GENEVA ( U.N. Refugee Agency Says Iraq situation “Chaotic” )

GENEVA – The United Nations’ refugee agency on Friday described the situation in Iraq as “chaotic,” saying it has not been able to reach or help tens of thousands of people who are internally displaced and fears that number will increase as the conflict spreads.

“The situation is chaotic,” Adrian Edwards, the spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, said of the crisis in Iraq, where several conflicts are raging at the same time.

The United Nations continues to give a figure of 500,000 people internally displaced as a result of this month’s seizure of the northern city of Mosul by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a jihadist group linked to Al Qaeda, and its allies.

Concurrently, humanitarian agencies must attend to another half-million people forcibly displaced by the conflict in the western province of Al-Anbar that predates ISIS’ uprising over the past two weeks.

Edwards said the UNHCR is “very concerned” because the fighting is causing more displacement, noting that humanitarian agencies are already overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who have fled and are unable to reach many others due to lack of security.

Neither the UNHCR, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs nor the International Organization for Migration can say how many of the internally displaced lack access to international aid, nor give their precise location, but they believe they number more than 100,000.

“The ongoing conflict and the extremely volatile environment is likely to limit humanitarian access to thousands of displaced people in areas controlled by armed groups,” Jacqueline Badcock, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said in a statement Friday.

The OCHA’s spokesman, Jens Laerke, said that for the moment no talks have been held with ISIS leaders requesting access to the internally displaced.

The situation is complicated further because many of the displaced are constantly on the move.
An additional major concern is the threat of outbreaks of infectious diseases due to high temperatures and the lack of sanitation, hygiene and potable water in many of the areas where the displaced have taken refuge, Fadela Chaib, spokesperson for the World Health Organization, said.

Iraqi officials contend that ISIS is solely responsible for the offensive in the northern part of the country, but other Sunni militant groups opposed to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are backing the jihadist movement.

The rebels are holding Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the capital of Nineveh province, and trying to advance on Baghdad.

Tijuana Mexico ( 3 people executed and placed in cans full of acid )

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2014 | 0 COMMENTS COMMENTS
During the early hours of Tuesday in separate incidents there were 3 people executed in the city of Tijuana, including two found inside cans.


In one case, apparently the victim was dissolved in acid and found him in the vicinity of the colony "Merida" of sub Los Pinos. Some "sources" indicated as responsible for these criminal acts to José Luis Mendoza Uriarte (a) "Guero Sweaters".

Around 10 in the morning, residents of the colony "Merida" made a call to the emergency number of the police to warn of the existence of an abandoned car in the area within which the dairy was found.

The officers who attended this appeal found that the unit had been reported stolen and that the passenger seat that container remains of a human being was.

Minutes later on the side road of the colony "Deer Heads" was located another body, this semi-calcined and in an advanced state of decomposition, but also within a bin.

In another case a corpse, of an individual or of about 35, who was inside a house located in the colony "Emperors". Initially it was said that the person was injured as a result of a quarrel, however, was found dead; learned that in the latter case the officers arrested the perpetrator.

Guero blame Sweaters

AFN sources consulted by police, who is considered "behind" these criminal acts is José Luis Mendoza Uriarte, alias "El Guero sweaters," cousin "The Crutches" Lopez Uriarte-Raydel, who was released from the last year .

Recalled that even in those days they ordered executions, but against those who "betrayed" when he was arrested in 2011. Researchers explained that currently, "El Guero Sweaters" is "eliminating" to steal the drug gives them to sale.

They also recalled that the cousin of "The Crutches" They kept their operation centers in the Villas of Baja California, Los Pinos and Sánchez Taboada colonies, so the "message" ball to the two executed located in the Pacific Industrial Park in recent days .

This last area, belongs to the delegation Sánchez Taboada, while the bodies found this very day, coincide with areas where Mendoza Uriarte "opera".

These versions also agree with the statements made this day the Secretary of State Public Security (SSPE), Daniel de la Rosa Anaya who said the criminal record rise that is due to "adjustments" led by "people liberated" by federal authority.


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Ecuador ( Ecuador to Take Legal Action Against Using Indian Blood for Research )

QUITO – The government of Ecuador is bent on taking action against an oil company and an American research center for the use of blood samples they tricked Amazon Indians into giving them and which they then allegedly used for scientific research.

So said Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa in his usual Saturday broadcast, during which he demanded an inter-American and international regulation to stop this kind of genetic “piracy.”

“We’re studying a course of legal action to be taken in the coming weeks,” Correa said.

This, the president said, is an example of the “unjust international order” that punishes the piracy of intellectual property with prison, but does not prosecute what is done with genetic material obtained illegitimately from indigenous peoples.

Correa said that since the 1970s, U.S. researchers have obtained blood samples from Waorani Indians, an Amazon ethnicity, without their consent in order to perform scientific research.

At least, he said, 31 research papers were written between 1989 and 2012 based on such samples, obtained without the Indians’ consent nor the payment of royalties that would be essential for other kinds of commercial substances.

The president recalled that the National Science and Technology Secretariat prepared a report in 2012 on the case involving the Maxus Energy Corporation and the Coriell Institute for Medical Research, as well as scientists from Harvard University.

As to what the researchers were looking for, Correa said that “people of the jungle who have not been in frequent contact with western civilization... are immune to certain pathologies.”

BAGHDAD ( Iraqi Army Repels Militants’ Attack on City near Capital )

BAGHDAD – The Iraqi army on Tuesday repelled an attack by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters on Baquba, a city located just 60 kilometers (37 miles) northeast of Baghdad, state media reported.

The operations command in Diyala province confirmed that army troops stopped the insurgents’ attack in three districts in Baquba, the provincial capital, Al Iraquiya television reported.

ISIS fighters attacked the police station in Al Mafraq, a neighborhood on the west side of Baquba, and killed 52 prisoners.

The “terrorists used mortars and grenades in their attack in an attempt to free the prisoners,” armed forces spokesman Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta told Al Iraquiya.

The mortar rounds and grenades, however, landed in the area where the prisoners were being kept, killing all of them, the military spokesman said.

Nine militants and two police officers died in the fighting that followed, officials said, adding that six officers were wounded.

Iraqi officials contend that ISIS is solely responsible for the offensive in the northern part of the country, but other Sunni groups opposed to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are backing the jihadist movement.

Nearly 20 insurgents died in the fierce fighting around Baquba, officials said.

The rebels are holding Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the capital of Nineveh province, and trying to advance on Baghdad.

India ( India has ordered the closure of a Coca-Cola plant )

LUCKNOW: Authorities in northern India have ordered the closure of a Coca-Cola plant at the center of protests that it is extracting too much groundwater, an official said.
An anti-pollution official said the Mehdiganj plant in Varanasi in the state of Uttar Pradesh had breached the conditions of its operating licence, prompting the order closure earler this month.
“The plant is closed following our orders,” Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board member secretary J.S. Yadav told AFP.
“They have also been asked to take suitable measures to recharge the depleting groundwater level by twice the amount they have extracted.
“Also, the effluents released by the plant contain pollutants beyond the permissible limits.”
The plant was also asked to produce a permission certificate from a government agency that regulates ground water use, Yadav said.
The company has appealed the closure order to India’s environment court, the National Green Tribunal, he said.
Coca-Cola, the world’s largest soft-drinks maker which has consistently denied the allegations, could not immediately be contacted for comment. 
The Indian unit of the company hit a hurdle earlier this year when local authorities said they would demolish the Varanasi plant, claiming it was built on village council land and was “illegal.”
The authorities also imposed a 126,000 rupee ($2,000) fine on Hindustan Coca-Cola Company Private Limited, over the land issue.
India is one of Coke’s fastest-growing markets thanks to an expanding middle class.

Syria ( Syria has freed after 21 years in jail an ex-horse rider )

BEIRUT: Syria has freed after 21 years in jail an ex-horse rider known to have been an equestrian rival of one of President Bashar Assad’s late brothers, reports said Sunday.
The release of Adnan Qassar is part of a wide-reaching amnesty that Assad decreed last week, and has seen some 1,500 people freed from the war-ravaged country’s prisons, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“In 1993, Adnan Qassar was one of the top horse riders in Syria and the Arab world. He won a horse race against Bassel Assad,” who at the time was being groomed for the presidency, said Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman.
“Qassar was thrown in Saydnaya jail (near Damascus) for his ‘crime’,” said Abdel Rahman.
Aks Alser, a Syrian opposition activist website, also reported Qassar’s release, and said he had been accused of “possessing explosives, and of trying to assassinate Bassel Assad.”
Qassar was jailed “without trial,” it added.
A year later when Bassel Assad died in a traffic accident, “Qassar was dragged out of his cell to a public square, beaten and then thrown back in jail. It took them 21 years to release him,” said Abdel Rahman.
The Assad clan has ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than 40 years.
“Qassar was not a political activist. But in Syria, no one is allowed to be better at anything than the Assads,” Abdel Rahman said.
Qassar was set free as part of a wide-reaching general amnesty that President Assad decreed last week.
So far, some 1,500 people have been set free from jails across the country, most of them from Damascus, according to the Observatory.
The amnesty is unprecedented because it pledges pardon and reduce sentences for people jailed under Syria’s controversial 2012 anti-terror law, which has seen tens of thousands of people jailed over political charges.
The regime has systematically branded armed and unarmed dissidents, including journalists, of being “foreign-backed terrorists.”
“Some of those released so far are prisoners of conscience, others were in jail over criminal charges,” Abdel Rahman said.
The number of those released so far pales in comparison to the estimated total of 100,000 people imprisoned, including some 50,000 held in security buildings dotted across the country.
Rights groups say torture and ill-treatment are systematic in Syria’s jails.

Russian reporter killed in Ukraine fighting

KIEV: A Russian state television reporter was killed on Tuesday during a fierce battle in Ukraine’s separatist east that put Kiev’s tattered relations with Moscow under further strain.
The chief doctor at the main hospital in the rebel stronghold city of Lugansk said Russia’s VGTRK media group reporter Igor Kornelyuk sustained severe stomach wounds after being hit by shrapnel.
“He was unconscious when he arrived and died on his way to the operating room,” doctor Fedir Solyanyk told AFP by telephone.
A Lugansk separatist spokesman told AFP by telephone that Kornelyuk and VGTRK sound technician Anton Voloshin were caught in the middle of a grenade launcher attack staged by Ukranian forces in the Russian border region.
The separatist spokesman said the fate of Voloshin and that of about 15 rebel fighters who were with the Russian television crew at the time remained unclear.
Ukrainian security officials said they would comment only after conducting a full investigation.
But Russia’s Foreign Ministry immediately denounced the reporter’s death as a “crime” committed by Ukrainian forces that it expected global media to condemn.
Kornelyuk’s death is the second confirmed fatality of a reporter in eastern Ukraine since fighting there broke out in mid-April.
Italian photographer Andrea Rocchelli and his Russian assistant Andrei Mironov were killed outside Slavyansk in the neighboring Donetsk region in late May.