Syrian forces pound Damascus suburbs, flights to resume

Reuters/Reuters - A general view of buildings, damaged by what activists said were missiles fired by a Syrian Air Force fighter jet loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, in Daria near Damascus December 1, 2012. REUTERS/Fadi Al-Derani/Shaam News Network/Handout

BEIRUT (Reuters) - Syrian forces pounded rebel-held suburbs around Damascus with fighter jets and rockets on Sunday, opposition activists said, killing and wounding dozens in an offensive to push rebels away from the airport and stop them closing in on the capital.

The army struck hard after a week of rebel advances, including the capture of two military bases near the capital. Rebels had been planning to push into central Damascus from their strongholds on the outskirts and fighting in the past week has been fierce.

Activists said heavy rocket fire struck towns close to the Damascus airport road, where rebels and the army had been locked in three days of clashes. Some described constant shelling, similar to carpet bombing, in towns like Beit Saham.

"It was frightening because it was the first time we heard continuous shelling. Really powerful explosions, one after the other, were shaking the area. I could see fire coming up from the town," said Samir al-Shami, from the opposition's Syrian Youth Union, speaking by Skype.

"This was the worst day in those people's lives."

In a sign the government had regained some control over the airport, EgyptAir said it was resuming flights to Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo on Monday after a three-day halt in which Damascus airport was effectively closed due to unrest. The airline's head said conditions were stable.

No comment was immediately available from Emirates Airline, which had also suspended its flights indefinitely.

The army's assaults appear to have staved off a rebel advance into central Damascus so far. But neither side has gained ground in recent days, and fighting continued along the outskirts of the city despite heavy shelling by Assad's forces.

But rebels said the area around Damascus airport was not secure, with clashes still erupting along the road. It is difficult to verify opposition reports because the government restricts media access into Syria.

Other activists said the road was in army hands but the area was still unstable due to fighting in nearby towns like Beit Saham, about 1 kilometer away.

"No one controls that road. The army has tanks along the road, but the whole area is exposed to rebel attacks and they could fire on it any time," said one, asking not to be named.

DEADLY ROCKET ATTACKS

Rocket attacks on Sunday killed at least 10 in the town of Deir al-Asafir, 12 km east of Damascus, activists said. Video published by activists from the town showed at least five bodies, one of them a young boy and one an elderly man. The other bodies were wrapped in blood-spattered white sheets.

Syrian security officials and diplomatic sources say the army's goal is to push rebels back and seal off central Damascus from the surrounding suburbs where the opposition is dominant.

Rebels say they want to control the airport because the army has used it to bring in weapons. Western intelligence reports earlier this year said that Iran, Assad's main backer, had been using civilian aircraft to fly military equipment and personnel through Iraqi airspace into Syria.

U.S. officials say the arms flow into Syria has continued due to Iraqi reluctance to check flights, according to a New York Times article. It said only two inspections had occurred since Iraq agreed to a U.S. request in September and that Iran may have been tipped off about the searches.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki told reporters in Baghdad on Sunday there was no such request.

"There is no ability to inspect all planes destined to Syria and there was no U.S. request to inspect all aircrafts because they know that this is not possible," he said.

Lebanese troops clashed with Syrian rebels on the border between the two countries on Sunday in what a security source called the first such incident between Lebanon's army and the rebels.

The clash occurred when a Lebanese border patrol spotted the rebel fighters along the border and the rebels opened fire to prevent the patrol from approaching, said a Lebanese military source. He said there were no casualties.

CAR BOMBINGS

In Syria's central city of Homs, a car bomb killed at least 15 people and wounded 24 on Sunday, Syria's state news agency SANA said. It said the blast in the city's Hamra district also damaged many nearby residential buildings. The government and the opposition traded blame for the blast.

There has been a rise in the number of car bombs around the country. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has a network of activists across Syria, reported four car bombs on Saturday.

The group gave a preliminary death toll for Sunday's fighting of 140.

Violence has risen in Syria particularly since rebels began to contest Assad's control around the capital and Aleppo, Syria's largest city, but foreign powers remain deadlocked.

Western countries support the opposition but Russia, Syria's main arms supplier, and China have blocked three U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Assad and reject sanctions.

Assad, whose family has ruled Syria autocratically for four decades, says he is fighting off radical Islamist militants funded by the West and Gulf Arab countries.

State television on Sunday said the army was "eliminating al Qaeda terrorists" in the rebel stronghold of Daraya, a suburb on the southern outskirts of Damascus from which mortar shells have been fired into the capital.

Rebel spokesman Abu Nidal said the army had entered one side of the suburb but that the rebels were still in control of the rest of the area.

(Additional reporting by Suadad al-Salhy in Baghdad; Editing by Roger Atwood)

Article: EgyptAir to resume flights to Syria

Article: Lebanese army clashes with Syrian rebels on border

Boehner Faces Line in the Sand in Fiscal Cliff Talks

President Obama and his White House team appear to have drawn a line in the sand in talks with House Republicans on the "fiscal cliff."

Tax rates on the wealthy are going up, the only question is how much?

"Those rates are going to have to go up," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner flatly stated on ABC's "This Week." "There's no responsible way we can govern this country at a time of enormous threat, and risk, and challenge ... with those low rates in place for future generations."

But the president's plan, which Geithner delivered last week, has left the two sides far apart.

In recounting his response today on "Fox News Sunday," House Speaker John Boehner said: "I was flabbergasted. I looked at him and said, 'You can't be serious.'

"The president's idea of negotiation is: Roll over and do what I ask," Boehner added.

The president has never asked for so much additional tax revenue. He wants another $1.6 trillion over the next 10 years, including returning the tax rate on income above $250,000 a year to 39.6 percent.

Boehner is offering half that, $800 billion.

In exchange, the president suggests $600 billion in cuts to Medicare and other programs. House Republicans say that is not enough, but they have not publicly listed what they would cut.

Geithner said the ball is now in the Republicans' court, and the White House is seemingly content to sit and wait for Republicans to come around.

"They have to come to us and tell us what they think they need. What we can't do is to keep guessing," he said.

The president is also calling for more stimulus spending totaling $200 billion for unemployment benefits, training, and infrastructure projects.

"All of this stimulus spending would literally be more than the spending cuts that he was willing to put on the table," Boehner said.

Boehner also voiced some derision over the president's proposal to strip Congress of power over the country's debt level, and whether it should be raised.

"Congress is not going to give up this power," he said. "It's the only way to leverage the political process to produce more change than what it would if left alone."

The so-called fiscal cliff, a mixture of automatic tax increases and spending cuts, is triggered on Jan. 1 if Congress and the White House do not come up with a deficit-cutting deal first.

The tax increases would cost the average family between $2,000 and $2,400 a year, which, coupled with the $500 billion in spending cuts, will most likely put the country back into recession, economists say.

Egypt's top court shuts down, blames protesters

CAIRO (Reuters) - Protests by Islamists allied to President Mohamed Mursi forced Egypt's highest court to adjourn its work indefinitely on Sunday, intensifying a conflict between some of the country's top judges and the head of state.

The Supreme Constitutional Court said it would not convene until its judges could operate without "psychological and material pressure", saying protesters had stopped the judges from reaching the building.

Several hundred Mursi supporters had protested outside the court through the night ahead of a session expected to examine the legality of parliament's upper house and the assembly that drafted a newconstitution, both of them Islamist-controlled.

The cases have cast a legal shadow over Mursi's efforts to chart a way out of a crisis ignited by a November 22 decree that temporarily expanded his powers and led to nationwide protests against him and his Muslim Brotherhood group.

The court's decision to suspend its activities appeared unlikely to have any immediate impact on Mursi's drive to get the new constitution passed in a national referendum on December 15.

Judges supervise voting in Egypt, and Mursi will need them to oversee the referendum.

But in a blow to the president, an influential body representing judges decided on Sunday not to oversee the vote, the state news agency reported. The Judges' Club's decisions are not binding on members, however.

Vice President Mahmoud Mekky said on Sunday he was confident the judges would perform that role, despite calls by Mursi's critics in the judiciary for a boycott.

Three people have been killed and hundreds wounded in protests and counter-demonstrations over Mursi's decree.

At least 200,000 of Mursi's supporters attended a rally at Cairo University on Saturday. His opponents are staging an open-ended sit-in in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the cradle of the uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

The National Salvation Front, an alliance of liberal, leftist and socialist opposition groups, called for protests in Tahrir Square on Tuesday against Mursi holding the referendum on what it branded an "illegitimate constitution".

Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood, which propelled him to power in a June election, hope to end the crisis by pushing through the new constitution hastily adopted by the drafting assembly on Friday. The next day the assembly handed the text to Mursi, who called the referendum and urged Egyptians to vote.

"The Muslim Brotherhood is determined to go ahead with its own plans regardless of everybody else. There is no compromise on the horizon," said Hassan Nafaa, a professor of political science at Cairo University.

DEEP SUSPICION

Outside the Supreme Constitutional Court, Muslim Brotherhood supporters rallied behind the referendum date. "Yes to the constitution," said a banner held aloft by one protester. Chants demanded the "purging of the judiciary".

The interior minister told the head of the court that the building was accessible and that the protests were peaceful, according a statement from the ministry.

The protest reflected the deep suspicion harbored by Egypt's Islamists towards a court they see as a vestige of the Mubarak era. The same court ruled in June to dissolve the Muslim Brotherhood-led lower house of parliament.

Since then, several legal cases have challenged the legitimacy of the upper house of parliament and the 100-member constituent assembly that wrote the constitution.

Those against the upper house have focused on the legality of the law by which it was elected, while the constitutional assembly has faced a raft of court cases alleging that the way it was picked was illegal.

Mursi believes securing approval for the new constitution in a popular referendum will bury all arguments on the legality of the constituent assembly, as well as controversy over the text it worked through the night to finish on Friday.

It will also override the November 22 decree that drew concern from Western governments and a rebellion by sections of the judiciary. The decree shielded Mursi from judicial oversight.

While the Islamists' critics, including representatives of the Christian minority, have accused the Brotherhood of trying to hijack the constitution, investors appear to have seen Mursi's moves as a harbinger of stability. They were also relieved that Saturday's mass Islamist protest went off calmly.

The main stock market index, which lost a tenth of its value in response to Mursi's November 22 decree, rallied more than 2 percent when the market opened on Sunday.

"The events that took place through the weekend, from the approval of the final draft of the constitution and the president calling a referendum, gave some confidence to investors that political stability is on track," said Mohamed Radwan of Pharos Securities, an Egyptian brokerage.

OPPOSITION INFURIATED

But opposition parties have been infuriated by what they see as the Brotherhood's attempt to ram through a constitution that does not enjoy national consensus. Mursi's opponents warn of deeper polarization ahead.

Liberal figures, including former Arab League chief Amr Moussa, pulled out of the constituent assembly last month, as did Christian representatives.

The draft constitution contains Islamist-flavored language which opponents say could be used to whittle away human rights and stifle criticism. It forbids blasphemy and "insults to any person", does not explicitly uphold women's rights and demands respect for "religion, traditions and family values".

New York-based Human Rights Watch said the draft constitution protected some rights while undermining others.

The text limits presidents to two four-year terms, requires parliamentary approval for their choice of prime minister, and introduces some civilian oversight of the military - although not enough for critics. Mubarak ruled for three decades.

Mursi described it as a constitution that fulfilled the goals of the revolution that ended Mubarak's rule. "Let everyone -- those who agree and those who disagree -- go to the referendum to have their say," he said.

The Islamists are gambling that they will be able to secure a "Yes" vote by mobilizing their core support base.

(Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Alistair Lyon and Roger Atwood)

Article: Egypt's opposition alliance calls for protests

Article: Egyptian judges' body urges members to boycott referendum

Article: Egypt's opposition alliance calls for protests

Bangladesh fire victims want old jobs back

In this photo taken on Friday Nov. 29, 2012, Rumi, 7, sits on her father Ahedul's knees as she shows a picture of her mother who died in a garment factory fire, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Major retailers have disavowed the Bangladesh garment factory where 112 workers died in the fire last month, but the survivors of the fire have not. Factories like the one gutted on Nov. 24 are a rare lifeline in this desperately poor country, and now many of the more than 1,200 surviving employees have no work and few prospects. (AP Photo/Ashraful Alam Tito)

FILE - In this Nov. 27, 2012 file photo, Bangladeshi garments workers take out a protest through a street to mourn the death of the victims of Saturday's fire in a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Factories like the one gutted Nov. 24 are a rare lifeline in this desperately poor country, and now many of the more than 1,200 surviving employees have no work and few prospects. (AP Photo/Khurshed Rinku, File)

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — As 112 of her co-workers died in a garment-factory fire, Dipa Akter got out by jumping from the third floor through a hole made by breaking apart an exhaust fan. Her left leg is wrapped in bandages and she has trouble walking.

Now she wants back in.

"If the factory owner reopens the factory sometime soon, we will work again here," the 19-year-old said. "If it's closed for long, we have to think of alternatives."

Major retailers whose products were found in the fire have disavowed the Tazreen Fashions Ltd. factory, but workers who survived have not. They can't afford to.

Factories like the one gutted Nov. 24 are a rare lifeline in this desperately poor country, and now many of the more than 1,200 surviving employees have no work and few prospects.

Akter spent 25 minutes trying to get down the smoke-filled stairs before jumping, which she said was "the only option other than being burned."

Despite her injuries and trauma, she needs the job. Without it, she said, she would either be a housemaid or jobless in her home village.

Almost one-third of Bangladesh's 150 million people live in extreme poverty. There are few formal jobs in villages, where about 70 percent of the population lives. Garment work is one of the few paths to secure a stable income, collect some savings and send money to family — especially for young, uneducated rural women, who are already trained to make clothes at home.

The industry has given women in this Muslim-majority, conservative nation an accepted opportunity to leave their homes and join the main workforce.

"I have a life here." Akter said. "I have a timetable to wake up in the morning and I know when I should go to bed."

Akter made about 4,550 takas ($57) a month sewing pants, shirts and nightgowns. Her husband makes about the same at another factory, but she said it is impossible for them to survive just on his salary.

The landlord is demanding rent and she has bills at a grocery shop.

"I am in big trouble because I don't have any savings," Akter said.

The government announced Saturday that it would give 200,000 takas ($2,500) to the families of those who died in the fire and 50,000 takas ($625) to the injured. It also said uninjured workers would get their November wages, but many employees are demanding four months' salary as compensation. It is not yet clear when, or even if, Tazreen will rebuild the factory.

"If I am not compensated, I have to start begging. I have to move to the street," said Ferdousy, a worker who uses only one name.

With overtime, the 20-year-old earned up to 7,000 takas ($87) a month from Tazreen as a sewing machine operator. She fled the factory unharmed by bolting out as soon as the fire alarm went off, ignoring her supervisors' insistence that she stay at her station.

But now she needs to work again, or to be compensated while the company rebuilds. But her husband needs treatment for asthma and is too sick to work. Her two children need food. The rent needs to be paid.

"I worked hard to support my family. I always tried to cross my production targets so I could earn extra money to support my family. But now I have no place to go," she said.

Ratna Begum, 30, is too injured to go back to work for the foreseeable future and needs compensation soon. She jumped out of a fifth-floor window to escape the flames, thinking, "If I die, my family will at least get my body."

Now she has a bandage on her head and unable to walk without assistance. Without her monthly pay of up to 5,000 takas ($62), she wonders how her family will afford rent, food, her medical bills and school for her two sons. Without compensation soon, the family from the desperately poor Rangpur district fears they will have no choice but to sell their only property: three cows.

The factory had no emergency exits. Police were continuing to question three managers suspected of locking in the workers during the fire. Clothes from major global brands including Wal-Mart and Disney were being produced at the factory, though the companies said the plant was considered high-risk and they had ordered subcontractors not to use it in recent months.

As difficult as life is for survivors, some families don't even know for certain whether their loved ones are among the dead. Dozens of bodies too badly burned to be identified have already been buried.

"My mother has gone to the factory, she has not returned home yet," 7-year-old Rumi said as she showed a passport-size photo of her mother. "Where's my mother? She has not come."

Her father, Ahedul, who uses only one name, said he went to the hospital morgue but could not tell whether his wife's remains were there.

"I don't know what to do now," Ahedul said. "The government said it will compensate us, but how will I compensate my baby?"

Former Catholic brother arrested in New Zealand after Australian police file 252 sex charges

Bernard Kevin McGrath.

Police say they arrested 65-year-old Bernard Kevin McGrath on Friday in Christchurch after he voluntarily returned to New Zealand from Sri Lanka. A judge on Monday released the former St. John of God brother on bail.

New South Wales police say they've investigated a large number of sexual assault claims by former students of the St. John order's Kendall Grange school for boys in the town of Morisset, about 110 kilometres (70 miles) north of Sydney.

McGrath previously served jail time in New Zealand after sexually abusing boys in Christchurch in the 1970s.

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