Syria talks focused on ceasefire get underway in Kazakhstan

ASTANA: Syria talks brokered by Russia, Turkey and Iran and seeking to bolster a shaky cease-fire in place since last month opened on Monday in Kazakhstan, marking the first face-to-face meeting between the Damascus government and rebel factions fighting to overthrow it.

The gathering in Astana, the Kazakh capital, is also the start of a new effort to end six years of carnage that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced half of Syria's population and sent millions of refugees to neighboring countries and Europe.

The UN envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, is participating in the talks, which if successful, are expected to be followed by more political talks in February in Geneva.

The new US administration is not directly involved, because of the "immediate demands of the transition," the State Department said on Saturday, but Washington is represented by the US ambassador to Kazakhstan, George Krol, who attended Monday's opening session held at the luxury Rixos President Hotel in Astana.

Osama Abo Zayd, a rebel media representative to the talks, told The Associated Press before the start that the scope of the negotiations is limited to strengthening the cease-fire. "There's no signif- icance to negotiations if the people on whose behalf we are negotiating are being killed," he said, adding that there has been absolutely no discussion about elections or Assad's future.

Syria's war is estimated to have killed about 400,000 people since March 2011. The conflict, which started as an uprising against President Bashar Assad's rule against the backdrop of Arab Spring movements, quickly descended into all-out civil war. Ahead of the talks, delegates passed through the hotel's soaring atrium, where songbirds are kept to chirp in cages, on their way to the conference room.

Reflecting persisting tensions, Arab TV stations said the rebel delegates stalled, entering the room a few minutes late to register their displeasure at being seated at the same oval-shaped table as the Iranian delegation. The hotel was closed off to all but a handful of representatives of the media.

Russia, Turkish and Iranian delegates were all seated around the same table, along with de Mistura and the US ambassador.

After a short opening ceremony during which Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov spoke, the meeting went into closed session. VIENNA: Four people have died over the weekend in Austria while skiing, snow-shoeing or sledding - an unusually high toll linked to winter sports in the country.

The Austria Press Agency says that two Czech nationals snow-shoeing in Salzburg's alpine region died on Sunday after being buried in an avalanche.

While the two others had managed to free themselves.

State broadcaster ORF says the two other deaths had taken place on Saturday.

It said that it was on Monday that a German man was killed after he hit a rock head first while sledding on the snow near the Swiss border, and an Austrian skier died after colliding with a snowboarder on a slope near the Italian border.

The snow-boarder was only slightly hurt.