The government of Iraq has suspended the licenses of 10 satellite TV channels operating in the country accusing them of in sighting violence and reporting misinformation. All the channels whose licenses have been suspended are considered by the Shia led government to be pro Sunni. The action follows nearly a week of unrest in which more than 100 have been killed following an Iraqi army raid on a protest camp in the northern city of Kirkuk.
'Misinformation'
More than 20 people died at the camp, in the northern town of Hawija, near Kirkuk, prompting two Sunni ministers to announce their resignation. Demonstrations spread to Ramadi and Falluja in western Iraq as well as towns and cities elsewhere in the north.
The protesters accused the Shia-led government of discriminating against Sunnis and demanded the resignation of Mr Maliki, himself a Shia.
The Iraqi Communication and Media Commission said in a statement that the satellite channels had "exaggerated things, given misinformation and called for breaking the law and attacking Iraqi security forces".
BBC Baghdad correspondent Rafid Jaboori says most of the 10 channels are Sunni-owned while Qatar-based al-Jazeera is perceived as more pro-Sunni in its Arabic-language reporting in Iraq.
Dhaka building collapse: Frantic effort to reach survivors
28 April 2013 Last updated at 07:42 GMT Rescuers are frantically trying to save about nine people located in the wreckage of a collapsed factory complex in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.
The BBC's Anbarasan Ethirajan at the scene says it is a race against time before officials bring in heavy machinery.
He says the smell of decomposing bodies is making some rescuers ill.
More than 350 people have died since Wednesday's disaster and hundreds more are missing.
On Sunday, two more people were pulled alive from the rubble of the eight-storey building in the suburb of Savar as the rescue operation entered its fifth day.
Election favourite's daughter takes to the streets to win the heart of Punjab Maryam Sharif feels the love as she canvasses for her father, who is likely to become Pakistan's PM for a third time
Jason Burke in Lahore
The Observer, Sunday 28 April 2013 The convoy slows. In front of the candidate's vehicle, men dance. Rose petals are hurled from the rooftops. Motorbikes swarm. "Look, look who is coming," supporters shout. A white tiger on top of a van yawns and stretches a paw. A small child and a 90-year-old party worker are hauled through the crowd to offer garlands.
"It's a beautiful feeling to be loved," says Maryam Sharif, leaning back in the seat of her luxury SUV three days into her first election campaign. "My shoulders hurt from waving six hours a day. I need to learn to wave wisely."
Syria and sarin gas: US claims have a very familiar ring Reports of the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons are part of a retold drama riddled with plot-holes
ROBERT FISK SUNDAY 28 APRIL 2013 Is there any way of escaping the theatre of chemical weapons? First, Israeli "military intelligence" says that Bashar al-Assad's forces have used/have probably used/might have used/could use chemical weapons. Then Chuck Hagel, the US Defence Secretary, pops up in Israel to promise even more firepower for Israel's over-armed military – avoiding any mention of Israel's more than 200 nuclear warheads – and then imbibing all the Israeli "intelligence" on Syria's use/probable use/possible use of chemical weapons.
N Korea set to stage major military drill
April 28, 2013 - 2:59PM North Korea appears to be gearing up for a major military exercise, a report says, amid tensions over an expected missile test and South Korea's pullout from a joint industrial complex.
Preparations are under way near the North's western port of Nampo for a combined live-fire drill involving artillery units and air force jets, the South's Yonhap news agency said on Sunday, citing a Seoul government source.
"It appears that the scale of the drill will be quite big," the unnamed official was quoted as saying, voicing fears of military provocations against the South or a missile test by Pyongyang during the exercise.
We are heading to Khartoum: Sudan rebels Sudanese rebels said they attacked five areas in North and South Kordofan states on Saturday, widening an anti-government offensive in one of their most audacious acts in years.
Sapa-AFP | 28 April, 2013 08:49 "This is a significant shift in the war in Sudan," Abdel Wahid Mohammed al-Nur, who heads a faction of Darfur's Sudan Liberation Army, told AFP.
"We are heading to Khartoum," he said. "This is not a joke."
A regional political expert said the attacks were timed to the "failure" of peace talks this week between South Kordofan rebels and the government.
U.S. role at a crossroads in Mexico’s intelligence war on the cartels
By Dana Priest, Sunday, April 28, 9:22 AM MEXICO CITY — For the past seven years, Mexico and the United States have put aside their tension-filled history on security matters to forge an unparalleled alliance against Mexico’s drug cartels, one based on sharing sensitive intelligence, U.S. training and joint operational planning.
But now, much of that hard-earned cooperation may be in jeopardy.
The December inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto brought the nationalistic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back to power after 13 years, and with it a whiff of resentment over the deep U.S. involvement in Mexico’s fight against narco-traffickers.
One guy who owns a tour business with magical powers along the lines of a Jedi Knight or perhaps Harry Potter is going to overthrow the must paranoid government on earth you bet. I know he's an army of one impersonating a tour guide.
Bae, identified in North Korean state media by his Korean name, Pae Jun Ho, is a tour operator of Korean descent who was arrested after arriving with a tour on November 3 in Rason, a special economic zone bordering China and Russia.
"The preliminary inquiry into crimes committed by American citizen Pae Jun Ho closed," the official Korean Central News Agency said in a brief report.
"In the process of investigation he admitted that he committed crimes aimed to topple the DPRK with hostility toward it. His crimes were proved by evidence."
DPRK is the acronym for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Under North Korea's criminal code, terrorist acts include murdering, kidnapping and injuring the country's citizens can lead to a death sentence or life in jail.
Two owners of garment factories in the building that collapsed on the outskirts of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka have surrendered to police.
Mahbubur Rahman Tapas and Balzul Samad Adnan are suspected of forcing staff to work in the eight-storey building, ignoring warnings about cracks.
At least 336 people are known to have died after the Rana Plaza in the suburb of Savar collapsed on Wednesday.
On Saturday morning, at least 24 more people were rescued from the rubble.
Rescuers and volunteers, who worked through the night, cheered as they were brought to safety.
One giant leap for mankind: £13bn Iter project makes breakthrough in quest for nuclear fusion, a solution to climate change and an age of clean, unlimited energy
It may be the most ambitious scientific venture ever: a global collaboration to create an unlimited supply of clean, cheap energy. And this week it took a crucial step forward. Steve Connor reports
An idyllic hilltop setting in the Cadarache forest of Provence in the south of France has become the site of an ambitious attempt to harness the nuclear power of the sun and stars.
It is the place where 34 nations representing more than half the world’s population have joined forces in the biggest scientific collaboration on the planet – only the International Space Station is bigger.
The international nuclear fusion project – known as Iter, meaning “the way” in Latin – is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.
KOSOVO
Serbian parliament approves normalizing ties with Kosovo
Serbia's parliament has overwhelmingly approved normalizing ties with its former breakaway province Kosovo. The historic accord will allow Belgrade to begin negotiating its eventual admission to the European Union.
Both the nationalist incumbents and the center-left opposition approved the deal on Friday, which recognizes Kosovo's authority over ethnic Serbs in the north, while also granting them a degree of autonomy from the ethnic-Albanian-dominated government in Pristina.
The legendary hero of Kenya's Mau Mau uprising, Muthoni wa Kirima continues to fight injustice in her country.
In her small home in the verdant hills that surround Nyeri, in central Kenya, wa Kirima seems like just another grandmother.
Visitors are welcomed with elaborately prepared tea and seated on the threadbare sofa or armchairs. The few pieces of modest furniture are strewn with sepia photographs and assorted keepsakes from her 83 years. It's only when she removes her headscarf and a cascade of matted dreadlocks falls to the sitting room floor that there is a hint of her extraordinary life.
The hair, which she calls her "history", is snow-white at the roots, darkening to black at the tips, and has remained with her since the 1950s, when she took to the forests of Kenya's Aberdare mountains to fight the British.
Venezuela's opposition asks election audit to include fingerprint verification
For years, Venezuela's opposition criticized the fingerprint scanners as intimidation but now hope it will prove incidents of voter fraud.
Wednesday, [opposition leader]Henrique Caprileswent on television to demand the [National Election Council] CNE offer his data as part of the [election] audit. The government of Nicolás Maduro quickly insisted that all television stations go to cadena, [where all channels must broadcast the same message from the government] in order to broadcast a prerecorded infomercial accusing Mr. Capriles of instigating violence. This had the added effect of blocking the Capriles press conference from the few stations that were broadcasting it.
Miguel has the specifics of Capriles campaign's audit request from Venezuela's CNE. Capriles wants the audit to look at who voted and how the fingerprint scanners that are supposed to prevent double voting functioned.
Japan Japan stirs Campbell's US 'pivot' soup By Peter Lee
Oscar Wilde wrote, "When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Perhaps this is how Kurt Campbell feels today.
Campbell, after all, as assistant secretary for East Asia in Hillary Clinton's State Department, was a key architect and proponent of the "pivot to Asia", which was meant to elicit satisfactory behavior from China - and, in the process, demonstrate US leadership and relevance - by confronting the PRC with a phalanx of Pacific democracies (plus Vietnam of course) determined to impose liberal security, economic, and human rights norms on the rogue superpower.
The inevitable result of US backing has been an increased
willingness of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Japan to stand up to China, which has contributed a virtuous cycle of Chinese hostility and a further defensive cleaving of the smaller nations to the United States.
South Korea has decided to withdraw the roughly 175 of its nationals stationed at Kaesong joint industrial zone after North Korea rejected Seoul’s offer to open formal talks on restarting operations at the complex, according to a senior official.
Seoul said on Friday it was worried about its workers not having access to food and medicine at the factory park that has been closed for nearly a month.
The statement by the country's Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae raises a major question about the future of the last major symbol of inter-Korean cooperation as tensions remain high in the region.
The jointly run industrial zone located inside North Korea on the border with the South provides jobs to more than 50,000 North Koreans, who withdrew after their government decided to shut operations there.
It's hard to believe that someone who is considered a progressive in American can be so cavalier about the lives lost when the factory in Bangladesh collapsed killing at least 200 people yet Matt Yglesias writing for Slate did just that.
It's very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where87 people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.
I think that's wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.
He thinks that's wrong because obviously the lives of the economically disadvantaged workers in Bangladesh are worth less than American workers in simular employment situations. Additionally because America has over time developed higher work place safety standards than Bangladesh those same standards should not be applied to a poor country and its workers because they are desperate for the needed income these types of jobs provide.
Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States, and there are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That's true whether you're talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus. Safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk-averse United States. Split the difference and you'll get rules that are appropriate for nobody. The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine.American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years, and Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer.
So, remember even though Bangladesh doesn't have particularly good work place safety rules that's all right because Bangladesh has become a richer country on the backs of its dead workers. Its really nice to know that Matt doesn't give a shit about the worlds poor.
'Growing evidence' of chemical weapons use in Syria - UK
There is "limited but growing" evidence that Syrian government troops have used chemical weapons, UK Prime Minister David Cameron says.
"It is extremely serious, this is a war crime," Mr Cameron told the BBC.
On Thursday, the White House said that US intelligence agencies believed "with varying degrees of confidence" that Syria had used the nerve agent sarin.
It said the gas had been deployed on a "small scale", but did not give details of where or when it had been used.
Mr Cameron said he agreed with the White House's warning that chemical weapons use would be a "red line" for possible intervention
North Korea rejects South's call for Kaesong talks
Pyongyang says similar demands in future would 'only speed up final destruction' of South Korea
A day earlier Seoul had used the same language in setting a Friday deadline for Pyongyang to answer its call for working-level discussions of the fate of the Kaesong industrial park.
While neither capital is providing specifics about what the grave measures might be, the war of words calls into question the future of the last major symbol of inter-Korean co-operation.
Unemployment hits new high in Spain
Over six million people out of work in first quarter of 2013
Spanish unemployment has hit a new high, with over six million people out of work as the country remains mired in recession.
The jobless rate hit 27.2 per cent in the first quarter of this year – the highest figure on record – according to the National Statistics Institute’s active population survey.
Young Spaniards were among the hardest hit as the jobless rate among the under-25s rose to 57.2 per cent.
Recent data highlighted the exodus of young Spaniards abroad as the active population fell by 85,000 in the first quarter. That drop in the population was also attributed to the return of unemployed immigrants to their home countries.
PEACEKEEPING
Kurdish PKK rebels announce withdrawal date from Turkey
A Kurdish rebel commander has announced that the group will begin withdrawing guerilla fighters from Turkey and into northern Iraq in May. The announcement comes amid a peace drive between Ankara and the rebel movement.
The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) chief Murat Karayilan told a news conference Thursday in the group's mountainous stronghold of Qandil in northern Iraq that the withdrawal would begin on May 8.
"As part of ongoing preparations, the withdrawal will begin on May 8, 2013," PKK leader Karayilan was quoted as saying by the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency.
Brazil's Heart of Darkness: Notorious Rebel-Killer May Finally Face Justice
Like a character out of the film "Apocalypse Now," Colonel Sebastião de Moura allegedly hunted, tortured and killed rebels without remorse during Brazil's military dictatorship. Now, almost 40 years later, he is likely to face charges.
The Curió is at home where the Amazon rainforest begins to thin out and becomes slightly less impenetrable. It has a black back, its feathers are the color of hazelnuts and its call varies from light and bell-like to somber and plaintive. Rainforest residents like to catch the bird because, in captivity, the Curió reacts aggressively when confronted with one of its own kind in a cage. The bird is known for fighting until it drops, which makes it the perfect candidate for betting operations. Its name means "friend of mankind" in the local language. It's certainly an odd bird.
The West's demand for "bargain-basement" clothes is causing factory disasters such as this week's Bangladeshi building collapse, labour activists say.
At least 273 Bangladeshi garment industry workers are dead following the collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-storey factory near Dhaka making clothes for a host of Western brands, including Britain's Primark and the Spanish label Mango, which recently announced a deal to set up shops within David Jones in Australia.
The deaths of these workers could have been avoided if multinational corporations, governments and factory owners took workers' protection seriously.
Up to 3000 people were in the building when it collapsed on Wednesday morning, and rescuers have spent three days pulling survivors, and the bodies of those killed, from the rubble. It's still unknown how many people, alive or dead, remain trapped inside.
