Syria 'moving chemical weapons to safety' - Panetta

Syria 'moving chemical weapons to safety' - Panetta

Fierce fighting is continuing in Aleppo

The Syrian government has moved some of its chemical weapons to safety as it battles rebel forces, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta says.

He said there was intelligence that there had been "limited movement" to secure the chemicals, but that "the major sites still remain in place".
Syria has admitted to having a large stockpile of chemical weapons.
US President Barack Obama has warned Damascus it would be held accountable if it uses them.
Mr Panetta told a news conference at the Pentagon on Friday: "We continue to have a concern about the security of the CBW (chemical and biological weapons) sites."
But he said the major sites "still remain secured by the Syrian military".
Mr Panetta added: "There has been some intelligence that with regards to some of these sites that there has been some movement in order for the Syrians to better secure... the chemicals."

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Kenyan forces surround Somali rebel bastion

Kenyan forces surround Somali rebel bastion

Kenyan troops surround port city of Kismayo, last rebel stronghold of al-Shabab fighters.

Al-Shabab was driven out of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, last August [EPA]

Kenyan and Somali troops have captured Somalia's southern port city of Kismayo, the last bastion of al-Shabab fighters, Kenya's military spokesman has said.

"[Report that] Kismayo fell today to KDF [Kenyan Defence Forces] and TFG [Somali government troops] forces is indeed very true," Cyrus Oguna, military spokesman, told Kenya's Citizen television.

Oguna said that the troops had entered Kismayo early on Friday.

Al Jazeera's Catherine Soi, reporting from Nairobi, said Kenyan forces faced "minimum resistance [but] have not yet taken the whole of Kismayo".

Residents said they could hear fighting near the beach, four kilometres outside the city.There have not yet been any reports of casualties in the operation which has seen the group surrounded from three sides.

"Now we hear shelling from the ships and the [rebels] are responding with anti-aircraft guns,"

Syrian refugees could 'double by year end'

Syrian refugees could 'double by year end'

UN refugee agency says numbers could reach 700,000 by end of 2012, as it appeals for more humanitarian aid.

The UN estimates there are around 300,000 refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq [Reuters]

The UN High Commission for Refugees has warned the number of Syrians fleeing to neighbouring countries could reach more than double the current number of 300,000 by the end of the year.

"There may be up to 700,000 Syrian refugees in neigbouring countries by the end of the year," Panos Moumtzsis, the UNHCR's chief co-ordinator for Syrian refugees, told reporters in Geneva on Thursday.

"We are running out of time," he added.

Faced with the soaring need for aid, humanitarian agencies upped

Former Israeli PM Olmert fined in breach of trust case

Israel’s former premier Ehud Olmert received a suspended jail sentence and more than $19,000 in fines for breach of trust Monday. Olmert faces separate bribery charges related to a controversial housing project while he was mayor of Jerusalem.

An Israeli court spared former prime minister Ehud Olmert a prison term over a conviction for breach of trust on Monday, potentially paving his way to a political comeback.
Dogged by corruption scandals as he tried to forge a peace deal with the Palestinians, Olmert resigned in 2008. Though found guilty in July of cronyism while in a former cabinet post, he was acquitted of more serious bribery charges.
Jerusalem District Court handed Olmert a suspended one-year jail sentence and a 75,300-shekel ($19,225) fine. Had he been put behind bars, the 66-year-old centrist politician might have been prevented from returning to public office.
“I leave court today walking tall,” Olmert told reporters, without elaborating on his plans.
After his conviction, Olmert, who denied all wrongoing, said he had no intention of reentering politics. The party he once led, Kadima, now heads the opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist Likud.
A comeback would likely depend on the outcome of a separate bribery case over Olmert’s role, as Jerusalem mayor from 1993 to 2003, in a controversial housing project.
“This is not over,” deputy Israeli state prosecutor Eli Abravanel said after Monday’s sentencing.

Netanyahu urges UN to draw ‘red line’ for nuclear Iran

© AFP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN Thursday that a “red line” should be drawn to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb. He also hit back at the Palestinian President’s earlier comments on settlements as “ethnic cleansing”.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew his “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program on Thursday - the point at which Iran has amassed nearly enough highly enriched uranium for a single atomic bomb - and voiced confidence that the United States shares his view.
Addressing the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu appeared to pull back from any threat of an imminent Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, saying the Islamic Republic would be on the brink of producing an atomic weapon only next summer.
He added that he was confident the United States and Israel, which have disagreed about the urgency of military action, could devise a common strategy to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
Holding up a cartoon-like drawing of a bomb with a fuse, Netanyahu literally drew a red line just below a label reading “final stage” to a bomb, in which it was 90 percent along the path of having sufficient weapons-grade material.
“A red line should be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb, before Iran gets to a point where it is a few months or a few weeks away from amassing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon,” he said.
“Each day that point is getting closer, and that is why I speak today with such a sense of urgency, and that is why everyone should have a sense of urgency.”
Netanyahu added that “the red line must be drawn on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program because these enrichment facilities are the only nuclear installations that we can definitely see and credibly target.”
“I believe that faced with a clear red line, Iran will back down. And this will give more time for sanctions and diplomacy to convince Iran to dismantle its nuclear weapons program all together,” he added.
Netanyahu was referring to Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 20 percent purity, a level it says is required for medical isotopes but which also brings it close to bomb-fuel grade.

Syrian internally displaced languish in squalor at Turkey's border

By Ivan Watson, CNN

updated 7:39 AM EDT, Thu September 27, 2012

Fleeing Syrians trapped In squalor

Northern Syria (CNN) -- On the northern edge of this war-torn country, barely a hundred meters from the Turkish border, thousands of desperate Syrians slept in the dirt.

They were hard to spot at first, hidden among ancient olive groves.

But as the sun rose, bodies stirred beneath their filthy blankets, next to pitiable shelters of plastic sheets strung up between olive trees.

Children began scavenging in surrounding fields for twigs to use for cooking fires. Women lined up next to a water tank pumping milky, chalky water presumed to have given many residents of this make-shift camp diarrhea.

A month ago, there was no camp here.

But now rebels from a local Free Syrian Army group that slept in a tent with the words "police office" spray-painted on it estimated there were between 5,500 and 6,000 people living here, with more arriving every day.

More: War marks highest daily death toll

"I came here because my house was destroyed," said Youssef Dabul, an English-speaking 30-year-old man who said he used to manage a KFC restaurant in Aleppo.

"I never imagined in all my life to come here and live under the olive trees."

Many of the residents told similar stories of rockets and air-strikes pummeling their villages and towns, forcing them to flee their homes.

Ousama Hamdou sat on a plastic mat under an olive tree holding his 2-year-old daughter Maram. Long, wide scars stretched across her chest, still pink from the explosion that left her badly burned last month.

"I don't know what exploded, whether it was a rocket or a bomb," Hamdou said. The explosion destroyed his home in the battleground city of Aleppo, in a flashpoint neighborhood called Sakari.

When a reporter asked "how are you" in Arabic to Maram, she didn't respond. Hamdou explained that last month's explosion left the little girl deaf.

Guards 'killed' in Syrian military HQ blast

Guards 'killed' in Syrian military HQ blast

Rebels say dozens dead while Syrian military claims guards only wounded and top brass safe.

In-depth coverage of escalating violence across Syria

Syrian state television is reporting that four security guards have been killed in two explosions near the Damascus general headquarters of Syria's army.

Wednesday's attack engulfed at least two floors of the building in flames and left 14 people injured.

Omran al-Zoubi, information minister, said the improvised explosive devices, one of which may have been placed inside the headquarters building itself, exploded minutes