US-bound Egypt plane diverted after threat

LONDON (AP) — A plane from Cairo bound for New York was diverted by fighter jets to an emergency landing in the U.K. after a passenger discovered a letter threatening the aircraft, officials said Saturday.

Police said late Saturday there had been no arrests, and that authorities are working to ascertain who wrote the note in a lavatory which forced Flight 985 — carrying around 300 passengers en routeto John F. Kennedy Airport — to make an emergency landing at Glasgow's Prestwick Airport.

British Typhoon fighter jets escorted the plane to Glasgow's Prestwick Airport, where the flight was met by a heavy police presence. It stayed there for several hours before passengers were able to disembark, at which point officers searched the plane.

The BBC said one of its producers, Nada Tawfik, had discovered the note, written in pencil on a napkin, with the words "I'll set this plane on fire" and what appeared to be a seat number written on it. She said that after discovering the note by the lavatory sink, she alerted cabin crew who then locked the toilet.

"It almost looked like a child's handwriting or someone who has very sloppy handwriting, but it was very alarming especially these days when everyone is so concerned about safety on flights" she told the BBC, saying she told the stewardesses she wasn't sure if the note was a prank or not. "Either someone has a very bad sense of humor or, you know, it's very scary."

Det. Superintendent Alan Crawford said there have been no arrests, and that police are working to determine where the note came from, who put it on the plane and under what circumstances.

"This note, whatever narrative it contained, we have to treat it seriously and maintain the safety of passengers and crew," Crawford said. "Whether it is a prank or not this will be investigated thoroughly to establish the circumstances. We could never write something off as a prank without investigating."

Arrangements for onward travel will be made once all passengers have been interviewed, police said.

Car bombs kill 13 in Shiite regions of Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — Seven car bombs struck three Shiite-majority regions of southern and central Iraq on Sunday, officials said, killing at least 13 people in the latest apparent coordinated attack by insurgents aimed at destabilizing the country.

A police officer said a parked car bomb went off early morning in the industrial area of the city of Kut, killing three people and wounding 14 others. That was followed by another car bomb outside the city targeted a gathering of construction workers that killed two and wounded 12, he added.

Kut is located 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

In the nearby oil-rich city of Basra, twin car bombs in a busy downtown street killed five people, included a police officer, and wounded nine others, a police officer said. As police and rescuers rushed to the scene of the initial blast, the second car exploded, he added.

Basra is located some 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad.

About an hour later, two parked car bombs ripped through two neighborhoods in the southern city of Nasiriyah, 320 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Baghdad, killing one and wounding 17, another police officer said. And in the town of Mahmoudiya, 30 kilometers (20 miles) south of Baghdad, two civilians were killed and nine wounded when a car bomb went off in an open market.

Four medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.

Violence has spiked sharply in Iraq in recent months, with the death toll rising to levels not seen since 2008. There was no claim of responsibility for any of the attacks, but they bore the hallmark of al-Qaida fighters in Iraq, who use car bombs, suicide bombers and coordinated attacks to target security forces, members of Iraq's Shiite majority, and others.

Police raid on Istanbul park triggers night of rioting

Protesters set fire to a barricade as they clash with riot police in Istanbul June 15, 2013. REUTERS/Cevahir Bugu

Riot police walk in front of Divan hotel in Istanbul June 15, 2013. REUTERS/Serkan Senturk

By Ayla Jean Yackley and Seda Sezer

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Thousands of people took to the streets of Istanbul overnight on Sunday, erecting barricades and starting bonfires, after riot police firing teargas and water cannon stormed a park at the center of two weeks of anti-government unrest.

Lines of police backed by armored vehicles sealed off Taksim Squarein the center of the city as officers raided the adjoining Gezi Park late on Saturday, where protesters had been camped in a ramshackle settlement of tents.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan had warned hours earlier that security forces would clear the square, the center of more than two weeks of fierce anti-government protests that spread to cities across the country, unless the demonstrators withdrew before a ruling party rally in Istanbul on Sunday.

"We have our Istanbul rally tomorrow. I say it clearly: Taksim Square must be evacuated, otherwise this country's security forces know how to evacuate it," he told tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters at a rally in Ankara.

Protesters took to the streets in several neighborhoods across Istanbul following the raid on Gezi Park, ripping up metal fences, paving stones and advertising hoardings to build barricades and lighting bonfires of trash in the streets.

Some chanted, "Tayyip, resign."

Local television footage showed groups of demonstrators blocking a main highway to Ataturk airport on the western edge of the city, while to the east, several hundred walked towards a main bridge crossing the Bosphorus waterway towards Taksim.

Thousands more rallied in the working-class Gazi neighborhood, which saw heavy clashes with police in the 1990s, while protesters also gathered in Ankara around the central Kugulu Park, including opposition MPs who sat in the streets in an effort to prevent the police from firing teargas.

A main public-sector union confederation, KESK, which has some 240,000 members, said it would call a national strike for Monday, while a second union grouping said it was holding an emergency meeting to decide whether to join the action.

"One million people to Taksim" - a call for more anti-government demonstrations later on Sunday - was a top-trending hashtag on Twitter.

"The police brutality aims at clearing the streets of Istanbul to make way for Erdogan's meeting tomorrow," said Oguz Kaan Salici, Istanbul president of the main opposition People's Republican Party.

"Yet it will backfire. People feel betrayed."

CLOUDS OF TEARGAS

A similar police crackdown on peaceful campaigners in Gezi Park two weeks ago provoked an unprecedented wave of protest against Erdogan, drawing in secularists, nationalists, professionals, trade unionists and students who took to the streets in protest at what they see as his autocratic style.

The unrest, in which police fired teargas and water cannon at stone-throwing protesters night after night in cities including Istanbul and Ankara, left four people dead and about 5,000 injured, according to the Turkish Medical Association.

Panicked protesters fled into an upscale hotel at the back of Gezi Park during Saturday night's raid, several of them vomiting, as clouds of teargas and blasts from percussion bombs - designed to create confusion rather than injure - engulfed the park.

"We tried to flee and the police pursued us. It was like war," Claudia Roth, co-chair of Germany's Greens party, who had gone to Gezi Park to show her support, told Reuters.

The Gezi Park protesters, who oppose government plans to build a replica Ottoman-era barracks there, had defied repeated calls to leave but had started to reduce their presence in the park after meetings with Erdogan and the local authorities.

"This is unbelievable. They had already taken out political banners and were reducing to a symbolic presence in the park," Koray Caliskan, a political scientist at Bosphorus University, told Reuters from the edge of Gezi Park.

ERDOGAN DEFIANT

Erdogan told protesters on Thursday that he would put the Gezi Park plans on hold until a court rules on them. It was a softer stance after two weeks in which he called protesters "riff-raff" and said the plans would go ahead regardless.

But at the first of two rallies this weekend by his ruling AK Party, he reverted to a defiant tone, telling supporters on the outskirts of Ankara that he would crush his opponents in elections next year.

The police intervention so soon after Erdogan spoke took many by surprise on a busy Saturday night around Taksim, one of Istanbul's main social hubs, not least after President Abdullah Gul, who has struck a more conciliatory tone than Erdogan, said earlier on Saturday that talks were progressing well.

Erdogan has long been Turkey's most popular politician, his AK Party winning three successive election victories, each time with a larger share of the vote, but his critics complain of increasing authoritarianism.

He has said the AK Party rallies in Ankara and Istanbul are meant to kick off campaigning for local elections next year and are not related to the protests, but they are widely seen as a show of strength in the face of the demonstrations.

(Additional reporting by Daren Butler, Can Sezer, Asli Kandemir, Evrim Ergin in Istanbul, Jonathon Burch and Humeyra Pamuk in Ankara; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Police seal off Istanbul square to protesters

A bulldozer clears construction materials used by protesters to make barricades in Taksim square, in Istanbul, Turkey Sunday, June 16, 2013. Turkish riot police firing tear gas and water cannon took less than half an hour on Saturday to bring to an end an 18-day occupation of an Istanbul park at the center of the strongest challenge to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's 10-year tenure. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Protesters try to resist the advance of riot police in Gezi park in Istanbul, Turkey, Saturday, June 15, 2013. Protesters will press on with their sit-in at an Istanbul park, an activist said Saturday, defying government appeals and a warning from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the two-week standoff that has fanned nationwide demonstrations to end. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

ISTANBUL (AP) — Bulldozers cleared all that was left of a two-week sit-in in an Istanbul park and police sealed off the area early Sunday, keeping angry demonstrators from returning to a spot that has become the focus of the strongest challenge to the prime minister in his 10 years in office.

Protesters set up barricades and plumes of tear gas rose in Istanbul's streets into the early hours after Turkish riot policerousted a group who had vowed to stay in Gezi Park despite Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's warnings to leave.

As dusk fell Saturday, hundreds of white-helmeted riot police swept through the park and adjacent Taksim Square, firing canisters of the acrid, stinging gas. Thousands of peaceful protesters, choking on the fumes and stumbling among the tents, put up little physical resistance.

The protests began as an environmental sit-in to prevent a development project at Gezi Park, but have quickly spread to dozens of cities and spiraled into a broader expression of discontent about what many say is Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian decision-making. He vehemently denies the charge, pointing to the strong support base that helped him win third consecutive term with 50 percent of the vote in 2011.

As police cleared the square, many ran into nearby hotels for shelter. A stand-off developed at a luxury hotel on the edge of the park, where police opened up with water cannons against protesters and journalists outside before throwing tear gas at the entrance, filling the lobby with white smoke. At other hotels, plain-clothes policemen turned up outside, demanding the protesters come out.

Some protesters ran off into nearby streets, setting up makeshift barricades and running from water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets.

As news of the raid broke, thousands of people from other parts of Istanbul gathered and were attempting to reach Taksim. Television showed footage of riot police firing tear gas on a highway and bridge across the Bosphorus to prevent protesters from heading to the area.

As the tear gas settled, bulldozers moved into the park, scooping up debris and loading it into trucks. Crews of workmen in fluorescent yellow vests and plain-clothes police went through the abandoned belongings, opening bags and searching their contents before tearing down the tents, food centers and library the protesters had set up in what had become a bustling tent city.

Demonstrations also erupted in other cities. In Ankara, at least 3,000 people swarmed into John F. Kennedy street, where opposition party legislators sat down at the front of the crowd facing the riot police — not far from Parliament. In Izmir, thousands converged at a seafront square.

Near Gezi, ambulances ferried the injured to hospitals as police set up cordons and roadblocks around the park, preventing anyone from getting close.

Tayfun Kahraman, a member of Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella group of protest movements, said an untold number of people in the park had been injured — some from rubber bullets.

"Let them keep the park, we don't care anymore. Let it all be theirs. This crackdown has to stop. The people are in a terrible state," he told The Associated Press by phone.

Taksim Solidarity, on its Web site, called the incursion "atrocious" and counted hundreds of injured — which it called a provisional estimate — as well as an undetermined number of arrests. Istanbul governor's office said at least 44 people were taken to hospitals for treatment. None of them were in serious condition, it said in a statement.

Huseyin Celik, the spokesman for Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, told NTV that the sit-in had to end.

"They had made their voice heard ... Our government could not have allowed such an occupation to go on until the end," he said.

It was a violent police raid on May 31 against a small sit-in in Gezi Park that sparked the initial outrage and spiraled into a much broader protest. While those in the park have now fled, it was unclear whether they would take their movement to other places, or try to return to the park at a later time.

The protests, which left at least four people dead and more than 5,000 injured, have dented Erdogan's international reputation and infuriated him with a previously unseen defiance to his rule.

Saturday's raid came less than two hours after Erdogan threatened protesters in a boisterous speech in Sincan, an Ankara suburb that is a stronghold of his party.

"I say this very clearly: either Taksim Square is cleared, or if it isn't cleared then the security forces of this country will know how to clear it," he told tens of thousands of supporters at a political rally.

A second pro-government rally is planned in Istanbul on Sunday.

According to the government's redevelopment plan for Taksim Square that caused the sit-in, the park would be replaced with a replica Ottoman-era barracks. Under initial plans, the construction would have housed a shopping mall, though that has since been amended to the possibility of an opera house, a theater and a museum with cafes.

On Friday, Erdogan offered to defer to a court ruling on the legality of the government's contested park redevelopment plan, and floated the possibility of a referendum on it.

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For Belfast, keeping peace means a city of walls

For Belfast, keeping the peace means towering walls to block Catholic-Protestant conflict

Associated Press -

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) -- When President Obama comes to Belfast, he's expected to praise a country at peace and call for walls that separate Irish Catholics and British Protestants to come tumbling down.

Barely a 10-minute walk from where the U.S. leader is speaking Monday, those walls have kept growing in size and number throughout two decades of slow-blooming peace. Residents today on both sides of so-called "peace lines" — barricades of brick, steel and barbed wire that divide neighborhoods, roads and even one Belfast playground — insist the physical divisions must stay to keep violence at bay.

Belfast's first peace lines took shape in the opening salvos of Northern Ireland's conflict in 1969, when impoverished parts of the city suffered an explosion of sectarian mayhem and most Catholics living in chiefly Protestant areas were forced to flee. The British Army, deployed as peacekeepers, erected the first makeshift barricades and naively predicted the barriers would be taken down in months.

Instead, the soldiers' role supporting the mostly Protestant police soon inspired the rise of a ruthless new outlawed group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, committed to forcing Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom and into the Republic of Ireland.

For all the unlikely triumphs of Northern Ireland diplomacy since the U.S.-brokered 1998 Good Friday peace deal — a Catholic-Protestant government, troop withdrawals, police reform, and disarmament of the IRA and outlawed Protestant groups responsible for most of the 3,700 death toll — tearing down Belfast's nearly 100 "peace lines" still seems too dangerous a step to take.

"I'd love to see that wall taken down and I could say hi to my neighbors, but it isn't going to happen. There'd be cold-blooded murder and I'd have to move out," said Donna Turley, 48, smoking a cigarette at her patio table in the Short Strand, the sole Irish Catholic enclave in otherwise Protestant east Belfast.

Right behind Turley's backyard refuge towers a 50-foot (15-meter) wall. It starts as brick, transitions into fences of corrugated iron, and is topped by more steel mesh fence. Each layer marks the history of communal riots like the growth rings of a tree. Higher still, two batteries of rotating police surveillance cameras monitor Turley and her Catholic neighbors, as well as the Protestant strangers living, audibly but invisibly, on the far side.

"It's terrible looking. But I wouldn't feel safe if it wasn't there. I couldn't imagine that wall being torn down. Nobody here can," said Tammy Currie, 21, who is Turley's nearest Protestant neighbor, standing in her own small cement patio backed by the wall. Her 3-year-old son jumps on a trampoline that a few months ago had to be cleared of shattered beer bottles thrown from the other side.

Both families rent state-subsidized homes provided by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, which is responsible for making their homes as safe as possible from the risk of further rioting. That means both have triple-layered Perspex windows that are foggy-looking and unbreakable, and metal-tiled roofs that can't be set on fire.

It was a lesson hard learned. The Protestants of Cluan Place and the Catholics of Clandeboye Drive used to be able to look, from upper floors, into each other's back yards until 2002, when militants on both sides sought to drive each other out with homemade grenades, Molotov cocktails and even acid-filled bottles. An IRA gunman shot five Protestants, none fatally, while standing atop what was then only a brick wall. Most homes in the area were burned, abandoned and rebuilt, and British Army engineers doubled the height of the wall in 2003. Nobody's been shot there since, even though both sides continue to host illegal paramilitary groups billing themselves as community defenders.

This stretch of wall connects with other security lines that date back to the early days of the modern Northern Ireland conflict in 1970, when IRA men in Short Strand shot to death three Protestants allegedly involved in attacking the district's lone Catholic church. To make it less of an eyesore, Belfast City Council has funded imaginative art works all along that stretch, but it still leaves Short Strand looking a bit like Fort Apache.

Last month, the Catholic and Protestant leaders of Northern Ireland's unity government announced a bold but detail-free plan to dismantle all peace lines by 2023. British Prime Minister David Cameron formally backed the goal Friday. Obama is expected to do the same Monday.

The politician working closest to the Cluan-Clandeboye wall, Michael Copeland, says both G-8 leaders are out of touch.

"Removing the walls would be a catastrophic decision," said Copeland, a former British soldier and a Protestant member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, who keeps his office just around the corner from Cluan Place.

"The biggest walls to be addressed are in the minds of the people. And what people in here remember is being shot at, being bombed, having their street burned," Copeland said while sitting on a Cluan Place bench outside one resident's home. He knows everyone living in all 23 homes on the Protestant side and, in fact, helped get many of them get their housing assignment.

"The walls will come down when the people who live in the shadow of these walls, and look to those walls for a sense of security, can feel secure without them. Memories will have to fade. It will take another generation at least," he said.

The two sides mark their cultural divide in ways petty and profound. Each morning, two sets of children depart in different directions, wearing different uniforms, as Catholics head for their own church-run schools, the Protestants for state-run ones. At night, the two sides usually order fast-food deliveries from their own areas, fearful that someone from "the other side" might spit in their food. They use separate taxi companies and favor different newspapers.

Short Strand's community association has erected house numbers bearing each family's name in Gaelic, the little-used native tongue of Ireland that is loathed by most Protestants.

Reflecting their anxiety that the faster-growing Catholic community wants to push them out, the Protestants of Cluan Place have painted the gable end of one house with a mural featuring a massive Union Jack and a list of attacks on their street since 2002. "Still loyalist, always British, no surrender," it says.

The house opposite Currie's, belonging to an aunt, has a dog strutting about sporting a Union Jack collar, and Ulster loyalist music blaring loudly enough from a stereo to carry to Catholic ears beyond the wall.

Across the divide, 56-year-old Maggie McDowell cocks an ear at the sectarian tune. "Och, him again," she said, identifying her Protestant neighbor not by a name or face she's never known, but by his musical taste. Unlike most living on both sides of this wall, she was here for the 2002 rioting — and credits the wall's extension with ensuring no repeat.

She and her husband, James, keep a collection of the most interesting objects that have crashed into their house or back garden, including one smooth stone used as a doorstop. He points out holes in their home's brick wall marking strikes from past violence. Golf balls, a favored weapon for both sides, she collects by the bucket to give every so often to her golf-enthusiast brother.

When asked if she'd like the wall to come down, Maggie McDowell said, "It's a terrible thing to say, but I wish they could make it higher."

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