Tag Archives: WorldNews

Egypt’s Coptic Pope shuns US VP Mike Pence over Jerusalem

just deserts

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The Coptic Christian Pope has cancelled a meeting with the US vice president in Cairo, protesting against America’s move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Palestinian leader Abbas also snubbed Mike Pence.

Guantánamo art show rattles US military and could prompt confiscation or destruction

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Works by detainees are making waves at a New York exhibition – but now officials have taken away finished artworks and won’t let them leave the site

When Moath al-Alwi wants to get his mind out of the US detention center in Guantánamo Bay, where he has been held without charge for almost 16 years, he builds model ships.

“A ship expresses rescue,” he told his lawyer during a recent visit. “Noah was able to rescue people and animals on Earth with a ship. That is why I love to build ships.”

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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: ‘Trump is where he is because of his appeal to racism’

True this

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The basketball legend and social activist who counted Ali and King among his contemporaries discusses Colin Kaepernick, LaVar Ball and Trump’s America

“Like all people my age I find the passage of time so startling,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says with a quiet smile. The 70-year-old remains the highest points-scorer in the history of the NBA and, having won six championships and been picked for a record 19 All-Star Games, he is often compared with Michael Jordan when the greatest basketball players of all time are listed. Yet no one in American sport today can match Kareem’s political and cultural impact over 50 years.

In the 90 minutes since he knocked on my hotel room door in Los Angeles, Abdul-Jabbar has recounted a dizzying personal history which stretches from conducting his first-ever interview with Martin Luther King in Harlem, when he was just 17, to receiving a hand-written insult from Donald Trump in 2015. We move from Colin Kaepernick calling him last week to the moment when, aged 20, Kareem was the youngest man invited to the Cleveland Summit – as the leading black athletes in 1967 gathered to meet Muhammad Ali to decide whether they would support him after he had been stripped of his world title and banned from boxing for rejecting the draft during the Vietnam War.

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Sweden to call Security Council meeting over Jerusalem

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Margot Wallström (Social Democrat) is the minister for foreign affairs.

Lyssna: Sweden to call Security Council meeting over Jerusalem

Sweden plans to call for a special meeting of the UN Security Council, where Sweden has one of the rotating seats, after the US decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Foreign minister Margot Wallström tells Swedish Radio News the American move is not part of a two-state-solution and calls for restraint right now.

 

Beatrice Janzon
beatrice.janzon@sverigesradio.se

Loukas Christodoulou
loukas.christodoulou@sverigesradio.se

North Korea is ready to open direct talks with US, says Russia’s Sergei Lavrov

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  • Pyongyang ‘wants above all to talk to the US about guarantees for its security’
  • Lavrov says he informed Rex Tillerson in Vienna on Thursday

North Korea is open to direct talks with the US over their nuclear standoff, according to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, who said he passed that message to his counterpart, Rex Tillerson, when the two diplomats met in Vienna on Thursday.

There was no immediate response from Tillerson but the official position of the state department is that North Korea would have to show itself to be serious about giving up its nuclear arsenal as part of a comprehensive agreement before a dialogue could begin.

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