The Star Online: World Updates
The Star Online: World Updates |
- Thirty-eight feared dead in Russian psychiatric hospital fire
- Capriles to challenge Venezuela election in court
- U.S. suspects Syria used chemical weapons, wants proof
| Thirty-eight feared dead in Russian psychiatric hospital fire Posted: 25 Apr 2013 09:16 PM PDT MOSCOW (Reuters) - A fire raged through a psychiatric hospital north of Moscow on Friday and 38 people were feared dead, Russian officials and media reports said. There were believed to have been 41 people in the building when the fire broke out - 38 patients and three staff members - and three escaped, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. A ministry official said a nurse led two patients to safety. The ministry said emergency workers had found 12 bodies so far and that the fire, which broke out in the middle of the night, had been extinguished. A Health Ministry official confirmed that 38 people were feared dead, state-run RIA news agency reported. There were bars on the windows of the single-storey building in Ramensky, 120 km (70 miles) north of Moscow, and some patients apparently died while trying frantically to make it to the main entrance to escape. Many others died in their beds, Itar-Tass cited an unnamed source as saying. "After the fire alarm went off, a nurse ... saw fire at the end of a corridor. She tried to put it out but could not and led two patients out," RIA quoted emergency official Yuri Deshyovykh as saying. Fires at state institutions in Russia such as hospitals, schools, drug treatment centres and homes for the elderly or handicapped have caused numerous casualties in recent years and raised questions about safety measures, conditions and escape routes. More than 12,000 people died in fires in 2011 and more than 7,700 in the first nine months of 2012 in Russia, where the per capita death rate from fires is much higher than in Western nations including the United States. The Emergency Situations Ministry said the fire started on or under the roof of the hospital at about 2:20 a.m. (11.20 p.m. British time on Thursday), but did not give its cause. (Writing by Steve Gutterman; Editing by Mohammad Zargham and Christopher Wilson) Copyright © 2013 Reuters | ||
| Capriles to challenge Venezuela election in court Posted: 25 Apr 2013 08:58 PM PDT CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles said on Thursday he will challenge President Nicolas Maduro's narrow election victory in the courts and that an audit of the vote being prepared by electoral authorities risked being "a joke."
Maduro, the hand-picked successor of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, won the April 14 vote by less than 2 percentage points. The opposition says there were thousands of irregularities in the election and that their figures show Capriles won. Both sides had agreed to an expanded audit of votes by the National Electoral Council. Since then Maduro has been sworn in as president and the opposition has grown increasingly frustrated by what it sees as foot-dragging by officials. Capriles has insisted that the audit process be rigorous and include all relevant paperwork from polling centres. "If we don't have access to those notebooks, we're not going to take part in an audit that would be a joke on Venezuelans and a joke on the world," he told a local TV station. "The next step will be to challenge the election, which must take place in the next few days. With all the proof, all the elements we now have, we are going to challenge the election." The election council has not responded to a demand by Capriles that it give concrete details of the audit by Thursday. It has stressed, however, that the process will only check that the system worked properly and the election results are "irreversible". Capriles conceded that his legal challenge, which could in theory result in all or parts of the ballot being rerun, faced a tough path through Venezuela's courts. Critics say Chavez packed the judiciary with loyal appointees during his 14 years in power. "We're not going to challenge the election with the expectation that the Supreme Court is going to give us a favourable reply, or that the justice system will work," Capriles said. "But we're going to go through all the legal procedures." MARCHES ON MAY 1 Both sides have called on their followers to march again on May 1, creating another potential flashpoint in the OPEC nation of 29 million people. Capriles, a 40-year-old state governor who favours Brazil-style, business-friendly policies with strong social protections, confounded opinion polls to run a close finish against Maduro in the election, held just five weeks after Chavez's death from cancer. The government calls Capriles a "fascist murderer" and blames him for post-election violence that it says killed nine people. This week, the "Chavista"-dominated Congress began an investigation of Capriles in connection with the unrest. The government says the violence was proof that the opposition had tried to launch a coup, while the opposition accuses the authorities of exaggerating the unrest and including victims of common crime to boost its figures. On Wednesday night, a televised news conference by the opposition leader was interrupted by a government "cadena" broadcast - which all local channels are required to show live - that held him responsible for the violence. On Thursday, moments before Capriles was to be interviewed live on local station Globovision, another "cadena" began that lasted almost an hour and showed Maduro and his cabinet meeting business leaders in the western state of Zulia. Again, the compulsory broadcast triggered noisy protests in wealthier Caracas neighbourhoods where opposition supporters banged pots and pans in a traditional form of demonstration. "It's just like last night," Capriles said later. "In everything he does, Nicolas keeps showing that he's scared. He doesn't want the people to know what's going on." (Editing by Christopher Wilson) Copyright © 2013 Reuters | ||
| U.S. suspects Syria used chemical weapons, wants proof Posted: 25 Apr 2013 08:47 PM PDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Thursday the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad had probably used chemical weapons on a small scale in the country's civil war, but insisted that President Barack Obama needed definitive proof before he would take action.
The disclosure created a quandary for Obama, who has set the use of chemical weapons as a "red line" that Assad must not cross. It triggered calls from some hawkish Washington lawmakers for a U.S. military response, which the president has resisted. In a shift from a White House assessment just days earlier, U.S. officials said the intelligence community believed with "varying degrees of confidence" that the chemical nerve agent sarin was used by Assad's forces against rebel fighters. But it noted that "the chain of custody is not clear." While Obama has declared that the deployment of chemical weapons would be a game-changer and has threatened unspecified consequences if it happened, his administration is moving carefully - saying it is mindful of the lessons of the start of the Iraq war more than a decade ago. Then, the George W. Bush administration used inaccurate intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq in pursuit of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that turned out not to exist. "Given the stakes involved and what we have learned from our own recent experiences, intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient - only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making," Miguel Rodriguez, White House director of the office of legislative affairs, said in a letter to lawmakers. One senior U.S. defence official told reporters, "We have seen very bad movies before," where intelligence was perceived to have driven policy decisions that later, in the cold light of day, were proven wrong. The term "varying degrees of confidence" used to describe the assessment of possible chemical weapons use in Syria usually suggests debate within the U.S. intelligence community about the conclusion, the defence official noted. The White House said the evaluation that Syria probably used chemical weapons was based in part on "physiological" samples. But a White House official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, repeatedly declined to say what that evidence was. Nor is it clear who supplied it. Chemical weapons experts say sarin, a nerve agent, can be detected in human tissue, blood, urine and hair samples, or in nearby soil or even leaves. But the chemical can dissipate within days or weeks, depending on ambient heat, wind and other factors. Iraq is said to have used sarin 25 years ago in an attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war. More recently, the agent was used in the 1994 attack by a religious cult on riders of the Tokyo subway system. In Syria, U.S. officials said the scale of the use of sarin appeared limited. Nobody is "seeing any mass casualties" from the possible use of chemical weapons in Syria, one U.S. intelligence official noted. The United States has resisted being dragged militarily into Syria's conflict and is providing only non-lethal aid to rebels trying to overthrow Assad. Washington is worried that weapons supplied to the rebels could end up in the hands of al Qaeda-linked fighters. But acknowledgement of the U.S. intelligence assessment appeared to move the United States closer - at least rhetorically - to some sort of action in Syria, military or otherwise. A White House official told reporters that "all options are on the table in terms of our response" and said the United States, which has been criticized for not doing enough to halt the bloodshed, would consult with its allies. The official said the U.S. military was preparing for a range of "different contingencies," but declined to give specifics. Options available to Obama could include everything from air strikes to commando raids to setting up a Libya-style "no-fly" zone, either unilaterally or in cooperation with allies. SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT But Obama appeared intent on deflecting pressure for swift action by stressing the need for a comprehensive U.N. investigation on the ground in Syria - something Assad has blocked from going forward. Syria's deputy foreign minister, Faisal Mekdad, in an interview with Reuters, dismissed Western and Israeli claims that government forces had used chemical weapons and said it was a "big lie" that Syria was preventing the U.N. probe. Assad has clung to power despite repeated U.S. calls for him to step down. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the revolt against his family's decades-long autocratic rule. A military stalemate has set in, but Assad has still been able to rely on support from Russia and Iran. "The reality is that as a country we can't declare red lines and then do nothing when they are crossed. Eventually we have to do something," said Ariel Ratner, a former Middle East adviser in the State Department and now a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. The Obama administration's sudden disclosure caught many off guard. It came just two days after Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel and other U.S. officials appeared to play down an Israeli assessment that there had been repeated use of chemical weapons in Syria. France and Britain have also concluded that evidence suggests chemical arms have been used in Syria's conflict. "The intelligence community has been assessing information for some time on this issue and the decision to reach this conclusion was made within the past 24 hours," Hagel said. The White House said it wanted to provide a "prompt response" to a query on Wednesday from lawmakers about whether Syria had used chemical weapons. The legislators' letter to Obama cited the assessments by Israel, France and Britain. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the leading advocates of deeper U.S. involvement in the Syrian conflict, said the intelligence assessment demanded a response. "The president of the United States said that if Bashar Assad used chemical weapons, it would be a game-changer, that it would cross a red line," he said. "I think it's pretty obvious that red line has been crossed." Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, voiced concern that the public acknowledgement of the U.S. intelligence assessment could embolden Assad and may prompt him to calculate "he has nothing more to lose." "Syria has the ability to kill tens of thousands with its chemical weapons. The world must come together to prevent this by unified action," she said. In Brussels, the NATO alliance was "concerned by reports of the possible use of chemical weapons," an official said. "As NATO has said in the past, any use of these weapons would be completely unacceptable and a clear breach of international law, and if any side uses these weapons we would expect a reaction from the international community," the official said. Patriot missile interceptors that NATO has sent to Turkey, a member of the alliance which borders Syria, would "help ensure the protection of Turkey against any missile attack, whether the missiles carry chemical weapons or not," the official added. (Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick, Roberta Rampton, Patricia Zengerle and Tabassum Zakaria; Editing by Warren Strobel and Peter Cooney) Copyright © 2013 Reuters |
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