Six In The Morning

Obama-Castro summit caps thaw in US-Cuba relations

   

BBC

US President Barack Obama has said his meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro will help both countries “turn the page” after decades of hostility.

He described the meeting on the fringes of the Summit of the Americas in Panama as “candid and fruitful”.

Mr Obama said that the former foes would continue to have differences but could advance mutual interests.

The meeting was the first formal talks between the two countries’ leaders in more than half a century.

 Beijing to limit Hong Kong visits by mainland Chinese  

  Unlimited trips cut to one a week per person after territory’s residents complained of being swamped by 47 million visitors last year

  Reuters in Hong Kong Sunday 12 April 2015 04.48 BST

China will limit visits by residents of the city of Shenzhen to neighbouring Hong Kong, a politician and the media said on Sunday, following recent tension in the former British colony over growing numbers of mainland visitors.

Hong Kong has seen a groundswell of discontent over the number of mainland Chinese visiting the crowded city, where frustration over Beijing’s stage-managing of an election process led to protests last year.

Shenzhen authorities would soon restrict residents to one Hong Kong visit a week, from an unlimited number of daily trips, said Michael Tien, a Hong Kong member of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress.

“It will definitely happen,” Tien said. “I’ve heard from very reliable government sources.”

  In the Middle East, our enemy’s enemy must be our friend

  World View: Al-Qaeda-type movements are gaining land and power, and there is only one way to stop them



Patrick Cockburn Sunday 12 April 2015

The ghost of Osama bin Laden will have been chuckling this month as he watches the movements he inspired conquer swathes of the Middle East. He will be particularly gratified to see fighters from Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) storm into Al Mukalla, the capital of Yemen’s eastern province of Hadhramaut from which the bin Laden family originated before making their fortune in Saudi Arabia.

As happened in Mosul, Iraq last summer when the Iraqi army fled before a jihadi attack, Yemeni government soldiers abandoned their bases in Al Mukalla leaving US Humvees and other military equipment. Earlier, AQAP had seized the central prison in the city and freed 300 prisoners, including Khaled Batarfi, one of the most important jihadi leaders in Yemen.

 New division threatens Ukraine

  The Ukrainian parliament has declared the former Communist regime to be criminal, and honored all those who fought for independence. Critics, however, see a further threat to the country’s unity.

 DW

 After the transition of power in Kyiv in February 2014, the new majority in parliament quashed a controversial language law, which, among other things, permitted Russian to be spoken at government offices. It was like pouring oil on a fire.

Pro-Russian separatists used the law as an argument against the government in Kyiv, and the division into pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian camps became even more entrenched. It’s feared that the three new laws passed by the Ukrainian parliament on Thursday could have a similar effect.

Hammer and sickle condemned

One of the laws has condemned “the Communist totalitarian regime” that ruled Ukraine between 1917 and 1991. Communist symbols such as the hammer and sickle, as well as all forms of “Communist propaganda,” are now banned.

  Korean ferry disaster: One year on, divisions over what was learned

 April 12, 2015 – 3:18PM

   Choe Sang-hun

Jeju, South Korea: At the windy port here on South Korea’s most famous resort island, truck drivers hauling cows, radishes and aluminium window frames on the 4½-hour journey to the mainland did something they had never done before last year: They handed in paperwork certifying the weight of their cargo.

That simple step is one of a host of regulatory changes made since the sinking of the Sewol ferry, one of South Korea’s most traumatic peacetime disasters. A year ago this week, the accident claimed the lives of more than 300 passengers, most of them teenagers on a school trip to Jeju.

“In the past, we didn’t weigh trucks and we didn’t know how much ships were carrying in cargo,” said Oh Myung-o, an inspector in Jeju who is back on the job while he and four other inspectors from the island stand trial for failing to stop routine overloading. “We did not suspect the Sewol would do foul play with its ballast water. We were wrong.”

 Virtual protest: Demonstrators challenge new law with holograms

 

  By Jethro Mullen, CNN Updated 0815 GMT (1515 HKT) April 12, 2015

Thousands of people marched past a Spanish parliament building in Madrid this weekend to protest a new law that they say endangers civil liberties.

But none of them were actually there.

The demonstrators were taking part in what organizers described as the world’s first hologram protest.

They used equipment to project the marchers’ holographic forms in front of the Congress of Deputies, the lower house of the national parliament, for about an hour on Saturday night.