Ex-IRA man hailed for peace role

WASHINGTON: FBI director James Comey has confirmed the bureau is probing potential ties between US President Donald Trump’s associates and Russia during the 2016 campaign and says there’s no evidence to support the president’s allegation that his predecessor Barack Obama “wiretapped” Trump Tower last year.

“I have no information that supports those tweets,” Comey told the House Intelligence Committee.

Comey said the Federal Bureau of Investigation was conducting a broad inquiry into Moscow’s efforts to “interfere” in the presidential election, commencing in July last year. Washington Post BRUSSELS: The EU signalled its intention to keep Theresa May waiting before engaging in negotiations over the UK’s exit from the bloc, in an early indication of how the British prime minister will see leverage slipping away as soon as she files for divorce.

As EU leaders insisted they are ready for the Brexit talks, they cancelled provisional plans to hold a summit on April 6 to agree on the outlines of their negotiating position, indicating May’s announcement that she will invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty on March 29 comes too late for that. The summit will be held in April or May. – Bloomberg WASHINGTON: Former US Senator Bob Dole, a pillar of the Republican Party and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump during his campaign, has accused the president of threatening “one of the proudest achievements of my lifetime” – by cutting a programme that has provided school meals to more than 40 million children in some of the world’s poorest countries.

The McGovern-Dole Food for Education programme, a bipartisan aid enterprise championed by Dole and his Democratic colleague George McGovern, was a casualty of the White House budget proposal released last Thursday.

Since 2003, McGovern-Dole initiative has provided meals in 40 of the world’s most impoverished nations, including several approaching famine.

Trump’s budget recommended eliminating the programme, citing it “lacks evidence that it is being effectively implemented”.

“Eliminating the programme would have a disastrous effect on the planet’s most vulnerable children,” Dole wrote.

“Without a reliable source of nutrition, these children face a lifetime of stunted physical and mental development and unrealised opportunity. This global school meals programme remains one of the proudest achievements of my lifetime. It embodies the very best of America’s values.

“Saving this programme means saving lives. It’s as simple as that.”

The McGovern-Dole programme is minor compared with the food aid programmes administered by the US Agency for International Development, which took a 28% cut in Trump’s proposed budget.

Each year, the US Department of Agriculture identifies countries that would make good candidates for the peacetime programme – countries that suffer high rates of food insecurity and illiteracy, but have stable and education-invested governments.

McGovern-Dole then awards monetary grants and commodities on a competitive basis to third-party organisations with existing humanitarian infrastructures.

The programme is not intended merely as food aid: it has also stressed education and community health.

Providing meals at school increases attendance rates, particularly among girls whose parents might see more value in keeping them home to do domestic work.

McGovern-Dole also tracks how many kids went to school, received medication and learned to read as a result of the programme.

Aside from the humanitarian issues inherent in cancelling a major food aid programme, several of the countries served are allies of the US, noted Kimberly Flowers, director of the Global Food Security Project at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. For example, Kenya and Ethiopia border Somalia, which is the base for militant group Al-Shabaab as well as major aid recipient.

Even if food aid is not a Trump priority, McGovern-Dole may not be axed. The budget will be passed by Congress with lawmakers facing pressure to preserve the programme. – Washington Post

MARTIN McGuinness, the Irish Republican Army commander who laid down his arms to become a key architect of Northern Ireland’s peace, died yesterday aged 66, prompting tributes from allies and former enemies alike.

The face of Irish Republicanism for many during some of the worst moments of three decades of sectarian bloodshed that killed more than 3 600 people, McGuinness remained a figure of hate for many pro-British Protestants until his death.

But he earned widespread respect across Britain and Ireland by embracing his most bitter rivals to cement a 1998 peace deal and allow Northern Ireland to slowly return to normality. “While I can never condone the path he took in the earlier part of his life, Martin McGuinness ultimately played a defining role in leading the Republican movement away from violence,” British Prime Minister Theresa May said.

“In doing so, he made an essential and historic contribution to the extraordinary journey of Northern Ireland from conflict to peace.”

He was present during the opening salvos of the Northern Ireland conflict as a 20-year-old IRA commander fighting the British army on the streets of his native Londonderry on behalf of a community he said had been denied basic human rights.

McGuinness swiftly rose to become a senior IRA commander and was convicted in 1973 of being a member of the group after being stopped in a car packed with explosives and bullets.

“Martin McGuinness never went to war, it came to his streets, it came to his city, it came to his community,” fellow Republican leader Gerry Adams told Irish national broadcaster RTE yesterday.

“He was a great man in my opinion, and he will be missed.”

By the 1980s, McGuinness emerged alongside Adams as a key architect in the electoral rise of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, advocating a strategy of using the ballot box alongside the Armalite rifle.

Following the IRA’s second ceasefire in 1997, McGuinness became Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator in peace talks that led to the landmark 1998 Good Friday peace accord.

“He had the grassroots credibility of a Republican leader and former IRA commander… to take Republicans from the past of terror and horror into a democratic future,” former British Northern Ireland minister Peter Hain told BBC radio.

But it was the energy with which he worked in the peace process that surprised many. His handshake with the British Queen in 2012 became one of the defining images of Northern Ireland’s peace.

Key to the success of power-sharing in Northern Ireland was the close relationship with former enemy Ian Paisley, the firebrand preacher many Catholics saw as a key player in the genesis of the conflict.

A partnership many thought would prove impossible was soon dubbed by the media “the Chuckle Brothers” and allowed McGuinness to become Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister in 2007. He held the role for a decade until he resigned in January shortly after being diagnosed with a rare heart condition.

On the night McGuinness retired, Paisley’s son Ian jr, a member of the British parliament, said that had it not been for McGuinness’ work, especially with his father, Northern Ireland would not have been in a position to rebuild itself.

McGuinness was active until the last weeks of his life, helping to orchestrate one of the biggest political victories for Irish nationalism in decades by forcing a snap election in March that deprived unionism of its majority in the regional parliament for the first time.

Colin Parry, whose son was killed by an IRA bomb, was measured in his view of McGuiness’s historical role. “We can never forgive him, but we can respect the man he became,” he said. – Reuters