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AFP

  • 30 years on, French agent apologises for sinking the Rainbow Warrior

    Jean-Luc Kister, whose face was not covered in the hour-long video interview, said he believed it was now the right time to say sorry to the family of Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira, who was killed in the explosion, to Greenpeace and to the people of New Zealand.

    “Thirty years after the event, now that emotions have subsided and also with the distance I now have from my professional life, I thought it was the right time for me to express both my deepest regret and my apologies,” Kister said.

    On July 10, 1985, the Rainbow Warrior was docked in Auckland on its way to protest against French nuclear testing at Mururoa Atoll, about 1,200 kilometres (750 miles) southeast of Tahiti.

    Kister was working for France’s spy agency, the DGSE, which carried out an unprecedented mission to stop Greenpeace by bombing a peaceful protest ship without warning in the waters of a friendly nation.

    He was part of the so-called “third team”, whose mission was to attach two large limpet mines to the hull of the converted trawler, working with fellow frogman Jean Camas.

    A third member of the team, Gerard Royal, a brother of France’s current environment minister and former presidential candidate Segolene Royal, picked up the two men in a dinghy after the covert operation.

    “I have the blood of an innocent man on my conscience, and that weighs on me,” a visibly emotional Kister said in the interview. “We are not cold-blooded killers. My conscience led me to apologise and explain myself.”

    He said the mission that the 12-strong unit were ordered to carry out by then French defence minister Charles Hernu was “disproportionate” and he claimed that other less drastic ways of damaging the ship, such as breaking the propeller shaft to prevent it from taking to sea, were rejected by the government.

    “There was a willingness at a high level to say: this has to end once and for all, we need to take radical measures. We were told we had to sink it. Well, it’s simple to sink a boat, you have to put a hole in it.”

    Name was leaked

    Kister’s name was leaked to the media soon after the bombing, albeit with a spelling mistake as Kyster. He said he considered his unmasking to be an act of “high treason”.

    “I’m not angry at the journalists, it’s the political powers I blame. If it had been in the United States, other heads would have rolled.”

    Two days after the bombing, two of the agents who took part — Alain Mafart and Dominique Prieur, who had posed as a couple of Swiss tourists — were arrested by New Zealand police and their identities revealed. Hernu, the defence minister, was forced to resign two months later.

    Mafart and Prieur were charged with murder, eventually pleading guilty to manslaughter and receiving 10-year jail terms, but they were freed within months under a deal that sparked almost as much anger in New Zealand as the bombing, involving France threatening to block trade access to European markets unless Wellington handed over the agents.

    France has since made an official apology for the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior and paid damages. In 1996 it halted the nuclear testing that had prompted the Greenpeace protest.

    The interview was carried out by French journalist and Mediapart founder Edwy Plenel, who in September 1985 revealed in a Le Monde newspaper report the involvement of the DGSE frogman in planting the explosives.

    Plenel says one aspect of the infamous bombing remains unexplained to this day — how much then president Francois Mitterrand knew about the operation.

    Although Mitterrand was aware that it was going to take place, “at which point did he know the operation was going to be so violent?”, Plenel asked.

  • 'Safe' screens touted for those who just can't look away

    Electronics giants are turning crisis to an opportunity — quickly declaring that their latest products feature “safe” screens.

    At the IFA mega consumer electronics show in Berlin, Dutch company Philips is showcasing a new technology for its computer screens called “SoftBlue,” which it claims is gentler on the retina.

    “We are shifting the harmful blue light frequencies, which are below 450 nanometers, to above 460 nanometers,” said Philips’ marketing director Stefan Sommer.

    Other brands like Asus and BenQ, along with American firm ViewSonic, have also seized on “safe” screens as a new selling point.

    “We’ve been told from a very early age by parents that too much screen time, in front of a TV or a computer, is bad. So a ‘safe’ screen might resonate with consumers,” said Paul Gray, an analyst at IHS Global Insight.

    Because it generates a relatively high intensity of light from just a low amount of energy, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are used to light up smartphones, televisions or computers.

    But the problem is the blue ray emitted at the same time, which is feared to pose potentially serious health consequences.

    Beware of ‘overconsumption’ 

    It is all scare-mongering or scientific fact? Serge Picaud, a researcher at the Institute of Sight in Paris, has a more measured take on it.

    “We should not be so afraid that we bin all our screens,” he said.

    Picaud carried out a study in 2013 in which he exposed sample retina cells from a pig — similar to those found in humans — to different wavelengths of light, and showed that those between 415 and 455 nanometres killed the cells.

    In other words, deep blue light, which is close to ultra-violet light, is particularly harmful to eyes.

    Nevertheless, the scientist says, “that must be taken in proportion as the light intensities produced by our screens are still relatively weak compared to sunlight”.

    “Those who worry about harm caused by screens, do they also wear sunglasses at the beach?” asked Picaud.

    Vincent Gualino, an ophthalmologist at a French hospital also believes that “we should not be afraid of the screens”.

    “The real problem is over-consumption,” the specialist on retina illnesses said, warning people against spending more than six hours in front of their screens.

    Children’s eyes are most vulnerable, as their retinas are clear and they “will be exposed over 40 or 50 years”.

    For those who cannot help but stay glued to screens, Gualino prescribes special glasses to filter out the blue light.

    Such glasses are widely available in Japan, while in France, lens maker Essilor offers special lenses that screen out the harmful rays.- AFP

  • Pakistani alleged narco brothers extradited to US

    Hameed Chishti, 47, nicknamed Benny, and Wahab Chishti, 49, also known as Angel, were flown to the United States from Spain more than a year after their arrest at American officials’ request.

    If convicted on all charges, they face between 25 years to life behind bars in an American prison.

    They are charged with conspiring to commit narco-terrorism, to provide support to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), to import heroin into the United States and unlawfully sell missile launchers.

    Prosecutors allege that the brothers agreed to sell heroin to people they believed were FARC, but who were actually undercover informants, thinking it would be smuggled into the United States.

    In April 2014, the Chishtis allegedly arranged delivery of a one-kilo heroin sample to presumed FARC cronies in the Netherlands.

    They then agreed to sell them weapons after the alleged FARC members claimed to want to buy Russian-made surface-to-air missiles to protect their drug-trafficking empire in Colombia.

    After Hameed Chishti forwarded bank account details for payment for the missiles, the brothers were arrested in June 2014 in Spain, where they lived, prosecutors said.

    They appeared before a US magistrate on Friday as prosecutors seek the extradition of two more defendants from Spain — delayed because they are seeking asylum.

    The Chishtis “illustrate once again that drug trafficking and terror conspiracies often intersect, support, and facilitate each other’s dangerous and potential deadly plots,” said Mark Hamlet, the Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge.

    The United States declared FARC a terrorist organization in 1997.

  • 47 dead as rebels battle IS in north Syria: monitor

    Twenty Islamist and other rebel fighters were killed in the clashes in Aleppo province throughout Friday, along with 27 IS jihadists, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

    The fighting centred on the town of Marea, a key rebel bastion that IS has been trying to capture for months.

    The Observatory said fighting was ongoing around the town, which rebel forces still control, as well in villages in the surrounding area.

    Marea is one of the most significant rebel-held towns in northern Aleppo and lies on a key supply route running to the Turkish border.

    IS has targeted the town for months, seeking to expand westwards from territory it already holds in Aleppo province.

    Last week, IS advanced in the area, seizing five villages from rebel forces around Marea after allegations it had used a chemical agent, possibly mustard gas, in its attacks.

    The IS advances came despite an agreement between Turkey and the United States to work on the establishment of an IS-free zone in northern Aleppo.

    In recent days, the US-led air campaign fighting IS in Syria has carried out strikes against the group near Marea, according to the Pentagon.

    More than 240,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011 with peaceful anti-government protests.

    It has evolved into a complex multi-front war, with regime and rebel forces as well as Kurds and jihadists involved in the fighting.

  • Austria expects up to 10,000 migrants from Hungary

    The total number of migrants entering Austria from Hungary in the current wave is expected to reach up to 10,000, the Austrian interior ministry said Saturday.

    Around 4,000 have poured across the border during the night and in the morning hours after Hungary began taking people in buses to the border.

    The first bus carrying migrants who have been stranded in the Hungarian capital reached the Austrian border early Saturday, after Vienna and Berlin agreed to take in thousands of refugees desperate to start new lives in Western Europe.

    Some 50 migrants from the 1,200 or so people who set off on foot from Budapest for the Austrian border earlier — including some in wheelchairs and on crutches — reached the Hegyeshalom-Nickelsdorf border post, Austrian police said, in the first of 100 vehicles laid on by the Hungarian authorities.

    Several other buses earlier also left the Keleti train station in the Hungarian capital carrying people who have been stuck there for days in makeshift refugee camps waiting for trains to Austria and Germany.

    Hungary has become the newest flashpoint as hundreds of thousands of migrants try to cross its borders on their journey to Western Europe, particularly Germany, which has said it will no longer deport Syrian refugees and will take in 800,000 people this year.

    Berlin urged an end to “recriminations” as Britain said it would take in thousands more Syrian refugees — but only directly from camps, not those already in overstretched Hungary, Greece and Italy, who are demanding their EU partners do more to help.

    The human cost of the crisis was exposed this week when the body of Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, which was buried with his brother and mother in his war-torn hometown of Kobane on Friday, was found washed up on a beach in Turkey.

    On board one of the buses to Austria, exhausted migrants veered between concern and relief as they waited to see if their long journeys to Western Europe were about to come to an end. Many were nervous after Hungary tried to transport a trainload of migrants heading for Austria into a camp on Thursday.

    “I was not comfortable leaving the Keleti railway station,” said 26-year-old Syrian Mohammed.

    But he relaxed as he caught a glimpse of the Danube river through the window: “I had heard about it, but I’ve never seen it,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

    Between 800 and 3,000 migrants are expected to arrive at the Austrian border in the coming hours, said police spokesman Werner Fasching, adding that law enforcement and workers from the Red Cross were waiting to receive them.

    Some 600 beds have been made available in Nickelsdorf for the new arrivals and neighbouring regions have also mobilised to ensure they are provided with food and medical care, he said.

  • Britain to take 'thousands more Syrian refugees': Cameron

    “Given the scale of the crisis and the suffering of the people, today I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees,” he told reporters on a visit to Lisbon.

    “We will continue with our approach of taking them from the refugee camps,” he added, in a reference to UN camps on the Syrian border.

    “This provides them with a more direct and safe route to the UK, rather than risking the hazardous journey which has tragically cost so many lives,” the prime minister said.

    Cameron did not specify how many more refugees Britain would accept, saying only that more details would be announced next week and that the resettlement scheme would be kept “under review”.

    “Britain will act with our head and our heart, providing refuge for those in need while working on a long term solution to the Syria crisis,” Cameron said.

    Britain has faced mounting pressure to accept a greater share of Syrian refugees, especially after the publication this week of harrowing images of a three-year-old Syrian toddler found dead on a Turkish beach.

    A petition to parliament urging Britain to accept more refugees has garnered nearly 360,000 signatures, while campaign group Avaaz said that 2,000 Britons had volunteered to host refugee families.

    Opted out of quota system

    Several editorials in Britain harked back to the times when Britain accepted huge numbers of refugees before and after World War II, and around the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

    Britain has accepted 216 Syrian refugees under a special government scheme over the past year and around 5,000 Syrians have been granted asylum since the conflict there broke out in 2011 — far fewer than countries like France, Germany and Sweden.

    More than four million Syrians have fled the war, many of them taking refuge in neighbouring Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

    Britain has also opted out of a quota system for relocating asylum seekers within the European Union despite growing calls in the EU for fairer distribution.

    On the streets of London, views on the issue varied.

    “I can’t believe that we haven’t done anything before now,” said 45-year-old Victoria Buurman as she walked with her shopping in central London.

    “I think it’s disgusting that we have to get to a point where children are dying before we even recognise that we’re not acting morally. It’s horrific,” she said, breaking into tears.

    But Souvik Ghosh, a 26-year-old research student from India, said Britain should not take any more migrants.

    “There should be some limitations, OK? Because otherwise this country’s economic system will be overflowed,” he said.

    Contenders for the leadership of the main opposition Labour Party have all urged Cameron to do more.

    Common humanity demands action’

    One of them, Yvette Cooper, has urged Britain to immediately accept 10,000 more Syrian refugees, while bookmakers’ favourite Jeremy Corbyn added there was no “electric fence and military solution” to the crisis.

    “It’s a humanitarian crisis and it must be solved by human beings acting in a humanitarian way,” he said.

    Several MPs from Cameron’s own Conservatives also urged the prime minister to do more.

    “Our common humanity demands action at home and abroad,” said Tom Tugendhat, who represents part of the Kent region where many undocumented migrants arrive on ferries or through the Channel Tunnel.

    There was also criticism from elsewhere in Europe, with the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muiznieks, saying he was “seriously concerned” by Cameron’s position.

    “While it is true that long-term peace should be brought to Syria and other war-torn countries, it is also true that the UK has a legal and moral obligation to offer shelter to those who flee war and persecution,” he said.

    “The truth is that at the moment the UK is doing much less than other European countries”.

    Peter Sutherland, the UN special representative on international migration, told the BBC that while some countries were “massively bearing the burden” of the migrant crisis, Britain was among those that “can do more”.

    Syrian Refugees Aylan Al-Kurdi & Ghalib Al-Kurdi

  • Father buries drowned Syrian boy as Europe wrangles over refugees

    Britain said it would take thousands more from refugee camps on the Syrian border as the heartbreaking images of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless body on a Turkish beach ramped up pressure on political leaders to act.

    His father Abdullah Kurdi — who has told how Aylan and his other young son Ghaleb “slipped through my hands” when their boat sank in the Aegean Sea — arrived in the Syrian flashpoint border town of Kobane with the funeral caskets of his sons and wife, who also died.

    “As a father who lost his children, I want nothing for myself from this world. All I want is that this tragedy in Syria immediately ends,” he said on his way to Kobane, which was devastated in clashes between Islamic State militants and Kurdish fighters.

    A divided Europe faces growing international criticism over its response to Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, during which more than 350,00 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean, and around 2,600 people have died.

    UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres warned that the EU faced a “defining moment” after little Aylan’s death and called for the mandatory resettlement of 200,000 refugees by EU states.

    With tensions growing, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande said Thursday they had agreed the EU should now require member states to take in a fixed number of migrants.

    Britain to take more refugees

    EU foreign ministers were to meet later in Luxembourg to discuss the crisis, which has split the bloc between countries like Germany advocating greater solidarity and mainly eastern nations such as Hungary that have taken a hardline approach.

    Under-fire British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose country has been accused of failing to help shoulder the burden, said he would set out plans next week for his country to take “thousands more” refugees.

    “I can announce that we will do more, providing resettlement for thousands more Syrian refugees,” Cameron said in Lisbon.

    However he insisted that Britain would take refugees direct from camps on the border with Syria and not those already in other EU member states, saying that would just encourage more people to make the journey to Europe.

    Disagreements are rife over Europe’s piecemeal migration system and its passport-free Schengen area.

    EU rules that asylum claims must be dealt with in the country they first arrive were thrown into turmoil by Germany, which said it will refrain from deporting Syrians.

    European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed quotas for resettling a total of 160,000 refugees across the EU to take the pressure off the overstretched frontline states of Greece, Italy and Hungary.

    In Budapest, a tense standoff continued between police and hundreds of refugees blocked by police from carrying on their train journey west towards Germany, Europe’s main destination.

    On Thursday, the police allowed the refugees board a train in Budapest bound for the Austrian border. But their journey ended just west of the capital in Bicske, where police tried to disembark them and take them to a refugee processing camp.

    An estimated 200 to 300 people, angry at what they saw as Hungary’s trickery, refused to get off the train, where they spent the night.

    ‘They slipped through my hands’

    The European tensions erupted into the open on Thursday when Hungary’s right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban lashed out at Germany, the EU’s biggest economy, for aggravating the crisis.

    Orban, whose government has built a fence on the border with Serbia to keep out migrants, also sparked anger by warning that Europe’s Christian roots were at risk and saying Hungary did not want Muslim migrants.

    The human cost of the migrant crisis has been brought into sharp focus by Aylan’s drowning, and the images of the child’s lifeless body, in a t-shirt, shorts and shoes, lying on the beach.

    His father Abdullah has told of the horrific moments when the family of four was tipped into the Mediterranean off Turkey’s coast.

    Reports said the family were trying to get to Canada but Ottawa denied it had received an asylum request from the boy’s family.

    The picture sent shock waves across social media and prompted a furious reaction from, among others, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who accused European leaders of turning the Mediterranean into a “cemetery”.

    Turkey is host to 1.8 million refugees from the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, a long standing ally of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, said Europe’s migrant crisis was an “absolutely expected” result of the West’s policies in the Middle East and that he had personally warned of the consequences.

    Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott meanwhile said the images of Aylan showed the need to stop the “evil trade” of people smuggling boats, defending Canberrra’s own hardline immigration policies.

    EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the bloc’s new naval mission could step up action against people smugglers in the Mediterranean within weeks, seizing and destroying their boats.

    A comic by Tariq Afridi on tragic Syria incident

  • Farm dust protects kids against asthma, allergies

    The findings published in the US journal Science could help lead to a vaccine against asthma one day.

    “At this point, we have revealed an actual link between farm dust and protection against asthma and allergies,” said Bart Lambrecht, a professor of pulmonary medicine at Ghent University.

    “We did this by exposing mice to farm dust extract from Germany and Switzerland. These tests revealed that the mice were fully protected against house dust mite allergy, the most common cause for allergies in humans.”

    Scientists also discovered that farm dust “makes the mucous membrane inside the respiratory tracts react less severely to allergens such as house dust mite” due to a protein called A20, the study said.

    The body produces the A20 protein when a person comes in contact with farm dust.

    Professor Hamida Hammad at Ghent University said the protective effect went away when the A20 protein was inactivated in mice, leaving the mucous membrane of the lungs “unable to reduce an allergic or asthmatic reaction.”

    When researchers examined a group of 2,000 people who grew up on farms, they found most did not suffer from allergies or asthma.

    Those who were still prone to allergies and asthma were found to be deficient in the protective protein.

    “Those who are not protected and still develop allergies have a genetic variant of the A20 gene which causes the A20 protein to malfunction,” said Lambrecht.

    Next, researchers will be hunting for the active substance in farm dust that is responsible for providing protection, so that they can use it to develop a preventive medicine against asthma.

    “Discovering how farm dust provides this type of protection has certainly put us on the right track towards developing an asthma vaccine and new allergy therapies,” said Hammad.

    “However, several years of research are required still before they will be available to patients.”

  • McDonald's Japan hit by another food scandal

    The company said it temporarily closed the outlet in Osaka this week, and sent a notice to 95 other restaurants that offer the kind of green tea latte frappe sold to the woman, who said she sustained injuries to her mouth.

    Dozens of pieces of plastic were found inside the beverage, a company spokesman told AFP, adding that a plastic instrument used to make the drink may have been the source.

    “At this point it is just a hypothesis but we think this plastic tool slipped into a blender to make the frappe,” he added.

    McDonald’s Japan unit has been battered by a series of scandals including a human tooth found in some fries.

    Last summer, a Chinese supplier was found to be mixing out-of-date meat with fresh produce, sending sales plunging and forcing a rapid switch to a Thai vendor.

    In April, the company announced it would renovate 2,000 of its 3,000 Japanese outlets and shut down another 130, while reducing its headcount in a bid to cut costs.

    That came after it said in February it had lost a worse-than-expected 21.8 billion yen ($182 million) for 2014 — against a year-earlier profit — recording its first loss in 11 years. – AFP

  • Another man attacked by shark in Australia

    Emergency teams said they were called to treat the man, who reported being knocked off his surf ski — similar to a kayak — by a shark, at Black Head Beach about 225 kilometres (140 miles) north of Sydney before noon.

    “The man fell into the water and was able to get back on the surf ski. He managed to get closer to shore where bystanders were able to help him from the water,” New South Wales police said in a statement.

    The 65-year-old sustained lacerations on one leg, authorities said with a spokesman for the rescue helicopter telling Australian Associated Press he had been bitten “to the bone” on the ankle.

    Late last month several beaches in New South Wales state further north of Friday’s attack were closed after a bodyboarder was seriously injured by a shark.

    Weeks earlier, a surfer suffered serious arm and leg injuries after being bitten at Evans Head in New South Wales’ far north, the same area where a Japanese surfer died in February after his legs were torn off in a shark attack.

    The New South Wales state government has ruled out culling sharks, but is also undertaking a review of new control technologies with a report to be completed in the coming weeks.

    “These attacks are unprecedented, they’re extraordinary and they are going to require action,” New South Wales Premier Mike Baird said on Friday.

    He added: “I have to be open to (shark) nets, notwithstanding how difficult I find them personally, it’s something that we have to be open to because we have to keep this community safe.”

    Sharks are a regular feature in Australian waters and experts believe attacks may be increasing in number simply because more people are engaging in water sports.