Mali PM Quits After Arrest

Mali’s prime minister announced his resignation on Tuesday, hours after being arrested by soldiers while trying to leave the divided and unstable West African nation for France.
The development in the Sahel state, whose desert north was occupied by Al-Qaeda-linked extremists following a March coup, seemed likely to complicate African and international efforts to organize a military intervention to reunite the country, Reuters reported.
“I, Cheick Modibo Diarra, hereby resign with my entire government on Tuesday, December 11, 2012,” a nervous-looking Diarra said in a statement broadcast on state television early on Tuesday morning.
News of Diarra’s resignation came hours after he was arrested late on Monday as he tried to leave the country for France.
Bakary Mariko, a spokesman for the group of soldiers that seized power in the March coup, and which remains powerful despite officially handing power back to civilians in April, said Diarra had been arrested for not working fully to address the nation’s problems. Asked if the overnight arrest was a second coup, Mariko said: “This is not a coup. The president is still in place but the prime minister was no longer working in the interests of the country.”
There was no immediate reaction from interim civilian President Diouncounda Traore.

Bangladesh Opposition in Violent Demos Over Attacks

Violence flared in many parts of Bangladesh as schools and most businesses were shut after opposition groups enforced a dawn-to-dusk strike.
They called the strike to protest against attacks on their supporters during a road blockade on Sunday, BBC reported.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party and its allies have been demanding a caretaker government be put in place to oversee the next parliamentary polls.
At least two people were killed and dozens injured in Sunday’s protests.
The government last year abolished the system under which caretaker officials take charge ahead of elections. At least 15 vehicles, mostly buses, have been damaged or set alight in and around the capital, Dhaka, since Monday evening and most private vehicles have remained off the roads.
The police fired tear gas on Tuesday to disperse protesters on the street, other reports say. A few crude bombs, plastic pots filled with gun powder, exploded in Dhaka but there were no reports of injuries.
“The situation is under control now. In some places miscreants tried to attack the vehicles in Dhaka. There were some minor incidents and we used tear gas to disperse them,” Mohammad Asaduzzaman, an assistant commissioner of police said. Police also arrested a senior opposition leader in connection with Sunday’s protests that saw the opposition alliance block the roads, our correspondent adds. Under the caretaker system, an independent administration at the end of a government’s term is set up to try to ensure that elections were conducted in an impartial manner. The government of current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina says it abolished the system following a court order and has no intention of reversing it.

Protest Held in US Against Benefit Cuts

Americans held a protest rally in the state of Florida against plans by the state’s lawmakers to slash social security benefits.
The protest rally took place Monday outside the office of Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio. The protestors demanded that state lawmakers not cut Medicare and social security benefits, Press TV reported.
The demonstrators further called on their legislators to raise the taxes on the wealthiest Americans instead.
US President Barack Obama has been heavily campaigning for his plan to extend tax cuts for middle-income Americans while increasing taxes on the country’s highest earners, a plan that is fiercely opposed by Republican congressmen and major corporate and business executives. Meanwhile, similar protest rallies were also held in other American states. In the state of Wisconsin, rallies were held on Monday at the Madison office of Democratic Senator Herb Kohl and seven other congressional offices around the northern state.
The demonstrators urged the lawmakers against making cuts to social security, Medicare or Medicaid programs as part of any “fiscal cliff” deal that is reportedly being worked out between the Obama administration and Republican lawmakers.
The so-called fiscal cliff constitutes a combination of tax hikes and federal budget cuts that is scheduled to go into effect in January 2013, threatening another economic depression in the country.

UK Plans to Support Syria Rebels With Air, Naval Power

From Page 1
The head of Britain’s armed forces, General Sir David Richards, hosted a confidential meeting in London a few weeks ago attended by the military chiefs of France, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and the UAE, and a three-star American general, in which the strategy was discussed at length. Other UK government departments and their counterparts in allied states in the mission have also been holding extensive meetings on the issue.
The commanders’ conference was held at the request of the Prime Minister, according to senior Whitehall sources. David Cameron is said to be determined that more should be done by Britain to bring to an end the bloody strife.
One key concern is the onset of winter, with 2.5 million people inside Syria needing help and 1.5 million internally displaced by the fighting, according to the UN. More than 100,000, it is estimated, will be gathering at borders with neighboring states which are already hosting refugees and refusing to take them in.

“Intervention Necessary”
There is also a growing belief among the Western backers of the opposition that intervention in some form is necessary now to influence the future political shape of Syria. Extremist groups among the rebels, some like Jabhat Al-Nusra linked to Al-Qaeda, have steadily gained in power and influence because of their access to weapons and money coming from the Persian Gulf Arab states putting more secular groups at a severe disadvantage.
The Obama administration is considering proscribing Al-Nusra as a terrorist organization, making it illegal for American citizens to fund it and sending a warning message to Arab states not to back it. At the same time Western help will be directed at and strengthen the moderate groups.
Britain, France and the US have agreed that none of their countries would have “boots on the ground” to help the rebels. The training camps can be set up in Turkey. However, the use of air and maritime force would, in itself, be highly controversial and likely to lead to charges that, as in Libya, the West is carrying out regime change by force.

No UN Authorization
Furthermore, any such military action will have to take place without United Nations authorization, with Russia and China highly unlikely to back a resolution after their experience over Libya where they agreed to a “no-fly zone” only to see it turn into a NATO bombing campaign lasting months. The plan will also draw accusations that the decision to station NATO Patriot missile defense systems at the Syrian border, at the request of Turkey, was, in reality, to camouflage intervention.
The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Foreign Secretary William Hague and the alliance’s Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, had all insisted at a meeting in Brussels last week that the deployment was a purely defensive measure. British defense sources maintain that Ankara would have made the request even without the plan to aid the rebels. Neither Germany nor the Netherlands, which will be deploying the Patriots, have been part of the secret Syria talks.

French Advisors Meet Rebels
Le Figaro newspaper has reported that French military advisers have met rebel groups just across the Lebanese border. The US is said to have stockpiled weapons retrieved in Libya for future supply to Syria.
One senior Whitehall official said: “The efforts have so far been uncoordinated without any focused objective.

Philippine Typhoon Toll Above 700

The death toll from the destructive typhoon that savaged the southern Philippines last week has climbed above 700, authorities said on Tuesday, warning that the final number may be much higher.
Nearly 900 people are still unaccounted for in the aftermath of Typhoon Bopha, the strongest and deadliest storm to hit the Philippines this year, according to the country’s emergency management agency.
The numbers of dead and missing have risen drastically during the past several days as government officials have gathered information from isolated areas where the scale of the devastation was previously unknown.
Both of the grim totals are likely to increase further this week, said Benito Ramos, head of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, the emergency agency. Search and rescue efforts are continuing, he said, despite the declining chances of finding people alive.
“We are still hoping against hope that there are still survivors,” he said by telephone, adding that some of the hundreds of fishermen reported missing after the storm could yet be found sheltering on small islands out at sea.
If only a few of those missing are found alive, Bopha could eventually prove more deadly than Tropical Storm Washi, which killed 1,268 people a year ago. But its toll would still remain far below that of Tropical Storm Thelma, the country’s most lethal storm on record that left more than 5,000 people dead in 1991.
The worst of the death and destruction from Bopha took place on the southern island of Mindanao, where the storm hit first and hardest with gusts as strong as 220 kph (138 mph). In the provinces of Compostela Valley and Davao Oriental, the heavy rain set off flash floods and landslides that engulfed whole neighborhoods, and the winds ripped apart fragile houses.

15 Killed in Nigeria Shootout With Radical Sect

A shootout in northeastern Nigeria between security forces and members of a radical sect killed at least 15 people, including a local police chief, authorities said on Tuesday.
The shootings took place in the city of Potiskum, which has increasingly become the scene of violent attacks by the sect known as Boko Haram, AP reported.
Army spokesman Lt. Eli Lazarus said the attack began late Sunday night in the city and went on for hours after suspected sect members bombed a local police station and attacked a bank branch.
Lazarus said the dead included a police chief and 14 suspected Boko Haram members. Civilians have been killed in such shoot-outs before and Nigeria’s military routinely downplays such casualties. The identity of those who died could not be independently verified Tuesday, though Lazarus said those killed had been carrying weapons and ammunition. However, Lazarus said authorities only collected four corpses of the suspected sect fighters, as the other 10 “were dragged away by other Boko Haram members in order to hide their identity.”
It was unclear the motivation behind the attack, though analysts and local security officials believe Boko Haram has funded some of its attacks through bank robberies in which sect members blow open bank buildings to steal the money inside.
Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sacrilege” in the Hausa language of Nigeria’s Muslim north, is waging an increasingly bloody campaign of guerrilla attacks against the nation’s weak central government. The sect says it wants Nigeria to enact strict Shariah law and release its imprisoned members. Despite a heavy military and police presence, the sect has been able to launch frequent attacks.

Strauss-Kahn Case

Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn signed a settlement with a hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo who accused him of sexual assault.