By Marcus Eriksen

If you could stand on the ocean floor, look up, and see only the plastic pollution suspended in our oceans, you would see massive clouds of plastic particles, a mist of dust-like microplastic fragments slowly settling to the seafloor.

This “plastic smog” is taking over our oceans. Today, there are more than five trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans, together weighing more than 250,000 tons.

Plastic in the oceans is always moving, sometimes violently, and becomes brittle under the ultraviolet rays of the sun. It is constantly being attacked by curious fish, seabirds, and marine mammals and reptiles, colonized by millions of microbes, and ingested by zooplankton and other filter feeders, like barnacles and jellyfish. As a result, plastic in the oceans is rapidly shredded into microplastics, which quickly disseminate.

To make matters worse, microplastics act as tiny sponges, absorbing chemical pollutants in the ocean, of which there are many. Chemical pollutants like pesticides flow downhill to the ocean and stick to plastic, leaving most marine scientists in agreement that microplastics in the ocean are hazardous waste.

Microplastics that are not ingested by marine life are typically driven below the ocean surface, to be captured by deep ocean currents for redistribution around the world. We are now finding microplastics in ice cores, remote shores, and on the ocean floor. Where there is seawater, there is plastic.

When faced with air pollution in the 1970s, people had all sorts of outlandish ideas, like installing giant vacuum cleaners on top of city buildings. Others looked up and said, “That doesn’t make sense. Just control emissions at the source.” Laws to control emissions from cars and power plants have since proven to be the solution.

Scientists like myself who study ocean pollution understand that plastic shreds to microplastic rapidly, is globally distributed, and settles to the seafloor the same way air pollution settles to the ground. With this knowledge, the public can accurately say, “Ocean cleanup is not where solutions start. Just control emissions at the source.” All solutions to this problem must start on land.

But controlling emissions is where we find conflict. Plastics Europe and the American Chemistry Council, the trade groups that represent plastic producers and manufactures worldwide, uniformly reject solutions that threaten plastic production. They focus solely on post-consumer waste-management solutions, including more landfills, incinerators, recycling centers, and trash bins, and they expect cities to pay for these solutions with taxpayer funds. They aggressively oppose product phase-outs and bottle bills, regardless of how successful these strategies are at eliminating waste.

Given the latest research on plastic pollution in our oceans, we must agree on a few principles.

First, microplastics should be labeled as hazardous waste. Overwhelming scientific study shows concentrations of toxins on plastic are at very high levels, and these levels decrease when marine organisms try to digest microplastic pollution.

Second, ocean cleanup is an inefficient and unnecessary strategy. The plastic that is in the oceans now will rapidly shred and settle to the seafloor or wash ashore, making cleanup at sea the least efficient means of recovery, and the least effective means of controlling emissions of waste to the ocean. Industry-funded beach and ocean cleanups are largely a distraction from efforts to stop pollution at the source.

Finally, producers must take responsibility for the lifecycle of plastics. Industry must either monetize incentives to recover waste plastics or innovate environmentally friendly product and packaging alternatives. Simply put, if you can’t get your product back, make it harmless. Taxpayers can no longer bear the full responsibility for managing the threats of plastic waste.

Knowing that trillions of plastic particles, which scientists deem hazardous waste, are cycling through entire marine ecosystems underscores the importance that community leaders eliminate single-use, throw-away plastic products and packaging from society. It will take leadership to design better products and packaging to replace the status quo. If we do not end this problem on land, we can surely anticipate greater contamination of all we gather from the sea.

Marcus Eriksen is the Research Director and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute. He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic marine pollution, which has included expeditions sailing through all 5 subtropical gyres, Bay of Bengal, Southern Ocean and inland lakes and rivers, most recently publishing the first global estimate of plastic pollution floating in the world’s oceans, totalling 270,000 metric tons from 5.25 trillion particles.

This article first appeared in TheMarkNews

By Ange Aboa

A court in Ivory Coast sentenced former first lady Simone Gbagbo on Tuesday to 20 years in prison for her role in a 2011 post-election crisis in which around 3,000 people were killed, her lawyer said.

Gbagbo, who is also wanted by the International Criminal Court, was tried alongside 82 other allies of ex-President Laurent Gbagbo in a case that reopened divisions in a nation still recovering from years of political turmoil and conflict.

General Bruno Dogbo Ble, who headed the elite republican guard, and former navy chief Admiral Vagba Faussignaux were both jailed for 20 years, according to their lawyer, while others including the ex-president’s son got shorter sentences.

Supporters of Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to acknowledge his defeat by Alassane Ouattara in elections in 2010 sparked a brief civil war, claimed the trial was politically motivated.

“The jury members retained all the charges against her, including disturbing the peace, forming and organising armed gangs and undermining state security. It’s a shame,” said Simone Gbagbo’s lawyer Rodrigue Dadje.

The sentence handed down to the former first lady by the six-member jury was longer than the 10 years requested by the state prosecutor. Her civil rights will also be suspended for 10 years, Dadje said.

Laurent Gbagbo is awaiting trial at the ICC accused of crimes against humanity. Ivory Coast refused to transfer Simone Gbagbo to The Hague to face similar charges, arguing that she could receive a fair trial in a domestic court.

The trial verdicts were announced in the early hours of Tuesday morning after around nine hours of deliberations by the jury, with the former president’s son, Michel Gbagbo, also convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, Dadje said.

“PREPARED TO FORGIVE”

Pascal Affi N’Guessan, president of Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) party and seen as a potential candidate to challenge President Ouattara in elections this year, was handed an 18-month sentence.

He was credited with time served and released, as were nine former government ministers and four journalists who had been among dozens of Gbagbo’s allies arrested following the violence in 2011.

As the trial drew to a close on Monday, Simone Gbagbo said prosecutors had insulted and humiliated her while failing to prove her guilt.

“I’m prepared to forgive. I forgive because, if we don’t forgive, this country will burn,” she said. “I am satisfied with this trial. I told my part of the truth.”

Though praised for his stewardship of Ivory Coast’s post-war recovery, President Ouattara has been accused by human rights groups of pursuing one-sided justice against his former rivals while ignoring abuses committed by his own supporters.

In the commercial capital Abidjan, reaction was divided.

“They should have freed them and given reconciliation a boost,” said Salif Bakayoko, a marketing agent, outside a newspaper kiosk.

But others welcomed the verdict as a sign there would be no impunity for the acts that plunged the country into turmoil.

“Everyone responsible for what happened in 2011 must pay,” said Gilbert Kouakou, an auditor.

By Soe Zeya Tun

Myanmar police beat students, monks and journalists with batons and detained about 100 people on Tuesday as they broke up protesters calling for academic freedom who had been locked in a standoff with security forces for more than a week, a Reuters witness said.

About 200 students and supporters have been protesting against an education bill they say stifles academic independence. They had planned to walk from the central city of Mandalay to the commercial hub of Yangon, but were blocked by police in Letpadan, about 140 km to the north of Yangon.

Police, who also traded slingshot fire with protesters, had said they would allow the students to continue their march on Tuesday, but that agreement fell apart.

Yangon is the site of numerous student-led demonstrations, including those in 1988 that sparked a pro-democracy movement that spread throughout the country before being brutally suppressed by the military government.

A semi-civilian reformist government took power in 2011 after 49 years of military rule and its response to the current protests has been more muted.

The witness saw about 100 protesters locked in two police trucks, while others fled the town and some were chased into a Buddhist temple.

The Delegation of the European Union, which has been training the police in crowd management, condemned the crackdown, saying in a statement that it “deeply regrets the use of force against peaceful demonstrators”.

The Interim Myanmar Press Council said it was filing a complaint, protesting “in the strongest terms against the arrest of reporters” and calling for their release, without saying how many journalists were detained.

Police and government spokesmen were not available for comment. The Information Ministry posted photos on its Facebook page showing student protesters tearing down police barricades and noted that the protesters removed them “with force”.

Student leaders rejected the suggestion that they had instigated the violence.

“It hurts my heart whenever they do this to us students, but for sure we will never use violence,” said Lin Htet Naing of the All Burma Federation of Student Unions.

Lin Htet Naing’s wife, a former political prisoner of the previous military regime, was among those arrested in Letpadan while he led a brief protest in Yangon on Tuesday.

About 100 protesters were met in the street in Yangon by a larger number of police who grabbed one protester and beat him. Police said they would release him if the protesters dispersed, which they did.

By Naomi Tajitsu and Gyles Beckford

Suspected environmental activists have threatened to contaminate infant formula in New Zealand, the world’s largest dairy exporter, in an attempt to halt the use of an agricultural poison on pests such as rats and possums.

New Zealand police said on Tuesday letters were sent to the national farmers’ group and dairy giant Fonterra in November accompanied by packages of infant formula laced with 1080, demanding that use of the toxic pesticide be stopped by the end of March.

The announcement pushed the New Zealand dollar to a six-week low over concerns about the possible impact on the country, which depends on dairy products for about a quarter of its export earnings.

Trading in New Zealand’s dairy companies and futures was halted for a while following the second milk-safety scare to hit the country over a two-year period.

Police said no traces of the poison resembling salt crystals were found in any products in factories. The Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) also sought to assure consumers, saying the chances of contamination were extremely low.

“We are confident that New Zealand infant and other formula is just as safe today as it was before this threat was made. People should keep using it as they always have,” said MPI Deputy Director-General Scott Gallacher.

Security of production facilities and the supply chain had been increased, the police said.

“Whilst there is a possibility that this threat is a hoax, we must treat the threat seriously and a priority investigation is underway,” said Police Deputy Commissioner Mike Clement in a statement.

He said no further letters had been received after the initial batch and the matter was being treated as blackmail rather than terrorism.

Fonterra, which controls nearly 90 percent of the country’s milk supply and collected roughly 14 billion litres of the liquid last year, said in-house tests conducted since January had not found any traces of the poison in its dairy products including infant formula powder.

“We can fully assure our customers and consumers that all of our milk and products are safe and of high quality, and our supply chain continues to be secure and world-class,” Fonterra CEO Theo Spierings said in a statement.

“We have taken immediate and decisive steps to give our customers and consumers added confidence – including increased testing and security measures.”

UNINTENDED IMPACT

The poison 1080 is extremely toxic and is used extensively in New Zealand, including in national parks and around the Milford Sound, one of the country’s biggest tourism draws, to control pests such as stoats, rabbits, deer, rats and possums.

While these non-native species cause damage to the native flora and fauna, conservation groups have long criticised the use of 1080 because of the unintended impact on native wildlife, and there have been occasional protests against its use and unsuccessful campaigns to have it banned.

The latest threat to the country’s dairy industry, which exported $11 billion in milk products in 2014, follows a contamination scare in 2013, when a botulism-causing bacteria was believed to be found in one of Fonterra’s products.

The incident prompted a recall of infant formula, sports drinks and other products in China, its biggest buyer, and other countries before the discovery was discovered to be false.

Dairy products make up more than 7 per cent of New Zealand’s gross domestic product.

The New Zealand dollar fell on Tuesday to as low as $0.7278, its weakest since early February, following the announcement, and analysts were bracing for any economic fallout from the incident.

“It’s just a threat and at this stage it hasn’t been carried out,” ANZ agricultural economist Con Williams said.

“It’s really the reputational issue given the sensitivity about food safety issues, and those things are impossible to quantify.”

By Alessandra Prentice

Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday pro-Russian rebels were amassing heavy weapons in depots around separatist-held Donetsk city despite a ceasefire deal.

Attacks have fallen in the past week, but accusations from both sides of violations show the fragility of the peace deal agreed in Minsk last month, which calls for the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the frontline.

“(Rebels) are continuing to transport equipment and artillery ammunition intensively via the Debaltseve railway junction and build weapons storages around Donetsk,” military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said in a televised briefing.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors the pull-back of weapons, has said it cannot fully confirm withdrawal on both sides as it has not been given access to all the locations where some weapons have been moved.

Lysenko said Ukrainian positions had come under attack from separatists 31 times on Monday, including five instances of artillery fire, and reported nine servicemen had been wounded in the past 24 hours.

“The most troubled areas are Shyrokyne and around Donetsk airport … yesterday there was fighting almost all day in Shyrokyne,” Lysenko said, referring to a village on the outskirts of government-held Mariupol, a strategic port city Kiev fears could be the focus of the next rebel offensive.

On the rebel side, officials said Ukrainian forces had violated the ceasefire 17 times in the past 24 hours, but reported no casualties, separatist press service DAN said.

By Katharine Houreld

Pakistan will begin executing criminals on death row whose appeals have been exhausted, an interior ministry spokesman said Tuesday, reversing an earlier announcement that only those convicted of terrorism would be executed.

“It applies to all (on death row), irrespective of the nature of the crime,” said the spokesman, who said the order was given late on Friday but not publicised.

There are more than 8,000 Pakistanis on death row. But the country had a de facto moratorium on executions in place from 2008 until December, when Taliban gunmen massacred 134 children and 19 adults in the worst militant attack in the country’s history.

Politicians say fast-track executions are vital to reigning in militant attacks in the nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people.

So legislators voted in sweeping powers allowing the military to try and execute civilians, arguing that the country’s civilian courts were too intimidated and inept to convict militants and murderers.

Human rights groups warned that convictions were highly unreliable and the Pakistan criminal justice system barely functioned. But the government promised only those convicted of militant attacks would be executed and regular convicts on death row would be spared.

Since then, 24 people have been executed, including two men who were not involved in a militant attack, according to legal aid group Justice Project Pakistan.

The group produced research in conjunction with US university Yale Law School documenting nearly 2,000 cases of torture in the eastern Pakistani district of Faisalabad. Interviewees said police routinely manufactured evidence, tortured suspects and botched investigations.

Torture is recognised as such a widespread problem that any confession a suspect gives to a policeman is inadmissible in court.

Lawyers are often also inept or corrupt, witnesses are frequently bribed or murdered and judges are threatened, the group says.

Police say that although torture used to be common, it is rarer these days.

Many of those on death row were children when they were arrested and say they were tortured into confessing, the group said, citing the case of a man who was 14 years old when he was sentenced to death ten years ago.

“We’ve seen time and time again that there is immeasurable injustice in Pakistan’s criminal justice system, with a rampant culture of police torture, inadequate counsel and unfair trials,” Sarah Belal, the executive director of Justice Project Pakistan, said in a statement.

“Despite knowing this, the government has irresponsibly brought back capital punishment.”

Let’s take a look at the backlines that have strikers licking their lips:

For more articles and the latest soccer news, check out 90min.com

By Andria Kades

Cyprus’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 0.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2014 compared to the previous quarter, according to the Cyprus Statistical Service (CyStat).

GDP in all industries decreased since the beginning of the year, particularly wholesale and retail trade, accommodation and food services, real estate activities and agriculture, CyStat figures showed on Wednesday.

By Karolina Tagaris

Greece’s justice minister said on Wednesday he was ready to implement a High Court ruling allowing Athens to seize German state-owned property to compensate victims of a Nazi massacre in a small Greek village.

Nikos Paraskevopoulos’s comments come against a backdrop of rising tensions between Athens and Berlin as Greece’s new leftist government struggles to persuade its European Union partners to renegotiate a 240 billion euro bailout package.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Tuesday accused successive German governments of using legal tricks to avoid paying reparations for the brutal Nazi occupation of Greece and said he would support efforts to push for compensation.

Speaking on Mega TV, Paraskevopoulos said a high court ruling from 2000, which allowed the confiscation of German property to compensate relatives of some 218 Greeks killed in the village of Distomo, was still valid.

The ruling needs to be endorsed by the justice minister to be enacted and Paraskevopoulos’s predecessors have baulked at the idea, knowing it would lead to a showdown with Berlin.

“I’m ready to sign (the decision),” the minister said. “The prime minister is aware of the views I have on the issue.”

Pressed on when this might happen, he said: “When the political time has matured.”

Germany said last month the issue of war damages had been settled at world power talks that led to German reunification in 1990. It dismisses the new government’s stance as a distraction from Greece’s serious financial challenges.

“It is our firm belief that questions of reparations and compensation have been legally and politically resolved,” Steffen Seibert, spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said on Wednesday.

Greece’s campaign for war damages, waged for decades by both governments and private citizens, has gained momentum due to painful austerity measures imposed by the euro zone since 2010 under the terms of huge international rescue packages.

RAMPAGE

The High Court ruling Paraskevopoulos raised relates only to the Distomo bloodshed, when Nazi forces went on a two-hour rampage, butchering men, women and children in what they said was retaliation for an attack on them by resistance forces.

Hundreds of other villages were destroyed, thousands of civilians executed and huge sums looted from the Greek central bank during the Nazis’ wartime occupation of the country.

With little apparent progress being made in Greece’s debt talks, Greek ministers have grown increasingly vocal in their criticism of Germany, angering many Germans already unhappy at having to pour billions of euros into the original bailout.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel narrowly averted a major rebellion in a parliamentary vote last month on Greece’s request for a bailout extension, suggesting it might prove tough for her to win the necessary support for any further funds.

By John O’Donnell and Michele Kambas

Doubts over Greece’s future membership of the euro are straining its historic kinship with Cyprus, as Nicosia distances itself from Athens to try to secure its foothold in the currency bloc.

Cyprus wants to reverse a perception that the two countries are inextricably linked, worried that it could be dragged down with Greece, should Athens’ finances collapse and force the Greeks to abandon the euro.

The fate of Cyprus could prove an important test of the durability of the euro zone and the wider European Union in the face of political uncertainty in Greece.

“(Sharing a) language is one thing but being the same economy is completely different,” said Finance Minister Harris Georgiades.

Linguistic solidarity leads Cyprus and Greece to give each other’s contestant the top score each year in the Eurovision song contest. “There are cultural ties but that’s it. We are following our own course,” Georgiades told Reuters in an interview.

Unlike Greece, Cyprus has been largely diligent in implementing reforms required in return for an international bailout it received in 2013. There has been little public protest despite the deep recession that ensued.

Their paths have diverged more sharply since the radical leftist Syriza party won power in Greece in January, denouncing austerity and demanding a reduction of its official debt.

The centre-right Cypriot government blames former Communist President Demetris Christofias for delaying a cleanup of Cypriot banks that made the eventual bailout more painful.

Cyprus hopes to return to borrowing on bond markets this year, Georgiades said, while Athens has little such prospect.

Trade ties are modest. Greece ranks second behind Britain in selling services to Cyprus, such as holidays, but it lags far behind Russia, Britain and Germany as a customer.

Cyprus has also severed its banks’ links to Greece that resulted in heavy losses when Greek bonds were restructured or ‘haircut’. It was those losses that fatally compromised the Cypriot financial system and prompted its bailout.

“We hope that there will be no problems in Greece,” said Chrystalla Georghadji, the governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus. “But if there are any problems, the banks here are ring-fenced.”

Yet the island remains vulnerable.

After prospering for a few years in the EU, Cyprus ran into trouble because of its banks’ exposure to the Greek debt crisis as well as a domestic property bubble.

The punitive bailout terms imposed losses on big depositors in Cypriot banks in return for loans from euro zone states such as hardline paymaster Germany. That triggered a deep recession in a country dependent on tourism and business services, often to Russian companies seeking to cut their tax bill.

“The terms of the bailout destroyed vast tracks of savings,” said John Hourican, chief executive of Bank of Cyprus.

“And while it was portrayed as an attack on Russian money, really it was an attack on Cyprus because the real Russian money destroyed was modest,” he said. “The savings and investment funds destroyed were enormous.”

The economy is on track to grow modestly this year but the improving outlook masks problems.

Many Cypriot borrowers can’t or won’t repay their loans. Almost half of loans given by the Bank of Cyprus, which accounts for most lending on the island, are in arrears.

A new foreclosure law to accelerate the slow-motion pursuit of bad debtors, which has been held up in parliament, will make it easier to seize security, such as property.

Ending a political logjam over this reform would enable Cyprus to join the European Central Bank’s asset purchase programme. Cypriot authorities expect this to release roughly €500 million to buy government bonds, making it cheaper for the state and banks to borrow.

There are signs of frustration in Cyprus but, unlike in Greece, they are mostly understated. When Syriza won the Greek election, some left-wing opposition lawmakers in the Cypriot parliament removed their ties in a show of solidarity.

Greece’s uncertain future worries many Cypriots, who regard Athens as their only pillar of support against Turkey.

“The euro zone pushing Greece out … is, as the Chinese say, like burning the house to roast the pig,” said Theo Panayotou of the Cyprus International Institute of Management.

“Greece is sort of the shield of Cyprus against the excesses of Turkish policies. If Greece defaults, Greece would be so poor … for at least two or three years, Greece would be no credible threat to Turkey,” said Panayotou.

That might prompt Turkey to move in on recently discovered major offshore gas reserves in Cypriot waters, which promise the island a prosperous future as an energy producer.

But being pigeon-holed with Greece by the wider world may be a bigger short-term problem for Cyprus.

“The worst risk is to reputation, people thinking if Greece fails, Cyprus is failing to,” said Stavros Zenios, an academic and member of the Board of Directors of Cyprus’s central bank.

Officials at EU headquarters in Brussels are also keen to avoid lumping the two together, to safeguard Cyprus in the euro zone. Losing Greece would be a blow to the currency bloc, but to lose two members could be fatal. (Reuters)

By Ahmed Rasheed

Iraqi security forces and militias fought their way into Saddam Hussein’s home city of Tikrit on Wednesday, advancing from the north and south in their biggest counter-offensive so far against Islamic State militants.

The provincial governor said the army and militia fighters captured part of the northern district of Qadisiya, while in the south of the Tigris river city a security officer said another force made a rapid push towards the centre.

“The forces entered Tikrit general hospital,” an official at the main military operation command centre said. “There is heavy fighting going on near the presidential palaces, next to the hospital complex.”

Islamic State fighters who stormed into Tikrit in June during a lightning offensive through north and central Iraq have used the complex of palaces built in Tikrit under Saddam, the executed former president, as their headquarters.

More than 20,000 troops and Iranian-backed Shi’ite Muslim militias known as Hashid Shaabi, supported by local Sunni Muslim tribes, launched the offensive for Tikrit 10 days ago, advancing from the east and along the Tigris river.

On Tuesday they took the town of al-Alam on the northern edge of Tikrit, paving the way for an attack on the city itself.

“The governor of Salahuddin announces the purging of half of Qadisiya district, the largest of Tikrit’s neighbourhoods,” a statement from governor Raed al-Jubouri’s office said.

The army and militia fighters raised the national flag above a military hospital in the section of Qadisiya they had retaken from the militants, security officials said.

After pausing while helicopters attacked Islamic State snipers and positions, the ground forces were progressing steadily, taking “one street every 30 minutes” the security official said. He said there was fierce fighting around Tikrit police headquarters just south of Qadisiya.

To the northwest, troops and Hashid Shaabi fighters were clashing with Islamic State militants in the city’s industrial zone, he added.

RAMADI ATTACKS

If Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government is able to retake Tikrit it would be the first city clawed back from the Sunni insurgents and would give it momentum in the next, pivotal stage of the campaign – to recapture Mosul, the largest city in the north.

Mosul is the biggest city held by the ultra-radical Islamic State, who now rule a self-declared cross-border caliphate in Sunni regions of Syria and Iraq.

Over the past few months Islamic State has gradually lost ground in Iraq to the army, Shi’ite militias and Kurdish peshmerga forces, backed by air strikes carried out by a U.S.-led coalition of mainly Western and allied Arab states.

The United States says Baghdad did not seek aerial backup from the coalition in the Tikrit campaign. Instead, support on the ground has come from neighbouring Iran, Washington’s longtime regional rival, which has sent an elite Revolutionary Guard commander to oversee part of the battle.

In the western province of Anbar, suicide car bombers in seven vehicles attacked Iraqi army positions in the provincial capital Ramadi, about 90 km west of Baghdad, police and medical sources say.

A total of five people were killed in the attacks, including two policemen, and 19 were wounded, a medical source said, stressing that the toll was only preliminary.

One of the car bombs exploded near a bridge in the west of the city and damaged part of the bridge, a police source said.

In the north, an Islamic State suicide bomber struck a position of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the town of Sinjar. After the bombing around 70 militants attacked but were driven back by coalition airstrikes, according to a senior Kurdish security official in the area.

By Daniel Dickson

Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador from Stockholm, the Swedish foreign ministry said on Wednesday, deepening a diplomatic row between the two countries over Riyadh’s record on human rights and democracy.

Sweden said on Tuesday it would cancel a long-standing defence cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia. That followed Riyahd’s decision to block a speech due to be given by Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom to the Arab League on Monday in Cairo.

“We have received information that Saudi Arabia has called its ambassador home,” said Erik Boman, spokesman for Wallstrom.

He said the reason given was the same as given by Saudi Arabia in blocking Wallstrom’s speech in Cairo: “Sweden’s criticism and statements which have been made about human rights and democracy”.

Boman said Sweden did not plan to recall its ambassador to Saudi Arabia. A spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.

Sweden’s Social Democrat-led government came to power in October promising to take a more active international role and refocus foreign policy on human rights.

The more vocal stance has already created problems.

In his inaugural address, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said Sweden would recognise a Palestinian state, leading to strong criticism from Israel. Wallstrom has also been very critical of Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Following the Saudi protest against her, the Arab League agreed a resolution denouncing Wallstrom’s remarks to the Swedish parliament, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

In February, Wallstrom told parliament Riyadh violated women’s rights and she criticised the flogging of activist and blogger Raif Badawi. She also called Saudi Arabia a “dictatorship.”

In an editorial following the government’s decision to scrap the Saudi defence cooperation agreement, business daily Dagens Industri said the current foreign policy had backfired.

“The government’s Middle East politics so far have worsened its relations with both Israel and the Arab world at a critical juncture for the whole region,” the paper said.

The health ministry said on Wednesday that three unrelated cases of meningitis in babies and children have been recorded but are not connected to a fatality that occurred last week.

All three were responding well to treatment, a written statement said.

The ministry said the three cases were not associated nor “are they connected with last week’s incident.”

All three cases received the appropriate treatment and were in good general condition, improving on a daily basis, the ministry said.

“The health ministry is monitoring the situation closely and there is no cause for concern.”

A nine-month-old baby died from meningitis last week in a case that sparked controversy after two state pathologists refused to perform an autopsy citing the risk of contagion.

By Stella Mapenzauswa

Two men, one armed with a gun, were caught on camera late on Tuesday mugging a South African journalist in Johannesburg as he prepared for a live television report on Zambian President Edgar Lungu’s hospital treatment.

The incident is just one of scores of often violent crimes, including rape, robberies and murder recorded every day in Africa’s most advanced economy, earning it a place among the most violent countries in the world outside a war zone.

The video, which went viral on the Internet, shows the men pacing around reporter Vuyo Mvoko while he speaks to the camera outside the hospital, before a scuffle ensues, and then Mvoko is heard shouting: “Hey, we’re being mugged.”

Mvoko was reporting on the arrival of Zambia’s Lungu, 58, at a Johannesburg hospital for medical tests after he fell ill at the weekend with a suspected narrowing of the food pipe.

“He was looking for the phone and when I wasn’t giving him the phone, he calls the other one who has a gun, to say: ‘shoot this dog’ or something like that,” Mvoko, who works for the national broadcaster, told radio station 702 on Wednesday.

“So I gave him the phone.”

Police spokeswoman Colonel Noxolo Kweza was not available for comment, but the government condemned the attack.

“Government has intensified the fight against crime to protect the rights of citizens … and will continue in its efforts to reduce crime to ensure that all people who live in South Africa are, and feel safe.”

The mugging came a day after a popular South African hip hop artist Nkululeko Habedi was killed when his girlfriend allegedly stabbed him on Monday, according to police.

Last year, South Africa’s football association launched a gun control campaign in the wake of the high profile shootings of the national team captain Senzo Meyiwa, and model Reeva Steenkamp who was killed in 2013 by her Paralympic boyfriend Oscar Pistorius.

Russian Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fyodorov said his ministry was considering softening its ban on food imports from a series of European Union countries, including Cyprus, Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday.

The embargo, introduced last year in response to Western sanctions imposed on Moscow for its role in theUkraine crisis, restricted many European food producers’ access to the large Russian market.

Combined with a weaker rouble, it also helped push Russian inflation in February to a near 13-year high of 16.7 per cent.

Fyodorov said Russia was considering easing the embargo first of all for Greece, Hungary and Cyprus.

“We are actively investigating to see what civilised opportunities there are to their proposals (countries which have asked to lift the embargo),” he told journalists. “If we help them, we would not want to create problems for them in their relations with Brussels.”

Fyodorov also said his ministry did not plan to change its wheat export duty and that it expected 2015 grain exports at up to 25 million tonnes.

The government has said the export duty, imposed as of February 1, amounted to 15 per cent of the customs price plus 7.5 euros and would be no less than 35 euros per tonne until June 30.

By Jean Christou

A new incentives package to entice more airlines to Cyprus was signed on Wednesday between airports’ operator Hermes and the ministry of communications, works and transport.

The scheme covers both airports at Larnaca and Paphos and is being offered to all airlines without discrimination, a joint statement said.

“The six incentive schemes aim at further strengthening the air connectivity of Cyprus and boosting the country’s tourism industry,” it added.

The package of will include schemes for the introduction of multiple new routes on a three-year agreement, development of new (single) routes, development of winter traffic, discounts on landing fees at Cypriot airports,  development through a Growth Bonus Plan on a net traffic growth for existing routes, and  marketing support for the promotion of Cyprus by the airlines.

The aim is to increase connectivity and boost passenger numbers especially during the slow winter period.

The statement said it was hoped the incentives would help increase tourist traffic from existing markets, develop new markets and allocate additional capacity on flights to and from Cyprus.

Cyprus this year saw the demise of its own national carrier, shut down on January after the European Commission ordered it to pay back some €66m in illegal state aid.

Tourism Minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis said at a recent hoteliers conference that the gap has been filled by other airlines. He said the government had also succeeded in promoting new air routes to and from Cyprus from Barcelona, Rome, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Vienna and other cities.

Low cost Ryanair, which was the first to benefit from government incentives when it set up a hub in Cyprus in 2012 but pulled out of Larnaca after one season when refused even lower landing charges, said recently prices were still “astronomically high” at both of Cyprus airports, which was deterring airlines.

Ryanair’s Chief Commercial Officer, David O’Brien, during a news conference in Paphos said: “Cyprus is a good example of what not to do. Excellently run airports which are operationally excellent, they look good, but they are too expensive.”

More information and details about the six incentive schemes of the international airports of Cyprus will be available on Thursday on the Cyprus airports’ website www.hermesairports.com, the operator said.

A 37-year-old former municipal employee in Paphos was remanded on Wednesday for eight days in connection with three bomb explosions near the town hall, according to Cyprus News Agency.

A police search in his house found empty fire extinguishers, gas canisters and tape that were used for the blasts, the report said.

The man, who had been sacked three years ago, was arrested when after authorities suspected he was the one who had placed the  low-impact devices in the public gardens behind the town hall on three separate occasions in the past week.

He denies any involvement.

A condolence letter from President Lyndon Johnson to the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. following the civil rights leader’s 1968 assassination is set to be auctioned on Thursday after a legal battle.

The typed letter from Johnson to Coretta Scott King is dated April 5, 1968, the day after King was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee, by a white supremacist and riots erupted across the United States.

“We will overcome this calamity and continue the work of justice and love that is Martin Luther King’s legacy and trust to us,” Johnson, who was president from 1963 to 1969, said in the letter on White House stationery.

Quinn’s Auction Galleries in Falls Church, Virginia, is selling the letter. It has set a minimum price of $60,000, and expects the letter to fetch from $120,000 to $180,000, according to the company’s website.

Auctioneer Matthew Quinn said the letter had special resonance given the 50th anniversary this month of the “Bloody Sunday” march at Selma, Alabama, a turning point in the US civil rights movement, and the release of the King-centered movie “Selma.”

“You know, we get to sell high-value items all the time. Rarely do we get a-hold of a piece of history, and it’s been humbling,” Quinn told Reuters Television.

Coretta Scott King held on to the condolence letter until 2003, when she gave it to singer and social justice activist Harry Belafonte. She died in 2006.

When Belafonte tried to sell it through Sotheby’s auction house in 2008, King’s children objected and the sale was canceled. The two sides became embroiled in a legal battle.

A 2014 settlement allowed Belafonte to keep the letter and other items, and Belafonte gave the letter to his half-sister Shirley Cooks. She and her husband Stoney Cooks, who was a staff member of King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, are selling it along with other memorabilia.

Stoney Cooks said the letter was remarkable because Johnson, who had signed landmark civil rights legislation, wrote it even as he grappled with a wave of rioting and arson sparked by King’s murder, including in the streets of the U.S. capital.

“I thought that quick response showed something about the nature of the relationship between the two men,” he told Reuters Television.

By Sam Wilkin

I Iran’s Supreme Leader hit out on Thursday at a letter by US Republican senators threatening to undo any nuclear deal between Washington and Tehran, saying he was worried because the United States was known for “backstabbing”, Mehr news agency reported.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the ultimate authority on all Iranian matters of state, added at a meeting with President Hassan Rouhani and senior clerics that whenever negotiators made progress, the Americans became “harsher, tougher and coarser”.

The letter signed by 47 Republican senators warned Iran that any nuclear deal made with U.S. President Barack Obama, a Democrat, could last only as long as he remained in office – an unusual intervention into U.S. foreign policy-making.

The White House has described the letter as “reckless” and “irresponsible,” saying it interfered with efforts by six major powers to negotiate with Iran on a deal to prevent it from building a nuclear bomb.

Mehr quoted Khamenei as saying: “Of course I am worried, because the other side is known for opacity, deceit and backstabbing.

“Every time we reach a stage where the end of the negotiations is in sight, the tone of the other side, specifically the Americans, becomes harsher, coarser and tougher. This is the nature of their tricks and deceptions.”

The clerical Supreme Leader said the letter was “a sign of the decay of political ethics in the American system”, and he described as risible long-standing US accusations of Iranian involvement in terrorism.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, Washington’s chief nuclear negotiator, voiced “utter disbelief” at the senators’ action, saying the notion that they could alter any executive accord between government leaders was “flat wrong”.

KHAMENEI BALANCING ACT

Khamenei has long been a conservative hardliner wary of any detente with the West but has backed the diplomacy pursued by Rouhani, who was elected by a landslide in 2013 promising steps to end Iran’s economically crippling international isolation.

At the same time, Khamenei has not stopped speeches larded with denunciations of the United States to reassure powerful hardliners in the clergy and security services, for whom anti-U.S. sentiment has been central to Iran’s Islamic Revolution.

The nuclear negotiations, which resume in Lausanne, Switzerland, next week, are at a critical juncture as the sides try to meet an end of March target for an outline accord, with June 30 the deadline for a detailed, final agreement.

Iran and the powers have twice extended their deadline to conclude the negotiations, which aim to place curbs on Iran’s nuclear energy capacity to help ensure it cannot develop nuclear bombs. In return, Iran would secure a removal of sanctions that have severely damaged Iran’s oil-based economy.

The Islamic Republic dismisses Western suspicions that it aims to develop nuclear weapons, saying its atomic energy programme is only for peaceful purposes.

Khamenei also criticised a March 3 speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tehran’s nuclear programme, describing it as remarks “by a Zionist clown”.

In the speech, in which he aligned himself with Obama’s hawkish Republican foes, Netanyahu warned Washington that it was negotiating a bad deal with Iran that could spark a “nuclear nightmare”.

Israel, the only Middle East state with a presumed nuclear arsenal, regards Iran’s nuclear agenda as a threat and is dismissive of the talks, suggesting Tehran is only trying to buy time to become a threshold nuclear power.

Khamenei also repeated a call for Iran’s economy to diversify away from oil revenues to reduce the effectiveness of international sanctions isolating the oil sector. “If the country and economy were not dependent on oil revenues… could the enemy harm us with sanctions?” he said.

By Joseph D’Urso

The world is “not even close to grasping the magnitude” of the humanitarian crisis in Syria, a top aid official said ahead of the fourth anniversary of the peaceful protests that marked the start of the devastating conflict.

“We may live with the aftermath of the Syrian conflict for generations,” Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The conflict has killed some 200,000 people, created more than 3.9 million refugees, mostly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and displaced 7.6 million people within Syria, UN figures show.

New figures from UNICEF show 14 million children are affected by the conflict in Syria and neighbouring Iraq, with millions trapped in areas cut off from help due to fighting.

“This is the biggest humanitarian crisis in a generation,” Egeland, a former UN humanitarian chief, said in an interview on Tuesday.

DON’T FORGET DAMASCUS

The conflict began in March 2011 as a popular uprising by peaceful protesters against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. After a government crackdown, the war has expanded into a civil conflict with regional backers.

The militant group Islamic State joined the fighting, and now controls a self-declared caliphate in a swathe of territory in Syria and Iraq, attracting foreign recruits and world attention with military advances and slickly produced videos.

“Attention has focused so much on Islamic State that it is important to remind people what is happening on the government side,” Egeland said.

Both Islamic State and the Syrian government have been accused of crimes against humanity by the United Nations.

In the fourth year of the conflict, government forces carried out at least 1,450 indiscriminate attacks from the air, Human Rights Watch said last month.

According to the New York-based group, these attacks often use barrel bombs, containers packed with explosives and projectiles that are dropped from helicopters.

SHORTAGE OF DOCTORS

Humanitarian groups are finding it hard to alleviate the plight of civilians caught up in the conflict.

Before the conflict, 2,500 doctors worked in Aleppo, Syria’s second biggest city, but the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) estimates fewer than 100 remain.

Life expectancy has plunged from 75.9 years in 2010 to an estimated 55.7 at the end of 2014, a UN-backed study has said.

“Our organisation should be running some of the largest medical programmes in its 44-year history,” Dr. Joanne Liu, MSF’s international president, said in a statement on Wednesday. “But it’s not. And the question is, why not?”

MSF was forced to scale back its activities inside Syria when five staff members were abducted by Islamic State in January 2014. “We could no longer trust that our teams would not be harmed,” said Liu.

MSF has also been unsuccessful in starting projects in government-held territory. The access granted by government forces to humanitarian groups has “decreased dramatically” in recent months, Nigel Pont of Mercy Corps, a global aid agency, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The United Nations Security Council is “failing Syria” by not implementing its own resolutions, the NRC and 20 other aid groups, including Oxfam and Save the Children, said on Thursday.

The unanimously passed resolutions, which authorise UN aid missions to enter the country without the Syrian government’s consent, have been “ignored or undermined”, the report said.

“I haven’t seen the Security Council so defunct since the build-up to the Iraq war in 2003,” said Egeland. “I think they are not willing.”

OVERWORKED AND UNDERFUNDED

NGOs also say there is a shortage of donations. “There is less money per victim than a year ago,” Egeland said.

In December, a lack of funds forced the United Nations to suspend handouts of food vouchers for 1.7 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt.

Private funding for the Syrian crisis “has always been low,” Nigel Pont of Mercy Corps said.

Unlike natural disasters, the complex geopolitical causes of the Syrian crisis do not generate the same emotional response from potential donors, he said.