Nigeria Urged to Investigate Religious Violence

The US government and human rights activists called Tuesday for Nigeria to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the deaths of more than 500 unarmed people in renewed violence between Christians and Muslims.
Acting President Goodluck Jonathan had promised that the fighting would stop after more than 300 people were slain in January, AFP reported.
Jonathan fired his national security adviser late Monday night following the weekend violence.
“After the January killings, the villages should have been properly protected,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said. “Clearly, previous efforts to tackle the underlying causes have been inadequate, and in the meantime the wounds have festered and grown deeper.”
Human Rights Watch also urged Jonathan to provide protection for those in the small villages surrounding Jos, a central Nigerian city that has become the fault line for religious violence in the region.
Those who survived attacks Sunday in three mostly Christian villages said security forces never provided them any guards, even though Jos itself has remained under a dusk-til-dawn curfew since January’s fighting. Police say they have arrested more than 90 people suspected of inciting the violence.

India: Pakistan Army Trained Terrorists

The November 2008 terrorist attack in India’s financial hub Mumbai was plotted in Pakistan, sponsored by the state and the gunmen were trained by the Pakistan Army, news reports in India quoted the prosecution at the trial of the lone surviving gunman as saying Tuesday.
A group of 10 gunmen launched an attack over three days beginning November 26, 2008, on multiple targets in Mumbai including two luxury hotels, a train station, a cafe and a Jewish center. By the time the siege ended three days later, at least 166 people, including 26 foreign nationals, were dead, DPA reported.
Indian intelligence agencies claim the gunmen were operatives of the Pakistan-based militant Lashkar-e-Taiba group (LET).
While nine of the terrorists were killed by security personnel, one, Ajmal Kasab, was captured and is facing trial along with two Indian accomplices.
“The conspiracy of the 26/11 attack was hatched on Pakistani soil and inevitable inference can be drawn that the attack was state- sponsored,” PTI news agency quoted special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam as saying while initiating the final arguments in the trial. Kasab and the nine other terrorists were given military and intelligence training by LET under the supervision of Pakistan Army officers, he said. Kasab said in his confession that a major general was present during their training and had supervised them, Nikam added.
“The name of the major general was deliberately not revealed to the attackers as he occupies a senior position in the army,” Nikam added.
The terrorists were all given fake identity cards with Indian names and the planners had directed them not to reveal their true identity and ensure that Pakistan’s name did not emerge in the attack, Nikam said.

Tymoshenko Holds Rally Against President

Defeated presidential candidate and outgoing Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Tuesday urged Ukrainians to unite against new President Viktor Yanukovych as she held her first opposition rally.
Tymoshenko, who was deposed as prime minister last week in a parliamentary vote, held the rally in central Kiev in front of a statue of famed Ukrainian poet and nationalist hero Taras Shevchenko, AFP reported.
“I ask you today to promise each other to jointly oppose all that is anti-Ukrainian,” she told the crowd of around 2,000 people.
“I want us to adopt a resolution on a union of honest political forces,” she added. Demonstrators then signed a resolution which declared Tymoshenko the leader of the opposition to Yanukovych.
The staunchly pro-EU Tymoshenko has repeatedly accused Yanukovych of carrying out anti-Ukrainian policies and warned that his presidency will undermine the country’s independence.
After successfully ousting Tymoshenko’s government last week, Yanukovych supporters in parliament have been seeking over the last days to form a coalition of their own. Technically, the Tymoshenko government remains in place in a caretaker capacity although she said it would step down as soon as last week’s no-confidence motion was adopted. On Tuesday, parliament passed a bill making it easier for factions to form a coalition by recruiting deputies as individuals rather than in parliamentary blocs.

Paedophile Priest Scandals Spreading in Europe

Roman Catholic authorities in Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and other countries reacted rapidly and “decisively” to paedophilia priest scandals in their churches, the Vatican said on Tuesday.
The German, Austrian and Dutch Catholic churches as well as that of Ireland have been rocked by scandal over “the very serious issue” of abuse of children by priests and teachers at Catholic schools, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said on Vatican Radio.
However, he said: “All objective and informed people know that the issue is much wider, and to focus accusations only on the Church leads to a skewed perspective, AFP reported.
“To cite one example, Austrian authorities recently provided data showing that over the same period, there were 17 certified cases in institutions linked to the Church, while there were another 510 in other settings,” Lombardi said.
“The mistakes made by the institutions under the responsibility of the clergy are especially reprehensible given the educative and moral responsibility of the Church,” Lombardi said.
But Church authorities in the countries hit by paedophile priest scandals “showed willingness for transparency and, in a certain way, speeded the revelations of problems by asking the victims to come forward even in very old (abuse) cases,” he said.
“The main ecclesiastical institutions involved...confronted the emergence of the problem rapidly and decisively,” Lombardi added.
Since late January, revelations of priestly abuse in Germany have snowballed, including within a boys’ choir that was directed for 30 years by Pope Benedict XVI’s brother Georg Ratzinger.
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger on Monday criticized the Vatican for allegedly hindering investigations into abuse within Catholic institutions.
The pope is preparing a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics shocked by government investigations into abuse of children.
One priest admitted to sexually abusing more than 100 children, while another said he had abused minors on a fortnightly basis over 25 years.

Austria Case
Child sex charges hit the Roman Catholic Church in Austria on Tuesday after a man said he was sexually abused by three clergy as a child.
A Catholic boarding school spoke out meanwhile about another case in the 1980s.
A 53-year-old Austrian told national radio Oe1 on Tuesday that he was abused for six years from the age of 11 by two priests and once by a trainee priest who is now abbot of Sankt Peter monastery in Salzburg.
The two padres--one of whom has left the Church, while the other has died--were arrested in Morocco in 2005 on sex tourism charges, according to Salzburg prosecutors. An Austrian court found one of them guilty of abusing underage Moroccan boys, they said.
The 53-year-old victim said he kept quiet about the abuse for years but eventually confronted the abbot last November. He said he was offered 5,000 euros (6,790 dollars) to take no further action.
On Monday, Sankt Peter monastery put out a statement saying the abbot had apologized for the abuse and submitted his resignation.

Russia, US Resume Nuke Talks

American and Russian negotiators resumed talks on Tuesday to reduce their nuclear weapons arsenals in the latest attempt to find a successor deal to the expired 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
According to AP, the US and Russian delegations were meeting in Geneva, said Michael Parmly, spokesman for the US diplomatic mission in the Swiss city. He declined to say when a new agreement might be ready.
“We’re committed to concluding negotiations,” Parmly said.
The two powers are trying to find a successor to the 1991 pact that limited how many nuclear warheads and carrier systems each side could deploy. They were supposed to reach an agreement by Dec. 5, when the old deal expired, and their latest round of negotiations ended without an accord last week.
Romania agreed in January to install anti-ballistic missile interceptors as part of the revamped US missile shield, replacing the Bush administration’s plans for interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic.
President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap the Bush-era missile defense sites was praised last year by the Kremlin, which had fiercely opposed the earlier plan as a threat.
Experts have said the new plan is less threatening to Russia because it would not initially involve interceptors capable of shooting down Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. But officials in Moscow have expressed concern that it is still designed against Russia.
Other problems in the talks are believed to concern monitoring and verification procedures. Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed in July that warheads should be capped at 1,500 to 1,675 from about 2,200 each side has now.

Japan Confirms Secret Nuclear Pacts With US

Japan confirmed for the first time on Tuesday the existence of once-secret Cold War-era pacts with the US that tacitly allowed nuclear-armed ships to enter Japanese ports in violation of Tokyo’s postwar principles.
While declassified US documents have already confirmed such 1960s agreements, Tuesday’s revelation broke with decades of official denials, AP reported.
The investigation is part of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s campaign to make his government, which was elected last year, more open than that of the long-ruling conservatives, who repeatedly denied the existence of such pacts.
Among the secret pacts the panel acknowledged was a tacit agreement that allowed US nuclear-armed warships into Japanese ports, violating a Japanese commitment not to make, own or allow the entry of nuclear weapons.
“It’s regrettable that such facts were not disclosed to the public for such a long time, even after the end of the Cold War era,” Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada told a news conference.
Speculation about the existence of such secret pacts have been swirling in Japan for years, so the panel’s findings likely won’t shock most Japanese, although it will likely exacerbate distrust of the previous administrations. That sentiment could help Hatoyama’s government, whose approval ratings have been sliding ahead of this summer’s upper house elections.
Okada said the investigation wouldn’t affect the US-Japan security alliance, under which nearly 50,000 US troops are stationed in Japan. The US is obliged to respond to attacks on Japan and protects the country under its nuclear umbrella.
Tokyo’s ties with Washington have been strained since Hatoyama took office last September because of a dispute over the relocation of a key US Marine airfield on the southern island of Okinawa.
The purpose of the investigation, Okada said, was to regain public trust in Japan’s diplomacy.
There is strong aversion to nuclear weapons in Japan, the only country to suffer atomic bombings — in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.

Women Bill in India Clears First Hurdle

A landmark bill that would reserve a third of all seats in India’s parliament for women cleared its first hurdle on Tuesday when members of the upper house approved it after a rancorous debate.
“The motion is adopted by the total members of the house,” said the speaker of the upper house, Hamid Ansari, after a vote that saw 186 of the 248 members back the draft law, AFP reported.
The government needed a two-thirds majority to pass the legislation, which will result in a change to the constitution.
The bill will now pass to the lower house of parliament and state assembles, where a third of seats will also be reserved for women. If it clears these two stages, it will then require presidential consent.
The quota law has been consistently stalled by opposition in parliament since it was first introduced 14 years ago and it again led to controversy, with seven members suspended from the upper chamber after unruly behavior.
The bill was introduced again on Monday, International Women’s Day, but politicians opposed to it forced repeated adjournments and at one point ripped up the law, threw shreds of paper at the speaker and grabbed his microphone.

Cartoonist Plot

Irish police arrested seven people on Tuesday in connection with an alleged plot to murder a Swedish cartoonist over a drawing insulting depicting the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).