A train and a minibus collided at a railway crossing near the northern Ukraine village of Vyry on Tuesday afternoon, killing 12 people and injuring five, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine said.
The crash happened at about 3:35 p.m. near Vyry, about 25 kilometers south of Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Further details about the crash weren’t immediately available. The State Emergency Service said it was investigating the crash.
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By Harut Sassounian
Publisher, The California Courier
It is noteworthy that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is holding simultaneous hearings on two rival lawsuits filed by Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Is this a mere coincidence or an attempt by the Court to intervene in a thorny dispute that political leaders have failed to resolve for over 25 years?
This week, ECHR is hearing the case of “Sargsyan vs. Azerbaijan,” dealing with Minas Sargsyan’s complaint against the Republic of Azerbaijan, claiming that he was forced to flee his Gulistan home in the Shahumyan region, after his property was destroyed by Azeri armed forces in June 1992. The Sargsyan case was first filed with ECHR on August 11, 2006. Interestingly, the Court held hearings on both the Armenian and Azerbaijani complaints on the same day: it heard the “Chiragov and Others vs. Armenia” case in the morning of September 15, 2010, and later that afternoon, the “Sargsyan vs. Azerbaijan” case.
In a preliminary decision on December 14, 2011, ECHR found Sargsyan’s complaint to be partly admissible. The Court rejected Azerbaijan’s contention that the case should be dismissed because it covered events prior to Azerbaijan’s ratification of the European Convention on Human Rights in 2002. Unfortunately, applicant Minas Sargsyan passed away in 2009, but his two children are continuing the complaint. ECHR will further probe the merits of the Sargsyan case during its February 5, 2014 hearing.
Two weeks earlier, ECHR heard the rival case of “Chiragov and Others vs. Armenia,” in which six Azerbaijani Kurds had filed a complaint against the Republic of Armenia. They claimed to be unable to return to their homes and properties in the Lachin district since May 17, 1992, having been forced to flee because of the Karabagh (Artsakh) war.
The Azeri complaint against Armenia was first filed with ECHR on April 6, 2005. In a preliminary decision on December 14, 2011, ECHR agreed to take up the case, finding that the ongoing negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan did not preclude the Court from dealing with this contentious situation. ECHR held a subsequent hearing on January 22, 2014, to consider the following questions:
1) does Armenia exercise effective control over the territory of Artsakh?
2) do the six Azeri citizens possess sufficient documentation proving their identity and ownership of the claimed properties?
3) should the Azeri applicants have exhausted all domestic remedies (ECHR requirement) by applying first to Artsakh courts prior to filing a complaint with ECHR, considering the further complication that Artsakh is not a recognized state?
Here are some thoughts about ECHR’s crucial role in these two conflicting cases:
1) Both complaints were filed with ECHR almost 10 years ago and cover alleged human rights violations that had occurred over two decades earlier. Since the Armenian applicant and one of the six Azeris had died in the intervening years, neither one will ever see the justice that they had sought from the European Court. As the popular saying goes, “justice delayed is justice denied!”
2) ECHR’s obvious effort to take simultaneous action on these two separate yet opposing cases indicates that the Court might be trying to resolve not only these two complaints, but also lay the groundwork for the resolution of the Artsakh conflict, at least the refugees’ right to return to their homes.
ECHR’s even-handed treatment of Armenian and Azerbaijani applicants thus far would lead one to believe that the Court would eventually rule in favor of both cases opening the door to thousands of additional complaints from refugees on both sides who suffered a similar fate during the Artsakh war. Since all member countries of the European Council are obliged to comply with ECHR’s decisions, the Court may order that these refugees be allowed to return to their native homes, thereby imposing a partial humanitarian solution on an intractable conflict that the leaders of both countries and international mediators have been unable to resolve for over 25 years!
Syria plans to send a large shipment of toxic agents out of the country this month, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov told Russian state-run news agency Ria Novosti.
Syria intends to finish the process by March 1, which would be in line with deadlines set by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), he said.
The head of the OPCW urged Syria last week to speed up the process of removing the chemicals earmarked for destruction outside its territory.
The chemicals were loaded onto ships at the Syrian port of Latakia and taken into international waters for destruction.
The OPCW has set a target of destroying Syria’s “priority” chemicals by March 31 and its entire chemical weapons stockpile by the end of June.
The U.S. ambassador to Russia has announced that he is stepping down after two turbulent years in Moscow.
Michael McFaul is considered the architect of President Barack Obama’s effort to reset relations with Russia.
McFaul points to many successes in U.S.-Russian relations, including the negotiation of a new strategic arms treaty and cooperation on the NATO-led military campaign in Afghanistan. But his tenure also has brought disappointments in the face of the rising anti-Americanism in Russia that accompanied Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency.
The ambassador announced his departure in a blog post on Tuesday, saying he would leave after the Sochi Winter Olympics.
A longtime Stanford University professor, McFaul said he would be returning to California. His wife and two sons had returned home last year.
A 12-year-old girl has left doctors speechless after crying stones instead of tears.
Saadiya Saleh, who lives in a village in Yemen, produces the small, hard stones beneath her eyelids.
They are then naturally pushed to the front of her eyes, before falling down her cheeks.
A video of the bizarre phenomenon was posted on YouTube by Yemeni television channel Azal.
Footage shows Saadiya lying on a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors and relatives – one of whom can be seen brushing a stone out of the child’s eye with a cloth.
A doctor then holds up a small box full of stones that have fallen out of Saadiya’s eyes in just a few hours.
Medics said they could not give an explanation for the condition – with Saadiya not suffering from any known disease, according to the Daily Mirror.
However, locals have spoken of their fears that the young girl is possessed by magic.
‘Some say the girl could be gripped by a magic spell, while others say it might be the devil.
‘Others fear it could be the start of a dangerous epidemic.’
Iran
Iran has sent Revolutionary Guard and army troops to two northern provinces struck by heavy snowfall that trapped thousands on the road and cut off water and power supply in the remote region.
The country’s state television says troops joined the Red Crescent and other rescue teams in Gilan and Mazandaran provinces where the snowfall left many households without power for nearly 72 hours and forced schools and universities to close their doors.
The TV says electricity was mostly restored by Tuesday morning. There were no reports of any casualties.
The TV also says that President Hassan Rouhani formed an emergency ministerial team to supervise relief assistance to the provinces.
Heavy snowfall in 2004 killed several people in Gilan and caused about $300 million in property damages.
At least 86 workers have been injured in a truck crash on their way to work at factories making garments and sports shoes for famous Western brands.
The truck carrying 93 workers rolled over after a front tire burst Tuesday morning. Transporting workers in open trucks is common in Southeast Asia.
Svay Rieng provincial governor Chieng Am said 11 workers were in critical condition.
Labor activist Chea Odom of the Collective Union of Movement of Workers said the workers were employed at eight different factories in two specially designated industrial zones. He said the factories make sports shoes and apparel for well-known Western companies.
The garment industry is Cambodia’s biggest export earner, in 2013 shipping more than $5 billion worth of products to the United States and Europe.
A group of computer hackers and human rights campaigners in Germany announced Monday that they are suing their government for allegedly breaking the law by aiding foreign spies.
The Chaos Computer Club and the International League for Human Rights submitted a criminal complaint to federal prosecutors claiming that Chancellor Angela Merkel, her government and security officials tolerated and even helped members of the U.S. National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ to spy on German citizens.
While the German government has expressed misgivings about some of the reported allegations and is seeking to negotiate a ‘no-spy’ agreement with the United States, opposition lawmakers have accused Merkel’s administration of failing to put sufficient pressure on Washington for fear of jeopardizing diplomatic relations and intelligence cooperation.
People around the world headed to the streets to celebrate the Chinese New Year, and to welcome the Year of the Horse.
Chinese New Year, which began on Friday, is the most important holiday in the country’s calendar with residents getting a week-long holiday. But this year celebrations were relatively low-key in China.
Chinese festivities normally begin with extravagant fireworks displays, which are believed to bring good luck and dispel evil spirits. However, as smog has blanketed parts of central and eastern China over the last few months, officials called on residents to buy fewer fireworks in order to lessen air pollution in the country.
Even the New Year galas, which are shown on state television, were reduced in scale in keeping with President Xi Jinping’s call for frugality, Reuters reported.
The holiday was also marked in cities around the world.
Sydney kicked off a week of festivities with a parade through the city’s centre attended by 100,000, according the City of Sydney Council.
The parade featured rocking horses, jockeys and a giant Trojan horse all moving to the sounds of pop song Horses, by Daryl Braithwaite. In keeping with the Year of the Horse celebrations, even the mounted police got a cheer from the crowd, according to AAP.
New York’s celebrations saw 5,000 participate in a parade through the streets of Chinatown. Magicians, acrobats, and dragon puppeteers spilled out into nearby streets.
A New York man armed with a rifle, boxes of ammunition and a machete was arrested Friday after allegedly threatening to kill former President George W. Bush, according to a federal court complaint.
Benjamin Smith, a resident of upstate New York, threatened to “kill, kidnap and inflict bodily harm” on Bush, the complaint said.
Smith also professed a love interest in Barbara, one of the former president’s twin daughters, according to the complaint filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
The U.S. Secret Service was alerted to the threat after Smith’s mother found a note in the home they share in which he allegedly wrote that he’s “going to work for George W. Bush and the Pentagon,” the complaint said.
Smith also allegedly wrote: “I have to slay a dragon and then Barbara Bush is mine… America is finished. Obama, Etc.”
On Friday, agents found Smith sitting in his car in Manhattan, with a loaded .38-caliber rifle, two boxes of ammunition, a container of gasoline and a machete, according to authorities.
During questioning, Smith told Secret Service agents, “I’m divorced and not currently seeing anyone, but I am working on a relationship with Barbara Bush,” the complaint said.
Threats against presidents of the United States are a federal crime.
The 15 victims simply couldn’t outrun the searing debris that billowed out of Indonesia’s Mount Sinabung.
Plumes of ash had spewed more than a mile into the sky Saturday and descended in superheated clouds. Scalding ash up to 700 degrees in temperature raced down the slope in just two to three minutes.
By the end of several eruptions, at least 15 people had been killed, a government official told CNN. It was the first time Mount Sinabung’s volcanic output had resulted in deaths, the Jakarta Post reported.
The victims, and at least three other injured people, were all found in Sukameriah, a village close to the volcano’s crater, disaster mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told CNN.
Eruptions at Mount Sinabung are becoming common. After about 400 years of minimal volcanic activity there, Sinabung erupted in 2010. It has been emitting gas since September.
The newest volcanic activity has forced people to evacuate 16 villages, the Jakarta Post reported. At least 30,000 people have been temporarily housed at 42 evacuation centers, according to Billy Sumuan, the emergency response director in Indonesia for the humanitarian group World Vision.
By ABBAS RANA |“As you know, there is an open nominations process. We are surely noticing a lot of interest from people to run for the Liberal Party and are looking forward to the beginning of the nomination process,” wrote Ms. Lyne-Hallé.
“This also shows that the interest of Canadians for the Liberal Party and its leader Justin Trudeau across the country is strong and increasing and that Canadians are looking for a change in politics.”
Meanwhile, three-term former Liberal MP Sarkis Assadourian, who did not seek re-election in the 2004 federal election and has since been out of federal politics, is already running a nomination campaign in the Ontario riding of Richmond Hill against Elizabeth Wilfert, wife of former Liberal MP Bryon Wilfert.
Mr. Assadourian, 66, is seeking the Liberal nomination in the Ontario riding of Richmond Hill. Currently represented by Conservative MP Costas Menegakis, the riding was previously represented by five-term former Liberal MP Bryon Wilfert. He lost the last federal election and is now working for Tactix, a government relations and public affairs firm in Ottawa as a strategic adviser.
Mr. Wilfert told The Hill Times last week that he decided not to seek re-election because he’s in the process of receiving an honorary diplomatic appointment from a foreign country in Canada, which restricts him from seeking any political office in the country.
Mr. Assadourian served as an MP from 1993 until 2004. He was first elected in the riding of Don Valley North and then twice in Brampton Centre. Prior to the 2004 federal election, then-party leader Paul Martin appointed Ruby Dhalla as a “star” Liberal candidate who served until the last election when she was defeated by Conservative MP Parm Gill.
The Martin government appointed Mr. Assadourian as a citizenship judge in 2005. Currently, he’s a member of the Ontario Deputy Judges Council.
Mr. Assadourian ran unsuccessfully in the 2010 Richmond Hill municipal election, finishing fifth out of seven candidates for a council seat.
Ms. Wilfert is currently the president of the College of Dieticians of Ontario.
As of last week, no nomination date had been fixed but already potential candidates have been campaigning.
[email protected]
The Hill Times
Terrorist acts and other violence killed at least 1,000 people and injured 1,800 in Iraq in January, a senior Iraqi Interior Ministry official said Friday.
Many parts of Iraq have been engulfed in sectarian and political violence for months, but the situation has been exacerbated by recent fighting in Iraq’s western Anbar province.
January’s death toll would be ahead of the monthly rate for 2013, which was the deadliest year in the Middle Eastern nation since 2098, according to United Nations data. The U.N. has said almost 8,000 people were killed in violence last year, most of them civilians.
January’s figures were compiled by Iraq’s Interior, Defense and Health ministries, the official said.
A Chinese businessman is fighting for his life after a woman fell to her death in a shopping mall – and landed on top of him.
Yu Li, 42, was shopping with his three-year-old son in a shopping mall in Changsha, Hunan province, in Southern China, when he was hit on the head by the unidentified woman as she plummeted from the fifth floor.
The man had gone to the shopping centre to buy his son a present for the Chinese New Year.
A police spokesman said: ‘He was walking towards the escalator, when he was struck by the falling woman. She was killed instantly and he was left badly injured.
‘The hospital tells us it is still a question of touch and go whether he will survive.
We are looking at CCTV footage to try and work out whether the woman jumped or was pushed.’
The Chinese New Year celebration, that comes at the end of this month is the biggest event on the annual Chinese calendar where the entire country takes a week off to spend time with their families.
The boy was treated for shock before being handed over to his mother and was not hit in incident.
chomped, they chowed, they chewed. Wings disappeared and, in two competitors’ cases, reappeared, but it was 5-foot-7, 125-pound mother-of-four pulled off ‘the greatest performance in Wing Bowl history,’
Molly Schuyler devoured 363 chicken wings in 30 minutes at a competitive eating contest in Philadelphia.
Ms. Schuyler flew past the previous long-standing record of 337 wings as she finished the last round of the 22nd annual WIP 94 Sportsradio Wing Bowl.
At 8 a.m. the 120-pound woman virtually swallowed the wings for her breakfast as second-place finisher Patrick Bertoletti from Chicago could only chomp home in second place with a total of 356 wing.
Ms. Schuyler, whose performance host Angelo Cataldi dubbed ‘the greatest ever’, won $22,000.
Each year, Wing Bowl brings out some of the region’s best competitive eaters, who themselves have to prove their worth to qualify for the event by performing a miraculous feat of eating.
To qualify for the Wing Bowl, Schuyler ate nine pounds of cottage cheese in 114 seconds. She also holds a world record for eating a 72-ounce steak in less than three minutes.
All Pro Eating, the world’s only independent competitive eating organization, lists her as the world’s number one female.
Thai anti-government demonstrators say they will keep up protests in Bangkok ahead of a controversial national election in a nation gripped by a bitter, protracted political crisis.
The protesters have been campaigning for months against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, fueling unrest that has left 10 people dead and hundreds more wounded.
Authorities have tightened security ahead of the vote Sunday, with 10,000 security personnel on standby.
In recent weeks, the anti-government demonstrators have blocked candidate registrations and early voting in parts of Bangkok and southern Thailand, the regions from which they draw their support.
Amid the bursts of violence, Thai authorities declared a state of emergency last week, giving extra powers to security forces and drawing criticism from human rights advocates.
But the government says it has no plans to use force against protesters, who plan to hold marches in central Bangkok on Friday and Saturday.
The protest leaders say they want as many of their supporters as possible to join them Sunday in the streets of Bangkok for what they describe as a “picnic” that they hope will shut down the city on the day of the election.
Gold medals presented to winners at the Sochi Olympics will contain fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteorite that struck Russia last year.
The medals are not the official coins handed out in the Olympic ceremony, but special commemorative ones to be given out to the sportswomen and men who win on the anniversary of the meteor strike on February 15.
Ten medals will have a chip of the meteorite embedded in its centre, crafted by specialists at a workshop in Zlatoust, in the Chelyabinsk region, Russian media report.
The meteor fireball meteor that blazed across southern Urals last February was the largest recorded meteor strike in more than a century.
The 600kg rock, believed to be one of the largest pieces of this meteorite, is currently being exhibited at the Chelyabinsk Regional History Museum in the Southern Urals.
The Chelyabinsk government said it had struck 50 medals, which will be unveiled on Monday, and ten would be issued to the athletes who win finals on the anniversary of the strike.
The presentations will not be part of the official Olympic program.
French actress Julie Gayet, the woman at the center of an alleged love affair with French President Francois Hollande, has received a best supporting actress nomination from the FrenchAcademy of Cinema Arts and Techniques, the academy said Friday.
Gayet’s private life has been the subject of global headlines since the French magazine Closer said this month she had been having an affair with Hollande for two years.
Gayet was nominated by the academy for her performance in “Quai d’Orsay”, a movie about the behind-the-scene intrigues at the French Foreign Ministry.
The annual Cesar Award Ceremony, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, will take place on February 28 in Paris.
The President, who has not confirmed or denied the claims about the alleged affair, announced Saturday that his relationship with partner and first lady Valerie Trierweiler was over.
Trierweiler sent a goodbye message Saturday via Twitter to the staff at the presidential palace.
Age hasn’t slowed French cyclist Robert Marchand.
The 102-year-old broke his own world record in the over-100s category Friday, riding 26.927 kilometers (16.7 miles) in one hour, more than 2.5 kilometers better than his previous best time in the race against the clock two years ago.
The retired firefighter and logger also holds a record for the 100 kilometers, covering the distance in four hours, 17 minutes and 27 seconds in 2012.
Marchand received a standing ovation and was mobbed by dozens of photographers and cameramen at the finish line in France’s brand-new National Velodrome, a 74-million-euro ($100 million) complex that officially opened its doors Thursday.