Category: news

The head of the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah has urged his countrymen to boycott the UN tribunal into the 2005 killing of former PM Rafik Hariri.

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah accused the investigators of sending information to Israel.

He had previously described the tribunal as part of an Israeli plot against Hezbollah.

The tribunal has not yet said who will be indicted.

“I call on every Lebanese official and every citizen to boycott these investigators and not to co-operate with them,” said the Hezbollah chief.

“All the information and data and addresses (they get) is sent to Israel.”

“From now on, any co-operation with the international investigators will be (considered as) helping them to attack [Hezbollah],” he added, in a video-linked speech broadcast on Hezbollah’s al-Manar television channel.

His comments came a day after two tribunal investigators were attacked by a group of angry women at a gynaecology clinic in a Hezbollah-controlled suburb of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut.

Meanwhile the US ambassador to the UN accused Hezbollah and its allies, Syria and Iran, of endangering Lebanon’s stability and independence.

“Syria especially has displayed flagrant disregard for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity and political independence of Lebanon,” said Susan Rice after the UN Security Council held closed-door discussions on Lebanon.

She accused Syria of arming Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah, with increasingly sophisticated weapons. Syria rejected the allegations.

The special international tribunal into Hariri’s assassination was set up under UN auspices to investigate the massive bomb explosion hit the magnate’s motorcade in Beirut in February 2005, killing the former prime minister and 22 others.

At the time, many Lebanese blamed Syria, an ally of Hezbollah. Damascus denied the accusation but eventually the killing led to the withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon after a military occupation of 29 years.

Mr Nasrallah has been accused of trying to pre-empt a UN report that is expected to implicate Hezbollah in the killing.

In August, he said he had evidence of Israeli involvement in the murder, including footage from Israeli spy planes of routes used by Mr Hariri.

But he said he would not hand the material to the investigating tribunal, saying he did not trust it.

The previous month, he said he had been told investigators would indict individuals from Hezbollah in the Hariri assassination, describing the tribunal as part of an Israeli plot against Hezbollah.

Last April, four Lebanese generals accused of Mr Hariri’s murder were released from custody because the evidence against them was deemed to be insufficient.

In 2008, 100 people died in clashes between Hezbollah and supporters of Rafik Hariri’s son Saad, now Lebanon’s prime minister.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Ten EU countries have rallied behind the UK’s call to limit an increase in the 2011 EU budget to 2.9% – well below the rise that Euro MPs called for.

France and Germany are among the group backing UK Prime Minister David Cameron on the budget.

The issue was not formally on the agenda at the Brussels summit, but Mr Cameron insisted that the EU should set an example of budget prudence.

Tough talks lie ahead with the European Parliament, which wants a 5.9% rise.

The European Commission – the EU’s executive arm – is on the parliament’s side in calling for 5.9%.

If no compromise is reached by a mid-November deadline the budget will remain frozen at the 2010 figure. A freeze was what Mr Cameron was originally calling for, but other EU leaders refused to back the idea.

In a letter to the European Council President, Herman Van Rompuy, the 11 leaders say the budget proposals from the Commission and the parliament “are especially unacceptable at a time when we are having to take difficult decisions at national level to control public expenditure”.

They say they cannot accept any more than 2.9% – the increase agreed earlier this year by the Council.

That rise would still cost UK taxpayers an estimated £435m (nearly 500m euros).

The main focus of the summit talks on Thursday was a plan to tighten EU budget surveillance, to prevent any future debt crisis like the one which triggered an emergency bail-out for Greece in May.

EU leaders backed a report by a European Council task force on measures to strengthen economic governance in the EU.

But the leaders remained divided over whether an EU treaty change would be needed to make a crisis mechanism legally watertight.

An array of sanctions is envisaged, including fines and even stripping a country of its EU voting rights if it persistently overshoots the agreed limits for budget deficits and public debt.

The EU created an emergency 440bn-euro (£386bn; $612bn) fund called the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) to protect any EU member states vulnerable to Greek-style liquidity problems.

But the EFSF only runs until 2013, so France and Germany are arguing for a permanent shield to protect the eurozone.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that requires a treaty change because the Lisbon Treaty does not allow any country to be bailed out by other member states.

She also wants more clarity and legal certainty on the emergency funding arrangements, so that in future the banks take some of the burden off taxpayers for any bail-out.

But several other EU leaders signalled that there was little appetite for rewriting the Lisbon Treaty, which was only adopted after eight years of tortuous negotiations.

The BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says a revision of Lisbon would create major domestic political problems in many EU states, with referendums or embarrassing parliamentary votes.

The likely outcome is that Mr Van Rompuy will be sent away to explore how some kind of compromise might be stitched together, our correspondent says.

The permanent crisis mechanism is intended to prevent contagion spreading among eurozone economies should there be another major debt crisis in one of the weaker members.

The UK says a mechanism to ensure stability in the eurozone is desirable – and that the planned sanctions would not apply to the UK. But all 27 member states’ budgets will come under close scrutiny in a “peer review” process.

There would be progressive sanctions on countries which overshot the maximum debt level allowed under the EU’s Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), which is 60% of GDP.

Sanctions would kick in earlier than is the case under the current SGP, enabling the EU to take preventive action for example against a country with an unsustainable housing bubble or with unsustainable debt that undermines its competitiveness.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The firms drilling a BP Gulf of Mexico oil well had tests showing cement used to seal it before it blew out was unstable, US investigators have found.

The findings conflict with statements by US oil contractor Halliburton, which supplied the cement and has said tests showed it was stable.

But a presidential panel on the disaster found that three tests prior to the blowout showed the opposite.

The 20 April rig explosion killed 11 workers and caused a massive oil leak.