Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian president, has been forced to dismiss his most senior deputy after a week of pressure from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader. Is internal political fighting on the verge of forcing a regime change in Iran? And can external pressure have any influence inside the country?
Al Jazeera has obtained a copy of the Taliban’s new military code of conduct, approved by their Afghan leader, Mullah Omar.
The document outlines the use of suicide bombings, guidelines on the treatment of hostages and how to win the battle for the hearts of the Afghan population.
As Al Jazeera’s James Bays reports from the capital, Kabul, the book offers rare insight into how the Taliban is evolving in Afghanistan.
The land-locked Southeast Asian nation of Laos is one of the poorest in the world and facing a food crisis.
Half of the children in the country’s rural areas are suffering from malnutrition, and some people go to great lengths to put food on the table.
The first country-wide food security study undertaken in rural Lao PDR from World Food Programme (WFP) is available for download. It provides WFP and its partners with a good understanding of the nature and extent of rural food insecurity and suggests sustainable interventions that could address these issues.
In a critical week for US-Israeli relations, four prominent American officials are in Israel to discuss key topics such as Irans nuclear threat and Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates spoke of tougher sanctions against Iran as Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak took a tougher approach, making clear that Israel has not ruled out military action.
The US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, traveled to Syria and Egypt.
Daniel Levy, the co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, joins Martin Savidge to discuss developments out of the Middle East.
The U.S. and China began two days of high-level meetings in Washington on Monday, with nuclear proliferation and the global economic crisis among the issues on the agenda.
In an address to diplomats from both countries, President Barack Obama said he was under no illusions that the US and China will agree on every issue. But the President also underscored the value of the relationship, which he claims will shape the 21st century.
Orville Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China relations at the Asia Society, joins Martin Savidge to discuss what may come of these meetings.
The United States is in the final stages of negotiations with Colombia to shift its anti-drug operations from Ecuador to Colombian airbases.
The plan has faced resistance in Colombia, where Senator Gustavo Pietro says the US uses its fight against drugs as an excuse to increase its influence in Colombia’s internal affairs.
When the US was expelled from Manta ten days ago, left behind were over 300 civil complaints over ten years against American military personnel including murder, rape, destruction of property, assault. That the US military got kicked out of Ecuador is something I think worth celebrating. Unfortunately for me, I am a Colombian and my government is preparing to sign a base agreement with the US. The US is about to get access to three air bases and two naval bases including one on each coast. From what I have read, some 1,700 US military and civilian personnel come with the agreement. You’re stepping into my civil war. Please don’t.
Colombia has enough problems without having to host 1700 more. The FARC is far from finished. Uribe can’t finish them. His tactics may have pushed the FARC to the brink but there they remain and since they have a profitable business that earns them hundreds of millions their future remains secure. The cocaine trade is less than 1% of Colombian GDP by UN estimates, other estimates put it at 3% at most. That tiny percentage is keeping a nation of 45 million hostage to the whims of a group of less than 10,000 members. To defeat the FARC, Colombia has to do two things. 1) aggressively reduce social inequality and 2) convince the world either to stop using cocaine or legalize it. I’m more optimistic on the former than the latter. Uribismo has run its course but whether Uribe can be defeated is as yet unclear. The war cannot be won militarily.
I understand that on the margin US foreign policy is changing on a number of critical issues. Gone is the Bush unilateralism but I find that when push comes to shove the US is still imposing its will on hapless countries such as mine. Surely US policy makers are aware that putting US forces into a country still in the midst of a civil war and with deep social cleavages is not a good idea. Then think how Chavez and Correa are going to respond. Recently the Wall Street Journal carried a story on how Venezuela has become a conduit for the drug trade. It’s old news. Drugs always take the path of least resistance and for a good six years that has been Venezuela but I can’t help but think as to the timing of the story. It is as if the drums of war beat on cue.
Deadly clashes have erupted between members of a little known Islamist group and police officers in northern Nigeria. The group Boko Haram, which wants to impose sharia, Islamic law, across the country, has attacked police stations and churches. Boko Haram, which literally means “education is prohibited,” began its string of attacks in the northeastern city of Bauchi on Sunday after the arrest of some of its members. Boko really refers to Western-style education, not religious training. The phrase comes from Arabic not Hausa or Fulani.
Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf, the leader and founder of Boko Haram, claimed that the government had been targeting his followers and that they would never surrender. The group was founded in 2004.
He told Nigeria’s Daily Trust newspaper: “What I said previously that we are going to be attacked by the authorities has manifested itself in Bauchi, where about 40 of our brothers were killed, their mosque and homes burnt down completely and several others were injured and about 100 are presently in detention. Therefore, we will not agree with this kind of humiliation, we are ready to die together with our brothers and we would never concede to non-belief in Allah.”
He added: “I will not give myself up. If Allah wishes, they will arrest me; if Allah does not wish, they will never arrest me. But I will never give up myself, not after 37 of my followers are killed in Bauchi. Is it right to kill them, is it right to shoot human beings? To surrender myself means what they did is right. Therefore, we are ready to fight to die.
“Democracy and the current system of education must be changed otherwise this war that is yet to start would continue for long.”
Boko Haram models itself on the Taliban but there is no known link. Bauchi, Yobe, Borno and Kano are among the 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states that started a stricter enforcement of Islamic law in 2000 – a decision that has alienated sizeable Christian minorities and sparked bouts of sectarian violence that has killed thousands over the past decade.
In the video, Al Jazeera’s Roza Ibrahimova reports on the unrest which is spreading across the northern provinces. Original reports put the dead at 42 but later updates suggest a death toll in the hundreds.
More from All Africa:
Around 42 people including a soldier were killed yesterday in clashes between police and members of a radical Islamic sect in Bauchi after an armed team of the sect’s followers attacked a police station in retaliation for the arrests of their leaders, hospital officials and security sources said.
There were conflicting figures yesterday as to the exact number of those killed in the violence, and the state police command declined to give any figure.
“We have received a total of 42 bodies,” Awwal Isa, a nurse at the Bauchi Specialist Hospital told AFP news agency by telephone. He said the corpses were of those involved in the fighting between the police and the radical sect.
A reporter for the Reuters news agency counted 32 bodies at two Bauchi police stations and said dozens were wounded among the more than 200 arrested. For his part, Police Force Public Relations Officer Emmanuel Ojukwu said the figure of those killed was in the dozens.
The incident was sparked off after a gang of around 60 men armed with guns and hand grenades attacked the Dutsen Tanshi Police Station, but retreated after a gun battle with the police, spokesman for the Bauchi police command Mohammed Barau said.
The police responded by raiding the group’s neighbourhoods and hideouts around the Bauchi Airstrip, arresting hundreds. Some of the items recovered from the group included army uniforms, boots, explosives and live ammunition.
Secretary of the Red Cross Adamu Abubakar said they took 16 wounded people to the hospital but declined to give the number of the dead, saying this was for the police to reveal. When our correspondent visited the Specialist Hospital, he was not allowed to talk to the victims of the clashes.
The Bauchi police spokesman said the armed gang belonged to the Boko Haram group, a local group opposed to the propagation of western form of education. They are members of a new Islamic sect headed by Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf, a cleric based in Maiduguri, Borno State.
The country’s entire diplomatic team gathers in Mombasa at a time Kenya’s foreign influence is seen as being at its lowest ebb ever. After the relative successes of the Sudan and Somali peace processes in the past, it has been a string of losses for Kenya’s diplomatic efforts with the Migingo Island fiasco painting the country in particularly frail terms. And as NTVs Rashid Ronald reports, the recent snub by US Barack Obama only serves to confirm Kenya’s diminished standing in the community of nations.
More on the Migingo Island border dispute with Uganda from the UK Independent:
Migingo Island rises out of the waters of Lake Victoria like an armour-plated turtle. An uneven, rocky dome of less than an acre, it is clad above the water line in corrugated iron. The rusty shacks crowded on to its back give shelter to a scarcely credible 500 people – a slice of life transplanted from the worst city slum into the middle of the world’s largest tropical lake. It is also home to Africa’s smallest war, a conflict fought in advances of three soldiers, a dozen policemen or eight marines. Any more than that and they would not fit. The fate of this rocky islet has caused outrage in east Africa, triggered a ministerial crisis and brought Kenya and Uganda to the brink of a shooting war.
The pair of flags that fly above the island, hoisted on driftwood, are testimony to a temporary victory and they have been torn down and replaced twice already. Across one of them prances a grey crane – fabled for its gentle nature – on a background of yellow, red and black: Uganda’s national flag. The other has the black and white colours of the Ugandan police which, from a distance, look worryingly like a pirate’s emblem. To the Kenyan fishermen who make up the bulk of the island’s population, it is a symbol of fear and humiliation.
Nicholas Makongo Nyanda, 30, used to be one of those fishermen but he has not been back to Migingo for two years. As the outboard engine pushes his reluctant craft through the waves towards it, he becomes visibly more nervous. He retreated from the island after being forced to pay £250 – a fortune on the impoverished shores of Victoria – to Ugandan officials as a ransom for his confiscated engine. He speaks of rumours of violent arrests, torture and men with guns. Kenyan fishermen who go to Migingo can be lost and never heard of again, he says, adding: “It is full of Ugandan soldiers.”
Like all good maritime stories, this one begins with pirates. Five years ago, the island was home to a solitary, eccentric fisherman. When word got out of the catches he was landing, more fishermen came, some from nearby islands, others from the Kenyan shore three hours away, and others from Uganda, a six-hour trip by motor boat. The influx brought with it a different kind of attention. Pirates, some with assault rifles, appeared from as far afield as Tanzania, stealing engines, fish and any cash they found. The fishermen appealed to their respective governments for help, and that was when the real trouble began. Uganda answered the call first, sending a detachment of maritime police to defend the fishermen, and suddenly an island which, if anyone had cared to think about it, had always been thought to be Kenya had the wrong flag flying over it.
Then the Ugandan officials on the rock saw how much money was being made. Migingo’s wealth lies in its proximity to some of the richest remaining deep-water fishing in the lake. A short ride from the barren rock, nets can still be filled with Nile perch, a freshwater giant worth tens of millions of pounds in exports to the EU and beyond. Boats have been landing more than 100kg of fish a day, earning up to £200 – three or four times what many in Kenya or Uganda make in a month on land. The rush to cash in on this bonanza created an increasingly harsh regime on the island as entry permits, taxes, fines, tithes and ransoms were used to extract money with menaces. Some fishermen were arrested and sent to Uganda, others were expelled or fled. Jacob Otieno, a shopkeeper on the island, described seeing two fishermen, caught without an expensive permit, being paraded and forced to eat raw okoko, a fish with spines like “helicopter rotors”.
The plight of the fishermen eventually attracted public attention in Kenya and the politicians were forced to respond. Last month, an excitable district commissioner, Julius Mutula, with a dozen Kenyan police, arrived on the island, declared it to be Kenyan soil, tore down the Ugandan flag and hoisted their own. Within 24 hours, Uganda sent in 60 heavily armed marines. Suddenly, the region stood on the brink of its first full-blown conflict over the dwindling resources of the once-abundant Lake Victoria.
While it is hard to imagine, given it is such a vast body of water, the 68,800sq-km (26,600sq-miles) source of the Nile is under an accelerating and life-threatening siege, with 30 million dependants divided between Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
Godfrey Ogonda, an environmental expert with the Friends of Lake Victoria, based in the Kenyan city of Kisumu, unravels the nightmare. He begins with a list of the lake’s attackers, industry, agriculture, sewage, over-fishing, climate change. But what it all comes back to is poverty. Unable to buy gas or paraffin, people cut down the trees for fuel. Deforestation strips the surrounding land of its protection and plays havoc with rainfall. The soil, loaded with chemical fertilisers and pesticides, is washed into the rivers in a process known as eutrophication and ends up in the lake where it joins a soup of other nutrients with alarming consequences. Vast mats of water hyacinth, an invasive species that has flourished in the deteriorating ecosystem, chokes the lake’s harbours and blocks its shoreline. A massive and costly manual extraction funded by the World Bank offered brief respite but in the past two years the hyacinth has returned, bringing with it hippo grass, a so-called “superweed”. The grass now forms entire floating meadows that are altering the chemical balance of the water. Professor Ogonda believes changes in the PH values of the lake are, in effect, slowly turning the water into acid.
Then there is overfishing. Victoria supports an estimated two million fishermen. Kenya’s fisheries department says stocks of some species have collapsed by 80 per cent in three years. Scientists believe the lake could recover if left alone for as little as five years and there are now calls for a moratorium on fishing. The problem, again, is poverty. The three nations bound by Victoria face a choice between co-operating in making difficult decisions to save the body of water or engaging in a destructive race to the ecological bottom of the dying lake. The Migingo crisis gives little cause for optimism. “Everyone wants their share,” says Professor Ogonda. “People do not understand they are killing their life source.”
President Obama addresses the opening session of the first US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, saying the relationship between the two countries will shape the 21st century. In his address, the President called for deeper cooperation on issues like financial regulation and clean energy.
More from the New York Times:
Saying that the ties between the United States and China are as “important as any bilateral relationship in the world,” President Obama welcomed senior Chinese leaders on Monday to begin high-level consultations on issues like the global economic downturn and North Korea.
“The United States and China share mutual interests,” Mr. Obama declared at the opening ceremony for the two days of talks, which will be led by both the secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and their Chinese counterparts.
“If we advance those interests through cooperation,” he said, “our people will be better off — because our ability to partner with each other is a prerequisite for progress on many of the most pressing global challenges.”
Ticking off those challenges, he said the two countries would discuss how to work together on economic policy, climate change, clean energy technology, nuclear nonproliferation, cracking down on terrorism and other threats, and tackling humanitarian crises like that in Darfur.
“All of these issues are rooted in the fact that no one nation can meet the challenges of the 21st century on its own,” Mr. Obama said. “It is this fundamental truth that compels us to cooperate.”
Mr. Obama referred to disagreements between the United States and China over human rights, saying the “religion and culture of all peoples must be respected, and that all peoples should be free to speak their minds — and that includes ethnic and religious minorities in China.”
But he said the two countries could narrow their differences with a wide range of exchanges between their governments and growing connections between individuals. The United States, Mr. Obama said, is enriched by its ties with China, a society he described as “at once ancient and dynamic.”
“Let’s be honest,” the president said, “Some in China think that America will try to contain China’s ambitions; some in America that think there is something to fear in a rising China. I take a different view.”
Mr. Obama said he wanted to see China be a “strong, prosperous, and successful member of the community of nations.”
The so-called Strategic and Economic Dialogue is a successor to a wide-ranging consultation begun during the Bush administration by the former Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr.
Mrs. Clinton had pushed for the State Department to take an equal role in the talks, which had been dominated by economic issues, like currency exchange rates, under Mr. Paulson.
While strategic issues like North Korea will loom large this week, much of the discussion is likely to revolve around the economic ties between China and the United States, including currency issues.
While there are tentative signs of recovery in both economies, Mr. Obama highlighted the need for Americans to save more and Chinese consumers to spend more, to put growth on a more “sustainable foundation.” He also called for completion of the global trade talks known as the Doha Round.
Mr. Obama also took a firm line toward North Korea and Iran, saying that North Korea must be persuaded to abandon its nuclear weapons program and that Iran must be prevented from obtaining a bomb.
“Neither China nor America has an interest in a terrorist acquiring a bomb or a nuclear arms race breaking out in East Asia,” he said.
The Chinese officials — Vice Premier Wang Qishan, who oversees economic policy, and State Councilor Dai Binguo, who oversees foreign policy — will meet with Mr. Geithner and Mrs. Clinton, respectively.
Mr. Dai, like Mr. Obama, alluded to differences between the United States and China, saying “the United States will never become China, and China will never become the United States.” But he noted that global upheaval, like the recent economic crisis, united the two countries.
“We’re actually in the same big boat that has been hit by fierce wind and huge waves,” he said. China and the United States, he said, needed “to cross the stormy water as passengers in this same boat.”
The Prime Minister has declared Operation Panther’s Claw a success in combating the Taliban in Afghanistan. Eleven British soldiers were killed in the operation and 22 have died in total in July – making it the deadliest month since troops arrived there in 2001. Sky’s Alex Crawford reports.
More from UK Guardian:
Hundreds of British troops are holding a crucial, heavily-populated area of Helmand province that had been controlled by the Taliban since the start of the war in Afghanistan, military commanders said today.
The capture of the strategically important zone came after a five-week battle involving fierce fighting and signalled the end of Operation Panther’s Claw, a campaign that commanders hope will be a decisive turning point in the eight-year conflict. The operation took nearly 3,000 British troops, many engaged in gun battles, to capture an area the size of the Isle of Wight.
Giving details of the operation, its commander Brigadier Tim Radford declined to put a figure on the number of Taliban who had been killed, though he said they had suffered “significant losses”. There had been up to 500 Taliban fighters in the area at the start of Panther’s Claw, he said. Some of the “less committed” would have fled. Others would have “melted back into the local population”, he predicted.
British troops had encountered 153 improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – the main cause of British deaths and injuries. Though more soldiers were killed in the buildup to the surge – 22 have been killed in Helmand province so far this month – 10 have been killed during it. The British soldier killed while fighting there on Saturday was named today as Bombardier Craig Hopson, 24, of the Royal Artillery.
Radford described the operation as having had “a major impact on Taliban capability and morale in the main population centres of central Helmand” – that is, between Gereshk, Helmand’s economic and commercial centre, and the capital Lashkar Gah.