Geneva—Ma’an - After listening to about 20
states and 30 nongovernmental organizations, the
UN Human Rights Council on Friday adopted the
resolution submitted by Palestine by a vote of
25 to six, with 11 abstentions. The council is
made up of 47 members and requires a majority of
votes to pass a resolution. The Palestinian
envoy to Geneva, Ibrahim Kraishi, had demanded
the UN body pursue criminals “wherever they are
and whoever they are.” “The occupying power
wants to make it look like it’s doing the right
thing,” he said. “It wants the international
community to look as if it’s mistaken. But it’s
not logical. It’s not possible for everybody to
be wrong at the expense of one power.”
Washington—A
fraud probe into Afghan elections has trimmed
President Hamid Karzai’s vote share to just 47
percent, a report said on Friday, while a senior
aide conceded a second round could be in the
offing. The much-awaited tally by the UN-backed
Electoral Complaints Commission will trigger a
run-off between Karzai and his nearest
competitor, former foreign min-ister Abdullah
Abdullah, because Karzai’s portion of the August
20 vote was low-ered to below 50 percent, The
Washington Post reported.
ALMOST everyone in a dispute hopes to find an
honest broker to mediate their differences. The
controversy over the Goldstone Report on Gaza
and the active role of Turkey’s prime minister
therein has raised a collateral issue, which is
the US role as a go-between or broker in the
Middle East. So let’s look at the prospect that
the US can be such a broker, either alone or in
tandem with Tur-key, which has been actively
involved in the area. No one can be a broker
when beholden utterly to one side, and while US
President Barack Obama sounds much better than
George W. Bush (he could scarcely sound worse),
and is better in some areas, where Israel is
concerned he is all talk and no action - except
where supporting Israel is concerned, where his
words and deeds go hand in hand.
Harare—Zimbabwe’s prime
minister announced he was boycotting the
country’s troubled unity government Friday,
citing the “persecution” of a top aide being
tried on what are widely seen as trumped up coup
allegations. At a news conference Friday,
longtime opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai
said, “We are not really pulling out
officially,” but that his party would not attend
Cabinet meetings or engage in other executive
work with President Robert Mug-abe’s ZANU-PF
party. Tsvangirai said his Movement for
Democratic Change party would continue
parliament activities.
Cilegon—A powerful 6.4-magnitude
earthquake struck off Indo-nesia’s Java island
on Friday, shaking office buildings in Jakarta
and sparking panic closer to the epicentre,
officials said. The quake struck off the coast
near Ujung Kulon, about 260 kilometres (162
miles) west of the capital Jakarta, but there
were no immediate reports of dam-age or
injuries, Indonesian officials said.
