President defends telecom minister
Sudanese police fired tear gas Monday at hundreds of protesters in the capital Khartoum against a state of emergency imposed by President Omar al-bashir to end rallies against his rule, witnesses said. Deadly protests have rocked Sudan for more than two months, and Bashir on Friday declared a year-long nationwide state of emergency to rein in the protest campaign, AFP reported.
The veteran leader, who came to power in a 1989 coup, also dissolved Sudan’s federal and provincial governments as part of a major shake-up of his administration. But protests have carried on, with demonstrators undeterred on Monday despite riot police firing tear gas at the crowds. Chanting “freedom, peace, justice” – the rallying cry of the campaign – hundreds rallied in downtown Khartoum, witnesses said.
Protest organizers, an umbrella group called Alliance for Freedom and Change, had called for Monday’s “rally to challenge the emergency”.
Riot police also fired tear gas into the compound of Ahfad University for Women after students staged a sit-in, witnesses said.
Protests first erupted in the town of Atbara on December 19 against a government decision to triple the price of bread. They quickly escalated into demonstrations against Bashir’s iron-fisted rule as protesters called on him to step down.
Officials say 31 people have died in protestrelated violence since then, while Human Rights Watch has put the death toll at 51.
The 75-year-old leader has remained defiant, but has launched top-level changes in his administration.
Sudan’s financial woes have worsened amid a lack of foreign currency since South Sudan became independent in 2011, taking with it the bulk of oil earnings.
The resulting shortages in basic goods have fueled spiraling inflation that has devastated the purchasing power and living standards of ordinary Sudanese, from agricultural laborers to middle-class professionals.
President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday that Iran needed to boost non-oil exports and manufacture high-end products to offset the impact of US sanctions on the economy.
“Combating sanctions means that we should do quality work and end Iran’s dependence on foreign countries,” Rouhani told a meeting of senior officials at the Ministry of Cooperatives, Labor and Social Welfare.
He further highlighted the necessity to increase non-oil exports considering the current situation of the country.
The United States pulled out of a multilateral nuclear deal with Iran in May and
After nearly two years of bitter and divisive talks on the departure of Britain from the European Union, it has come to this — the sides cannot even agree on a divorce date anymore.
European Union leader Donald Tusk said that with any agreement far from being clinched and businesses fearing a chaotic and costly cliffedge departure, keeping the Brexit day at March 29 would be too risky, AP reported.
“I believe that in the situation we are in, an extension would be a rational solution,” Tusk told reporters.
He said “all the 27 (member states) will show maximum understanding and goodwill” to make possible such a postponement, which needs unanimity.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, however, immediately dug in her heels and said she could deliver on the set date, however massive the challenge.
“It is within our grasp to leave with a deal on 29th of March and I think that that is where all of our energies should be focused,” May said.
She said that “any delay is a delay. It doesn’t address the issue. It doesn’t resolve the issue.”
May met EU leaders over restored economic sanctions that were lifted under the 2015 agreement.
US sanctions, which target Iran’s vital energy sector and banking system among other things, have harmed the country’s economy causing its currency, the rial, to lose more than two-thirds of its value against the dollar.
Rouhani said that the Iranian people were “facing problems in life” due to sanctions, but noted that his government its working with full force to resolve those problems.
“If anyone says that people have no problems, they have made a mistake… People should know that the government, as their servant, is working with all its power to reduce people’s problems,” he two days at the Eu-arab League summit in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-sheikh.
May met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Jean-claude Juncker early Monday as she sought elusive changes to the UK-EU divorce agreement.
Britain’s Parliament has rejected the deal once, and May has just over a month to get it approved by lawmakers before the UK’S scheduled departure day.
May says a new vote won’t said.
The president described unemployment as “the mother of all evils,” saying that job creation is “a national duty.”
According to the president, there are three million unemployed people in Iran despite his government’s efforts to reduce the unemployment rate.
He said Iran needed to create one million jobs annually in order to bring down unemployment in a meaningful way.
“Knowledge-based services and companies have a huge capacity for employment,” said Rouhani, adding that such enterprises have had billions of dollars of income in 2017, and created over 300,000 jobs in the same year. be held this week and could come as late as March 12.
Tusk, the European Council president, said that such a timeframe might get too tight to avoid a chaotic departure.
Tusk refused to say how long such an extension should be as rumors swirled it should go to anything from two months to almost two years.
British lawmakers’ objections to the Brexit deal center on a provision for the border between the UK’S Northern Ireland and EU member Ireland. The mechanism, known as the backstop, is a safeguard that would keep the UK in a customs union with the EU to remove the need for checks along the Irish border until a permanent new trading relationship is in place.
May wants to change the deal to reassure British lawmakers that the backstop would only apply temporarily.
But EU leaders insist that the legally binding Brexit withdrawal agreement, which took a year and a half to negotiate, can’t be reopened.
A group of British lawmakers will try this week to force the government to delay Brexit rather than see the country crash out of the bloc without a deal. They want Parliament to vote Wednesday to extend the negotiating process.
Labour lawmaker Yvette Cooper, one of those behind the move, said it was irresponsible of the government that just a few weeks before Brexit “we still don’t know what kind of Brexit we are going to have and we’re not even going to have a vote on it until two weeks before that final deadline.”
“I don’t see how businesses can plan, I don’t see how public services can plan and I think it’s just deeply damaging,” Cooper told the BBC.