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Telegrah co.uk. Jan 22, 2010
The world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is hit by lightning in this picture captured by Mahmoud Hamdan, a student, as a huge electrical storm rolled in over the United Arab Emirates. The building is 828 m (2,717 ft) high
Picture: MAHMOUD HAMDAN / CATERS  The US has just missed a deadline to close the prison camp |
A task force on the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has advised that 47 inmates should be held indefinitely without trial, officials say.
It is thought to be the first time that officials have given a figure for those who might be held without charge.
Some 35 prisoners have been recommended for prosecution through trials or military commissions.
The news came as the deadline US President Barack Obama had set himself for closing the prison camp passed.
The task force, led by the US justice department, recommended that while 35 people could be prosecuted, 110 could be released either now or at a later date, unnamed officials said.
The other nearly 50 detainees are considered too dangerous to release, but cannot be tried because the evidence against them is too flimsy or was extracted from them by coercion, so would not hold up in court.
'Dismay'
Congress has laid down that only those to be tried can be moved to US soil, so the question of what to do with those to be detained indefinitely without trial has yet to be resolved.
The BBC's Adam Brookes says the outcome will dismay civil liberties groups, and will also dismay many of Mr Obama's supporters who hoped the president would end the practice of detention without trial.
A White House official stressed that this was only a recommendation, which Mr Obama does not have to accept.
The task force's findings are subject to review by the National Security Council.
More than 40 detainees have been transferred out of the prison under the Obama administration.
But diplomatic hurdles and domestic opposition to the government's plan to house suspects on US soil have hampered his plans to close it down completely.
Plans to move detainees approved for trial to a prison facility in Illinois remain under consideration.
Yemen suspension
The task force recommended that among those cleared for release, 80 detainees, including about 30 Yemenis, could be freed immediately, the Washington Post said.
The panel said the release of another 30 Yemenis should be contingent on an improved situation in Yemen, the newspaper reported.
However, the US recently suspended the repatriation of Yemeni prisoners indefinitely, following an airliner bomb plot that was allegedly planned in Yemen.
Yemenis account for approximately half of the inmates at Guantanamo.
Mr Obama set himself the 22 January deadline a year ago, shortly after being sworn in.
He has subsequently said he wants the camp closed this year, without setting a specific deadline.
BEIJING (Reuters) - China hit back at U.S. criticism of Internet censorship and hacking on Friday, warning that relations between the two global heavyweights were being hurt by a feud centered on web giant Google.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday challenged Beijing and other authoritarian governments to end Internet censorship, an issue that has jumped to the heart of U.S.-China ties after Google threatened to quit China due to hacking and web restrictions.
China's Foreign Ministry said the U.S. criticisms could hurt relations between the world's biggest and third biggest economies, already strained by disagreements over trade imbalances, currency values and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
"The U.S. has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated that China restricts Internet freedom," said spokesman Ma Zhaoxu. "This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-U.S. relations.
"We urge the United States to respect the facts and cease using so-called Internet freedom to make groundless accusations against China," Ma said in a statement carried on the Foreign Ministry website www.mfa.gov.cn.
But the spokesman also indicated that his government did not want to see the dispute overwhelm cooperation with the Obama administration, which has sought Beijing's backing on economic policy and diplomatic standoffs, such as Iran and North Korea.
Ma said each side should "appropriately handle rifts and sensitive issues, protecting the healthy and stable development of China-U.S. relations."
On Thursday, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei played down the dispute with Google and indicated that his government was more worried about broader economic and political disputes that could flare up in coming months.
Clinton's speech criticized the cyber policies of China and Iran, among others, and demanded Beijing investigate the hacking complaints from Google.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China, which uses a filtering "firewall" to prevent Internet users from seeing overseas web sites with content anathema to the Communist Party.
"Sino-U.S. ties have been impacted," Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing, said of Washington's push on Internet controls.
"China has admitted there are areas where it can improve, and then Clinton made her comments in a public venue, comparing us to Egypt and Saudi Arabia," he added. "So I think over the past year Clinton's speech is the most undiplomatic thing she's said."
MURKY MEDIA RESPONSE
Some sections of the Chinese media were quick to criticize Clinton's remarks. But many of the Chinese reports were themselves cut from websites within hours of appearing.
It was unclear why they were removed, but Chinese websites often adjust or cut content based on propaganda authority instructions, especially for volatile issues.
Many cyber-experts suspect that the hacker attacks from China on Google and other targets were so sophisticated that official involvement was likely.
Ties between China and the United States have been put to the test in recent months over trade, currency, climate change and arms sales to Taiwan.
With the two giant nations joined at the hip economically, Sino-U.S. tensions are unlikely to escalate into outright confrontation, but could make cooperating on global economic and security issues all the more difficult.
Earlier this month, China denounced the U.S. sale of Patriot air defense missiles, capable of intercepting Chinese missiles, to Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own.
China announced its own anti-missile test soon after.
Beijing has warned that more U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan could badly bruise relations with Washington, and has urged President Barack Obama not to meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled Buddhist leader of Tibet who Beijing denounces as a separatist.
"I think over the short haul (the Google issue) is going to go away because other problems that the U.S. and China face are rather numerous," said Niu Jun, an international studies expert at Peking University. "I think economic and trade issues are still more important."
(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley, Lucy Hornby, Yu Le and Huang Yan; Editing by Ken Wills and Jeremy Laurence)
Editor's note: Details were added after the fourth paragraph
Azerbaijan, Baku, Jan. 22 / Trend News E.Tariverdiyeva /
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be resolved only by preserving the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, said Ramiz Mehtiyev, Azerbaijani Presidential Administration head, at the first Azerbaijani-Russian Civil Forum today.
"The Foreign Ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a joint document at the OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting in Athens," he said. "Signing this document, for the first time Armenia recognized that the solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is possible only within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan."
According to Mehdiyev, the forum could not bypass such a mandatory issue as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
"Azerbaijan's territorial integrity is recognized by all world powers. I want to take this opportunity to ask journalists participating in this event to literate covering this complicated conflict. The situation with the media coverage of the conflict must change," he added.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. Armenian armed forces have occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan since 1992, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. Azerbaijan and Armenia signed a ceasefire agreement in 1994. The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group - Russia, France, and the U.S. - are currently holding the peace negotiations.
Armenia has not yet implemented the U.N. General Assembly's resolutions on the liberation of the Nagorno-Karabakh region and the occupied territories.
"Azerbaijan said a firm 'No!' to the Soviet totalitarianism exactly 20 years ago on Jan. 20, 1990," he said.
In that fateful January, under Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's order, the Soviet authorities sent a large contingent of the Soviet army to Azerbaijan. The contingent was composed of reservists of Armenian origin from the Northern Caucasus. This operation was accompanied by unprecedented brutality against the civilian population, he added.
"But for some reason Gorbachev did not sent troops to Yerevan in 1988-90, when the aggressively-minded group of Armenians forcibly expelled Azerbaijanis, including the elderly, women and children, from their historic lands, accompanying it all the numerous brutal murders," he said. "When a group of mad ripped open pregnant women, raped and rioted, the Soviet media was silent about it."
