700 migrants held in Macedonia after crossing Greek border

© AFP | Migrants cross a river on their way to Macedonia from a makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border near the Greek village of Idomeni on March 14, 2016

IDOMENI (GREECE) (AFP) -  About 700 refugees and migrants were being held in Macedonia on Tuesday after they managed to slip across the border from Greece, a frontier that has been shut for a week.
Dozens of others who failed to cross were returning to the overflowing Idomeni camp on the Greek side, where 14,000 people are stuck in increasing squalor following a string of border closures on the European migrant route.
European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos was set to visit the camp at Idomeni at around midday on Tuesday.
Giorgos Kyritsis, spokesman for Greece's migration coordination agency, said the hundreds who managed to cross the border Monday were still in Macedonia after they were intercepted by the Macedonian army.
"If the authorities ask us to take them back, we will examine the request," Kyritsis told public broadcaster ERT.
A group of around 80 journalists and activists who were detained by Macedonian police after travelling with the group, including an AFP video journalist, were released and allowed to return to Greece, Kyritsis added.
A local Greek police source said Macedonian authorities had pushed back groups of migrants from unguarded parts of the border during the night.
ERT reported that dozens who were blocked from entering Macedonia from the Greek side of a river were heading back to Idomeni after tramping through the night in the cold and rain, carrying children and babies.
Greek authorities said the migrants who tried to breach the border on Monday -- around 1,500 in total, according to media -- had read leaflets in Arabic describing the route across the river.
The document warned migrants that they risk being sent back to Turkey if they stay in Greece, the ANA news agency reported.
Dozens of Greek police had tried to block the route, before giving up because of the size of the crowd.

© 2016 AFP

China 'weighs tax on currency trades'

© AFP | China's foreign-exchange reserves dropped to $3.20 trillion at the end of February 2016

BEIJING (AFP) -  China's central bank has drafted plans to impose a tax on currency trades, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, in what would be its latest volley against those betting on a depreciation of the yuan.
Chinese authorities have spent unprecedented sums to support the currency and stem capital flight since a surprise devaluation rattled investors last summer.
The tax would be the most dramatic measure to date, although Bloomberg reported that the rules had yet to be approved and the level might initially be kept at zero as an experiment.
Dubbed a "Tobin tax" after Nobel economics prizewinner James Tobin, it would impose a small levy on foreign-exchange transactions. The aim would be to deter investors from seeking to profit on fluctuations in the currency.
Analysts said the move would reduce liquidity in the long term and possibly fuel short-term volatility as investors were forced to leave the market.
If implemented, the tax could also raise questions about plans for the yuan to join the International Monetary Fund's elite reserve currency basket, scheduled for October.
"RMB as reserve currency RIP," George Magnus, associate at the University of Oxford China Centre, wrote on Twitter. "Not that it was likely anyway."
"Tobin taxes" have been fiercely debated since they were first proposed, with Sweden adopting a financial transaction tax in the 1980s to boost government revenue, and then abolishing it after bond trading volumes collapsed.
Major banking hubs such as Britain and the US have previously opposed them for the damage they would cause the financial sector.
The idea of a Chinese Tobin tax was floated last year by the deputy chief of the central People's Bank of China in an article for China Finance magazine, in which he said it would help "contain the inflows and outflows of short-term speculative and arbitrage funds".
Chris Weston, chief market strategist at IG, said there was speculation that the central bank "is taking the fight to the speculative FX community", but that the Tobin tax would "not be taken kindly by the IMF" if adopted.
"If Chinese officials broaden this to other markets, like swaps, then speculators may pile into proxy currencies" such as the Hong Kong dollar, he added.
China's foreign-exchange reserves dropped to $3.20 trillion at the end of February, the People's Bank of China reported last week -- down more than $300 billion in just four months.

© 2016 AFP

Al-Qaeda threatens France and allies after Ivory Coast attack

© AFP | A soldier patrols on a beach in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, on March 14, 2016, a day after a shooting rampage that killed 18 people

ABIDJAN (AFP) -  Al-Qaeda's north African branch threatened France and its allies fighting against jihadists in the volatile region, in a statement boasting about the group's deadly weekend attack on an Ivory Coast beach resort.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM) said the shooting rampage at the Grand-Bassam resort on Sunday that left 18 people dead was one of a series of operations "targeting dens of espionage and conspiracies".
It warned that those nations involved in the regional anti-insurgent Operation Barkhane and the 2013 French-led Operation Serval in Mali would "receive a response", with their "criminal leaders" and interests targeted, according to the SITE group which monitors extremist organisations.
The statement was issued on the eve of a visit Tuesday by French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to Ivory Coast after the beach attack whose victims included four French nationals.
Barkhane, which succeeded Serval in 2014, has at least 3,500 soldiers deployed across five countries -- Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger -- to combat jihadist jihadist insurgencies.
AQIM warned Ivory Coast and all allies of France in the region that their "crimes will not pass without a response" and issued a wider threat to Western nationals to leave Muslim lands or "we will destroy your security and the security of your citizens".
The group had also claimed the attack on a top hotel and a nearby restaurant in the Burkina Faso capital in January that killed 30 people, and a hostage siege in the Malian capital Bamako in November that cost 20 lives.

© 2016 AFP

Berlin car bomb 'kills driver'

© AFP/File | German police said the explosion occurred during peak-hour traffic on Bismarckstrasse

BERLIN (AFP) -  A car bomb killed a driver travelling down a street in central Berlin on Tuesday, police said, adding that it was caused by an explosive device "on or in the vehicle".
The explosion occurred during peak-hour traffic on Bismarckstrasse, within sight of the Victory Column monument, leaving the front of the car severely dented after it flipped over, while debris was strewn a few metres away.

© 2016 AFP

Voting opens in 'Super Tuesday 2' presidential nominating contest

© AFP/File | Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton

YOUNGSTOWN (UNITED STATES) (AFP) -  Voting began Tuesday in North Carolina and Ohio, two of the five states where Republican and Democratic primary contests are being held to choose a nominee for the November US presidential election.
Polls opened in North Carolina and Ohio at 1030 GMT, while polls are set to open in Florida, Illinois and Missouri at 1100 GMT in an event dubbed "Super Tuesday 2."
Among Republicans, Donald Trump is seeking to confirm his status as a front-runner and possibly push one or two of his rivals out of the race. Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton hopes to fend off a resurgent Bernie Sanders and assert her claim as the party's all-but-certain presidential nominee.

© 2016 AFP

 

 

American Islamic State group fighter' in Iraqi custody

© AFP file photo | Image posted on the jihadist Twitter account Al-Baraka news in June 2014 allegedly shows an IS militant at the Syrian-Iraqi border.

Text by NEWS WIRES

Latest update : 2016-03-15

An American fighting for the Islamic State group was taken into custody in northern Iraq after he left territory controlled by the militant group, according to two Kurdish officers, one of whom arrested him.

Both said it appeared the man was intending to escape both Islamic State and Kurdish forces but handed himself in after peshmerga fighters opened fire on him near the frontline in the village of Golat.
Captain Daham Khalaf said they had spotted the fighter hiding in long grass around dawn and waited until the sun rose before surrounding him. “He shouted, ‘I am a foreigner’,” Khalaf said, describing him as bearded and dressed in black.

https://youtu.be/FjHf5F_OtQw
The fighter did not have a passport but was carrying an American driving license and spoke English and broken Arabic, according to General Hashim Sitei who spoke to him.
A copy of what was said to be the license, seen by Reuters, was in the name of Khweis Mohammed Jamal. Reuters was unable to independently confirm the man’s identity.
“We gave him food and treated him with respect and handed him over to military intelligence,” said Sitei. The fighter was unarmed but carrying three mobile phones and said his father was Palestinian and his mother was from the Mosul area in Iraq, both officers said.
The State Department said it was aware of the reports that a U.S. citizen said to have been fighting for Islamic State was captured by Kurdish peshmerga forces in northern Iraq.
The address on the driver’s license confiscated by the peshmerga was for a residence in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Alexandria, Virginia.
As reporters and television crewmembers waited outside, a black Lincoln Town Car drove up. Two men stepped out and angrily demanded that the media leave.
The older man, who identified himself as Jamal Khweis, grabbed a photographer’s camera as the younger man pushed at the lenses of television cameras.
The man confirmed that he has a son the same age as the American captured by the peshmerga. He said he did not know where his son was, but that he would “never go” to Iraq.
“He is my son. He is a good person,” he said. More than 250 Americans have joined or tried to fight with the extremist group in Syria and Iraq since 2011, according to a September 2015 bipartisan congressional taskforce report.
At least 80 men and women have been charged by federal prosecutors for connections to Islamic State, and 27 have been convicted.
(REUTERS)

Burma parliament elects Suu Kyi confidant as president

© Ye Aung Thu, AFP | Burma’s newly elected president, Htin Kyaw (pictured left), and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in the capital Naypyidaw on March 11, 2016

Text by NEWS WIRES

Latest update : 2016-03-15

Myanmar’s parliament elected a close friend and confidant of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi as president on Tuesday, making Htin Kyaw the first head of state who does not hail from a military background since the 1960s.

Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy (NLD) to a landslide election win in November, but a constitution drafted by the former junta bars her from the top office.
She has vowed to run the country anyway through a proxy president, and on Thursday the NLD nominated Htin Kyaw for the role. He runs a charity founded by Suu Kyi and has been a trusted member of her inner circle since the mid-1990s. He is not a lawmaker.
“Today’s result is because of the love of people for her. It is the victory of my sister Aung San Suu Kyi,” Htin Kyaw told Reuters after the vote.
The NLD’s sizeable majority ensured a comfortable win for Suu Kyi’s pick in a vote by both houses of parliament. Htin Kyaw received 360 of the 652 votes cast, the parliamentary official counting the votes said.
Suu Kyi, who had been the first member of parliament to vote, clapped and smiled after the result was announced.
“This is the big day for us,” Zar Ni Min, an NLD lower house MP, said after the vote. “This is what we have hoped for since a long time ago.”
The still-powerful military holds a quarter of the seats in parliament and has the right under the constitution to nominate one of the three candidates for president. Its candidate, retired general Myint Swe, received 213 votes, making him the first vice president.
Simmering tensions
Tensions between Suu Kyi and the military have simmered in the run-up to the presidential election and as her party prepares to take power.
Relations between the armed forces and Suu Kyi will define the success of Myanmar’s most significant break from military rule since the army seized power in 1962.
Suu Kyi wants to demilitarise Myanmar’s politics, but to do so she effectively needs the support of the military itself.
The armed forces are guaranteed three ministries under the constitution, as well as a parliamentary minority that gives them a veto over constitutional amendments - enough to limit the potential scope of Suu Kyi’s reforms.
Sources in Suu Kyi’s camp say she has grown increasingly frustrated with military intransigence on issues ranging from amending the constitution to relatively minor formalities such as the location of the handover of power.
NLD lawmakers also privately said the military’s choice of Myint Swe went against the spirit of reconciliation that Suu Kyi says she is seeking to foster.
Myint Swe served the junta as head of the feared military intelligence and is on the U.S. sanctions list.
The third candidate for the presidency, Henry Van Thio, was also nominated by the NLD. He will become second vice president and was chosen by Suu Kyi to represent the country’s numerous ethnic minorities. He is a member of the Chin ethnic group from the northwest of Myanmar.
The president picks the cabinet that will take over from President Thein Sein’s outgoing government on April 1, with the exception of the heads of the home, defence and border security ministries, who will be appointed by the armed forces chief.
(REUTERS)