The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- At least one Mursi supporter killed in Cairo protest march
- China's disgraced Bo Xilai to face trial soon - paper
- Clashes on Syria, spying mark debate on U.S. defense funding bill
| At least one Mursi supporter killed in Cairo protest march Posted: CAIRO (Reuters) - At least one supporter of Egypt's deposed President Mohamed Mursi was killed on Wednesday in Cairo during a protest march, a security source and the Muslim Brotherhood said. The Muslim Brotherhood said on its website that police in civilian clothes had opened fire using live ammunition early on Wednesday on marching Mursi supporters, killing two and injuring others. A security source confirmed one Mursi supporter was killed. The Muslim Brotherhood has accused the Ministry of Interior of using thugs in plain clothes to attack protesters, but security officials have denied this accusation. In a separate incident, a bomb exploded at a police station in a province north of Cairo early on Wednesday, killing one person and wounding 17 others, Health Ministry and security sources told Reuters. Unknown assailants threw the bomb from a passing car in Mansoura, the capital of Dakhalia province, two security sources said. Nine people were killed in Cairo on Tuesday in clashes between opponents and Islamist supporters of Mursi who was toppled by the army earlier this month. (Reporting By Shadia Nasralla; Editing by Philip Barbara) |
| China's disgraced Bo Xilai to face trial soon - paper Posted: HONG KONG (Reuters) - Disgraced former senior Chinese leader Bo Xilai will soon face public trial on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power, a Hong Kong newspaper reported on Wednesday. Bo's wife Gu Kailai and his former police chief, Wang Lijun, have both been jailed over China's biggest political scandal in decades, which stems from the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011. The government in September last year accused Bo of corruption and of bending the law to hush up that murder. China's prosecutors and courts come under party control and are most unlikely to challenge the party's accusations, though formal charges have yet to be publicly announced. Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, citing unnamed sources, said details of the charges against Bo had been read out at meetings of government officials in his former power base of Chongqing and other cities. No timetable for the trial was given, but it would happen soon in the eastern city of Jinan, the daily said. Bo was ousted from his post as Communist Party chief in the southwestern city of Chongqing last year after Heywood's murder. Before that, Bo had been widely tipped to be promoted to the party's elite inner core. His downfall came after his estranged police chief Wang fled briefly to a U.S. consulate in the neighbouring city of Chengdu last February and accused Bo's wife of poisoning Heywood. Bo, a former commerce minister, used his post as Communist Party chief of Chongqing from 2007 to 2012 to cast the sprawling, haze-covered municipality into a showcase for his mix of populist policies and bold spending plans that won support from leftists yearning for a charismatic leader. Rumours have swirled in China about Bo's fate, but the government has given no definitive word on progress into the investigation against him since late last year. Another Hong Kong newspaper, the Beijing-backed Ta Kung Pao, reported in January that Bo was about to be tried in the southern city of Guiyang, which sent dozens of reporters flocking to the courthouse. The report turned out to be untrue. (Reporting By Grace Li; Editing by Ben Blanchard and Mark Bendeich) |
| Clashes on Syria, spying mark debate on U.S. defense funding bill Posted: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers clashed over Syria, Afghanistan and government spying on Tuesday as the House of Representatives began debating a $598 billion (389 billion pounds) defense spending bill for 2014, including a Pentagon base budget of $512 billion and $86 billion for the Afghan war. The confrontations began even before the measure made it to the floor of the House after Republican leaders moved to restrict the number of permitted amendments to 100, with no more than 20 minutes of debate on divisive issues like Syria policy and spying by the National Security Agency. A final vote on the bill, which includes about $3 billion more than requested by President Barack Obama, is not expected until Wednesday at the earliest. Debate on the thorniest amendments, including on Syria, funding for Egypt and NSA spying, was not likely to begin until Wednesday. The White House has threatened a presidential veto of the overall bill unless it is part of a broader budget that supports U.S. economic recovery efforts, saying current House proposals cut too much from education, infrastructure and innovation. The White House joined senior House Republicans in urging lawmakers to oppose an amendment by Michigan Republican Justin Amash, a favourite of the conservative Tea Party movement, that would bar the NSA from collecting telephone call records and other data from people in the United States not specifically under investigation. The proposed amendment comes after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of an agency surveillance program that collects and stores vast amounts of electronic communications like phone call records and emails. White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama welcomed a debate on safeguarding privacy, but opposed Amash's amendment, saying it would "hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community's counterterrorism tools." Senior House Republicans, including Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers and Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, circulated a letter to colleagues urging them to oppose the amendment. "While many members have legitimate questions about the NSA metadata program, including whether there are sufficient protections for Americans' civil liberties, eliminating this program altogether without careful deliberation would not reflect our duty ... to provide for the common defense," they said. SYRIA SPLIT As debate got under way, lawmakers expressed concern over the constraints placed on their ability to discuss contentious issues. Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused Republican leaders of ignoring the "real split" in Congress over the Syrian civil war and denying "any real substantive debate" over whether the United States should intervene in a conflict that has already killed 100,000. U.S. involvement in Syria so far has been limited to providing humanitarian assistance to refugees and non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But Obama is moving ahead with lethal aid after determining the government of President Bashar al-Assad has sometimes used chemical weapons. "The Republican leadership ducked a real important debate when it comes to Syria," McGovern said. "I hope that ... a few years down the road we don't look back ... and express regret that somehow we got sucked into this war without a real debate." Lawmakers also strongly condemned the Afghan government for trying to charge the U.S. military customs duties to remove American equipment from the country. They debated a series of amendments aimed at stripping funding from military programs for the Afghans. The bill sets Afghan war funding at $86 billion. |
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