Greek Journalists Strike Against Austerity Cuts

Greek journalists have walked off the job for 24 hours to protest austerity measures and income cuts, pulling radio and television news broadcasts off the air and leaving news websites without updates from 6 a.m. (0400 GMT).
Tuesday’s strike coincides with a six-hour visit to Athens by French President Francois Hollande. Despite a court order ruling the strike illegal for state media, journalists at state-controlled outlets heeded union calls to participate, meaning no Greek media would cover the visit live.
Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou accused the main opposition Syriza party for orchestrating the strike to cause “a news blackout” during Hollande’s visit.
Journalists’ unions have been protesting firings and pension and benefit cuts among other issues. Hundreds of journalists in the private sector frequently go unpaid for months.
Journalists’ strike in Greece came a day after journalists in Britain’s broadcaster, BBC, walked off the job in a 24-hour strike to protest job cuts across the corporation including BBC Scotland, BBC World and BBC’s Asian Network.
Staff mounted picket lines outside of the BBC’s studios in central London and around the country. Programs went on, but many shows were canceled, including the flagship morning news radio program ‘Today’.
National Union of Journalists (NUJ) general secretary Michelle Stanistreet said poor decisions by the BBC leadership were leading to quality journalism being compromised. The union says 2,000 jobs are at risk in BBC cost-cutting. Many will be eliminated through attrition, but about 30 jobs are targeted for compulsory layoffs.
The union said members across the BBC, including the World Service, are at risk of compulsory redundancy.
“NUJ members across the BBC are taking action to defend jobs and quality journalism at the corporation,” NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet said.
“Instead of making sure that the redeployment process works properly in all areas of the BBC, managers are prepared to waste public money on needless redundancies and sacrifice the livelihoods of experienced and talented journalists, at the same time as advertising other jobs externally,” Stanistreet added.

Armenian President Reelected

Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan promised on Tuesday to make the country secure and stable after cruising to victory in an election.
But Sarksyan faces a challenge in his second five-year term to prevent tensions increasing with Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh that could lead to a new war in the South Caucasus, where pipelines carry Caspian oil and gas to Europe, Reuters reported.
Preliminary results showed Sarksyan won 58.6 percent of the votes cast in Monday’s election, enough to avoid a second-round run-off. His closest rival, US-born former Foreign Minister Raffi Hovannisian, trailed on nearly 37 percent.
“Armenia chose the path towards a safe Armenia and I am happy and proud of the fact that every resident of Armenia will be on that path,” Sarksyan, 58, told celebrating supporters.
International observers said the vote was an improvement on recent elections in the former Soviet republic, including the 2008 presidential ballot in which 10 people were killed.
“However, the limited field of candidates meant that the election was not genuinely competitive,” representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said in a statement.
“The candidates who did run were able to campaign in a free atmosphere and to present their views to voters, but the campaign overall failed to engage the public’s interest.”
Several of Sarksyan’s potential rivals, most notably former President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, decided not to run because they feared the election would be skewed in the president’s favor.
A minor candidate was shot and wounded during campaigning, and police received 70 complaints of voting violations. The result was in line with opinion polls, however.
The result strengthens Sarksyan’s hold on Armenia, which borders Iran, Georgia, Turkey and Azerbaijan, after his Republican Party won a parliamentary election last year.
Sarksyan’s promises of economic recovery went down well with voters in the country of 3.2 million, where more than 30 percent live below the poverty line. The average monthly wage is about $300 and unemployment was 16 percent last year.
Sarksyan has outlined no big policy changes and investors and foreign governments are worried by Armenia’s fraught relations with Azerbaijan.

Clashes Erupt In Bulgaria Protests

World Desk

Bulgaria’s prime minister proposed an 8 percent cut to electricity prices on Tuesday and said Czech company CEZ’s transmission and distribution license would be revoked after nationwide protests against rising power prices.
Tens of thousands demonstrated across Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest company, against high electricity bills and demanded that the government re-nationalize power distributors, just months before an election.
Boiko Borisov said CEZ’s license for power distribution would be revoked but he was against the renationalization of power distributors, which also include another Czech company, Energo-Pro, and Austria’s EVN.
“We may reduce the electricity prices by 8 percent in March if the energy regulator accepts (the proposal),” Borisov told reporters, in his first public comments since protests broke out on Sunday.
“The CEZ license will be revoked by the end of the day, the three power distributors were fined today.”
On Monday the government, whose support is slipping before a July election, sacked Finance Minister Simeon Djankov, who was unpopular for keeping a tight rein on spending, but protests continued regardless.
CEZ shares in Prague extended losses after the news, falling as much as 1.6 percent to a three-week low.
CEZ said it had fulfilled its regulatory duties in Bulgaria, and accused the government of politicizing the issue to win votes.
Eleven people were injured during the anti-government demonstration held in the capital Sofia on Monday, officials said.
Sofia police chief Valery Yordanov said five policemen and six protesters were wounded as clashes erupted between protesters and riot police.
Yordanov also said that police officers arrested eleven protesters for hooliganism and vandalism, after more than 1,500 people threw stones at parliament building in Sofia.
Riot police then deployed to disperse the angry protesters from area around parliament. At least six police cars were damaged and several shop windows were crashed.
Local media said protesters torched four vehicles in Plovdiv city. The vehicles belonged to the Austrian company EVN, which increased electricity prices.
On Sunday, thousands of protesters held demonstrations in Sofia, demanding the expulsion of the Czech Republic’s CEZ, Energo-Pro, and Austria’s EVN, the three foreign-controlled power distributors that control the local market.

EU Approves Military Mission to Mali

European Union foreign ministers on Monday formally approved the launch of a 500-strong EU military mission to train the Malian army as Brussels also announced the holding of a major international conference on the country’s future.
A first group of 70 EU military personnel arrived in the west African nation 10 days ago and Monday’s ministerial green light was the final phase in setting up the European Union Training Mission (EUTM), which has a 15-month mandate to shape up the ramshackle Malian army.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said the mission “is going to be of enormous importance in support of the Malian army,” a poorly equipped and trained force without the capacity to maintain the country’s territorial integrity.
The 27 EU nations first approved the notion of a training mission in December to boost the army’s ability to fight rebels who last year seized control of the country’s vast arid north.
But its launch was accelerated after the surprise intervention of France in its former colony on January 11 to stop the insurgents marching south on the capital.
Some 16 countries from the EU as well as Norway have agreed to take part in the EUTM, which will have a 12.3-million-euro budget, with each contributor nation financing its own troops.
Around half of the troops will be trainers, the remainder providing protection and administrative and medical backup.
European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso later Monday met Mali Premier Diango Sissoko and announced the EU would host a donors conference in mid-May in Brussels which would reinforce efforts to help stabilize the country, both politically and economically.
Barroso stressed that EU aid will “support Mali’s transition process” and highlighted the importance of planned elections in July as “a real opportunity to set the country on the right path.”
Sissoko said the conference would bring together “emergency aid and development aid.”

US Firm Alleges Massive Chinese Hacking

Cyberattacks that stole massive amounts of information from military contractors, energy companies and other key industries in the US and elsewhere have been traced to the doorstep of a Chinese military unit, a US security firm alleged Tuesday.
China’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the report as “groundless,” and the Defense Ministry denied any involvement in hacking attacks, AP reported.
China has frequently been accused of hacking, but the report by Virginia-based Mandiant Corp. contains some of the most extensive and detailed accusations to date linking its military to a wave of cyberspying against US and other foreign companies and government agencies.
Mandiant said it traced the hacking back to a neighborhood in the outskirts of Shanghai that includes a drab, white 12-story office building run by “Unit 61398” of the People’s Liberation Army.
The unit “has systematically stolen hundreds of terabytes of data from at least 141 organizations,” Mandiant wrote. By comparison, the US Library of Congress 2006-2010 Twitter archive of about 170 billion tweets totals 133.2 terabytes. “From our observations, it is one of the most prolific cyber espionage groups in terms of the sheer quantity of information stolen,” the company said. It added that the unit has been in operation since at least 2006.
Mandiant said it decided that revealing the results of its investigation was worth the risk of the hackers changing their tactics and becoming even more difficult to trace.
“It is time to acknowledge the threat is originating in China, and we wanted to do our part to arm and prepare security professionals to combat that threat effectively,” it said.
In a statement faxed to The Associated Press, the Defense Ministry firmly rejected any involvement in hacking, saying Chinese law forbids all activities harming Internet security.

Afghan Women, Girls Increasingly Victims in War

From Page 1
“The sad reality is that they were killed and injured while going about their daily work, their daily business,” said UN human rights director in Afghanistan, Georgette Gagnon.
The return of armed groups opposing the Taliban insurgency but not directly linked to government forces was also documented, particularly in the country’s north and northeast.
“In some areas, such groups had a presence and held power and control greater than local Afghan national security forces,” the United Nations said.
Afghanistan was plagued by violence between rival factions for much of the 1990s. As a result, many people welcomed the Taliban when they spread out from the south of the country vowing to end the factional chaos.
There are fears that militia factions will again arise as Western forces wind down their operations and withdraw by the end of 2014, especially if government forces struggle against the Taliban insurgency.
The report’s findings underscored “the continuing high human cost of armed conflict in Afghanistan”, the UN special envoy to Afghanistan, Jan Kubis, said. While NATO-led foreign forces had reduced the number of civilian casualties they caused by 46 per cent last year, from 1,088 to 587, deaths and injuries caused by insurgents increased by 9 percent, the United Nations said.
The drop in civilian casualties caused by NATO and government forces was attributed to fewer clashes and fewer air strikes in residential areas following a ban last year. On Monday, President Karzai issued a similar ban for Afghan forces, forbidding them from calling in NATO air strikes in residential areas.

Multimillion-Dollar Diamond Heist

Eight masked gunmen made a hole in a security fence at Brussels’ international airport, drove onto the tarmac and snatched some $50 million worth of diamonds from the hold of a Swiss-bound plane without firing a shot.