Ukraine forces, rebels largely suspend hostilities

December 09, 2014

DONETSK, Ukraine (AP) — Government troops and Russian-backed separatists largely suspended hostilities in east Ukraine on Tuesday, raising hopes of a lasting peaceful settlement in a conflict that has raged for seven months and claimed thousands of lives.

The lull in fighting followed a proposal by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to hold a "day of silence" as a bid to revive a largely ignored cease-fire deal reached in September. The war has left more than 4,300 people dead, displaced hundreds of thousands and exhausted a nation struggling to stave off economic collapse.

As Ukraine enters its long winter, when temperatures can drop below freezing for days if not weeks on end, combat fatigue is showing on both sides. Separatist rebel leaders have supported the truce, which appeared to be holding around the main rebel-held cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Despite a noticeable decrease in the level of shelling, the military press office said Tuesday evening said there had been 13 attacks on army positions and residential areas in government-controlled settlements.

"Ukrainian troops, behaving with honor and restraint, didn't open fire in return," according to a statement. Earlier, a military spokesman said attacks had been mounted in areas around Debaltseve, a town 70 kilometers (45 miles) east of Donetsk that has been the scene of some of the heaviest shelling as separatists attempt to squeeze out government forces ensconced there.

Rebel authorities said they recorded no rocket attacks by government troops, but that they were engaged with small arms fire. Viktor Muzhenko, chief of Ukraine's General Staff, said the truce that began Tuesday was open-ended and that no end date had been set. Military authorities have indicated that the cessation of hostilities is being seen as a confidence-building exercise and that heavy weaponry could be pulled back from the front if fighting stop for several days.

Intense shelling continued right up until the eve of the cutoff period for hostilities, killing four people and wounding 10 others. Local authorities said 20 residential buildings were damaged in rebel-controlled Donetsk.

At one shattered house in Donetsk, the mother and daughter of a man killed in the shelling were still reeling from the events of the previous day. "He was 47 years old. He was so hard working, such a good father, a good husband and good son," said Anna Frolova, the man's mother. "How are they going to live without him? What are they going to do now?"

Poroshenko's office earlier this week announced new peace talks involving Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to be held Tuesday in the Belarusian capital, Minsk. Vasiliy Vovk, head of the Ukrainian security services' investigative department, said Monday night that the talks had been pushed back to Friday.

Ukrainian military officials said Tuesday evening, however, that they were uncertain when negotiations would take place. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov struck a conciliatory note earlier in the day, suggesting that Moscow could support the return of separatist areas into Ukraine's fold. Lavrov told state news agency RIA-Novosti that rebels were ready "to restore a common economic, humanitarian and political space" with Ukraine.

Peter Leonard reported from Kiev. Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report.

Monaco's Princess Charlene gives birth to twins

December 10, 2014

MONACO (AP) — For the first time since Monaco was founded in the 13th century, its royal family gave birth to twins on Wednesday, and dozens of cannons were fired to celebrate.

Monaco's Princess Charlene had a girl first and a boy second, but the boy will be the principality's future ruler, reflecting the male priority of Monaco's laws of succession. The royal twins Gabriella Therese Marie and Jacques Honore Rainier — born to Charlene, 36, and Prince Albert II, 56 — are heirs to the centuries-old Grimaldi dynasty that rules the wealthy principality.

Gabriella was born at 5:04 p.m. (1604 GMT) and her brother Jacques two minutes later, according to a palace statement. Monaco is a two-square kilometer (0.8 square mile) enclave of ritzy apartments and luxury shops on the French Riviera with a population of around 30,000.

Albert, son of the late American actress Princess Grace, had some subjects worried by his long bachelorhood and his lack of an heir since his two previous children were born out of wedlock and are not eligible for the throne. Then the prince married Charlene Wittstock, a Zimbabwe-born, South Africa-raised former Olympic swimmer, in 2011.

Now the tiny royal state on the Riviera has two reasons to rejoice. "This is going to create an immense joy. Immense!" said Monaco resident Isabelle Roux. "They are awaited like the messiah. ... Everyone is talking only about that."

"Two babies for the price of one. I think it's very good for the image," said Adelaide de Clermont-Tonnerre, editor-in-chief of the celebrity weekly Point de Vue. "With twins, there's always an extra interest."

Only one woman has ever reigned over Monaco, Princess Louise-Hippolyte, but she died months after assuming the throne in 1731. In 2002, with no heirs in sight, Monaco's parliament quietly changed its constitution to allow royal power to pass from a reigning prince with no descendants to his siblings — potentially Albert's two sisters. That ensured the continuation of the Grimaldi dynasty, one of the oldest royal houses in Europe, even if Albert never produced an heir.

By palace decree 42 cannon shots were fired to announce Wednesday's births, instead of the 21 that would boom for a single baby. Charlene's pregnancy was announced on May 30, and it was later revealed in September that she was expecting not one, but two new heirs to the crown.

Though these are the princely couple's first children, Albert has had several children with different women out of wedlock. He has publicly recognized two other children. Other dynasties have produced royal twins.

The crown prince and crown princess of Denmarkbecame the parents of royal twins in 2011 — a boy and a girl. The boy, Prince Vincent, is fourth in the line of succession, ahead of sister Princess Josephine, but only because he emerged from the womb first.

Ganley reported from Paris. AP medical writer Maria Cheng in London, and Thomas Adamson and Bastien Inzaurralde in Paris contributed to this report.

UK, Irish premiers to join Belfast peace talks

December 11, 2014

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) — The British and Irish prime ministers, David Cameron and Enda Kenny, are traveling to Belfast to oversee multi-party negotiations on saving Northern Ireland's power-sharing government, a peacemaking alliance at risk of collapse.

Cameron says their arrival later Thursday signals that nine weeks of negotiations "have reached a crucial phase." The British leader says both premiers will push to persuade rival parties to sustain power-sharing between the Protestant majority and Catholic minority, the central achievement of the 1998 Good Friday accord.

Over the past year the two principal parties, the Irish Catholics of Sinn Fein and British Protestants of the Democratic Unionist Party, have taken opposite sides in a growing list of political, financial and cultural disputes. They have made Christmas Eve an informal deadline for a deal or defeat.

Crimea annexation upends lives of Tatar minority

December 09, 2014

SARY-SU, Crimea (AP) — Since Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, armed men have shown up frequently and at odd hours to search the cinder-block houses, mosque and school in this settlement of Crimean Tatars, a Muslim ethnic minority that has long suffered from discrimination in the peninsula that is its historic homeland.

The worst shock came in September, when two men in the town of 3,000 were abducted. Now the community of Sary-Su "is trembling with fear," said Rebiya Setarova, an 80-year-old Tatar as she tottered anxiously across a dirt road to check on her son and grandchildren ahead of Friday prayers. "Now I worry for the fate of my son. Everybody worries about the children."

Police have made no arrests, and the kidnappers' identities remain a mystery. But Setarova has no doubts about who is responsible: "This is what we get when Russia comes to Crimea." The fears and uncertainties of people in Sary-Su sum up how life has been upended for the 300,000-strong Crimean Tatar community. Deported en masse to Central Asia by the Soviets 70 years ago, they began returning to Crimea in the 1980s to rebuild their lives in an independent Ukraine.

Russia's annexation in March, which many Tatars vocally opposed, overturned their world. Since then, the Tatars' self-ruling body, the Mejlis, has been disbanded by Russian authorities, its highest-ranking leaders barred from re-entering Crimea and dozens of impromptu searches for narcotics, weapons and banned literature conducted in Tatar neighborhoods across the region.

Human-rights experts say that Russia is punishing them for speaking out against annexation. "For their openly critical position, the authorities have been cracking down on dissent," said Yulia Gorbunova, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

It was a warm September evening in Sary-Su when Abdureshit Dzhepparov's 18-year-old son, Islyam, served him Turkish coffee and left the house. A half hour later, neighbors were on the phone: They had seen Islyam, along with his 23-year-old cousin, frisked and forced into a dark blue Volkswagen van by men dressed in black.

The van sped away. Neither of the kidnapped men has been seen since. "When these things happen, you can't even make plans — every night, if your children are out ... as a parent you can't sleep until they get home," said Dzhepparov, who also has a daughter in high school.

Elsewhere in Crimea, at least seven other Tatars have vanished since March, including three who had been active in demonstrations calling for the region to remain part of Ukraine. Two of the abducted were later found dead. The others are missing.

Police have opened investigations into the disappearances. And Sergei Aksyonov, Crimea's leader, has attempted to reassure the Tatars that their community is being treated fairly. "We have respect for people of any faith or confession, and I can guarantee that there will be no infringements based on nationality on Crimean territory," Aksyonov told The Associated Press in an interview.

That statement and a visit by Aksyonov to the Sary-Su area have done little to reassure Dzhepparov. He said he does not understand why action was not taken faster, especially since witnesses jotted down the license plate number of the van used by his son's captors.

"With the capabilities they have, they could have blocked off all of Crimea, all the roads, and stopped and checked every Volkswagen van," Dzhepparov said. "So now I've started to think: Who in actual fact did this?"

Such questions have reverberated in Sary-Su, where residents are worried that the new lives they built from scratch in Crimea could quickly unravel. This settlement by a creek — the name means "Yellow Water" in the Tatar language — sprang up in the 1990s, when families returning from exile occupied empty fields and built their homes.

Most people here do not legally own their houses or the plots they were built on and cannot afford to return to ancestral Crimean Tatar cities or villages now populated by ethnic Russians or others. That feeling of vulnerability has only been reinforced in recent months, as Sary-Su became one of the targets of "dozens of very intrusive and in some cases unwarranted searches" of Tatar homes throughout Crimea, according to Gorbunova.

The pro-Moscow authorities say the searches were intended to look for drugs, guns and literature banned by Russian law. Human Rights Watch noted that many searches, sometimes conducted in the middle of the night, involved dozens of masked men with guns.

On the same street where Dzhapparov lives, Setarova's son had his house searched in September by men claiming to be from the prosecutor's office. Unlike his mother, Akhseid Dzhedzhekov is determined to remain calm and face the new facts of life in Crimea with quiet resolve. He said the men took nothing, and he has not heard from them since.

"You can't stare down a tank," said the 40-year-old builder. "So today, our strategy is patience. We know that God is with us." Sary-Su's mosque was searched in August when children were attending religion classes. That same month, at nearby School No. 4, armed men burst into the empty classroom of Asiye Abduvelieva, who teaches Tatar language and culture. They seized dozens of books. The instructor was later found guilty of violating Russia's strict law against the spread of religious extremism, and fined 1,000 rubles ($22).

"I have been working for 33 years and suddenly at the end of the career I have a court conviction against me," the 54-year old educator with a bouffant hairdo said with indignation, clacking around the classroom in her black leather stiletto heels. "When (we were) in Ukraine, I always won all the teaching awards."

Abduvelieva's conviction was annulled on appeal, and the fine dropped. But the sting remains — not just for her but for many in Sary-Su outraged that a well-loved and long-honored local teacher could be treated like a criminal.

In October, when Aksyonov met with Dzhepparov in the nearby city of Belogorsk, hundreds of angry Sary-Su residents massed to vent their outrage over the kidnappings and official actions toward the Crimean Tatars. Footage of the protests was captured by ATR, a Tatar television station and other news outlets.

"There were snipers on the roofs, the entire city was surrounded by troops," said Dzhepparov, who said he was nervous the enraged crowd might get out of hand. "If something had suddenly gone wrong, it would have been a catastrophe."

Such fears seem well-founded: Tatar protests occurred frequently and peacefully under Ukrainian rule, but since Russian annexation, they have sometimes ended in confrontations with ethnic Russians or police.

In May, hundreds of Crimean Tatars defied authorities and broke through a border checkpoint to greet their leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, who had been banned from entering Crimea. Forty-nine people were charged with minor administrative violations, such as engaging in an unsanctioned protest or crossing the border illegally. More serious charges of injuring a government official — which can carry a prison term of 10 years — were later brought against three people.

Defense lawyers said the case could end up ensnaring dozens more and voiced concern about the wider implications of official policy and actions for the Crimean Tatars. "Ukrainian authorities were diplomatic and allowed the steam to be let out of the valve," said attorney Dzhemil Kemishev. "People came out and protested, talked about the things that were worrying them, and things ended there.

"But when you're being told not to do that, it's like when you don't lift the lid off a pot of boiling water: Sooner or later it will explode."

Dahlburg reported from Kiev, Ukraine.

Brazil panel details military regime's brutality

December 11, 2014

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil took its most significant step yet to address the human rights violations of its military dictatorship on Wednesday, releasing an exhaustive report that documents nearly two decades of government-approved political killings and torture.

After 30 years of impunity for crimes of the state, the National Truth Commission report names 377 people allegedly responsible for 434 deaths and disappearances, and thousands of acts of torture. The list includes top regime figures who instituted policies of persecution, and lowly soldiers who carried them out.

The nearly 2,000-page report describes crimes against humanity in excruciating detail, and calls for the perpetrators to be prosecuted. But while the commission's work has renewed debate on how Brazil has handled its dirty-war legacy, there's little political will for overturning a 1979 amnesty law that has protected both military figures and leftists ever since the 1964-1985 dictatorship. Only 46 percent of Brazilians said they want to scrap the amnesty, while 37 percent supported it and another 17 percent said they were unsure in a survey published in March by the respected Datafolha polling group.

Even President Dilma Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who was savagely tortured in the 1970s, seems unwilling to push for prosecutions. "Truth doesn't mean vengeance. Truth mustn't be the source of hatred or score-settling," Rousseff said in an emotional ceremony as the report was made public. "Truth frees us all from that which went unsaid. It frees us from what remained hidden."

"We, who believe in the truth, hope that this report contributes to make it so that ghosts from the sad and painful past are no longer able to find shelter in silence and omission," she said, pausing several times to stave off tears as the audience in the capital of Brasilia rose in a standing ovation.

Created by Congress in 2011, the seven-member commission researched government and corporate archives and hospital and morgue records. Commissioners conducted more than 1,200 interviews with victims, their families and their alleged perpetrators. The panel consulted with religious leaders, and visited the military installations where "subversives" including students, labor unionists, factory workers, farm workers, indigenous tribes people, gays and others were tortured and killed.

In all, the report documents 224 killings and 210 disappearances. These were not rare exceptions, but rather the result of a "systematic practice" by the military, it said. "Repression and the elimination of political opposition became the policy of the state," the report said. The commission "therefore totally rejects the explanation offered up till today that the serious violations of human rights constituted a few isolated acts or excesses resulting from the zeal of a few soldiers."

The report does not examine crimes committed by leftists during Brazil's dictatorship era. This nearly three-year effort is the most thorough accounting to date of the crimes of the military regime, and provides a new official death toll, but its authors said continuing resistance from the military left an unknown number of victims unaccounted for.

"These numbers certainly don't correspond to the total of deaths and disappearances," the report cautioned, "but only to cases it was possible to prove." The document weaves together a detailed, harrowing, almost blow-by-blow narrative of the victims' ordeals.

Rousseff, who was one of the leaders of an armed militant group but has denied participating in any violence before her arrest at age 22, was among those interviewed, a rarity for a politician who has generally avoided talking about her experience.

In the report, Rousseff details torture she underwent in detention, including taking such hard punches to the face that many of her teeth were knocked out, causing her jaw problems to this day. She also was subjected to electrical shocks, beatings and long hours in the "macaw's perch" stress position, which kept her hanging upside down, her arms and legs strapped to a wooden pole.

It was physical agony, but detainees suffered even more damaging psychological impacts, she said. "None of us can explain the lasting damages — we'll just always be different," said Rousseff. "I was held for three years. The stress was fierce. ... I faced death and loneliness," she said. "There is something to it that will mark us for life. The scars of torture are part of me."

Brazil's neighbors are decades ahead in addressing human rights violations from South America's dictatorship era. Argentina did away with its amnesty and generated a broad consensus around prosecuting those responsible. Uruguay still has laws protecting both sides in its dirty war, but has found ways of prosecuting some military figures nonetheless. Chile has sentenced hundreds to harsh prison sentences.

Three bills in Congress would loosen or undo the amnesty, and the left wing of the ruling coalition supports them, but Rousseff has never suggested changing the law, and without high-level Workers' Party backing, their approval is unlikely.

Brazil's Supreme Court also considers the question closed. Hours after the report's release Justice Marco Aurelio Mello told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper the court will not revisit its 2010 decision upholding the amnesty law's constitutionality.

"We need to get it through our heads that amnesty is forgetting, turning the page, pardoning in every sense of the word — and for both sides," Mello said. "We're going to fix Brazil for the future, not for the past."

That's not enough for Fatima Oliveira Setubal. The 61-year-old teacher, twice detained and tortured while working with the poor in a Rio de Janeiro church, called the report a "historic and important step," but yearns for more.

"We need to keep fighting," said Setubal, whose two brothers were killed under the dictatorship. "We cannot stop if there is no punishment of the crimes, no trial for the torturers."

Contributors include Brad Brooks and Yesica Fisch in Rio de Janeiro and Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo.

Two Israeli parties join forces against Netanyahu

December 10, 2014

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's opposition Labor party said Wednesday it is joining forces with a former government partner in a bid to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the country's coming elections.

Labor leader Isaac Herzog announced the alliance with Tzipi Livni of the Hatnuah party amid a hard-hitting critique of Netanyahu's free-market, pro-settler policies, which have seen increasing Israeli economic inequality and a breakdown of the peace process with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

"Six years of Netanyahu and there are still no answers," Herzog said. "The time for change is now." Standing side-by-side with Livni under a banner proclaiming "Together We Win," Herzog said that if he and the Hatnuah leader formed the next government, they would rotate as prime minister — Herzog for the first two years, Livini for the second two years.

Opinion polls give the joint Herzog-Livni list about 24 seats in the 120-seat Knesset — slightly more than their current total. That's two or three more seats than polls give Netanyahu, though he retains the option of joining forces with the nationalist Jewish Home Party. That would give him a bloc of 35-40 seats — probably enough to be asked by Israel's president to try to form the next government.

Former Likud lawmaker Moshe Kahlon remains a potential kingmaker in any coalition-building scenario. Known for his combination of egalitarian economics and a relatively hard line with the Palestinians, he has so far given few indications of which bloc he prefers — Netanyahu's or Herzog's.

The elections are set for March 17.

Putin hopes to expand ties with India

December 09, 2014

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin has voiced hope for expanding ties with India during his visit there and sought to assuage New Delhi's concern about Moscow's ties with Pakistan.

Putin, speaking in an interview with the PTI news agency released by the Kremlin on Tuesday, hailed a "privileged strategic partnership" between Russia and India, and said the two nations would move to expand it further during his Thursday's visit to New Delhi.

He praised Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a "reputable political leader, who has already made a significant personal contribution to the promotion of the Russian-Indian cooperation." Russia and India have shared close ties since the Cold War, when Moscow was a key ally and the main arms supplier to New Delhi.

Putin has sought to reinvigorate relations with old allies as part of his efforts to restore Moscow's global clout, and India has remained a top customer for Russian weapons industries. Putin said in the interview that military ties remain a key part of Russian-Indian cooperation and pointed at programs to jointly develop supersonic cruise missiles and a next generation fighter jet.

"The high level of bilateral cooperation and trust allows us to start a gradual transition from the traditional producer-consumer model to joint development and production of advanced weapons systems," he said.

Putin voiced hope that energy cooperation will also expand, saying that Moscow would welcome Indian energy companies to tap prospective oilfields in the Arctic. Russia plans to start supplies of liquefied natural gas to India starting in 2017, he said.

Putin also sought to soothe New Delhi's concerns about Moscow's intention to develop military-technical ties with India's rival Pakistan, saying that Russia's cooperation with Pakistan is focusing on cooperation in fighting terrorism and drugs.

"This kind of cooperation serves the long-term interests of all countries of the region, including India," he said.