Gerry Adams was set yesterday to urge British Prime Minister Tony Blair to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from republican strongholds of Northern Ireland, the Sinn Fein leader said on Irish television.
Adams and Martin McGuinness, his No. 2 in Sinn Fein, the political wing of the militant Irish Republican Army, were to meet Blair in Downing Street along with Northern Ireland police chief Hugh Orde.
It's the first face-to-face meeting between Orde and the Sinn Fein leaders.
"This is a crucial meeting in which we will be expecting Mr. Blair and his chief constable to deliver for us on demilitarizing republican heartlands," as promised in a joint London-Dublin agreement last year, Adams said on RTE public television on Sunday.
Earlier in the day, Adams received a phone call from US President George W. Bush, who offered to mediate in the Northern Ireland conflict.
Bush had on Friday called Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, which supports continued British rule in Northern Ireland, to make the same offer.
"I thank president Bush for his interest. I briefed the president on Sinn Fein's objectives in the current negotiations," Adams said on efforts to get a power-sharing agreement between the Catholic and Protestant groupings in the British province back on track.
"These are to get the DUP [the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party] on board for an agreement and to ensure that the British government position remains faithful to the power-sharing, equality-based and all-Ireland institutions contained in the Good Friday agreement," he said.
"I told him we may need the help of the White House" to secure these, added the leader of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, which has been resisting efforts to disarm following the 1998 Good Friday peace accords.
Adams said he did not expect the US government's new special envoy for Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss, to return to Northern Ireland at this stage.
Reiss was in Northern Ireland in February for his first visit, on the eve of what were expected to be months of talks to revive the province's self-governing Assembly and executive, suspended since 2002. The UK, Ireland and Northern Ireland's political parties have been working to revive the power-sharing government that was intended to end three decades of sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics.
The institutions, created under the Good Friday peace accords in 1998, were suspended in 2002 following a crisis triggered by allegations of IRA espionage targeting Protestant politicians.
The DUP never embraced the Good Friday pact, having refused to compromise with Sinn Fein.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS