Yemen’s opposition yesterday rejected an offer to join Gulf-mediated talks in Saudi Arabia on a transfer of power and set a two-week deadline for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step aside.
Gulf Arab foreign ministers had said they would invite Saleh, who has faced two months of street protests demanding his resignation, and his opponents to mediation talks on a transfer of power. However, the opposition has seesawed on the offer.
“We have renewed our emphasis on the need for speeding the process of [Saleh] standing down to within two weeks. Therefore we will not go to Riyadh,” said Mohammed al-Mutawakkil, a prominent opposition leader.
Saudi and Western allies of Yemen fear a prolonged standoff in the Arabian Peninsula state could ignite clashes between rival military units in the capital and elsewhere and cause chaos that would benefit an active Yemen-based al-Qaeda wing.
Yemen’s opposition first rejected a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) statement on the framework for the talks, which had been due to take place in Riyadh, because it appeared to offer Saleh a waiver from future prosecution and did not call for an immediate handover.
Later, they met the ambassadors of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Kuwait on Tuesday seeking clarification of the GCC understanding of a “transfer of power,” which does not specify a time frame for Saleh to step down.
Some opposition leaders had hinted that talks could start as early as tomorrow, before Mutawakkil said the clarifications offered by Gulf ambassadors had been inadequate.
“We didn’t find in the clarifications that the ambassadors presented anything that meets our demands for an immediate removal,” Mutawakkil said. “There was nothing new from the Gulf Cooperation Council ambassadors.”
Saleh has accepted the talks framework, while another key player, General Ali Mohsen, a kinsman of Saleh’s whose units are protecting protesters in Sana’a, has welcomed the GCC plan.
A transfer of power in Yemen could technically last until the next presidential election scheduled for 2013, a prospect the opposition finds unacceptable.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of