Kashmir border deaths spark India and Pakistan row

 

Violence along the LoC has diminished in recent months

Indian forces have killed three Pakistani soldiers in firing across the Line of Control in the disputed region of Kashmir, the Pakistani army says.

It has accused Indian forces of opening "unprovoked" fire across the LoC - which divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan - in the Neelum valley.
India denied the allegations, saying Pakistani forces opened fire first.
Kashmir has a history of such clashes, though they have become less frequent in recent months.
Correspondents say the latest incident underlines the fragility of ties between India and Pakistan, who have fought two of their three wars since 1947 over Kashmir.
There were regular clashes across the LoC before the nuclear-armed neighbours agreed to a ceasefire in 2003. They now only exchange sporadic fire and there have been only a handful of clashes over the last three years.
Correspondents say that the latest incident is unlikely to have any impact on renewed efforts by the two countries to improve their relations.
Ceasefire violations "[Our] soldiers were moving from one post to another when they came under fire. Three soldiers were killed," Pakistani military spokesman Maj-Gen Athar Abbas said.

 

The LoC is one of the most heavily militarised areas of South Asia

 

He said that Pakistani forces returned fire and the incident was raised with local Indian commanders.
But India gave a different version of events.
A military spokesman in Srinagar said that tension along the LoC first began on Tuesday night when militants tried to cross from the Neelum valley into the Indian sector.
The spokesman said that an Indian soldier was killed in the clash.
On Wednesday night, an Indian border post came under attack from Pakistani troops, the spokesman said, and Indian soldiers retaliated.
The exchange of fire continued throughout Thursday after a brief lull, the spokesman said, accusing Pakistan of two ceasefire violations over the last 15 hours.
In February, the two countries resumed a formal peace process suspended after the 2008 attack on Mumbai (Bombay), in which 165 people were killed. Delhi blamed the attack on Pakistan-based militants.
Foreign ministers from India and Pakistan met in Delhi in July and hailed what they said was a new era in ties, agreeing to fight militancy and boost trade and travel.

Syrian unrest: Top Hama legal official 'saw executions'

 

On Monday, the Syrian state news agency said Adnan Bakkour had been kidnapped

A man purporting to be the top legal official in the central Syrian city of Hama has said he has resigned after witnessing crimes against humanity.

In a video statement, provincial attorney-general Adnan Bakkour said he had seen more than 70 executions and hundreds of cases of torture.
It is not clear when it was filmed, but it was posted online on Wednesday.
On Monday, the Syrian state news agency said Mr Bakkour had been kidnapped by gunmen while on his way to work.
It quoted the Hama Police Command as saying the attorney-general, his driver and a bodyguard had been abducted in the village of Karnaz.
There had been no other reports about Mr Bakkour since then.

Yoshihiko Noda becomes Japan's new prime minister

 Mr Noda faces a series of tough challenges

Japan's parliament has backed Yoshihiko Noda as the country's sixth prime minister in five years.

The vote came after the 54-year-old former finance minister secured the leadership of the ruling Democratic Party in an election on Monday.
Ex-PM Naoto Kan, criticised for his handling of the March quake, formally resigned with his cabinet beforehand.
Correspondents say the new PM faces a daunting agenda, including trying to unify a divided party.
Large parts of Japan need to be rebuilt after March's earthquake and tsunami, and the crisis at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant still needs to be resolved.
Added to that, Mr Noda, a fiscal conservative, will need to address Japan's stagnant economy.
He has said in the past that he favours raising funds through increased taxation - including a doubling of Japan's sales tax, which currently stands at 5% - to cut debt and meet social security commitments.

YOSHIHIKO NODA

• Served under Naoto Kan as finance minister
• Wants to double sales tax to 10% to meet social security spending commitments
• Has not backed Naoto Kan's call for a nuclear-free Japan
• Has stressed importance of Japan-US security alliance

• 
  

On Tuesday he said Japan faced problems with the high yen and with deflation.

"On the topic of fiscal discipline, we need to carry out careful management of the economy and public finances," he said.
Unlike Mr Kan, he wants Japan's halted nuclear reactors to be restarted and has not backed his call for a nuclear-free Japan.
Monday's vote went to a run-off between Mr Noda and Banri Kaieda, the former trade minister backed by party heavyweight Ichiro Ozawa, after no candidate secured a majority in the first round.
Mr Noda won the run-off after lawmakers backing the public's choice, former foreign minister Seiji Maehara, swung behind him.
The DPJ won power in a general election in 2008, ending half a century of almost unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.
But it lost control of the upper house in polls in 2010 and has struggled to pass key legislation through parliament.
It has also been hit by in-fighting, with the leadership race turning into a bitter factional battle between supporters and enemies of Mr Ozawa.
Known as the Shadow Shogun, Mr Ozawa commands the loyalty of around 130 lawmakers, despite awaiting trial on charges of misreporting political donations. He is currently suspended from the party.

Irene: US East Coast left counting cost after storm

 

Insurance and rebuilding costs from Irene are said to run into billions of dollars

The US East Coast has begun clearing up after the devastation of tropical storm Irene, which killed at least 21 people.

The storm is now lashing Canada's north-east, after causing severe flooding in the US and leaving some five million homes without power.
But New York was not nearly as badly affected as state officials had feared.
President Barack Obama has warned that the impact of the storm will be felt for some time and that the recovery effort will last for weeks.
Flooding and power cuts are still a risk as swollen rivers could burst their banks, he said on Sunday.
The brunt of Irene's impact was felt by towns and suburbs from New Jersey to Vermont. Driving rains and flood tides damaged homes and cut power to more than three million people in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York.
Irene was earlier downgraded to a tropical and then a post-tropical storm.

At 03:00 GMT, Irene was moving north-north-east at a speed of 26mph (43km/h). An increase in speed is expected over the next couple of days, with the centre of the storm moving over eastern Canada on Monday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami says. Irene brings high winds near 50mph (85km/h) with higher gusts, it adds.

The storm, downgraded from a hurricane, passed New York on Sunday.
More than 300,000 people evacuated from low-lying areas in New York City are heading home.
New Yorkers will attempt to return to work on Monday, but the subway service will be limited while the tracks are inspected, says the BBC's Laura Trevelyan in New York. Most of the commuter rail services feeding the city were out indefinitely, reports say.
The New York Stock Exchange said it would be open for business on Monday and officials at the 9/11 memorial at the World Trade Center site said they had not lost a single tree.
Airlines said about 9,000 flights had been cancelled, but services into New York and Boston were due to resume on Monday.
In Philadelphia, officials lifted the city's first state of emergency since 1986. Several buildings were destroyed by the storm, but there were no deaths or injuries.
Vermont lashed Widespread flooding is reported in Vermont where hundreds of people have been told to leave the capital, Montpelier.

The city faces flooding, once from Irene, and again if the local water company decides to release water to save the Marshal Reservoir, a local dam where waters are reaching record levels.
"It's very serious for us at the moment in Vermont. The top two-thirds of the state are inundated with rapidly rising waters, which we anticipate will be an issue for the next 24 hours," said Robert Stirewalt, a spokesman for Vermont Emergency Management Agency.
Further south in North Carolina, Governor Beverly Perdue said some areas of the state were still unreachable. TV footage showed fallen trees and power lines.
Officials in Virginia began the clear-up, but said the damage was not a bad as feared.
The north-eastern seaboard is the most densely populated corridor in the US. More than 65 million people live in major cities from Washington DC in the south to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston further north.
Irene was classified as a category-three hurricane, with winds of more than 120mph (192km/h), when it swept through the Caribbean last week.

Libya: Col Gaddafi 'offers talks on power transfer'

 

The opposition has to tackle widespread shortages

Fugitive Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi is ready to begin talks to transfer power, his spokesman has said.

Moussa Ibrahim reportedly said the toppled leader's son Saadi would lead the talks. The rebels say they will not negotiate until he surrenders.
Meanwhile, desperately-needed fuel and water supplies are expected to arrive in the Libyan capital Tripoli later.
More than 50 charred bodies have been found in a burnt-out warehouse in the south of the capital.
Residents of the district of Salah al-Din said they were civilians who had been executed on Tuesday by members of a brigade commanded by Col Gaddafi's son, Khamis, before they abandoned a nearby military base.
Human Rights Watch says it has evidence that pro-Gaddafi forces killed at least 17 prisoners and carried out "suspected arbitrary executions of dozens of civilians, including professionals" in the days before Tripoli fell to the rebels.
On Friday, more than 200 decomposing bodies were found at an abandoned hospital in the capital's Abu Salim district. Doctors and nurses fled because of the fighting and many injured patients were left to die.
'Sea of blood' The Associated Press news agency in New York reported that it had received a call from Col Gaddafi's spokesman Moussa Ibrahim, who said the former leader was still in Libya although he did not specify where.

Colonel Gaddafi's offer to negotiate is pretty significant if only because it looks as though he is thinking about giving up.
He wouldn't be negotiating from any position of strength, except that the main reason for the shortage of water seems to be because pro-Gaddafi forces are still in control of the great man-made river water supplies in the south.
Any deal with Col Gaddafi would enable water to be returned to Tripoli, and there are other aspects of things that would improve if some sort of deal was made with him.
However, it is impossible to imagine that any deal - especially given the evidence of massacres that have come to light - would enable him to sit quietly in a private house in Tripoli.

Mr Ibrahim, whom AP says it identified by his voice, said Col Gaddafi was offering to negotiate with the rebels to form a transitional government.

Those negotations would be led by Col Gaddafi's son, Saadi, said Mr Ibrahim, who told AP he was still in Tripoli and had seen the former leader on Friday.
Early this week, CNN reported it had been in email contact with Saadi Gaddafi who confirmed his desire to negotiate a ceasefire.
"I will try to save my city Tripoli and 2 millions of people living there... otherwise Tripoli will be lost forever like Somalia," he wrote.
Without a cease-fire, Mr Gaddafi added, "Soon it will be a sea of blood."
An official in the rebel's National Transitional Council (NTC) told Reuters news agency that they did not know where Col Gaddafi was and no negotiations were taking place with him.
"If he wants to surrender, then we will negotiate and we will capture him," said Ali Tarhouni, the rebel official in charge of oil and financial matters.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague described Colonel Gaddafi's offer as "delusional", saying the NTC is already in charge of the country.
"What is needed from the remnants of the Gaddafi regime is the fighting to stop," he told the BBC.
The focus has now moved to the urgent humanitarian situation in Tripoli.
The opposition says it will start distributing 30,000 tonnes of petrol on Sunday, and provide cooking gas within the next 48 hours.
A ship carrying fresh water and diesel for the power stations is due to dock in the next couple of days.
Symbolic victory Meanwhile, rebels are advancing towards one of the last sizeable pockets of pro-Gaddafi support in Libya - the town of Sirte.

Rebel commanders say negotiations are being held with Sirte's elders to try and force a peaceful surrender of the town, but so far those talks have gone nowhere.
The town sits in the middle of the main east-west coastal highway that runs across Libya and, until the rebels can take control of it, they cannot bring the two halves of the country together under their control.
Sirte is also Col Gaddafi's birthplace, meaning its fall would also be a huge symbolic victory for the rebel leadership, our correspondent says.

Bodies littered floor of Tripoli hospital

 

Local people made a heroic attempt to clean up the hospital

A once bustling, busy hospital is now littered with bodies - dozens, even hundreds of them.
They were mainly men, but there were also some women and children. They were lying in corridors, on trolleys in wards and even piled up at the hospital entrance.
Why they are all here and how they died is not clear.
What we do know is that the doctors and nurses who usually work here fled for their own lives on Monday when the Abu Salim district erupted in violence.
Many civilians, as well as fighters, were wounded or killed in the battle.
The dead and severely injured were simply left and abandoned at the hospital.
After four days of heavy, intense street fighting the bodies were literally piling up.
'Massacre' In temperatures of more than 36C, the stench was as appalling as the images were gruesome.
Local people, feeling safer about venturing out of their houses, made a heroic attempt to clean up some of the mess and reclaim their hospital.

 

It is impossible, at this stage, to know exactly what happened at the hospital

But their efforts were in vain, so broken was much of the basic infrastructure in Tripoli.
There was no running water, for example, to even attempt washing the bloodstained floors.
Many put the blame for what happened at the hospital on the Gaddafi regime.
Some said that as the colonel lost control of his capital, his forces took brutal revenge on anyone suspected of opposing the man who ruled this country with an iron grip for more than 40 years.
One doctor who had returned to help the clean-up called it a "massacre".
"There are more than 200 bodies here but there is no government in charge. What can we do? We urgently need international help to stop the situation deteriorating," Osama Bilil said.
It is impossible, at this stage, to know exactly what happened at the hospital.
But the horrors witnessed are a reminder of what Libya and its people have to overcome as they seek to finally defeat one of the most notorious rulers in modern history.

Bomb at UN building in Nigerian capital Abuja

There has been a bomb attack at the UN building in the Nigerian capital Abuja, the United Nations says.

The ground floor of the building has been badly damaged.
The emergency services are removing bodies from the building while a number of wounded are being rushed to hospital, our correspondent says.
Islamist militants have carried out recent attacks on the city.
A car bombing at police headquarters in June was blamed on Islamist sect Boko Haram, a group which wants the establishment of sharia law in Nigeria.
There has been no claim of responsibility for Friday's attack, but government officials have blamed "terrorists" for the bombing, our correspondent says.
Friday's attack took place at about 1100 local time (1000 GMT) in the diplomatic zone in the centre of the city, close to the US embassy.
There was a loud explosion and smoke billowed from the building. Eyewitnesses told our correspondent that a car bomb had exploded, but that detail is unconfirmed.
"We have deployed our policemen and anti-bomb squad. We can't establish how many casualties [there are]," an Abuja police spokesman said according to Associated Press news agency.