French Court Upholds New Powers for Intelligence Services Sunday July 26th, 2015 at 11:53 AM
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Military commanders are turning to surveillance planes to protect their territorial waters from rival claimants
France’s top constitutional court mostly upheld a new French surveillance law that would give intelligences services broad new powers to spy in France and abroad.
The arrest was related to the posting of a death threat on the White House website and comes months after the envoy was injured in a knife attack in Seoul.
Some 90 migrants were in a dinghy which began shipping water and up to 40 had died before help could reach them. Nearly 2,000 migrants have lost their lives in the Mediterranean so far this year.
Turkish forces launched airstrikes on Kurdish militants in northern Iraq overnight, the latest escalation between the groups that effectively ends a shaky cease-fire in place since 2013.
The first time this tiny Baltic nation held a gay pride march, the minuscule crowd was pelted with rotten eggs and bottles under the copper-green spires of Riga’s medieval old city. The participants — all 40 of them — fled to safety in a church.Read full article >>
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Universal finds pirated copy of Jurassic World seeded from its own servers ... conditions · privacy policy · cookie policy · securedrop. © 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
A break in a water main in Brooklyn, New York, sends a 30 foot geyser into the air. The incident occurred on Pennsylvania Avenue at around 3:20 p.m. on Friday. The water was reportedly shut off by 5:30pm. A stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to traffic in both directions Continue reading...
Stone head that once formed part of giant 62-foot tall statue of Lenin in East Berlin to be exhumed for exhibition on Berlin's monuments
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Reptile named CockadoodleQ survives for only a day despite best efforts of animal shelter staff, leaving behind a mystery about where it came from and where it was going
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Barack Obama says "bad things happen" when countries don't accept their citizens' right to be homosexual
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Act of kindness by police officer in Flordia shows softer side of US law enforcement
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Ex-Ukrainian Spy Chief: Russian Camps Spreading Chaosby webdesk@voanews.com (Mark Snowiss)
Ukraine’s former intelligence chief says Russia is financing and organizing training camps from within Ukraine’s rebel-controlled eastern provinces in order to destabilize the country. “Up to 30 camps in Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea are training subversive groups, providing them with weapons and sending them on missions throughout Ukraine,” said Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, who ran the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), the country’s successor to the Soviet-era KGB, until his forced resignation...
Israeli Security Forces Clash with Palestinians at Jerusalem Mosque by webdesk@voanews.com (VOA News)
Israeli police clashed Sunday with Palestinian protesters at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, as Jews visited the site they revere as the Temple Mount on an annual day of mourning. Palestinians threw stones and fireworks at Israeli authorities as police fired stun grenades to quell the protest in Jerusalem's old city. Security forces briefly entered the mosque to restore calm and locked the demonstrators inside. There were an undisclosed number of arrests and injuries in the...
The acclaimed American novelist and playwright E. L. Doctorow gives some writing tips. He died Tuesday in Manhattan at the age of 84 due to complications from lung cancer.
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For almost two years, Turkish troops sat idly on the country’s shared border with Syria as Islamic militants increased their territory and fought on the frontier. The Turkish parliament voted in October to allow its military to join the fight against the Islamic State or Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) but little happened. Then, early Friday morning, a squad of Turkish F-16s struck ISIS positions inside Syria. It was a quick and significant change in the country’s actions toward the militants.
“ISIS and Turkey had a nearly two-year-long Cold War in which they avoided fighting, with the knowledge that their confrontation would lead to destruction on both sides,” says Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute. “That Cold War is definitely over.”
Turkey, a member of NATO, was already a signed ally in the fight against ISIS, but has done little to combat the militants or even restrict their access to Syria through Turkey. Cagoptay says this “open door policy” was meant to allow all fighters who want to oust President Bashar al-Assad into Syria. The Islamist-leaning government in Ankara maintains that Assad is enemy number one in Syria, not his opponents but the U.S.-led coalition has attacked ISIS and al-Qaida-linked groups in Syria but not the Assad regime.
“ The Turkish government thinks only fighting ISIS is just dealing with the symptom and not the cause,” says Hakan Altinay, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute. Turkey sees the rise of ISIS as a result of Sunni discontent with Assad’s Alawite regime.
The bombing in the Turkish town of Suruc on Monday, which left 32 dead and the death of a Turkish soldier by ISIS fire from Syria on Thursday has made ISIS a immediate threat for the Turkish government. U.S. officials also said on Thursday the Turks have allowed American warplanes to use Turkish bases to attack ISIS.
Altinay says that the recent violence was only a trigger, ISIS’s strengthened position on the shared border and sustained pressure from the U.S. were also factors. “I think that there was one too many reasons to get into action,” says Altinay.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the operations against ISIS were not a one-off, but part of a broader strategy. Government forces also arrested more than 200 people in security sweeps across the country.
For some the question is why it took so long for the Turks to act against ISIS. Redur Xelil, a spokesman for the YPG, the Kurdish group fighting ISIS in northern Syria, has many times accused Turkey of siding with ISIS. “Turkey is helping ISIS and facilitating their moves in and out of Syria, as well as aiding them in logistics and other levels,” says Xelil.
Xelil says he doesn’t trust Turkey’s motivations, believing it to be more of political play than genuine desire to defeat the militants. “All this is connected to the policy of the Turkish state and its interest in pleasing the international community and the world by showing it is against terrorism,” says Xelil. “If the Turkish state was truly serious about fighting ISIS, it would have taken action the day the international coalition was formed.”
Turkey has fought a long and bloody war against its own Kurdish separatists. This has complicated the situation in southern Turkey where Turkish troops — many times targeted by the Kurdish separatists — decide what goes in and out of Syria. Some of the 200 people arrested in in these security sweeps were actually Turkish Kurds who were not suspected of being part of ISIS.
Some analysts speculated that Turkey might prefer ISIS to an independent Syrian Kurdish state on its border, worried it could further motivate Turkish Kurds to reignite their violent campaign for Kurdish sovereignty on Turkish territory. Just this week Kurdish militants claimed an attack that killed two Turkish troops.
But both Cagoptay and Altinay say the delay was Turkey’s desire not to bring the violence of the Syrian conflict onto its territory, despite already hosting more that 1.8 million Syrian refugees. “I think Turkey was between a rock and hard place,” says Altinay of the attempt to balance U.S. pressure to act while not spurring attacks by the militants.
US officials have stressed the importance of Turkey’s active participation in the coalition. Not only do does it have a better equipped and more capable military than the U.S.’s other regional anti-ISIS allies, but also bases with proximity to strategic ISIS locations which will be key for both surveillance and military action. “It’s game changing in that it has given the U.S. the military tool box,” says Cagoptay.
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(NAIROBI, Kenya)—President Barack Obama nudged African nations Saturday to treat gays and lesbians equally under the law, a position that remains unpopular through much of the continent. Obama’s Kenyan counterpart responded by calling the matter a “non-issue” for his country.
Obama tackled the sensitive issue on his first full day in Kenya, the country of his father’s birth. He drew on his own background as an African-American, noting the slavery and segregation of the U.S. past and saying he is “painfully aware of the history when people are treated differently under the law.”
“That’s the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen,” Obama added during a joint news conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. “When a government gets in the habit of treating people differently, those habits can spread.”
Kenyatta was unmoved, saying gay rights “is not really an issue on the foremost mind of Kenyans. And that is a fact.”
A number of Kenyan politicians and religious leaders had warned Obama in outspoken terms that any overtures on gay rights would not be welcomed in Kenya, where gay sex is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.
Obama’s visit to Kenya — the first by a sitting U.S. president — has been long sought by this East African nation where he is widely considered a local son.
Acknowledging that some Kenyans have been frustrated that it took him until the seventh year of his presidency to visit, Obama joked that he didn’t want the rest of Africa to think he was “playing favorites.” He will also visit Ethiopia on this trip.
Still, he noted the U.S. had concerns about violence that erupted in Kenya after its 2007 election. Kenyatta faced charges related to that violence in the International Criminal Court, though those charges were later dropped. Deputy President William Ruto, however, still faces charges at the ICC.
Obama said he was encouraged by statements Kenyatta has made about the need to root out corruption in the country, saying that’s one issue that could slow down Kenya’s economic growth and development.
Much of Obama’s discussions with Kenyatta centered on counterterrorism cooperation. Kenya has been grappling with deadly attacks from extremists, most notably Somalia-based al-Shabab, a network linked to al-Qaida.
Al-Shabab has conducted major attacks in Kenya, including the 2013 attack on Nairobi’s Westgate mall and an April attack in Garissa town that killed nearly 150 people.
“This is an existential fight for us,” Kenyatta said.
The two leaders opened their day-long meetings with a joint appearance at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, a U.S.-sponsored business conference. Obama announced $1 billion in commitments from the U.S. government, as well as American banks, foundations and philanthropists.
“Africa is on the move,” Obama declared.
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There is perhaps no wider chasm between the United States and Africa than over the issue of gay rights. The tension was thrown into sharp relief during U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Kenya, the first visit of a serving U.S. President to this East African Nation. In a joint press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Saturday, following what appeared to have been a warm and productive meeting behind closed doors, Obama made it clear that the issue of gay rights in Kenya remained unresolved.
“I believe in the principle of treating people equally under the law, and that they are deserving of equal protection under the law and that the state should not discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation,” Obama said. “I’m unequivocal on this.”
Kenyatta’s government has staunchly defended laws imposing up to 14 years in prison for homosexuality. Kenya and the United States, he said, shared many values, from a love for democracy, entrepreneurship and families.
Gay rights were not one of those values.
“There are some things that we must admit we don’t share—our culture, our societies don’t accept. It is very difficult for us to be able to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept.”
As I wrote in a recent cover story on gay rights in Uganda, this issue has resonance across the continent.
By and large, Africa as a whole is far behind the United States and Europe in regards to acceptance of homosexuality. Legislated homophobia is on the rise across the continent, even as LGBT people have made historic gains elsewhere in the world. According to a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center, a large majority of North Americans, Latin Americans and residents of the European Union now accept homosexuality. Same-sex marriages are legal in 20 countries, including the United States. But in Africa, where the vast majority of people—98% in Nigeria, 90% in Kenya and 96% in Uganda, Senegal and Ghana, according to the Pew poll—say homosexuality is unacceptable, many religious leaders have watched that progress with alarm. Conservative politicians have also sought to protect their nations from what they see as a Western import by drafting anti-gay legislation even more draconian than the colonial-era sodomy laws that remain on the books in many African countries.“Over the last five years, we have seen more laws being proposed and being passed into law in Africa,” says Laura Carter, Amnesty International’s adviser on sexual orientation and gender identity. “Even in places where the laws have not changed, enforcement has increased.” Thirty-four of 54 African nations currently criminalize homosexuality. According to Amnesty, South Sudan, Burundi, Liberia and Nigeria have implemented increasingly punitive penalties for people who engage in homosexual acts. Gambia now calls for life in prison. Mauritania, Sudan and parts of both Somalia and Nigeria permit courts to impose the death penalty in certain cases for individuals found guilty of same-sex activity.The Pew survey also describes how intolerance for homosexuality tends to be more intense in communities where there are high levels of religious observance, and African nations stand out as some of the most observant in the world. Religious conservatives, Christian and Muslim alike, may be losing ground with the public on LGBT rights in the West, but in Africa, where church and mosque remain the cornerstones of society and politics, anti-homosexual campaigners are determined to hold ground. Ty Cobb, global director for the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT-rights advocacy group, says the growing backlash against homosexuality in Africa over the past several years is a proxy war in the cultural conflict that is being lost by the evangelical Christian movement in the U.S. and beyond.
Kenyatta argued that Kenya had other priorities, listing heath, education and road development, along with greater representation of women in society. “This is why I repeatedly say that, for Kenyans today, the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue,” he said. “Maybe once, like you have overcome some of these challenges, we can begin to look at new ones.”
But when it comes to human rights, Obama made clear, it’s not so much a matter of priorities, but a matter of what is right. Drawing a comparison between anti-gay discrimination and the U.S. laws that once justified slavery and segregation, he brought in an unexpectedly personal angle. “As an African-American in the United States, I am painfully aware of the history of what happens when people are treated differently, under the law, and there were all sorts of rationalizations that were provided by the power structure for decades in the United States for segregation and Jim Crow and slavery, and they were wrong.”
He was not calling for a change in religious doctrine in Kenya, he said. “The state just has to say we’re going to treat everybody equally under the law.”
As Kenyatta made clear, little is likely to change in terms of Kenyan laws regarding gay rights. That was not the expectation, says U.S. presidential spokesman Ben Rhodes, who was accompanying Obama on the trip. Obama, he said, has been raising the issue during all his Africa travels. “Frankly, what we can do is keep a spotlight on [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] rights and raise this issue and make sure that governments know that they are going to be hearing about this from us and hopefully from our partners in the international community.”
Nonetheless, Obama’s passionate defense of equality in a country that has long claimed him, a grandson of Kenya, for their own, may yet plant a seed that leads to greater acceptance down the line.
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The leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine agreed July 23 to accelerate the pullback of heavy weapons in east Ukraine, and talk next week about holding local elections as Ukraine decentralizes its government.
Medvedev Upbeat About Russian Economy, Ties With Europeby support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL)
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said he expects Russia's recession-hit economy to start growing again at the end of the year, while he hopes for improving economic ties with friendly countries in southeastern Europe.
Russia's Gazprom Seeks Arbitration In Price Dispute With Turkmengaz by support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL)
Gazprom has filed a lawsuit against Turkmenistan's Turkmengaz at an international arbitration court in Stockholm.
A Moscow court sentenced Ilya Goryachev to life in prison on July 24 for organizing several high-profile murders. Goryachev, the leader of the ultranationalist group Russian Image, had also been found guilty of establishing and organizing an extremist organization.
Kyiv LGBT Hand-Holding Experiment Ends In 'Neo-Nazi' Attackby support@pangea-cms.com (Tom Balmforth)
A video experiment in which a gay couple strolled around Kyiv hand-in-hand to gauge homophobic sentiment went largely without incident until the pair was surrounded by a gang of young men who "pepper-sprayed" and attacked them in broad daylight.
Russian Money Laundering In Britain: From Documentary To Hashtag...To Reform?by support@pangea-cms.com (Robert Coalson)
A British documentary film exposing the complicity of London real-estate agents and others in laundering criminal money from Russia has set off a social-media campaign aimed at ending the United Kingdoms's role as handmaiden to "the global looting machine."
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The United States will begin training Ukrainian army troops this fall in an expansion of its military involvement in the divided country, the State Department said July 24.
Flurry Of Moscow Activism Hints That Mood For Protest Is Very Much Alive by support@pangea-cms.com (RFE/RL)
Three years into President Vladimir Putin's third term and a renewed effort to banish conspicuous political dissent in Russia, local protests are bubbling up all over the capital.
Kurdish rebels blamed for attack on military police vehicle carrying several officers, as PKK says ceasefire has ‘lost all meaning’ after Turkish air strikes
The fragile peace process between the Turkish government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, appeared to be on the brink of collapse on Sunday after two Turkish soldiers were killed and four others were injured in a car bomb attack which Ankara blamed on Kurdish rebels.
The blast came after Turkey launched air strikes against PKK positions in northern Iraq as well as against Islamic State in Syria, in retaliation for a string of violent attacks last week that Turkey holds both groups – themselves fierce rivals – responsible for.
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As Turkey steps up role in battle against ISIS, it's now also bombing the fighters who've been most effective against the group
"It's something that's very troubling, it's very disturbing," Lynch said.
Deadly amoeba found in New Orleans water supply for second time in two years.
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Louisiana theater gunman known as angry, provocative man unafraid of fights with government
NYC police launch investigation after parking attendant gives away Grandmaster Flash's car
Police say motive unclear after 5 members of Oklahoma family stabbed to death
Movie theater gunman built a reputation as an angry provocateur who didn't like to be crossed
Latest target for a Trump thump: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who leads in Iowa polls
Northern California wildfire threatens at least 150 homes; evacuations ordered
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Summer is a time for sun, fun, exploration and relaxation. Unfortunately, scammers love summer, too. Here are some simple tips to avoid getting got.
$9 million Southampton mansion destroyed in 7-hour blaze; residents safely escape
US lawsuit, leaked emails reveal extent of hacking by Ethiopia amid Obama's first visit there
White House condemns PKK attacks, says Turkey has right to defend itself against Kurds
Police say he wrote down theater, time and date of film where shooting happened.
U.S. Says Parole of Jonathan Pollard, Spy for Israel, Will Follow Law by JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS
The White House says relations with Israel will not influence the November release of Mr. Pollard, an American who was convicted of spying for Israel.
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The modest expansion of nonlethal military assistance will begin with training this fall for Ukrainian Army personnel in the western part of the country.
The Soviet leader will gaze again on the people when the 3.5 tonne piece is resurrected from its current grave - a sandpit under a pile of rocks which is home to a colony of lizards.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Edward was delighted. And though a vile form of ‘drawing-room’ anti-Semitism was common in Britain, it seems Edward had a virulent dislike of Jews.
The prime suspect may have only offered to give evidence to the public inquiry into the spy's horrific death just to find out more about the proceedings.
In Latvia, tolerance of gays and lesbians has increased markedly in the 11 years since it joined the E.U.
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U.S. troops will begin training regular Ukrainian military forces later this year in an expansion of their current mission, the State Department said Friday.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. troops will begin training regular Ukrainian military forces later this year in an expansion of their current mission, which so far has been limited to instructing Interior Ministry national guard units, the State Department said on Friday.
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish fighter jets and ground forces hit Islamic State militants in Syria and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) camps in Iraq on Saturday, in a campaign Ankara said would help create a "safe zone" across swathes of northern Syria.
Theater gunman known as angry man with radical viewsby By JAY REEVES and KATE BRUMBACK
For decades before he opened fire in a Louisiana movie theater and killed two people, John Russell Houser was known as a man prone to anger, a loudmouth provocateur never afraid to share his opinion....
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- Turkish jets flying from a base in Turkey's southeast have struck Islamic State group targets across the border in Syria for the second straight night, Turkish news reports said Saturday. The fighter jets also hit camps of Kurdish PKK militants in northern Iraq, the reports said....
BAGHDAD (AP) -- Turkish jets struck camps belonging to Kurdish militants in northern Iraq Friday and Saturday in what were the first strikes since a peace deal was announced in 2013....
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