Danish politicians say Greenland is still years away from true autonomy, despite its vote for greater self-rule.
In a referendum on Tuesday, 75.5% of voters in Greenland backed a plan to increase their autonomy from Denmark, the former colonial power.
Denmark subsidises Greenland’s 57,000 population to the tune of 3.2bn kroner (£395m) annually - two-thirds of the Arctic island’s budget revenue.
Greenland’s foreign policy and security will remain in Danish hands.
The attack took place in a Shia mosque during prayer time on Friday, a day after parliamentarians passed a controversial security pact with the US.
The mosque was filled with around 300 worshippers when the bomber attacked, destroying doors and windows and filling the building with smoke, Kadhim al Shammari, a police officer, said.
In July 2005 more than 70 people were killed in the same mosque when a suicide bomber detonated explosives loaded on a lorry.
SUMMITS are a dime a dozen these days. So it is tempting to shrug off the announcement on November 26th that China pulled out of an EU-China summit, at less than a week’s notice. But China’s high-profile snub—aimed at President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who was to be the host on the European Union side—cannot be dismissed so easily.
Cancelling a meeting at such a high level is a rare breach of diplomatic manners. Mr Sarkozy has irked China by proposing to meet the Dalai Lama at a party in Poland for former winners of the Nobel peace prize on December 6th. Before then, he was due to play host to the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, in the French city of Lyon, in his capacity as holder of the rotating presidency of the EU. Some of the EU’s regular summits with China are very dull. This one had important things to discuss, such as joint action on tackling the global financial crisis. An official EU statement regretted the summit’s postponement, “particularly” at a time when the world situation calls for “very close co-operation”.
For outsiders, one of the biggest obstacles to uncovering the truth about the UN is the sheer tedium of its procedures and lingo. Waste, fraud and abuse—when disclosed at all—tend to come wrapped in generic labels, referring in many cases to unnamed officials, with the shockers often embedded deep in lengthy, bloodless reports. Investigations too often devolve into drawn-out coverups, while UN officials look for ways to contain not the harm to the public, but the damage to the UN’s reputation.
Even in the reports of the supposedly tell-all 2004-2005 UN-authorized inquiry into Oil-for-Food, led by Paul Volcker, it is hard in many places to draw a line between exposé and coverup. One of my favorite examples is Volcker’s first interim report, released in February 2005, in which his committee described disturbing behavior by the person who was then deputy secretary general, Louise Frechette, referring to her 12 times without once mentioning her name.
They were also sweeping the luxury Oberoi hotel in search of further hostages and trapped people.
Meanwhile, eight hostages were freed from the headquarters of a Jewish outreach group, according to an official of the Maharashtra state home department, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
It was unclear if any others remained inside the ultra-orthodox Chabad Lubavitch offices.
Gunfire and explosions could be heard well into the night from the Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels, two of the city’s top gathering spots for the Mumbai elite, as well as at the Jewish group’s centre.
Authorities said 119 people died and 300 were injured when the militants - armed with assault rifles, hand grenades and explosives - launched their attacks against 10 sites in the city yesterday. Eight of the terrorists were also killed.
Almost 300 children have been killed while taking part in terrorist attacks over the past eight years, a new study conducted by Palestinian Authority researcher Mahdi Jaradat has revealed. A total of 3,973 PA Arabs died in the past eight years while committing acts of terrorism, he found.
Fatah had the most fatalities, with a total of 1,437 terrorists, 128 of them children, killed since September 28, 2000. Hamas was in second place with 1,410 killed in the same time period, 96 of them minors. Fifty-three children were killed while taking part in Islamic Jihad operations, five were killed as members of the PFLP, four died with the DFLP, and three with PRC.
Demonstrations took place in towns across France on Saturday against the planned privatization of the postal service. The protests were called by five unions against the planned change in status of La Poste on January 1, 2010 to a limited company. This would open up a 30 percent share of the postal service to private investors “to finance modernisation”—to the tune of €3 billion.
Shortly after the Kosovo War ended in June 1999, harrowing reports began to surface about atrocities committed by both the ethnic-Albanian-led Kosovo Liberation Army and Yugoslav-Serbian forces. Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s trial later confirmed that crimes against humanity took place during the conflict, while reports of revenge attacks carried out by ethnic Albanian rebels against the Serb minority in Kosovo, then an autonomous part of what was left of Yugoslavia, highlighted the level of brutality that unfolded in the war’s aftermath. Now comes another sordid accusation to open up an old wound between the bitter rivals.
Last week, Serbian prosecutors announced that a number of mental patients who disappeared after the Kosovo War may have been victims of an organ-trafficking network set up in neighbouring Albania. Bruno Vekaric, Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor, told the Associated Press that the mysterious disappearance of 40 people in 2001 from a mental hospital in the southern Kosovo town of Stimlje may have been linked to the alleged organ-trafficking ring. Vekaric added that Serbian authorities have “reliable evidence [that] fits the picture that something gruesome was going on in Albania.”
TERROR has stalked Mumbai, India’s commercial capital, all too many times before. In 1993 more than 250 people died in a series of bomb attacks, seen as reprisals for the demolition by Hindu fanatics of the mosque at Ayodhya. In 2003, more than 50 people were killed by two car bombs, including one just outside the Taj Mahal hotel, next to the monumental tourist attraction, the “Gateway of India”. And in 2006 over 180 people were killed in seven separate explosions at railway stations and on commuter trains. But the latest atrocity—or rather co-ordinated series of atrocities (see article)—is something new to the city. It has alarming implications not just for India, but for the entire international fight against terrorism.
It is a sad fact that India’s big cities have become accustomed to terrorism over the past few years. While Indians have routinely pointed to Pakistan any time there was an attack in the past, it has become clear that there are various home-grown terrorist organizations in India as well.
The groups are effectively motivated by domestic policy issues. These include: Indian Muslims radicalized by discrimination and pogroms spurred on by radical Hindu politicians; a variety of separatist groups, from Kashmir to the northeast of the country; and finally, the last weeks have seen the arrest of apparently Hindu terrorists who attacked Muslim targets—including an army officer on active duty.
Kimonyo expressed this to The New Times last week at the Rwanda embassy in Washington. He was commenting on the arrest of Rwanda’s Chief of State Protocol, Rose Kabuye, in Germany and her conditional release by a French court.
Two judges from France and Spain issued indictments against Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF), officers, including Kabuye. The indictments have been widely condemned as fraudulent with Kabuye’s arrest sparking off protests in Rwanda and many parts of the world.
We are following my Mother’s tradition.
Get as many family as possible together and make sure they bring strays.
that I live in the greatest country on earth and that these guys are out there for me and others ... and that they remember.
With a headline like this, you know that they’ve gone to far.
Fake penis drug test creators face jail.
Thank goodness there’s no pictures.
Follow the link on this page and get to this picture.
CNN didn’t tell them that it was a ‘humanitarian mission’.
Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling, who leads U.S. forces in northern Iraq, said the women turned themselves in after a local cleric and their families persuaded them that suicide attacks violated the tenets of Islam.
The number of bombings carried out by women has spiked this year even as overall violence has declined, and Hertling said Wednesday’s surrender would deal a significant blow to recruitment efforts.
U.S. military figures show 31 attacks by 35 female suicide bombers so far this year, compared with eight in 2007.
Boulder Time
