08 Apr
For a change from the same old news stories from the same old news networks, here are links to English-edition online newspapers from other parts of the world. Nearly all of these are English-edition daily newspapers, with an emphasis on the Middle East and Asia. These sites have interesting editorials and essays, and many have links to other good news sources. We try to limit this list to those sites which are regularly updated, reliable, with a high percentage of “up” time.
Some of the available newspapers:
Asia & CIS
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China
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China & Hong Kong
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France
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Israel
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Norway
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Palestine
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Russia
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Ukraine
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Opposition says PM still has questions to answer after he finally admitted benefitting from late father’s offshore fund
David Cameron is facing mounting pressure to be fully transparent about his previous finances after finally admitting he benefited from a Panama-based offshore company set up by his late father.
After three days of stalling and four partial statements issued by Downing Street, on Thursday night the prime minister confessed that he owned shares in a tax haven fund, which he sold for £31,500 just before he became prime minister in 2010.
Opposition parties said the admission had failed to draw a line under the matter and demanded full disclosure on what other financial arrangements Cameron benefited from as an MP and leader of the opposition.
Owen Smith, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said Cameron still had questions to answer.
“Why didn’t he register his interest in this offshore [fund] back in 2005 when he first became an MP?” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “He [Cameron] says he’s going to publish his tax return. I think he will need to go further and be clear about what his investments have been in the past.”
Labour, the Scottish National party and the Greens are demanding that Cameron make a statement in the Commons about his finances……….
Police department maintains man was ‘waving a large knife’, but witnesses say he was not threatening the officers before he was shot dead
Police were called to a homeless encampment in San Francisco’s Mission District (pictured) by the city’s homeless outreach team. Photograph: Julia Carrie Wong for the Guardian
The San Francisco police chief’s account of the fatal shooting of a homeless man on Thursday was immediately challenged by two eyewitnesses, who said that the victim was not threatening police officers before he was killed.
The SFPD chief, Greg Suhr, said that police were called to a homeless encampment in the city by members of San Francisco’s homeless outreach team who reported a “suspect waving a large kitchen knife”.
Officers confronted a Latino man who refused their orders to drop his knife, even after he was shot four times with beanbag rounds, Suhr said.
The chief said the man then charged at the officers, and that two of them opened fire. Seven bullet casings were found at the scene.
The man, who has not be identified, was transported to a local hospital and declared dead around 1pm.
However two witnesses, John Visor, 33, and Stephanie Grant, 31, who told the Guardian that they were less than 10ft away during the shooting, contradicted the police narrative.
“He didn’t charge at the officers. He was going in circles because he didn’t understand what they said,” Visor said. “He had a knife on him but he didn’t have it out. He had it on his hip, and when he hit the ground, that’s when it fell out.”
“They need to realize that some people don’t speak English,” Grant added. She also remarked on the speed of the encounter, saying: “They didn’t wait for anything. It all happened so fast.”………….
Researchers find clouds contain more liquid – as opposed to ice – than was previously believed, threatening greater increase in temperatures
Under a blanket of clouds, tourists watch a meltwater waterfall on an icecap. Photograph: Ralph Lee Hopkins/National Geographic Society/Corbis
Climate change projections have vastly underestimated the role that clouds play, meaning future warming could be far worse than is currently projected, according to new research.
Researchers said that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere compared with pre-industrial times could result in a global temperature increase of up to 5.3C – far warmer than the 4.6C older models predict.
The analysis of satellite data, led by Yale University, found that clouds have much more liquid in them, rather than ice, than has been assumed until now. Clouds with ice crystals reflect more solar light than those with liquid in them, stopping it reaching and heating the Earth’s surface.
The underestimation of the current level of liquid droplets in clouds means that models showing future warming are misguided, says the paper, published in Science. It also found that fewer clouds will change to a heat-reflecting state in the future – due to CO2 increases – than previously thought, meaning that warming estimates will have to be raised.
Such higher levels of warming would make it much more difficult for countries to keep the global temperature rise to below 2C, as they agreed to do at the landmark Paris climate summit last year, to avoid dangerous extreme weather and negative effects on food security. The world has already warmed by 1C since the advent of heavy industry, driven by CO2 concentrations soaring by more than 40%……………..
President Putin’s best friend Sergei Roldugin’s name appears in the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents. Photograph: Dmitry Astakhov/EPA
It’s been a big month for news about links between Kremlin insiders and the west.
First came the US announcement that Mikhail Lesin, architect of Russia Today, now RT, and former head of Gazprom Media, had died in Washington from blunt force injuries to the head.
Then came the Sunday Times’ revelation that Andrei Yakunin, son of anti-western ideologue and former Russian Railways head Vladimir, had access to another London mansion, far larger than the one we already knew about. While Vladimir Yakunin was instructing Russians to avoid contact with the west, his own son was reportedly taking British citizenship and his grandson was attending an elite British private school.
Finally, of course came the Panama Papers, with their revelations about the corporate structures controlled by Dmitry Peskov’s wife and, of course, the godfather of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Sergei Roldugin.
While ordinary Russians were being instructed to tighten their belts in the ideological battle with the west, their rulers were employing Mossack Fonseca to infiltrate their money into enemy territory.
It is of course not a secret that Kremlin insiders run Russia for their own enrichment, but this barrage of revelations provides extraordinary levels of detail, and lays bare the nature of how Russia is governed in ways we have not seen before………….
Afghans and Syrians on Chios say policy will lead to ‘terrible scenes’, as concerns grow over 13 deported ‘by mistake’
People sleep at the port on Chios island, Greece. Photograph: Petros Giannakouris/AP
Syrians and Afghans threatened with deportation from the Greek islands of Lesbos and Chios have said they would rather take their own lives than be expelled from the EU under its migration deal with Turkey.
On Monday, 202 migrants were forcibly returned from Lesbos and Chios to the Turkish coast under the landmark deal aimed at halting “irregular” migration to Europe.
But Souaob Nouri from Kabul, who is held in the high-security camp in Chios, said: “If they deport us, we will kill ourselves. We will not go back.”
A man next to him warned of “terrible scenes” if Greek authorities insisted on pursuing policies that have already caused alarm among human rights groups.
“We are not terrorists,” said the man, who gave his name as Akimi. “We are refugees. The conditions here are very bad. There is no water. They hit pregnant women. Why do they treat us like this? All we want is asylum.”……………
Daniel Willis cleared of murder charges in the 2014 death of Yvette Smith by visiting judge who chose jurors in Sandra Bland case
Daniel Willis, who is white, saw Yvette Smith, a black 47-year-old former caretaker, and ordered her to come outside. Photograph: Alamy
A former Texas police deputy on trial for killing an unarmed woman without warning immediately after she opened the front door of a friend’s house was found not guilty on Thursday.
Daniel Willis was cleared of murder by visiting district judge Albert McCaig during a retrial 30 miles east of Austin.
Yvette Smith was seemingly trying to act as a peacemaker during a dispute between two men that involved a gun. She called 911 about half an hour after midnight on 16 February 2014. When Bastrop County police arrived at the house, at least one of the men was in the front yard and the worst of the disturbance appeared over.
Willis, who is white, saw Smith, a black 47-year-old former caretaker, and ordered her to come outside. As she opened the door he shouted “police!” then fired within about three seconds. She died in the hospital after being shot twice by the deputy, who was using his personal AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Judge McCaig usually works in Waller County, where the death of Sandra Bland last year in custody drew national attention. He helped choose grand jurors last year to analyze evidence related to Bland’s death…………….
Opinion
‘Clinton’s campaign platform does include some very good climate policies that surely do not please these donors … still, the whole funding mess stinks.’ Photograph: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
There aren’t a lot of certainties left in the US presidential race, but here’s one thing about which we can be absolutely sure: the Clinton camp really doesn’t like talking about fossil-fuel money. Last week, when a young Greenpeace campaigner challenged Hillary Clinton about taking money from fossil-fuel companies, the candidate accused the Bernie Sanders campaign of “lying” and declared herself “so sick” of it. As the exchange went viral, a succession of high-powered Clinton supporters pronounced that there was nothing to see here and that everyone should move along.
The very suggestion that taking this money could impact Clinton’s actions is “baseless and should stop,” according to California senator Barbara Boxer. It’s “flat-out false,” “inappropriate,” and doesn’t “hold water,” declared New York mayor Bill de Blasio. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman went so far as to issue “guidelines for good and bad behaviour” for the Sanders camp. The first guideline? Cut out the “innuendo suggesting, without evidence, that Clinton is corrupt.”
That’s a whole lot of firepower to slap down a non-issue. So is it an issue or not? First, some facts. Clinton’s campaign, including her Super Pac, has received a lot of money from the employees and registered lobbyists of fossil-fuel companies. There’s the much-cited $4.5m that Greenpeace calculated, which includes bundling by lobbyists.
But that’s not all. There is also a lot more money from sources not included in those calculations. For instance, one of Clinton’s most prominent and active financial backers is Warren Buffett. While he owns a large mix of assets, Buffett is up to his eyeballs in coal, including coal transportation and some of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country.
Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years,Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron have all contributed to the foundation. An investigation in the International Business Times just revealed that at least two of these oil companies were part of an effort to lobby Clinton’s State Department about the Alberta tar sands, a massive deposit of extra-dirty oil. Leading climate scientists like James Hansen have explained that if we don’t keep the vast majority of that carbon in the ground, we will unleash catastrophic levels of warming.
Did these donations have anything to do with the investigation found, Clinton’s State Department approving the Alberta Clipper, a controversial pipeline carrying large amounts of tar-sands bitumen from Alberta to Wisconsin? “According to federal lobbying records reviewed by the IBT,” write David Sirota and Ned Resnikoff, “Chevron and ConocoPhillips both lobbied the State Department specifically on the issue of ‘oil sands’ in the immediate months prior to the department’s approval, as did a trade association funded by ExxonMobil.”
Did they make Hillary Clinton more disposed to seeing tar-sands pipelines as environmentally benign, as early State Department reviews of Keystone XL seemed to conclude, despite the many scientific warnings? There is no proof – no smoking gun, as Clinton defenders like to say. Just as there is no proof that the money her campaign took from gas lobbyists and fracking financiers has shaped Clinton’s current (and dangerous) view that fracking can be made safe……………..A president willing to inflict these losses on fossil-fuel companies and their allies needs to be more than just not actively corrupt. That president needs to be up for the fight of the century – and absolutely clear about which side must win. Looking at the Democratic primary, there can be no doubt about who is best suited to rise to this historic moment. The good news? He just won Wisconsin. And he isn’t following anyone’s guidelines for good behaviour…………..
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President Putin’s best friend Sergei Roldugin’s name appears in the leaked Mossack Fonseca documents. Photograph: Dmitry Astakhov/EPA