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Wednesday, August 22, 2012
CYPRUS
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Church feeling the pinch of the recession
New rat species found in Indonesia 8
How Team GB’s golds can bring in the megabucks centre
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Russia warning on Syria action Army kills some 70 people in two-day assault on suburb By Dominic Evans
R
USSIA warned the West yesterday against unilateral action on Syria, a day after US President Barack Obama threatened “enormous consequences” if his Syrian counterpart used chemical or biological arms or even moved them in a menacing way. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking after meeting China’s top diplomat, said Moscow and Beijing were committed to “the need to strictly adhere to the norms of international law... and not to allow their violation”. The remarks were a reminder of the divisions hampering efforts to end the 17-month old conflict that increasingly sets a mainly Sunni Muslim opposition against President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority. The United Nations says more than 18,000 people have been killed in a war which is affecting neighbouring states. Russia and China have opposed military intervention in Syria throughout the revolt. They have vetoed three UN Security Council resolutions backed by Western and Arab states that would have put more pressure on Damascus
to end the violence. After meeting Lavrov in Moscow, Syrian Deputy Prime Minister Qadri Jamil said Obama’s talk of action against Syria was media fodder. He said the West was seeking an excuse to intervene, likening the focus on Syria’s chemical weapons with the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by US-led forces and the focus on what proved to be groundless suspicions that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction. “Direct military intervention in Syria is impossible because whoever thinks about it... is heading towards a confrontation wider than Syria’s borders,” he told a news conference. In one of the latest battle zones, troops and tanks overran the Damascus suburb of Mouadamiya yesterday, the second day of an offensive to regain control of the area. Activists said Assad’s forces had killed at least 70 people in Mouadamiya since Monday. They included some two dozen men who had been executed and 16 people killed in a helicopter gunship attack on a funeral for victims of Monday’s violence. “The mourners set off with 19 bodies and came back with
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Children cooling off in a fountain in Montpellier, southern France yesterday as the city, in common with much of Europe, swelters under a summer heatwave (AFP)
Imported cod and haddock: demand exceeds UK sea supply By Emily Beament UK fish consumption in 2012 has already matched what its seas can supply for the year, leaving the country reliant on imported cod and haddock for fish and chips, campaigners said yesterday. Annual fish supplies from British seas can only satisfy demand for 233 days, so if the UK were to rely on its own fisheries for the year it would have run out of
stocks by yesterday, a report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) said. At least one in three fish consumed there is imported from outside the EU, the thinktank said, with the UK reliant on countries such as Iceland, Norway and even China for a large share of traditional British fish, such as cod and haddock. The situation has improved since last year, when the UK effectively ran out of fish more than a month earlier than in
2012, but is largely unchanged over the past decade. Across Europe the situation is even more acute, with EU consumption of fish outstripping the bloc’s annual fish supplies by July 6. Campaigners are calling for ambitious reform of the European Union’s common fisheries policy, which governs the fishing activities of the EU fleet, to ensure fisheries are more sustainably managed to prevent overfishing.