Category: News

Iraq has threatened to go to the UN if Turkey does not withdraw soldiers it sent to areas near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul within 48 hours, the BBC reports.

Baghdad said the deployment was done without consultation and was a violation of national sovereignty.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu defended the move as routine troop rotation at a pre-established camp.

Mosul has been under the control of militants from the so-called Islamic State group since last year.

Turkey deployed hundreds of its forces to the town of Bashiqa to train Iraqi Kurdish forces fighting IS.

“Iraq has the right to use all available options, including resorting to the UN Security Council if these forces are not withdrawn within 48 hours,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a statement.

Mr Davutoglu wrote to Mr Abadi promising not to send further troops but stopped short of agreeing to a withdrawal.

Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan visited today Gyumri town on the 27th anniversary of the 1988 earthquake.

The Head of Government laid a wreath and observed a minute’s silence at the Earthquake Memorial in the Holy Savior church of Gyumri.

US President Barack Obama has made a rare Oval Office address after the San Bernardino shootings that left 14 dead.

He said the killings were “an act of terrorism designed to kill innocent people,” the BBC report.

But “freedom is more powerful than fear,” said President Obama, warning that falling prey to divisiveness in American society would play into the hands of extremists.

He also said the US must make it harder for potential attackers to obtain guns.

Mr Obama vowed that the US would overcome the evolving threat of terrorism, but warned that Americans “cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam”.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has released a statement on its Observation of the referendum on the new constitution in Armenia:

“A cross-party delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) was present in Armenia from 4 to 7 December 2015 to observe the referendum on constitutional reforms which took place on 6 December and led to a new constitution.

After a somewhat low-key campaign with little public debate and a calm referendum day, according to preliminary results, around 64% of those who participated voted did so in favour of the changes thus meeting the quorum of 25% of the registered voters needed to approve the changes.

The relatively low turn-out, around 50% of the population, reflects the fact that the referendum was driven by political interests instead of the needs of the Armenian public and was perceived by many citizens as a vote of confidence in the government rather than on the many proposals for change. The two-and-a-half-year reform process was not inclusive enough, the parliament having only a few weeks to discuss the text and public debate being limited to two months, making it difficult for an agreement to be reached. Thus, the core of the constitutional change – the shift from a presidential to a parliamentary system – was understood by too many citizens as being a means for the current president to remain in power after the end of his second (and what would have been final) term.

Concerning the voting process, the delegation regrets that the authorities were not more concerned by the integrity of the process leading to a new constitution and that it must mention several problems, many of them already mentioned in previous PACE and Venice Commission and OSCE/ODIHR recommendations:

• the inaccuracy of the voting lists containing the names of many people residing permanently abroad or even deceased, leading to claims that these identities were usurped by people who then voted several times;
• allegations of large-scale organized vote buying and carousel voting as well as pressure on voters;
• the media playing field was once again not a level one and the political parties were not able to fulfil their duties of informing and motivating the public;
• the misuse of administrative resources by executive bodies;
• allegations of pressure on, and attempts to corrupt, election officials;
• shortcomings in the training of precinct election officials, particularly during counting;
• the lack of mobile voting effectively excluded disabled citizens from the process.

The delegation urges the authorities to address these issues in order to build trust in the voting process and in politics in general to ensure a genuinely democratic future for Armenia.

While in Armenia, the delegation met leaders and representatives of parliamentary groups and parties, the Chairperson of the CEC, representatives of civil society and the media as well as OSCE/ODIHR experts.”

Evidence of quarrying for Stonehenge’s bluestones is among the dramatic discoveries leading archaeologists to theorise that England’s greatest prehistoric monument may have first been erected in Wales, reports.

It has long been known that the bluestones that form Stonehenge’s inner horseshoe came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, around 140 miles from Salisbury Plain.

Now archaeologists have discovered a series of recesses in the rocky outcrops of Carn Goedog and Craig Rhos-y-felin, to the north of those hills, that match Stonehenge’s bluestones in size and shape. They have also found similar stones that the prehistoric builders extracted but left behind, and “a loading bay” from where the huge stones could be dragged away.

Carbonised hazelnut shells and charcoal from the quarry workers’ campfires have been radiocarbon-dated to reveal when the stones would have been extracted.

Prof Mike Parker Pearson, director of the project and professor of British later prehistory at University College London (UCL), said the finds were “amazing”.

“We have dates of around 3400 BC for Craig Rhos-y-felin and 3200 BC for Carn Goedog, which is intriguing because the bluestones didn’t get put up at Stonehenge until around 2900 BC,” he said. “It could have taken those Neolithic stone-draggers nearly 500 years to get them to Stonehenge, but that’s pretty improbable in my view. It’s more likely that the stones were first used in a local monument, somewhere near the quarries, that was then dismantled and dragged off to Wiltshire.”

The dating evidence suggests that Stonehenge could be older than previously thought, Parker Pearson said. “But we think it’s more likely that they were building their own monument [in Wales], that somewhere near the quarries there is the first Stonehenge and that what we’re seeing at Stonehenge is a second-hand monument.”

There is also the possibility that the stones were taken to Salisbury Plain around 3200 BC and that the giant sarsens – silicified sandstone found within 20 miles of the site – were added much later. “Normally we don’t get to make that many fantastic discoveries in our lives,” Parker Pearson said. “But this is one.”

 

A powerful 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the east of the Central Asian country of Tajikistan on Monday, US experts said, while the impoverished country’s government said no casualties were reported, AFP reports.

The tremor hit at 7:50 GMT some 109 kilometres (67 miles) west of the town of Murghob at a depth of 28 kilometres, the US Geological Survey said.

The epicentre was located in a remote area some 345 kilometres east of the capital Dushanbe, it added.

Tajikistan’s emergency situations committee told AFP there had been no reports of casualties and that a rescue team had been dispatched to assess possible damage to housing.

The Tajik seismological service reported that the epicentre of the quake was just 22 kilometres from the high altitude Lake Sarez.

Sarez, formed following an earthquake in 1911 and containing some 17 cubic kilometres of water, is considered a major threat to the region if its dams break as a result of seismic activity.

The quake was also felt in the capital of neighbouring Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to the north, northern parts of Afghanistan to the south as well as nearby Pakistan and India, but no damage was immediately reported.

 

 

 

The voting in the referendum on Constitutional amendments was open and transparent, head of the CIS observation mission Yevgeny Sloboda said, as he presented the preliminary assessment of the referendum held in Armenia Sunday. The observation mission will present the final assessment after the Central Electoral Commission releases the final results of the vote.

“The mission considers that the referendum provided the citizens with an opportunity to express their will,” Sloboda said. He added that the observers noticed no violations either before or during the voting.

“The CIS observers visited 508 polling stations on voting day in all provinces except Syunik. They participated in the opening of the polls, the voting process and the vote counting. Our observers registered an open and free voting,” he said.

Seventy-eight members of the CIS observation mission followed the Constitutional referendum on December 6.

Private of the NKR Defense Army Varazdat Khachatryan, born in 1995, was wounded as a result of shelling from the Azerbaijani side at about 18:45, November 5.

According to a report from the NKR Ministry of Defense, about 180 cases of ceasefire violation by the Azerbaijani side were registered at the line of contact between the armed forces of Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan last night.

The rival used weapons of different caliber as it fired more than 3,500 shots in the direction of the Armenian positions.

“Taking into consideration that complex geopolitical situation and in an attempt to foil the ongoing state-building processes in Armenia and Artsakh, the rival continues to destabilize the situation all along the line of contact, intensively violating the ceasefire regime with the use of artillery weapons of different caliber, mortars and rocket launchers,” the Ministry said in a statement.

The NKR Defense Ministry declared that “the rival’s adventurist policy will not go unpunished, and the military-political leadership of Azerbaijan carries full responsibility for the whole situation.”

AFP Photo/Mikhail Mordasov

 

Azerbaijan was on Sunday searching for 29 missing oil workers after a storm caused their offshore oil rig to catch fire, as the president ordered a day of mourning, Agence France-Presse reports.

A fire broke out on the rig in the Caspian following a storm on Friday “leading to many deaths,” said a statement on the official website of President Ilham Aliyev.

“I join the relatives in their grief and designate December 6 as a day of mourning in Azerbaijan,” it quoted him as saying.

The statement was the closest to an official confirmation that 30 workers may have perished at sea when one lifeboat where the crew was taking refuge fell into the water.

Rescue workers had lifted a total of 33 people from the rig, the open water, and from a lifeboat that was suspended 10 metres above the stormy waters.

But the second lifeboat fell into the water and has not been recovered.

So far, one worker’s body has been recovered.

On its Facebook page, SOCAR listed the 62 names of those working on the rig, who were either rescued or missing.

“We are looking for 29 people. Whether they are alive or dead we don’t know. Before we find them we cannot pronounce them dead,” SOCAR vice-president Khoshbakht Yusifzade told journalists at a press conference on Sunday.

 

Islamic State said on Saturday that the married couple who killed 14 people in a mass shooting in Southern California were its followers, and FBI agents raided a home apparently belonging to a friend of the husband, reports.

Islamic State’s claim came in an online audio broadcast three days after U.S.-born Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his Pakistani wife Tashfeen Malik, 29, opened fire with assault rifles on a holiday party for civil servants in San Bernardino, 60 miles (100 km) east of Los Angeles.

The pair, who had left their six-month-old baby daughter with relatives, were killed two hours later in a shootout with police SWAT team members.

Federal agents tore through a garage door to search a house in Riverside, a few miles (km) southwest of San Bernardino, on a street where neighbors said Farook once lived.

An FBI spokeswoman confirmed agents made a “precautionary tactical entry” while serving a federal search warrant, but she declined to give details.