Sunday May 11th 2014
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Pro-Russian separatists
in Ukraine's two eastern regions are holding "self-rule" referendums - a
move condemned by Ukraine's government and the West.
BBC correspondents at polling stations report chaotic scenes, no voting booths in places and no electoral register.
Self-proclaimed leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk regions are
going ahead with the vote despite Russian President Vladimir Putin's
call to postpone it.
Ukraine condemned the vote as a "criminal farce" organised by Russia.
An official in Kiev, national security chief Andriy Parubiy, said: "We do not consider there to have been a referendum."
Ballot papers, in Ukrainian and Russian, ask
one question: "Do you support the Act of State Self-rule of the Donetsk
People's Republic/Luhansk People's Republic?"
Outbreaks of violence have continued; fighting was reported overnight around rebel-held Sloviansk.
Russia's Alisher Usmanov has lost his spot as the richest man in
Britain, according to the Sunday Times, as the crisis in Ukraine wiped
billions of pounds off the bank balances of Russian and Ukrainian
oligarchs.
The Indian-born, London-based brothers Sri and Gopi
Hinduja, who run the global automotive, banking and investment Hinduja
Group, have climbed to the top of the list as Britain's wealthiest pair,
valued at 11.9 billion pounds ($20 billion).
Usmanov, ranked as
Russia's richest man by Forbes, lost 2.7 billion pounds over the last
year as he fell to second place on the Sunday Times Magazine's list of
billionaires in Britain.
Britain has more billionaires per head of
population than any other country, according to the Sunday Times, which
put the combined wealth of the 104 billionaires on its list at 301
billion pounds, up over 50 billion pounds since 2013.
Philip
Beresford, who compiles the annual table, said the Russian and
Ukrainians at the top of the list had seen their wealth dented by the
intervention in Ukraine. That led to the ruble falling to an all-time
low and Russian stocks tumbling.
"The malaise of the Russian economy and the current crisis has had its effect on them all," said Beresford.
Ukrainian-American
Len Blavatnik, who owns international record label Warner Music, and
Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea soccer club, together lost nearly
1.8 billion pounds in the last twelve months.
DAMASCUS, Syria – On billboards and in
posters taped to car windows, new portraits of President Bashar Assad
filled the streets of Damascus on Sunday as Syria officially opened its
presidential campaign despite a crippling civil war that has devastated
the country and left large chunks of territory outside of government
control.
The Syrian opposition and its Western allies have denounced the June 3
election as a sham designed to lend Assad, who is widely expected to
win another seven-year term, a veneer of electoral legitimacy. The
government, meanwhile, has touted the vote as the political solution to
the conflict.
The election comes more than three years into a revolt against
Assad's rule that has killed more than 150,000 people and forced more
than 2.5 million to seek refuge abroad. The war has destroyed entire
cities and towns, left the economy in tatters, and set alight sectarian
hatreds in a society once known for its tolerance.
With the country so bitterly divided, it remains unclear how the
government intends to hold a credible vote in the middle of the
conflict. But officials have brushed aside such doubts, and have forged
ahead undeterred.
Assad faces two other candidates in the race: Maher Hajjar and Hassan
al-Nouri, both members of the so-called internal opposition tolerated
by the government. But the men are relatively unknown, and neither has
the full weight of the state behind him like Assad does.
Militants have killed 20 Iraqi soldiers in an attack on a base near the northern city of Mosul, officials say.
Many of the soldiers had been shot at close range. Some of
the dead had their hands tied behind their backs, a medical worker told
the AP news agency.
Insurgents in Sunni-dominated parts of northern and western
Iraq have been fighting security forces under the command of the
Shia-led government.
Violence has peaked again since the sectarian conflict of the last decade.
The UN says more than 8,000 people were killed in Iraq last year, the highest figure since 2007.
The government has blamed the rising bloodshed on Sunni militants, linking it to the conflict in neighbouring Syria.
But many analysts and diplomats say the government, led by
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, has contributed to the unrest by
alienating the Sunni minority.
Iraq held a parliamentary election earlier this month. The result has not yet been announced.
Christians are under siege in the Middle East, and the Obama
administration is not doing enough to stop religious persecution by its
allies, according to a new report from a bipartisan federal commission.
The report, from the United States Commission on International
Religious Freedom, faulted usual suspects Iran, Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan, as well as North Korea. The number of Christians in the Middle
East has plunged to just 10 percent of the overall population from more
than 25 percent in 2011.
"While the Obama administration should continue to shine a spotlight
on abuses through public statements, it also should impose targeted
sanctions to demonstrate that there are consequences, too," Dwight
Bashir, the commission's deputy director of policy and research, told
FoxNews.com. "By not utilizing an existing legislative tool, the United
States risks sending the message that it prefers a nuclear deal to
standing up for the rights of the Iranian people. The United States
should not be confronting such a scenario in the first place."
Dmitry Rogozin reacts to being barred by saying that he will return in a military aircraft next time
Romania has asked Moscow for an explanation after Russia's
deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, reacting to being barred from
its airspace, tweeted he would return in a TU-160 strategic bomber.
Rogozin,
one of the senior Russian officials sanctioned by the European Union
and United States after Moscow moved to annex Crimea, was turned away
when his plane tried to fly to Moscow from Moldova's breakaway Transdniestria region.
According to his tweets in English,
Rogozin, who oversees Russia's powerful arms industry, was also blocked
by Ukrainian interceptor jets as he tried to fly home from the
Russian-speaking region of Moldova bordering Ukraine.
"Upon
US request, Romania has closed its airspace for my plane," he tweeted.
"Ukraine doesn't allow me to pass through again. Next time I'll fly on
board TU-160." The supersonic Soviet-era TU-160 is Russia's largest
strategic bomber.
On Saturday the Romanian foreign ministry asked
Moscow to clarify whether Rogozin's comments represented "the Russian
Federation's official position towards Romania as an EU and Nato
member".
It said it "believes the threat of using a Russian
strategic bomber plane by a Russian deputy prime minister is a very
grave statement under the current regional context."
It added that
"the Russian Federation has broken Ukraine's territorial sovereignty
... while pro-Russian separatists are violating public order in the
neighbouring state."
Assad's forces have been under siege in border area for months, facing rebels which include radical jihadi groups.
The IDF's Northern Command declared a closed military zone in the
Quneitra Crossing area bordering Syria and the mountain range to the
south of it in the Golan Heights for security reasons, the IDF
Spokesman's Office said Sunday.
The decision came amid fears that the fighting from the Syrian civil war is coming closer to Israel's border fence with Syria.
In recent days, fighting between Syrian army soldiers and rebels has
intensified, and according to estimates by military sources, decisive
battles are taking place close to the border. The IDF fears that some of
the fire will spill over and harm, among others, Israeli farmers
working fields near the border.
The Golan Regional Council added
that it was getting updates from the army on the matter, but the daily
routine of local residents had not changed in light of the situation
assessment as of Sunday morning.
Residents have, however, heard multiple explosions from the Syrian fighting.
Evidence
of the intensity of the Syrian fighting can also be seen in the flow of
wounded Syrians who arrived in Israeli hospitals over the weekend for
treatment. The IDF transported five Syrians wounded in the civil war to
Ziv Hospital in Safed, including a 19-year-old Syrian in very serious
condition and a moderately hurt 18-month-old baby.
Delhi: It’s not often that India’s capital city finds itself top of the table.
How dispiriting then, when the accolade from the World Health
Organisation this week was for Delhi being the world’s dirtiest city,
far outranking such competitors as Beijing, Shanghai, Jakarta and Mexico
City.
‘‘The biggest contributor, by far, is cars and other
vehicles,’’ says Dr Anumita Roychowdhury, the head of the clean air
program at India’s Centre for Science and Environment.
‘‘There are 7.5 million vehicles on the road in this city,
and we have around 1400 new vehicles on the road every day, so this is
where the battle must be fought.’’
What makes it worse, she says, is that vehicle emissions are impossible to avoid.
‘‘We all live near roads, or we spend a lot of our day on the
road, so vehicle emissions are constantly around us, getting into our
lungs, and into our bloodstream and slowly poisoning the people who live
in this city.’’
So what, exactly, is in the average lungful of Delhi air?
More than just carbon dioxide. Other dangerous pollutants include a mix
of sulphur and nitrogen oxides, ammonia, carbon monoxide, methane, black
carbon, and a range of heavy metals.
‘‘I don’t know, and I don’t want to know,’’ says Anil Shah,
one of Delhi’s 100,000 auto rickshaw drivers, who has been driving his
rickshaw around the city for at least 35 years.
Three years ago Shah started covering his mouth with a cotton
scarf to limit the amount of dust he breathes, but doubts its efficacy.
Taliban suicide car bomber kills 5 in southern Afghanistan
KABUL: A suicide car bomber attacked an Afghan army vehicle Sunday in southern Afghanistan, killing five civilians and wounding 36, authorities said.
The blast also wounded four Afghan army soldiers in the Maywand district of Kandahar province, local government spokesman Dawkhan Menapal said.
Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi claimed responsibility for the attack.
Afghan security forces are frequently targeted by insurgents. Violence has intensified in the country as most international troops prepare to withdraw at the end of the year.
Separately Sunday, Nato said one of its service members died as a result of a non-battle related injury in the country's north. The NATO force said the death occurred Sunday but gave no other details. Coalition policy is for home countries to identify their military dead.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Sunday that
Western expectations for the Islamic Republic to limit its missile
programme were “stupid and idiotic”.
The Supreme Leader also called on the country’s Revolutionary Guards to mass-produce missiles.
The
United States and its allies have said they are worried about Iran’s
missile programme as they fear the weapons could carry nuclear warheads.
Iran has long denied having any plans to develop atomic weapons.
“They expect us to limit our missile programme while they constantly
threaten Iran with military action. So this is a stupid, idiotic
expectation,” Khamenei was quoted as telling the IRNA news agency while
on a visit to an aeronautics fair by the Revolutionary Guards.
“The
revolutionary guards should definitely carry out their programme and
not be satisfied with the present level. They should mass produce. This
is a main duty of all military officials,” Khamenei said.
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Unidentified 9/11 remains returned to 'Ground Zero'
Thousands of unidentified remains from the 9/11 attacks have been returned to "Ground Zero" in a solemn ceremony.
Fifteen vehicles took the remains from the Office of the
Chief Medical Examiner to a repository under the World Trade Center
site.
The move has split opinion among the families of victims, with some holding a protest at the memorial site.
The 11 September 2001 attacks killed almost 3,000 people in New York, the Washington DC area and Pennsylvania.
The remains consist of 7,930 fragments of human tissue that could not be identified by forensic teams.
They were placed in metallic boxes, covered in the American
flag and taken in a convoy comprising fire trucks and police vehicles to
the site of the attacks in downtown Manhattan.
Members of a top Secret Service unit responsible for patrolling the
perimeter of the White House were reportedly pulled off their posts for
several weeks in the summer of 2011 and ordered to protect the home of
the assistant to the agency's then-director.
The Washington Post, citing three people familiar with the operation,
reported late Saturday that the agents were sent to a rural area
outside La Plata, Md. in what was known as Operation Moonlight. The
paper said that agents were told that they were there because
then-Secret Service director Mark Sullivan was concerned that his
assistant, Lisa Chopey, was being harassed by her neighbor after an
altercation.
Operation Moonlight consisted of sending two agents from the
so-called Prowler surveillance team to monitor Chopey's home in the
morning and evening. The paper reported that the trips began on June 30
of that year and continued through July before slowly tapering off in
August.
In addition to their work patrolling the mansion, members of the
Prowler team also monitor the southern side of the executive mansion
whenever crowds gather to watch the president and first family travel
via motorcade or helicopter.
Agents inside the Washington field office were concerned that the
diversion of agents increased security risks to the compound and the
president, two people familiar with the discussion told the newspaper. A
spokesman for the agency told the Post that the agents involved were
not part of the president's protective detail and therefore the
operation had no impact on it.
“Here’s what’s more
disconcerting. Their [Republicans’] willingness to say ‘no’ to
everything — the fact that since 2007 they have filibustered about 500
pieces of legislation that would help the middle class just gives you a
sense of how opposed they are to any progress — has actually led to an
increase in cynicism and discouragement among the people who were
counting on us to fight for them.”
—President Obama, remarks at a DCCC dinner, May 7, 2014
Addressing a dinner of the Democratic Congressional Campaign
Committee in Los Angeles on Wednesday evening, President Obama made a
rather striking claim — that Senate Republicans have filibustered “500
pieces of legislation that would help the middle class.”
Regular readers know that The Fact Checker has objected to the way that Senate Democrats tally these figures, but the president’s claim makes little sense no matter how you do the numbers.
The Facts
First, some definitions: A filibuster generally refers to
extended debate that delays a vote on a pending matter, while cloture is
a device to end debate. Filibusters are used by opponents of a nominee
or legislation, while cloture is filed by supporters.
Since 2007, there have been 527 cloture motions that have been filed, according to Senate statistics.
This is apparently where Obama got his figure. But this tells only part
of the story as many of those cloture motions were simply dropped,
never actually voted on, or “vitiated” in the senatorial nomenclature.
Obama is assuming every cloture motion can be counted as a filibuster. Political scientist Sarah Binder of the Brookings Institution in 2002 co-wrote a paper that
concluded there was 94 percent correlation between cloture motions and
documented filibusters between 1917 and 1996. But the Congressional
Research Service, using newer data, warned in a 2013 report that “it would be erroneous however to treat this table as a list of filibusters on nominations.”
Indeed,
when you go through the numbers, there have been just 133 successful
filibusters — meaning a final vote could not take place — since 2007.
Only one in five Chicago voters credit Mayor Rahm Emanuel with doing a
better job of running the city than Richard M. Daley did, and only 29
percent would support him if the mayoral election were held today.
Those are the results of a new poll conducted for Early & Often,
the Chicago Sun-Times’ political portal. The telephone survey of 511
registered Chicago voters who said they were “very likely” to go to the
polls on Feb. 24 was conducted Wednesday by the firm of McKeon &
Associates.
“Right now, Rahm is not connecting. If he doesn’t do that, he’s gonna lose,” McKeon said.
Emanuel is raising campaign cash at a frenzied pace — with more than
$7 million in the bank already and former President Bill Clinton
headlining a mega-fundraiser next month — in hopes of scaring off
serious challengers.
He’d better hope the strategy works, according to the new poll, which
measured Emanuel’s support against County Board President Toni
Preckwinkle — the challenger City Hall fears most — along with three
others: Ald. Bob Fioretti (2nd); Chicago Teachers Union President Karen
Lewis and former Ald. Robert Shaw (9th).
Shaw is the only declared mayoral challenger.
If the election were held today, Emanuel would find himself in a horse race.
The mayor would get 29 percent of the vote to Preckwinkle’s 26
percent. The poll shows Lewis finishing third with 10 percent, followed
by Fioretti at 5 percent and Shaw with 3 percent. An estimated 27
percent of voters interviewed were undecided.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage
points, higher when the results are broken down by demographic factors.
More than 39 percent of respondents were interviewed on their
cellphones.
Washington (CNN) – Hillary Clinton
honored her late mother, Dorothy Howell Rodham, as her life's biggest
influence in excerpts from her upcoming memoir, "Hard Choices," released
Sunday by Vogue magazine.
Clinton, whose first grandchild is expected this year, said that as
she approaches that stage in life, she has found herself "thinking a lot
about my relationship with my own mom, as an adult as well as in
childhood, and what lessons I learned from her." Chelsea Clinton, Bill
and Hillary Clinton's only daughter, is due to give birth this fall.
"No one had a bigger influence on my life or did more to shape the
person I became," Clinton says in the Mother's Day tribute. "Mom
measured her own life by how much she was able to help us and serve
others. I knew if she was still with us, she would be urging us to do
the same. Never rest on your laurels. Never quit. Never stop working to
make the world a better place. That’s our unfinished business."
Clinton speaks about her mother more than she does other members of
her family. Last month in Louisville, Kentucky, Clinton discussed how
her mother, who taught Sunday school, grounded her in Methodism and
showed her the faith's "concerns about social justice and compassion."
Clinton echoed those words in her book's excerpts, writing that "even
in her 90s, Mom never lost her commitment to social justice, which did
so much to mold and inspire me when I was growing up."
Dorothy Howell Rodham had a difficult childhood and was abandoned by
her mother twice in her young years. After leaving her mother's home in
Chicago, she moved in with her strict grandparents in California. She
moved back to Chicago at 14 and was on her own, working as a secretary,
when she met Hugh Rodham, the man she would marry.
Hugh and Dorothy Rodham raised their children in Park Ridge, a
conservative and religious suburb of Chicago. When Clinton moved to
Arkansas and married Bill Clinton, the couple followed and lived in
Little Rock. Hugh Rodham died in 1993 and Dorothy in 2011.
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