Mexico ( Mexico City Law Would Ban Use of Animals in Circus Acts )

 

MEXICO CITY – The Federal District Legislative Assembly has approved the Law on the Staging of Public Shows, a measure that would ban circuses from using elephants, lions, camels, bears, tigers and other animals at performances in Mexico City.

The assembly voted 41-0, with 11 abstentions, on Monday to approve the law, which “prohibits the use of live wild or domestic animals during the staging of circus performances.”

The law, which must still be approved by Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, would take effect one year after its publication in the Federal District Gazette, giving circuses time to develop new acts and find homes for the animals.

Some circus owners may put their animals up for adoption, Federal District lawmaker Jesus Sesma, a Mexican Green Party (PVEM) member and one of the law’s main backers, told Efe.

The law prohibits circuses from presenting, selling or using live animals as lottery prizes or in games, as well as using animals “for the taking of photographs or any other related activity.”

The ban applies only to circuses and will not affect dolphin shows, theater companies, bullfights and other kinds of animal shows, the legislator said.

“An initiative already exists that seeks to prohibit” bullfighting in Mexico City, Sesma said.

“We have been working to make it happen (the ban on bullfights), but you have to keep in mind that you have to go step by step and this circus law is progress,” Sesma said.

Violators will be subject to seizure of their animals and fines of more than 700,000 pesos ($53,722).

Mexico City is on its way to becoming the seventh entity in the federation to ban the use of animals in circuses, joining Colima, Guerrero, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos and Queretaro states.

Similar legislation has been proposed in the states of Aguascalientes, Chihuahua, Oaxaca, Puebla, Tamaulipas and Quintana Roo.

Hillary Clinton hints at White House run

WASHINGTON: Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed to be dropping hints Tuesday about making another run for the White House.
For the second time in as many days, Clinton talked of her interest in possibly running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016. She lost a hard-fought primary battle in 2008 to Barack Obama, and later agreed to be his secretary of state.
In an interview on the day her book “Hard Choices” was being released, Clinton told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that she wants “to use the talent and resources that I have to make sure” others have the same opportunities.
Earlier, Clinton said that Republican inquiries into her handling of the deadly 2012 attack on the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, gave her more of an incentive to run. While she said she’s still undecided about her political future, Clinton cited the Benghazi probe as an example of a dysfunctional Congress.
“It’s more of a reason to run, because I do not believe our great country should be playing minor league ball. We ought to be in the majors,” Clinton said emphatically, leaning forward in her chair during an interview aired Monday with ABC’s Diane Sawyer. “I view this as really apart from, even a diversion from, the hard work that the Congress should be doing about the problems facing our country and the world.”
On Benghazi, Clinton said Tuesday she believed “there were some systemic problems within the State Department. And if we had known that earlier, perhaps we could have done some changes.”
But she also said, “You can’t always sit in an office in Washington and say this and that will happen.”
Clinton also sought to refine remarks she made about how she and former President Bill Clinton were “dead broke” when they left the White House, which Republicans have seized on to cast her as out of touch with regular Americans.
Clinton said Tuesday that she and her husband “fully appreciate how hard life is for so many Americans,” and have “gone through some of the same challenges that many people have” and that they “understand what that struggle is.”
The former first lady said the Clintons left the White House roughly $12 million in debt at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term in early 2001 and were burdened with legal bills that dwarfed their income.
Clinton said Monday that at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency her family “came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education. You know, it was not easy.”
Republicans quickly condemned the comment, two years after their presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, was dogged by accusations of being out of touch because of his wealth. Republican officials pointed out that Hillary Clinton received an $8 million book advance for her 2003 memoir and said it showed she would have trouble relating to average Americans.
In another interview, Clinton revealed that shortly after her loss and Sarah Palin’s nomination as the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, the Obama campaign proposed that Clinton go on the attack against her. Clinton said she refused.
“The Obama campaign did contact me and asked me if I would attack her,” Clinton told NBC in an interview that aired Tuesday. “I said, ‘Attack her for what, for being a woman? Attack her for being on a ticket that’s ... trying to draw attention?’“
Clinton said she told the campaign, “There’ll be plenty of time to do what I think you should do in politics, which is draw distinctions.”

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LONDON ( Angelina Jolie launches fight against wartime rape )

LONDON: Hollywood star Angelina Jolie and British Foreign Secretary William Hague have launched a four-day summit on ending rape in war, calling for an end to the “culture of impunity” and more prosecutions.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who will also attend the conference in London, said the delegates from 117 countries wanted to “relegate sexual violence to the annals of history.”
The summit is the fruit of a two-year campaign by UN special envoy Jolie and Hague, who have visited the Democratic Republic of Congo and Bosnia to meet victims of rape during conflict.
As she opened the conference, Jolie said she and Hague had discussed a woman they met in Bosnia, who was still too ashamed to tell her son that she had been raped.
“This day is for her,” said Jolie. “We believe it truly is a summit like no other.”
Standing next to her, Hague told reporters: “This will be the greatest concentration of effort, of discussion and decision ever seen in combating sexual violence in conflict.”
The conference, held at a vast conference center, includes 150 events open to the public in what the organizers hope will be a giant exercise in raising awareness.
In a statement, Kerry called for countries to end their protection of individuals who commit “these vile acts.”
“We must declare in unison: ‘They can’t run and they won’t hide here’,” he said.
Almost 150 governments have endorsed a declaration of commitment to end sexual violence in conflict.
Organizers also want to increase and improve the documentation of rape in warzones to allow more prosecutions to be brought.
Liesl Gerntholtz, of Human Rights Watch, said that while most victims were women and girls, “there’s an emerging body of research and documentation that certainly shows that men have been targeted.”
She said: “Human Rights Watch’s own research shows that in Syria and Libya sexual violence against men has been part of the pattern of sexualized torture, particularly for men who are in detention or who are being held by the regime or militia.”
Hague has said it was Jolie’s film “In the Land of Blood and Honey” that alerted him to the extent of sexual violence in conflict zones.
The 2011 film, which marked Jolie’s directorial debut, is a love story told against the backdrop of the Bosnian war two decades ago, when according to Hague some 50,000 women were raped.
Jineth Bedoya Lima, a journalist who endured sexual violence in Colombia’s conflict, will speak at the conference.
“For the first time in history a world summit highlights and denounces a crime that is normally made invisible and is often silenced by the majority of states,” she said.
Hague and Jolie will take part in meetings with youth delegates and are due to launch an international protocol.
On the sidelines of the summit, Hague will chair a ministerial meeting on security in northern Nigeria in the wake of the kidnap of hundreds of schoolgirls by the Al-Qaeda-linked Boko Haram movement.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon — by video message — and US Secretary of State John Kerry will speak in a closing plenary session on Friday.

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Pakistan ( Taliban stormed Pakistan’s biggest airport on Sunday and killed 26 )

ISLAMABAD: Militants stormed Pakistan’s biggest airport on Sunday and at least 26 people were killed in a night-long battle at one of the country’s most high-profile targets.
The assault on Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, Pakistan’s sprawling commercial hub of 18 million people, took place as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government tries to engage Taleban militants in talks to end years of fighting.
The attack began just before midnight when 10 gunmen wearing military uniforms shot their way into the airport’s old terminal used mainly for charter and executive flights.
The Pakistani Taleban, an alliance of insurgent groups fighting to topple the government and set up a sharia state, claimed responsibility, saying it was in response to army attacks on their strongholds along the Afghan border.

“It is a message to the Pakistan government that we are still alive to react over the killings of innocent people in bomb attacks on their villages,” said Shahidullah Shahid, a Taleban spokesman.
The attack all but destroys prospects for significant peace talks with the government of Sharif, who came to power last year promising to find a negotiated solution to years of violence.
At the airport, gun battles went on for five hours and television pictures showed fire raging as ambulances ferried casualties away. At least three loud explosions were heard as militants wearing suicide vests blew themselves up.By dawn on Monday, the army said the airport had been secured but heavy smoke rose above the building.
“Ten militants aged between 20 and 25 have been killed by security forces,” said a spokesman for the paramilitary Rangers force. “A large cache of arms and ammunition has been recovered from the militants.”
Pakistan’s paramilitary force said that the attackers were ethnic Uzbeks. Pakistani officials often blame foreign militants holed up in lawless areas on the Afghan border for staging attacks alongside the Pakistani Taleban around the country.
“Three militants blew themselves up and seven were killed by security forces,” Rizwan Akhtar, the regional head of the paramilitary Rangers, said in televised remarks. “The militants appear to be Uzbek.”
Officials said no aircraft had been damaged.
Earlier, officials said all flights had been diverted.
Peace talks between the government and the Pakistani Taleban have failed in recent months, dampening hopes of reaching a negotiated settlement with the insurgency, which continues attacks against government and security targets.
Pakistan’s Taleban are allied with but separate from the Afghan Taleban.

BAGHDAD ( At Least 38 Dead in Clashes with Jihadists in Northern Iraq )

BAGHDAD – At least 38 people died Sunday, including 30 alleged members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, in clashes between Iraqi security forces and that jihadist group in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

According to what local police told Efe, the clashes in the capital of Nineveh province, some of the western districts of which are controlled by the ISIL, resumed Sunday morning and are still continuing.

Besides the Islamist fighters, eight civilians died and 15 were wounded in bombardments of the neighborhoods of Tamuz, Al Islah, Al Zarai, Al Saha and Yarmuk.

Mosul police said that at least five snipers are among the terrorists who were killed.

Iraqi forces managed to drive some militants out of portions of the neighborhoods they had controlled, but the ISIL – which has expanded its influence into several provinces around the country – still holds sway in significant parts of Mosul, and the army has sent reinforcements in to deal with them.

Over the past three days, dozens of ISIL fighters, as well as Iraqi police officers and soldiers, have been killed in Mosul.

Also on Sunday, at least 17 people, including five police officers, were killed and 65 others were wounded in a double bomb attack in front of the headquarters of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan in the city of Jalula, capital of the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala.

Police told Efe that a car bomb exploded next to the party’s offices and, when police arrived on the scene, a suicide bomber detonated the explosives he had strapped to his body.

Iraq is experiencing an increase in sectarian violence and terrorist attacks, which in 2013 killed more than 8,860 people, 7,818 of them civilians, according to a United Nations tally.