The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- NEWSMAKER - Strauss-Kahn's accuser: Schemer or immigrant survivor?
- Japan PM says early poll against public feeling - Jiji
- China launches 2-month safety campaign after deadly train crash
| NEWSMAKER - Strauss-Kahn's accuser: Schemer or immigrant survivor? Posted: 25 Jul 2011 08:57 PM PDT NEW YORK (Reuters) - First she was portrayed as a model of virtue who was violated by a rich and powerful man.
Then she was presented as a liar, a schemer associated with criminals in the New York underworld, who may have taken down the next president of France for her own financial gain. The world remains divided on the hotel maid who accused former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of assaulting her in a New York hotel on May 14, an explosive case which like many sex cases comes down to whose account of the incident you believe. Nafissatou Diallo, whose story had been told through prosecutors and defence lawyers, gave her own account to the media this weekend in a graphic interview with Newsweek and ABC, saying Strauss-Kahn behaved like a "crazy man." It was the first time the widow with a teenage daughter, an immigrant from Guinea in West Africa, had spoken publicly since she alleged Strauss-Kahn emerged naked from the bathroom of his luxury suite and forced her to perform oral sex. Defence lawyers insist any sex was consensual and called the interview an effort to extract money from Strauss-Kahn. Diallo's lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, said she wanted people to know she is not a "shakedown artist or a prostitute." The illiterate daughter of a Muslim imam, she was working as a cleaner at the luxury Manhattan hotel. "She is not a whore, she is a good mother," said Blake Diallo, the Senegalese manager of a Harlem restaurant she once frequented, who is not related to her. "She was a wonderful, caring, hard-working African woman." To women's rights advocates she is a survivor who embodies the immigrant story of fleeing poverty and repression for a better life in America. They also lament how the accuser so easily becomes the accused. Yet defenders and political supporters of Strauss-Kahn were also handed material they could eagerly latch on to. Prosecutors hoping to jail Strauss-Kahn for up to 25 years were forced to report troubling information about Diallo's background. In order to win U.S. asylum she had lied about being gang-raped and she changed details of her story about what happened minutes after her encounter with Strauss-Kahn. What's more, the woman appeared to be surrounded by shady characters. The revelations threw the case into disarray, providing Strauss-Kahn's defence lawyers with ammunition to undermine her credibility should the case ever reach trial. SHATTERED HOMELAND According to lawyers for the accuser, prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney's office said they had found a recorded telephone conversation after the incident between her and a man detained in an Arizona jail in which she said "words to the effect" that "this guy has a lot of money. I know what I am doing." The precise context of the conversation has been clouded by the difficulties of interpretation of a dialect of Fulani, but they were seen as seriously undermining the prosecution case. Despite speculation that he might drop the charges, New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance has yet to do so, indicating prosecutors may believe parts of both narratives -- that she was a victim but she also has inconvenient facts in her background. "Poor immigrants of violence often do things to survive ... and are sometimes drawn into criminal or unsavoury activity and often end up with really poor quality immigration assistance," said Dorchen Leidholdt, director of the battered women's services group that has provided services to the accuser. "She's typical of so many of the very vulnerable immigrant women in our city." Despite Guinea's ample natural resources, decades of misrule mean its 10 million residents mostly make do on average incomes of around $3 a day. One of six brothers and sisters, Diallo's early life was one of limited horizons and expectations. Her home village in the remote Labe region, a hard day's drive north of Conakry, still has no water, electricity or phone lines. It is reached only after a 30-minute scramble on foot through thick forest. Her family is of Fula ethnicity, like 40 percent of the population. Her late father was known as a devoted and learned Muslim. Like many West Africans, her family practiced the Tidjiane version of Sunni Islam. "Here, the girls get married at 16 and the boys at 20. We don't know anything about that other way of life," her older brother Mamoudou told Reuters, referring to the Western lifestyle his sister found in New York. Her own arranged marriage to a distant cousin ended with the death of her husband -- the cause is unclear -- after which she left her home village in the mid-1990s, travelling to the capital to become a seamstress. Her ties with her family back in the Labe region then appeared to weaken. Later, in her asylum application, prosecutors said she fabricated and embellished her story, claiming she and her husband were persecuted and harassed by the Guinean regime and her husband was jailed, tortured, deprived of medical treatment and eventually died as a result. After the encounter with Strauss-Kahn, she told prosecutors she had fabricated the statement with the help of an advisor. Kenneth Thompson, a lawyer representing her, said she volunteered to prosecutors she had lied on her asylum application due to that bad advice. FROM AFRICA TO THE BRONX Diallo was a victim of genital mutilation, and she wanted to avoid the same fate for her daughter, Thompson said. Those facts would have been enough to win asylum without the need to invent a story, he said. "We've seen ... clients are encouraged to make misrepresentations, even when the true story might be the very strong basis for an immigration claim," Leidholdt said. Prosecutors said Diallo was the victim of a rape in Guinea, though not a gang-rape as related in her asylum application. Within days of Strauss-Kahn's arrest, his advisers worked to collect information about Diallo's history. They quickly turned up links with people involved in criminal activities, but it was Manhattan prosecutors who uncovered some of the most damaging information on Diallo, according to William Taylor, one of Strauss-Kahn's lawyers. The man she spoke with in the Arizona jail had been arrested for bartering counterfeit designer clothes for marijuana, the New York Times reported. In addition, the Times said, investigators had found bank records showing deposits of thousands of dollars into her bank account, transferred there from a variety of U.S. states by the jailed man. Taylor said those details came from the District Attorney's office and their investigators. Diallo told Newsweek magazine the man did indeed transfer the money into her account, but she was never told about it and she never spent any of the cash. Once she moved to New York, she became a regular at Cafe 2115 on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, a magnet for the many French-speaking West Africans who live in Harlem, the largely black section of upper Manhattan. "These stories of drugs and laundering money, I don't know her that way. She is not that kind of person," the restaurateur Diallo said. She worked at the African American Restaurant Marayway, a Gambian eatery in the Bronx, where she worked serving Gambian food before landing a job at the luxury Sofitel hotel. Immigrant opinions of the woman are sharply mixed. "Why would a big man who could be president of France want to spoil his chances by doing such a thing?" asked Ouma Mahamadou, 23, a Nigerian patron of Cafe 2115. "It doesn't make any sense to me, so she must be lying." (Additional reporting by Paula Rogo and Noeleen Walder in New York, Mark Hosenball in London, and Saliou Samb in Conakry, editing by Mark Egan and Sandra Maler) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. | ||
| Japan PM says early poll against public feeling - Jiji Posted: 25 Jul 2011 07:56 PM PDT TOKYO (Reuters) - Unpopular Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Tuesday denied speculation that he might call an early election for parliament's powerful lower house, a move that would risk sparking a revolt inside his own Democratic Party.
Kan, whose support rating has sunk to 17.1 percent, also told a parliamentary committee that the next lower house election should be held in the summer of 2013, when a poll for the upper chamber is also scheduled, Jiji news agency reported. "To speak of a snap election is against public sentiment," Jiji quoted Kan as saying. Kan, under fire for his handling of the triple calamities of an massive earthquake, tsunami and a nuclear disaster in March, survived a non-confidence vote last month by pledging to hand over power to his party's younger generation. But he has been vague about the timing. Expectations are growing that Kan-- already Japan's fifth premier in as many years -- will step down in August after the passage of key legislation including a bill to allow fresh borrowing to help fund a $1 trillion budget for the year from April. Earlier this month, Kan listed the passage of the deficit-funding bill, an emergency budget approved on Monday and a law promoting renewable energy as conditions for his resignation. But doubts remain about whether he will quit without intense pressure from his own party. "I think Kan would like to say as prime minister beyond this parliament session (which ends on August 31) but the chances are approaching zero and if he doesn't leave willingly, I think some key cabinet members will resign and he'll be forced to go," said Columbia University professor Gerry Curtis. Curtis also said an early election was unlikely given strong resistance to the move inside the Democratic Party, which has a huge majority in the lower house now but would likely lose seats heavily if a vote were held soon. The Democrats swept to power in 2009 with promises of change, ending more than 50 years of almost non-stop rule by the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. But they have since seen their public support dwindle due to policy flip-flops, perceived bungling of diplomatic disputes and criticism of the government's handling of the March disasters. No lower house election need be held until summer 2013. (Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by Tomasz Janowski) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. | ||
| China launches 2-month safety campaign after deadly train crash Posted: 25 Jul 2011 07:55 PM PDT BEIJING (Reuters) - China's rail minister has ordered a two-month safety check on railway operations and apologised for Saturday's deadly train crash that killed 39 people, state media reported on Tuesday. It was the latest effort to assuage public anger after Internet users flooded websites and microblogs with comments following the crash in eastern China's Zhejiang province, the country's deadliest rail accident since 2008.
Even before the investigation into the cause of the crash was complete, Beijing on Sunday sacked three middle-level railway officials. Subsequent efforts by the propaganda department to bar Chinese media from questioning official accounts of the accident fueled even more anger and suspicion. The People's Daily quoted Sheng Guangzu, Minister of Railways, as saying a range of railway officials were directed to work on front-line operations during the next two months and to learn from the accident. He said the safety campaign will extend through the end of September and will focus on high-speed rail and passenger trains, such as implementing maintenance standards and reinforcing checks on power connections to pre-empt outages. Special attention would also go to prevent accidents caused by flooding and inclement weather, the minister said. The ministry is still investigating the cause of the accident. However, state media has said a bullet train hit another express that lost power following a lightning strike, adding that the power failure knocked out an electronic safety system designed to alert conductors about stalled locomotives on the line. The accident has raised concerns about the safety of the country's high-profile and fast-growing rail network and threatens to undermine its plans to export high-speed train technology. (Reporting by Chen Aizhu; Editing by Ken Wills and Jonathan Thatcher) Copyright © 2011 Reuters Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by Used Car Search. |
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