TOKYO, October 22 -- Japan and the United States will carry out joint space observation in order to counter possible attacks of China. As reported by the Asahi news daily, these plans are indicated in the main updated principles of Japan–US of defense cooperation, which will be published by the end of a year. The newspaper quotes Frank Rose, Deputy Assistant US Secretary of State, as saying that the US is concerned about increasing capabilities of the Chinese armed forces.According to the government official, China carried out an anti-satellite missile test in July. He added that joint space observation is a crucially important aspect of Japan–US cooperation under the emergence of new threats and challenges. According to the document, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will be obliged to provide the US Armed Forces with information on spacecraft, gathered by its satellites and radars.
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NEW YORK, October 22 -- NBC News cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who contracted Ebola while working in Liberia, has been declared free of the virus and can leave the Nebraska Medical Centre in Omaha, where he has been treated for the past two weeks, the centre reported on Tuesday. Earlier reports said the experimental drug Brincidofovir developed by U.S. Chimerix company was used to treat the Ebola patient. Mukpo contracted the virus while on an assignment in Liberia. After he began showing symptoms, he was immediately isolated and soon brought to the United States for medical treatment. His colleagues returned from Liberia a bit later and were examined by medics who found no Ebola symptoms. Also on Tuesday, the U.S. National Institutes of Health upgraded from “fair” to “good” the condition of another Ebola patient, Texas nurse Nina Pham. She was also diagnosed with Ebola earlier in October after taking care of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed on U.S. soil. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week that the Ebola epidemic was spreading geographically and the death toll exceeds 4,500, while the number of probable and suspected cases nears 9,000. NEW YORK, October 22 -- Syria’s UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari said the United States had not warned Damascus beforehand about plans to deliver weapons to the Kurdish forces in Kobani. “No, we had not been warned. They did this only once when the US permanent representative [Samantha Power] met with me to inform my government of the beginning of the military operation,” the diplomat said. In remarks to media reports that some of the weapons have been apprehended by the Islamic State (IS) militants, Jaafari said: “I cannot confirm this, but such things have repeatedly happened in the past.” On Sunday, the US military air-dropped arms for Syrian Kurdish forces defending the embattled northern Syrian town of Kobane on the Turkish border against the IS militants.Later US TV channels released a video apparently showing a masked man with some of the dropped packages wrapped in clear plastic attached to parachute cords. A source in the US presidential administration has told CBS News that the possibility that part of the cargo could be in the hands of terrorists cannot be excluded. MOSCOW, October 22 -- More than 9,000 troops participating in the drills represented Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan , Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan Combat readiness tests of the integrated air defense system of members of the Commonwealth of Independent States /CIS/ have been completed successfully, the press service of the Russian Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.“Results of trainings have once again proved the reliability and efficiency of the integrated missile defense system in protecting air space of CIS member states,” Lieutenant General Alexander Golovko, the commander of Russia’s Airspace Defense Forces, who headed the training tests, said. The training involved about 100 warplanes and helicopters, including fighters, attack aircraft and bombers. Apart from that, more than 160 units of radio-technical troops and more than 40 air defense missile systems of the integrated missile defense system, took part. More than 9,000 troops represented Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan , Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. AMSTERDAM, October 21 -- Paint and chemicals company AkzoNobel boosted its net profit by 32% in the third quarter of this year, compared with 2013. Nevertheless, the market remains difficult and sales fell 2% to €3.7bn, the company said. In particular, the strong euro is having an impact on the results. Chief executive Ton Büchner said in a statement Akzo Nobel will reach its 2015 targets, despite the difficult economic circumstances. Since February last year, the company has focused on improving the return on investment rather than increasing sales.
Sweden released a hazy photograph of what might be a mini-sub on Sunday HONG KONG, October 21 -- Hong Kong student representatives and government officials have held much-awaited talks to end street protests now in their fourth week, but achieved little progress to defuse the crisis in China's semi-autonomous city. In opening remarks, student leader Alex Chow said that an August decision by China's legislature ruling out direct elections for the city's chief executive in 2017 had "emasculated" Hong Kong. "We don't want anointment," Chow, secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, one of three groups leading the protests, said at the talks on Tuesday. Government officials stuck to the official position that Hong Kong's mini-constitution cannot be amended to accommodate protesters' demands, while also saying that many others do not share their views. "We hope you would understand that there are a lot of people who are not in Mong Kok, who are not in Admiralty, many people at home who aren't insisting on civil nomination," said Justice Secretary Rimsky Yuen. Live telecast People gathered at the three main protest zones to watch the talks on big screens, and frequently cheered at remarks by the student leaders. But many held little hope that the talks would end the impasse, though they thought broadcasting them would help get their position out to the wider population. Reports from Admiralty, one of the main protest sites, said the talks seemed to have done little to dampen the protests. Student leaders appearing on a stage at Admiralty after the talks were met with loud cheers by thousands of people gathered. "They told the crowd that they did not get a practical response from the government and they are disappointed in the discussions," she said. "They urged protesters to carry on occupying sites, saying that the five speakers at the talks are not enough to convince the government to address their issues." Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying told reporters ahead of the talks that the government would not let the public nominate candidates to run in inaugural direct elections to succeed him in 2017, as demanded by thousands of protesters camping out on main streets across the city. But he added that there was room to discuss how to form a key 1,200-member committee that would pick candidates. Leung said such changes could be covered in a second round of consultations over the next several months. "How we should elect the 1,200 so that the nominating committee will be broadly representative, there's room for discussion there," Leung said. "There's room to make the nominating committee more democratic, and this is one of the things we very much want to talk to not just the students but the community at large about." Protesters have occupied main streets in three areas of the city since September 28 to demand that the government abandon plans to use the screening committee. KOCHO, October 20 -- When Islamic State fighters conquered the border region between Iraq and Syria, the Yazidi village of Kocho also fell into their hands. Fair Game Nadia has had three tattoos since childhood, each consisting of just one dot. She has one violet pinprick on the back of each hand and a dab of violet on the tip of the chin. They function as a kind of protection to ward off evil at key places on the body: on the hands, which are used to touch things, and near the mouth, so it can tell no lies. Nadia and her family are Yazidis, a monotheistic religion that most likely dates back to the Middle Ages and is steeped in mysticism. An estimated 400,000 Yazidis, making up approximately 5 percent of the Kurdish population, live in northern Iraq and Syria. Islamic State fighters see the Yazidis as idol and devil worshippers -- in other words, as scum, as they never tire of telling their prisoners. And, as far as they are concerned, Yazidi women are fair game. Islamic State fighters came to Nadia's town several times, always at intervals of one or two days. They were at pains to demonstrate their military strength, roaring into town and announcing that they were the new lords of the land. The men wore mirrored sunglasses, kept their faces masked with black scarves, and carried pistols and daggers in their belts, recalls Nadia. At first, they led the townspeople to believe that they were safe, as long as they handed over their weapons, mostly old hunting rifles and kitchen knives. They told the men of Kocho that disarmament was the price to pay they had to pay to avoid being killed by Islamic State fighters. After the weapons were collected and piled up on the back of a pickup truck, the jihadists herded the residents into the school. They separated the men from the women and took away the men in small groups. The women heard shots all afternoon and were paralysed with fear, says Nadia. Then the older women were separated from the younger ones. At the last moment, her mother slipped a gold ring from her finger and gave it to Nadia: "In case you need it," she whispered. This is Nadia's last memory of her mother. Islamic State fighters used SUVs and minibuses to drive a total of 64 young women, including Nadia, to Mosul, the city that IS had captured in mid-June. During the nine days in which Nadia was a prisoner of the "caliphate," they stayed in five different places, and with every move they took the young women along with them. 'We Remained Steadfast' The first house, Nadia recalls, belonged to a judge named Ghasi Hussein, who had fled the area, one of their captors told the young women. But in the future, as the man said, it will belong to them, in honour of Allah. Photos of the judge and his wife still hung on the walls, and he had had teacups printed with their likeness. The men and their prisoners stayed there for three days before they moved to a second, a third, a fourth and a fifth house. Nine days can be longer than an entire lifetime, says Nadia, but she can remember every second of those nine days. Sometimes they were given nothing to eat, other times just a putrid egg for six young women. For two long days, they received no water. It was extremely hot and their captors had given them a single glass of tea. They passed around the glass -- two tiny sips for each woman. If you convert to Islam, the men said, you'll be given as much fresh water as you want. "We remained steadfast," says Nadia. On another occasion, they were deprived of drinking water once again, only this time their captors put down a bucket of used bathwater. It tasted like soap and reeked of urine, but they had nothing else. Their captors beat them, sometimes several times in a single day, for no apparent reason. There was a man with a beard who used an electric cable, while two others preferred wooden switches. Sometimes they were also punched and kicked, and they were repeatedly sexually abused. Nadia doesn't give a literal account of these rapes. It is virtually impossible for her to talk about them, and it contravenes the conventions of her culture. She merely says: "We were taken individually to another room, to one of the men." Then she lowers her head, in silence, awash with shame. "What else could we do?" she says after a while, now speaking very quietly. She says the men were merciless. Some women threw themselves at their tormentors' feet, kissed their knees and hands, and -- eyes filled with tears -- pleaded for mercy. It was no use. The men remained unmoved. It only entertained them. Related article: Nine Days in the Caliphate: A Yazidi Woman tells (1) GENEVA, October 21 -- The clinical trials of perspective vaccines against the Ebola virus in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO) are due to begin in Switzerland by November 1, WHO Assistant Director-General Marie Paule Kieny told journalists on Tuesday.The trials are set to start in Switzerland’s Lausanne late this month or on the first day of the next month. A total of 125 volunteers are to be injected two various doses of chimpanzee-based adenovirus vaccine, she said. Clinical tests of this vaccine are already underway in the United States, the United Kingdom and Mali, in West Africa. Simultaneously, Geneva is due to carry out clinical trials of a second vaccine, containing a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus. Five various doses of the vaccine are to be tested in Geneva. The trials will also involve 125 volunteers.These tests will last for between 6 months and one year, but the first results on their safety and antigenicity will be ready in December. If the vaccine proves to be successful, it will be delivered to the West African states in January 2015. Kieny said there is yet no talk of a massive vaccination. Some 10,000 people are expected to be vaccinated, she added. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week that the Ebola epidemic was spreading geographically and the death toll exceeds 4,500, while the number of probable and suspected cases nears 9,000. HONG KONG, October 21 -- Talks are currently under way between Hong Kong officials and the leaders of the Occupy Central protest movement, which has shaken this Special Administrative Region of China, Reuters reports. The government of Hong Kong has sent Chief Secretary Carrie Lam to reason with the leaders of the student political movement. Lam has recognized the need to hear out the protesters’ demands, but noted that “no matter how high the ideals, they must strive for them through legal, appropriate and rational means,” Reuters said. For their part, the students have demanded that the government present a roadmap for the expansion of democratic options for the upcoming 2017 elections. Speaking before the press several hours before the meeting, Leung Chun Ying, the head of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, noted that a “more democratic" nominating committee for the 2017 elections is possible, noting that “there’s room for discussion there,” according to Reuters. Leung also noted that the Region’s security forces would not use force to remove protesters while negotiations continued, and that he has not had any “instructions” from Beijing in this regard. The talks follow several weeks of protests and clashes which have left dozens injured over the weekend, including 22 police officers. The Occupy Central with Love and Peace protests began on September 27 when demonstrators spoke out against the Chinese government's plans to screen candidates ahead of the 2017 election. Protestors are not happy about the 1,200 person nominating committee approving candidates via a majority vote, which they decry as “fake” democracy. The protesters claim that Beijing has gone back on its promise of more autonomy to the region, which was handed back to China from Britain in 1997. MOSCOW, October 21 -- Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent a telegram to his French counterpart Francois Hollande expressing condolences over the death of Total’s CEO and crew members in a plane crash in Moscow, the Kremlin press service said on Tuesday. “I am shocked by the report of an air crash at the Moscow Vnukovo airport, which has led to the death of the chairman of the board of directors and the president of the Total oil concern, Christophe de Margerie, and the crew members,” Putin said in the telegram. “I ask you to convey the most sincere condolences and regrets to the relatives and friends of Christophe de Margerie, a distinguished French businessman who stood at the origins of the major joint projects which have laid the basis for the fruitful cooperation between Russia and France in the energy sphere for many years,” the telegram reads. The president’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said Putin knew Margerie and maintained close working contacts with him. The president highly valued Margerie’s business qualities and his consistent commitment to the development of Russian-French relations and mutually beneficial cooperation on the whole, Peskov said.Moscow also highly valued Margerie’s contribution to the development of the cultural dialogue and his support for various cultural projects, the press secretary said. TOKYO, October 21 -- Installation of a new missile defence radar began at a US military base in the Japanese city of Kyotango on the coast of the Sea of Japan on Tuesday. Such early warning systems are deployed in Japan to warn first of all about missile launches from North Korea and may be used to monitor launches from Russia and China. The radar will begin operating this year. It will detect launches and distinguish real from false warheads at a range of more than 4,000 km. Another American mobile radar of such a type has been already operating in the prefecture of Aomori in northern Japan since 2006. OTTAWA, October 22 -- Terrorism threat level raised as suspect in incident which killed one soldier is identified as a young convert to Islam. A young Canadian convert to Islam who killed a soldier in a hit-and-run incident had been on the radar of federal investigators, who feared he had jihadist ambitions and had seized his passport, according to federal authorities. The suspect was shot by police after a chase in the Quebec city of Saint-Jean-Sur-Richelieu. A second soldier suffered minor injuries in Monday's attack. Steven Blaney, Canada's public safety minister, said on Tuesday the attack was "clearly linked to terrorist ideology". Guy Lapointe, Quebec Police spokesman, said the act was deliberate and that one of the two soldiers was in uniform. He said there were no other suspects at this time. An official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly about the case identified the suspect as Martin Couture-Rouleau, 25. The suspect was known to authorities and recently had his passport seized, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Bob Paulson said. He was one of 90 suspected people in the country who intend to join battles abroad or who have returned from overseas.However, it was not known whether the suspect had any ties to armed groups. "He was part of our investigative efforts to try and identify those people who might commit a criminal act travelling abroad for terrorist purposes," Paulson said. A Quebec business data base shows Couture-Rouleau started a water-pressure cleaning company in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu in 2012 with two other people. OTTAWA, October 21-- Prime minister's office says 25-year-old killed by Quebec police after car chase outside Montreal was "radicalised". A man who was shot and killed by police in Quebec after he struck two members of the Canadian military with his car had become radicalised, according to senior officials. Quebec police shot the man after two members of the military were struck by the motorist in a parking-lot mall near Montreal on Monday. The 25-year-old man from Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu died a few hours after being shot. Lieutenant Michel Brunet of the Quebec provincial police said earlier that police ended up shooting the man after a car chase in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, southeast of Montreal. After the man hit the two soldiers with his vehicle in the parking-lot mall, he fled in his vehicle, prompting a police chase that ended with the man losing control and his car rolling over several times. Brunet said the man exited the car and was shot. He said they found a knife on the ground but he could not say if he had the knife in his hand when police fired their weapons. Police said one of the soldiers was seriously injured, while the other's injuries are less serious. Brunet said he did not know if the soldiers were wearing uniforms at the time they were struck. Harper briefed Jason MacDonald, a spokesman for the Canadian prime minister, said Stephen Harper was briefed on Monday about the incident by the head of Canada's national police force, the head of the military and his national security adviser. The "federal authorities have confirmed that there are clear indications that the individual had become radicalised", MacDonald said. He said the suspect was known to domestic anti-terrorist police. Both police and Harper's office declined to provide further details, citing the investigation. Harper said earlier on Monday in parliament that he was aware of the reports and called them "extremely troubling". "First and foremost our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families; we're closely monitoring the situation and obviously we will make available all of the resources of the federal government," Harper said. The Islamic State (ISIS) group has urged supporters to carry out attacks against Western countries, including Canada, that are participating in the US-led coalition battling the fighters who have taken over large expanses of territory in Iraq and Syria. It was not known whether the suspect in the Quebec attack had any ties to armed groups. |
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