Tag: Evening Edition

Russian prime minister and self-proclaimed animal lover Vladimir Putin opened his native city to the world’s first gathering of leaders from 13 nations where the tiger’s free rein has been squeezed ever-tighter by poachers.

“This is an unprecedented gathering of world leaders (that aims) to double the number of tigers,” Jim Adams, vice president for the East Asia and Pacific Region at the World Bank, said at the opening ceremony of the four-day event.

The 48 countries that make up the NATO-led force in Afghanistan signed a deal with President Hamid Karzai to begin handing his government control of fighting in early 2011 and move to a support role by 2014.

Nevertheless, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said NATO would stand by Kabul after its combat mission ends, and US President Barack Obama said US forces would stay on and were ¨breaking the Taliban’s momentum.”

Thomas de Maiziere said it was not immediately clear who had carried out the test, which sparked a major security alert Wednesday, but said he had had no advance knowledge of the purported exercise.

“Experts from the (German) federal police force examined the luggage on site,” De Maiziere told reporters after a security conference with interior ministers from Germany’s 16 states.

Organizers had urged people to vent their anger at the United Nations and the Haitian authorities in a demonstration at a main square by the presidential palace, but what transpired was more like urban guerrilla warfare.

Tear gas filled the air and sporadic gunfire could be heard as gangs took to the streets of the quake-ravaged capital, blocking roads with barricades of burning tires and dumpsters full of rotten garbage.

Ireland in turn showed little sign of going along with its European Union peers, with possible conditions on any aid package hitting a raw nerve in Dublin over its right to make policy and set crucial tax levels.

For the EU’s Belgian presidency, it was a matter of when Ireland, one of the EU’s greatest beneficiaries in the past, would give way, rather than if.

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke did not reveal the amount of compensation nor the identity of those involved, but media reports suggest it stretches to millions of pounds (dollars, euros) and recipients include former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed.

“The government has now agreed a mediated settlement of the civil damages claims brought by detainees held at Guantanamo Bay,” Clarke told parliament.

Speaking at her party headquarters in Yangon, where she met senior regional members for the first time in years, she told the BBC she was sure democracy would eventually come to her country, although she did not know when.

“I think we also have to try to make this thing happen… Velvet revolution sounds a little strange in the context of the military, but a non-violent revolution. Let’s put it that way,” the 65-year-old said.

Some estimates put the number of pilgrims this year at 2.5 million, posing a major headache for the Saudi authorities as many of them are not hajj permit holders.

Pilgrims were still flooding on Sunday night into the vast plain of Mina outside a small village about five kilometres (three miles) east of Mecca, using all possible means to begin their hajj journey.

The daughter of Myanmar’s independence hero carries a weight of expectation among her followers for a better future for the nation after almost half a century of military dictatorship.

A crowd of thousands roared its approval on Saturday after the Nobel Peace Prize Winner — who has been locked up for most of the past two decades — appeared after the end of her latest seven-year stretch of detention.