on heels of agreement between social media giant and Israel to team up against "incitement".
Sophia Hyatt
Editors from two Palestinian news publications based in the occupied West Bank say their Facebook accounts were suspended last week and that no reason was provided, alleging their pages may have been censored because of a recent agreement between the US social media giant and the Israeli government aimed at tackling "incitement".
Last week, four editors from the Shehab News Agency, which has more than 6.3 million likes on Facebook, and three executives from the Quds News Network, with about 5.1 million likes, reported they could not access their personal accounts.
Both agencies cover daily news in the occupied Palestinian territories.
A WALKING TOUR OF NEW YORK’S MASSIVE SURVEILLANCE NETWORK
Cora Currier
EARLIER THIS MONTH, on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the lower tip of Manhattan was thronged with soldiers in uniform, firefighters marching with photos of lost friends pinned to their backpacks, and tourists bumbling around the new mall at the World Trade Center. Firetrucks and police cars ringed Zuccotti Park and white ribbons adorned the iron fence around the churchyard on Broadway. Trash cans were closed up, with signs announcing “temporary security lockdown.”
So it felt a bit risky to be climbing up a street pole on Wall Street to closely inspect a microwave radar sensor, or to be lingering under a police camera, pointing and gesturing at the wires and antenna connected to it. Yet it was also entirely appropriate to be doing just that, especially in the company of Ingrid Burrington, author of the new book “Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure,” which points out that many of the city’s communications and surveillance programs were conceived and funded in response to the attacks.
No comments:
Post a Comment