EU lawmakers cancel Iran visit in row

A VISIT to Iran by five Euro MPs has been called off after Tehran refused to let them meet with a jailed activist lawyer and a filmmaker, just a day after the two were awarded a prestigious European human rights prize.

"The five MEPs were about to leave for Tehran when delegation chair (Tarja) Cronberg received a phone call from the Iranian ambassador to the EU, saying they would not be allowed to meet with the two Sakharov Prize winners," jailed lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh and filmmaker Jafar Panahi, a European Parliament source said.

Sotoudeh, 47, who is serving an 11-year jail sentence for conspiring against state security, and Panahi, 52, who is under house arrest and has been banned from making films for 20 years, were awarded the 2012 Sakharov Prize on Friday.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran categorically rejected any pre-conditions. Therefore this visit has been cancelled," the Young Journalists Club, an affiliate of the state broadcaster, reported on its website.

The ISNA news agency quoted Hossein Sheikholeslam, international affairs adviser to the speaker of parliament, as saying Iran had "rejected a pre-condition set by the European parliamentary delegation to meet with two prisoners".

"If the delegation agrees to visit Iran under the initially agreed conditions and agenda, then there is no objection to the visit... But we cannot accept the current pre-condition."

Iran has cracked down on both since its disputed June 2009 presidential election.

Sotoudeh is a leading human rights campaigner known for her work as a lawyer representing opposition activists, while Panahi has been acclaimed at international festivals for his gritty, socially critical movies.

The human rights and democracy prize "is a message of solidarity and recognition to a woman and a man who have not been bowed by fear and intimidation and who have decided to put the fate of their country before their own," Parliament President Martin Schulz said on Friday.

Schulz had also warned the visit would be cancelled if the delegation was unable to meet Sotoudeh and Panahi.

The rights award comes on the heels of tough new European Union sanctions against Iran aimed at forcing a breakthrough in talks between global powers and Tehran on its disputed nuclear program.

After a biting oil embargo took effect in July, EU foreign ministers last week tightened the economic noose by targeting dealings with Iran's banks, shipping and gas imports.

The last visit by a European parliamentary delegation to Iran was in 2007.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Russian opposition leaders detained

RUSSIAN opposition leaders have been detained while protesting what they say is the torture of a fellow activist.

Investigators earlier this week said that Leonid Razvozzhayev had turned himself in and confessed to plotting riots. But days later the activist disavowed his confession and filed a complaint over what he said was his abduction from Ukraine.

Rights activists who visited him in jail say he had been tortured into confessing.

Police detained Alexei Navalny, Sergei Udaltsov and Ilya Yashin as they were standing outside the Russian former intelligence and former KGB headquarters, protesting "torture and repression."

The three men were among hundreds of people gathered in central Moscow to protest an increasingly relentless crackdown on the opposition in Russia.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Iraq Eid attacks kill 16

ATTACKS mostly targeting Shi'ite Muslims during the Eid al-Adha holiday, including bombings of a marketplace and a minibus carrying pilgrims, killed at least 16 people in Iraq on Saturday.

The shootings and explosions, which also left more than 40 people wounded, were the latest in a spate of violence in the past week that has broken a relative calm in Iraq, even though authorities had announced a series of moves to boost security during the four-day Eid break.

UN special envoy Martin Kobler condemned Saturday's violence as "atrocious", adding in a statement: "The targeting of worshippers is an appalling crime."

In the east Baghdad district of Maamal, a bomb exploded in a neighbourhood market as women were shopping for groceries alongside their children at around 9am (4pm AEDT).

At least five people were killed, including three children and a woman, security and medical officials said. They added that 13 others were wounded.

Just north of Baghdad in the town of Taji, a magnetic "sticky bomb" attached to a minibus ferrying Shi'ite pilgrims killed at least five people and wounded 12 others, a security official and medics said.

The doctors warned that the toll could rise.

Officials said some Iranian pilgrims were among the dead and wounded, but it was unclear how many. Differing tolls and details of casualties are common in the chaotic aftermath of attacks in Iraq.

A Shi'ite car salesman in the town of Muqdadiyah was shot dead, and eight people were wounded by a car bomb targeting a Shi'ite religious foundation's offices in the town of Tuz Khurmatu.

Shi'ites in Iraq typically use the Eid al-Adha holiday, which began on Friday, to either visit relatives, the graves of dead family members or shrines of key figures in Shi'ite Islam located across the country.

In the run-up to the holiday, authorities in several provinces, including Baghdad, announced tightened security for the holiday, apparently to no avail.

While no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, Sunni militants frequently target Shi'ite pilgrims during Muslim holidays such as Eid or Shi'ite commemoration ceremonies.

In Mosul, 350km north of Baghdad, three attacks targeting the tiny Shabak community killed five people and wounded 10 others, officials said.

In separate shootings, gunmen burst into the homes of Shabak families and killed five people and wounded four others, including young children, while a bombing in the compound of a family home wounded six.

"The security forces are supposed to be responsible for protecting all the citizens of Mosul," said Qusay Abbas, a Shabak member of the provincial council of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital.

"This is a very troubling attack."

The Shabak community numbers about 30,000 people living in 35 villages in Nineveh. They largely follow a faith that is a blend of Shi'ite Islam and local beliefs.

The community was persecuted under former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and after the 2003 US-led invasion they were targeted several times by al-Qaeda.

Mosul is widely cited as one of the places where al-Qaeda Iraqi front still holds sway.

At least 49 people have been killed in a week since October 20, more than in the first 15 days of the month combined, according to an AFP tally.

At least 250 people have been killed as a result of unrest in each of the past four months.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Rebels raid poultry farm

COMMUNIST guerrilla rebels raided a poultry farm in the southern Philippines and torched two buildings after the owner ignored their extortion demands, the military said on Saturday.

Thousands of chickens were killed after rebels from the New People's Army set fire to the buildings in a pre-dawn attack on Friday, military spokesman Captain Alberto Caber told reporters.

The rebels later contacted the farm owner Onyx Go by telephone, threatening to return with gasoline and matchsticks unless he agreed to pay up 60,000 pesos ($1400) a month, according to a military statement.

The raid marked the second such attack on businesses owned by Mr Go since last year, when his chicken shop in a nearby town was ransacked by the rebels, Captain Caber said.

The Maoist NPA has been waging a decades-old guerrilla campaign that has cost tens of thousands of lives.

Earlier this month the Philippine government said it hoped to resume peace talks with the communist rebels, after announcing a peace agreement with Muslim rebels who also operate in the restive south.

Talks with the communist rebels were suspended in November last year due to persistent demands by the rebels to free jailed comrades they claimed were consultants to the negotiations.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Police fire rubber bullets at miners

SOUTH African police have fired rubber bullets, stun grenades and tear gas to disperse striking miners trying to prevent a rally by the country's main labour grouping.

Bullet casings littered the ground and a helicopter circled above, with police sirens howling, as the protesters were chased into the area surrounding a stadium in northwestern Rustenburg.

The protesters were trying to prevent a rally by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu), the country's main umbrella union organisation.

The strikers say they are unhappy with the way unions have been representing their interests. A wave of wildcat strikes that has shaken the mining sector since August has seen workers spurn the main National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Cosatu's main affiliate.

The clashes broke out after police cleared around 300 people from the stadium where union T-shirts were set alight, and blocked the entrance with armoured vans.

An Agence France-Presse photographer saw a man dressed in Cosatu's red colours bleeding after he had been beaten up and a correspondent saw at least eight protesters bundled into a police truck after the crackdown.

"We are here to demonstrate ... we the striking mineworkers are tired of NUM," Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) worker Reuben Lerebolo told AFP.

The clashes came a day after the NUM announced it had reached a deal with the world's number one platinum producer Amplats to rehire 12,000 workers who were fired for a wildcat strike.

But striking workers said they were not aware of the deal, which would signal a further winding down of a wave of wildcat strikes that have rocked platinum and gold mines since August.

"We know nothing about it. We were not consulted, we only heard about it on the radio," said Lerebolo, carrying a poster stating "NUM we are tired of you".

"We can't go to work until our demands are met," he said.

Cosatu staged the Saturday march and rally in a bid to regain its authority in the area after workers snubbed the NUM in the recent strikes and to demand that fired workers be reinstated.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Vatican cannot revoke Savile's honour

THE Vatican says it cannot rescind the papal knighthood awarded to television star Jimmy Savile, who emerged as an alleged child sex predator after his death.

The Catholic Church of England said it has contacted the Holy See to ask it to posthumously revoke Savile's honour in recognition of the "deep distress" of the victims allegedly abused by Savile, a well-known BBC children's television host who died last year at the age of 84.

But the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told The Associated Press that the names of people who receive the knighthood don't appear in its yearbook and that the honor dies with the individual.

Lombardi said Savile never would have received the honour had the truth about his behavior been known.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Supermarket roof collapse in kills one

AT least one person was killed and nearly a dozen were missing after a supermarket roof collapsed in southern Argentina, authorities said.

The accident struck shortly before closing Thursday when an adjacent building under construction collapsed, damaging the structure supporting the market's roof.

Emergency workers were clearing debris and searching for survivors of the Thursday evening accident.

"We have confirmation of one death, it is a student named Freyda Yanez," said a source close to the mayor's office in Neuquen, about 1150 kilometres southwest of Buenos Aires.

Another city official, Marcelo Bermudez, had earlier said 18 were injured and 11 missing in the accident.

Neuquen, a city of 300,000, is the capital of the state of the same name, where the economy is based largely on agriculture, tourism and oil exploitation.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Syrian army 'responding to ceasefire violations'

THE Syrian army said it was responding to attacks by armed rebels that were in violation of a temporary ceasefire agreed for a four-day Muslim holiday.

"Armed terrorist groups attacked military positions, thereby clearly violating the halt to military operations agreed by the army command. Our valiant armed forces are responding to these violations and pursuing these groups," the military said in a statement read on state television.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

US stocks flat in opening trade

US stocks have opened flat under the shadow of earnings disappointments from tech giants Apple and Amazon but shored up by a slightly better-than-expected estimate of GDP growth in the third quarter.

Apple lost 0.4 per cent after reporting a quarterly profit of $US8.2 billion ($A7.97 billion) but missing expectations.

Amazon was stunned with a loss, mainly from a writedown of its stake in LivingSocial and higher operating costs. The online retailer rose 2.7 per cent in early trade.

Five minutes into Friday trade the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1.64 points (0.01 per cent) to 13,102.22.

The broad-based S&P 500 lost 0.75 (0.05 per cent) to 1,412.22, while the Nasdaq Composite added 0.68 (0.02 per cent) at 2,986.80.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More

Package shuts Canada's US embassy

A SUSPICIOUS package was found at the Canadian embassy in Washington Friday and the building was evacuated, police and local media reported.

City police said in a Twitter message that a section of Pennsylvania Avenue, a busy downtown Washington street, in front of the embassy was closed as they investigated a "suspicious package."

Police did not immediately say what the package contained.

Embassy personnel evacuated the building, local media reported. Embassy officials were unavailable for immediate comment.

22.34 | 0 komentar | Read More