| Europe shivers under heavy snowfall | |||
Plunging temperatures and heavy snows have caused the deaths of at least 80 people across Europe. Grazyna Puchalskam, Poland's national police spokeswoman, said on Monday: "Six people died on Friday, 15 on Saturday and 21 on Sunday". The deaths brought the country's death toll since the start of December to 69. Police and municipal employees have stepped up patrols of areas where the homeless are known to gather, notably public parks and allotments, to try to persuade them to head to special hostels. Ukraine reported 27 deaths, while six people were killed in accidents in Germany and three in Austria. "RTE has put in place a programme of controlled load-shedding in order to avoid a complete black-out in the region," an RTE spokesman said, referring to the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region. The country was forced to import power earlier than normal this winter and has warned that cold weather could force cuts because of near record consumption and delays to maintenance in its network of nuclear power stations. | |||
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Monday, 21 December 2009
Europe shivers under heavy snowfall
French inquiry into Eurostar chaos
| French inquiry into Eurostar chaos | |||||
France is to investigate the breakdown of Eurostar trains over the weekend which left thousands of passengers trapped and delayed. Dominique Bussereau, the country's transport minister, said on Monday that he did not believe that bad weather could be the sole cause of the problems. "We can't believe that Eurostar trains can't run for three days because of snow, so there must be a technical problem," Bussereau said. Eurostar, which is owned by the French and Belgian state railway operators and Britain, has said the trains were stranded after moving from cold air outside into the warmer tunnel caused problems with condensation. Snow screens More than 2,000 passengers were trapped inside the trains on Friday and Saturday after six trains broke down. The company said on Sunday that it needed to modify the snow screens and snow shields in the trains' locomotives. More than 50,000 people have seen their journeys cancelled as a result of the disruption. Eurostar announced on Monday that it had commissioned an independent review into the problems. French demand "We demand that the reasons behind the breakdown are found," Bussereau said, adding that measures must be taken so this kind of problem would not occur in the future. Bussereau said Eurostar train manufacturer Alstom was co-operating in trying to solve the issue. Eurostar carries about 40,000 people a day between England and continental Europe. The suspension of its services, coupled with problems with cross-Channel ferries and bad weather, has helped cause considerable disruption to traffic in southeastern England. Europe hit Harsh weather has swept across Europe with 42 people having died of cold over the past three days in Poland after temperatures plunged to -20C.
The deaths brought the country's death toll since the start of December to 69. The majority of the victims were homeless men aged between 35 and 50, who died while drunk, said Puchalska on Monday. The toll is not unusual in Poland, where harsh winter conditions are common. In France, the electricity grid was forced to cut off power to around two million people in the southeast in order to avoid a massive regional blackout, the operator said. The country was forced to import power earlier than normal this winter and has warned that cold weather could force cuts because of near record consumption and delays to maintenance in its network of nuclear power stations. Snowfall disrupted road and rail transport in Spain and forced the cancellation of dozens of flights as well as a friendly football match in Madrid between Ecuador and Peru. | |||||
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Iranians mourn dissident cleric
| Iranians mourn dissident cleric | |||||||||||
Tens of thousands of Iranians have turned out to attend the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a senior cleric who was critical of the Iranian government. Montazeri's funeral was held in the holy city of Qom on Monday, amid speculation by some analysts that it could become a catalyst for fresh opposition protests. The reformist website Jaras said that hundreds of thousands of people joined a procession for Montazeri. "They were shouting slogans in his support and also in support of Mirhossein Mousavi [an opposition leader]," the website reported. The opposition Kaleme website reported that a bus carrying opposition supporters to Qom was stopped and some of those on board arrested. It also reported some small clashes following the funeral. "The police cracked down on people who were shouting [anti-government] slogans in front his house and people threw stones at them," the website said. But Sadegh Zibakalam, a politics professor at Tehran University who attended the funeral, told Al Jazeera it had passed off peacefully. "There was a huge crowd of both government and supporters of Montazeri ... people had come as far as from Tabriz and other very distant cities," he said.
Mohammed Shakeel, an Iran Analyst with the Economist Intelligence Unit, said that there was a potential for unrest with the funeral coinciding with heightened tensions around a major Shia Muslim festival. "This almost adds a momentum in its own right to the Ashura commemorations," he told Al Jazeera from Dubai. "The opposition are going to, not necessarily use, but utilise the death of Ayatollah Montazeri to propogate the whole opposition element and the ideas they stand for. Foreign media were banned from covering the funeral ceremony. Ahead of the funeral, Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, who were both defeated in June's disputed presidential poll, called for a national day of mourning. "We invite all saddened religious people mourning the death of this pride of the Shia world to take part in the funeral of this legend of endeavour, jurisprudence and spirituality," Mousavi and Karroubi said in a joint statement published on the Kalme website. Mousavi later arrived in Qom to attend the burial in the shrine of Masoumeh, a revered Shia figure. In the wake of the street protests that followed the election dispute, Montazeri was referred to as the spiritual leader of the opposition. In August, Montazeri described the clerical establishment as a "dictatorship", saying that the authorities' handling of street unrest after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, "could lead to the fall of the regime". He was also an architect of the 1979 Islamic revolution but fell out with the Iranian leadership in the 1980s. Montazeri passed away on Sunday in Qom after suffering a cardiac arrest. Videos posted on the internet prior to the funeral appeared to show hundreds of Montazeri's supporters taking to the streets of Najafabad, his birth town, to mourn his death. Baqer Moin, an Iranian journalist and author, told Al Jazeera that Montazeri's absence would be "greatly felt across the country", among people on both sides of the political divide. "He was the most heavyweight among them [the reformists]. He had great popularity because he was a humble man, he was a simple man ... and above all he was very courageous," Moin said. "He didn't fear expressing his views, critical of the current supreme leader or the policies of the government." Ghanbar Naderi, a journalist for the Iran Daily newspaper, told Al Jazeera: "This is huge blow to the reformist camp, because he is unreplaceable and nobody is happy to hear about his sad demise. "He used to say that religion should be separated from politics, because in this way, we can keep the integrity of religion intact." But Seyed Mohammad Marandi, a political analyst at the University of Tehran, told Al Jazeera in August that Montazeri said "the same thing for around 25 years". "He is not a major player and has always been very critical," Marandi said. | |||||||||||
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Israel debates prisoner swap
| Israel debates prisoner swap | |||||||||||||
Israeli ministers have held their fourth meeting in two days to discuss exchanging hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for a captured Israeli soldier held in the Gaza Strip. Army radio said that a further meeting was planned in an attempt to resolve the differences before a possible final vote on the deal. Family's plea
Following the meeting with the prime minister, Noam Shalit, the soldier's father, said: "I am not pessimistic but nor am I optimistic."
Germany, which has a history of organising successful prisoner exchange between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah, has also been involved in mediating in recent months. It also wants Hamas to agree to some of the prisoners being deported to areas other than the West Bank to prevent them from joining groups of Palestinian fighters in the future. In October, Israel freed about 20 Palestinian women prisoners in exchange for a video showing Shalit in captivity. The video showed Shalit alive and moving - the first proof of his wellbeing since he was captured. | |||||||||||||
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Israel admits to organ thefts
| Israel admits to organ thefts | |||
Israel has admitted that it harvested organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians and Israelis in the 1990s, without permission from their families. The admission follows the release of an interview with Jehuda Hiss, the former head of Israel's forensic institute, in which he said that workers at the institute had harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers. In the interview, which was conducted in 2000 when Hiss was head of Tel Aviv's Abu Kabir forensic institute, he said: "We started to harvest corneas ... Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family." Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who conducted the interview, told Al Jazeera on Monday that Hiss had said the "body parts were used by hospitals for transplant purposes - cornea transplants. They were sent to public hospitals [for use on citizens]. Guidelines 'not clear' "And the skin went to a special skin bank, founded by the military, for their uses", such as for burns victims. The practice is said to have ended in 2000. The interview was also reported on Israel's Channel 2 television, which quoted an Israeli military statement that said: "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer." Israel's health ministry said in the Channel 2 report that at the time the guidelines for transplants "were not clear" and that for the last 10 years "Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law". Scheper-Hughes, who is a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, said that she made the interview public because of the controversy last summer over allegations of organ harvesting made by a Swedish newspaper. In August the Aftonbladet newspaper ran an article alleging that the Israeli army had stolen body organs from Palestinian men after killing them. Israel denied the claims, calling them anti-Semitic, and the incident raised tensions when Sweden refused to apologise for the article, saying that press freedom prevented it from intervening. 'Conflict deaths' Donald Bostrom, the journalist who broke the story in Aftonbladet, told Al Jazeera: "UN staff came to me and said that you have to look into this very serious issue. Palestinian young people were disappearing in the areas and five days later they appear back in the villages with an autopsy done on them against the will of the families. "We need to know who are the victims. Mothers need to know what happened to their sons." Bostrom said that there is no proof that people were killed for their organs but that an investigation is needed to find out whether there was a policy in place or if the bodies used were random. Bostrom added that Hiss is the "main key" to solving such unanswered questions, but that there would also be other people involved who could help uncover the truth. Scheper-Hughes said that some of the dead Palestinians from whom organs were harvested were killed during military raids. "Some of the bodies were definitely Palestinians who were killed in conflicts," she told Al Jazeera. "Their organs were taken without consent of families and were used to serve the needs of the country in terms of hospitals as well as the army's needs." 'Technically illegal' She said that Hiss told her "that the people who did the harvesting were sent by the military. They were often medical students". "He did it informally and without permission, and it was technically illegal," she said. The military establishment gave their "sanction and approval" to the procedures, according to Scheper-Hughes. During his interview with Scheper-Hughes, Hiss said that the eyelids of bodies were glued shut to prevent the removal of corneas being found out. Hiss was dismissed as head of Abu Kabir in 2004 over irregularities in the use of organs, but charges against him were eventually dropped. He still holds the position of chief pathologist at the institute. | |||
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Iran 'holding bin Laden relatives'
| Iran 'holding bin Laden relatives' | |||
Iranian authorities are holding several family members of Osama bin Laden, according to Abdul Rahman bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader's second son. In an interview published on Al Jazeera Arabic's website on Monday, Abdul Rahman bin Laden said that Eman, his sister, one of his stepmothers and five of his brothers have been detained in Tehran since 1997. He alleged that his sister had managed to escape several weeks ago while on a shopping tour permitted by authorities every six months. She has since taken refuge in the Saudi Arabian embassy. Abdul Rahman bin Laden said that he had been unaware whether his relatives were alive until Eman contacted him a month ago. He then told her to go to the Saudi embassy. 'Other people's disputes' He told Al Jazeera that he was concerned for his sister's health and he called on Tehran to release his relatives. He also called for the Saudi government to ensure his sister's departure from the country. Hussein Shobokshi, a columnist for the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Alawsat, told Al Jazeera that the discovery Iran was holding members of bin Laden's family was consistent with reports "that Iran has been able to infiltrate al-Qaeda operations". "They have been hosting key figures in the leadership structure of al-Qaeda for some time and they have been co-operating visibly with them in Iraq, Yemen and Somalia amongst other places," he said. But Abdul Rahman bin Laden cited poor relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran for the reason no agreement had been reached over freeing his relatives. "My siblings are innocent and have nothing to do with other people's disputes with our father," he said. Abdul Rahman bin Laden and his siblings are the children of the al-Qaeda leader's first wife. | |||
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Stolen Auschwitz camp sign found
| Stolen Auschwitz camp sign found | |||
Police in Poland have detained five people following the recovery of the stolen "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, taken from the entrance to the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz last week. The metal sign, which was taken in the early hours of Friday morning, was found cut into three pieces, officials said in a statement. The sign's motto – which translates as "work makes you free" – has become a symbol of the brutality of the Nazi regime. The theft of the infamous symbol had sparked outrage around the world and the Polish government had made its recovery a national priority. Sign dismembered Officials had also appealed to international police organisations Interpol and Europol for help. More than one million people, mostly Jews, but also Roma, Poles and others, died at Auschwitz – most of them executed in gas chambers or worked to death in the camp's factories. The five metre sign was reportedly recovered following a raid in northern Poland late on Sunday. The sign had been cut into three pieces, one for each word. Speaking to Al Jazeera, Lukasz Lipinski, editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper, said: "We know that these five people are being held by the police. "We know that the motive is that they wanted to sell that object, that top of the gate, that symbol. "And we know that there is some unofficial information that someone actually ordered them to steal it through the interent. "As far as we know there is no connection between them and any fascist, or Nazi or far-right groups." "The surveillance was concentrated on the archives and exhibited objects, because no sane person could have imagined such an act," Piotr Cywinski told the AFP news agency. "The camp entrance, from where the sign was stolen, was being monitored by just one camera, an old model. Moreover the snow meant the image was blurred." | |||
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Nigerians await Pfizer settlement
| Nigerians await Pfizer settlement | ||
Families in the Nigerian state of Kano have been awarded millions of dollars by Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker, in a settlement over a medical trial that allegedly caused deaths and injuries. Pfizer carried out medical trials in Kano in 1996, when about 200 children were tested with an antibiotic called Trovan, which was supposed to treat meningitis. Eleven of those tested died soon after, while many others were left with deformities. Ten years later, the Nigerian government sued Pfizer for $2bn, saying that the company misled Kano state about the unapproved drug. Pfizer denies any wrongdoing. An out-of-court settlement was finally reached in July this year, with Pfizer agreeing to pay up to $75m - a fraction of what was sought. But many families are still waiting to recieve their share of that money. Al Jazeera's Yvonne Ndege returned to Kano to meet some of those families. | ||
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Suu Kyi to appeal Myanmar detention
| Suu Kyi to appeal Myanmar detention | |||
Myanmar's supreme court is to hear an appeal against the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country's opposition leader, after she was sentenced to a further 18 months in detention. The court did not release a date for the hearing, but Nyan Win, Suu Kyi's lawyer, said he expected to present the case within a month. Lawyers are appealing the 64-year-old democracy leader's house arrest, which she received for sheltering a US intruder who swam to her lakeside home. Suu Kyi was initially sentenced last August to three years in prison with hard labour, but that sentence was commuted by General Than Shwe, Myanmar's junta chief. The court said her actions broke a law protecting the army-ruled state from "subversive elements" and breached the terms of her house arrest. But her lawyers say the law she was charged under can no longer be applied because it was part of the 1974 constitution, which was replaced last year. Critics have dismissed Suu Kyi's house arrest as an attempt to keep her in detention ahead of next year's elections, which will be Myanmar's first in two decades. Suu Kyi has spent 14 out of the last 20 years in detention, since her party swept the last elections in 1990 - a victory that was never honoured by the military, which has ruled the country since 1962. | |||
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Taliban clash with Afghan forces
| Taliban clash with Afghan forces | ||
Two Taliban fighters have been killed in a clash with Afghan police near a police station in eastern Paktia province, officials have said. The Taliban fighters launched an assault on the police headquarters in Gardez, the provincial capital, shortly before 10am local time (05:30 GMT) on Monday and opened fire on security forces, Rahullah Samon, a provincial government spokesman, said. General Azizuddin Wardak, the provincial police chief, told AFP: "It's now over. They were two people and both have been killed." The fighters were armed with rifles, rocket launchers and grenades, and were wearing explosive vests, he said. Their bombs detonated under police fire, he said. He did not give further details. Taliban intercepted "A spokesperson of the governor of Paktia told Al Jazeera that two Taliban suicide bombers were killed and that 12 [people] were injured - four policemen and the rest civilians, and that an Isaf (Nato-led International Security Assistance Force) soldier was also injured. "A spokesperson of the Taliban told Al Jazeera that the aim of this operation was to tell the international community to 'stop thinking about parliament and the Afghan government, because you have to bear in mind that we are the ones to call the shots in Afghanistan'." Eastern Afghanistan has seen some of the worst violence by the Taliban, which is targeting the Western-backed government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and 113,000 US and Nato troops in the country. Barack Obama, the US president, and Nato allies have pledged to deploy an extra 37,000 troops to Afghanistan, which will take the total number of foreign troops in the country to 150,000. | ||
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