NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said yesterday the EU-brokered deal for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia was unacceptable and hard to swallow because it ceded too much ground to Moscow.
De Hoop Scheffer made his comments in an interview with the Financial Times hours before he was to lead a NATO mission to Georgia in a gesture of support for the aspiring alliance member after its forces were routed by Russia last month.
He said Russia was being allowed to retain a military presence inside Georgia’s breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, contravening an EU-brokered plan that sought a return to the status quo before the war.
“If the Russians are staying in South Ossetia with so many forces, I do not consider this as a return to the status quo,” De Hoop Scheffer said.
The NATO chief was to lead all 26 NATO ambassadors on the two-day visit, to include talks with Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili on the country’s NATO bid and on reconstruction needs after last month’s Russian military assault, NATO and Georgian officials said.
Russia, which deeply opposes NATO enlargement, has urged the alliance to cancel the visit.
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.
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