A round-up of today's other stories in brief
US kidnapped and held suspects secretly - report
GENEVA – The US is among dozens of countries that have kidnapped and held terrorism suspects in secret detention over the past nine years, violating their basic human rights, a United Nations report said yesterday.
It says Algeria, China, Egypt, India, Iran, Russia, Zimbabwe and Sudan are also detaining security suspects or opposition members in unknown places.
On a global scale, secret detention in connection with counter-terrorist policies remains a serious problem, four independent UN rights investigators said in a year-long study based on flight data and interviews with 30 former detainees.
Victims and their families deserve compensation and those responsible should be prosecuted, they said in a report to be presented in March to the UN Human Rights Council.
Secret detention as such may constitute torture or ill- treatment for the direct victims as well as their families, the report said.
The very purpose of secret detention was to facilitate and cover up torture and inhuman and degrading treatment to obtain information or silence people, it said.
Used by the Nazis, the Soviet gulag system and Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, secret detention is banned under international law embodied in the Geneva Conventions, it added. – (Reuters)
Obama says al-Qaeda "greatly weakened"
WASHINGTON – US president Barack Obama has dismissed Osama Bin Laden’s attempt to claim responsibility for the failed Christmas Day attack on a US aircraft, a plot thought to have been hatched in Yemen, saying it was evidence al-Qaeda was greatly weakened.
Bin Laden associated himself with the attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a transatlantic flight over Detroit in a recording claimed to be from “Osama to Obama”.
“Al-Qaeda itself is greatly weakened from where it was back in 2000,” Mr Obama told ABC News yesterday. “Bin Laden sending out a tape trying to take credit for a Nigerian student who engaged in a failed bombing attempt is an indication of how weakened he is because this is not something necessarily directed by him.”
US attention is instead increasingly focused on Yemen, where Abdulmutallab is believed to have been trained.
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton is expected at a London conference on the threat from Yemen today. – (Guardian service)
Works of art donated to Cuban museum
HAVANA – A Swiss art collector has donated nine works by artists ranging from Pablo Picasso to Camille Pissarro to Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuban media has reported.
Gilbert Brownstone plans to donate 120 works of art to Cuba and has dedicated the donation to five Cuban agents imprisoned in the US for their role in the 1996 shooting down of two aircraft piloted by anti-Castro Cuban exiles, Communist Party newspaper Granma said.
Cuban officials awarded him the Medal of Friendship on Monday. Thanks to Gilbert, we are acquiring essential names of the vanguard that were not included in our patrimony, culture minister Abel Prieto said.
The nine works are by artists including Picasso, Pissarro, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Roy Lichtenstein and André Masson, Granma said. – (Reuters)