CR IP TI ON BS SU
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2013
Brotherhood leader denies ‘terror’ claims
US heat wave prompts early school dismissals
10
Wildfire rages on, threatens San Francisco water
Arsenal in CL for 16th straight year
20
NO: 15911
10
‘Ready to hit’
40 PAGES
150 FILS
7
www.kuwaittimes.net
SHAWWAL 21, 1434 AH
West powers could attack Syria ‘in days’
Max 45º Min 31º High Tide 03:48 & 17:31 Low Tide 11:01 & 22:52
AMMAN: Western powers could attack Syria within days, envoys from the United States and its allies have told rebels fighting President Bashar Al-Assad, sources who attended the meeting said yesterday. US forces in the region are “ready to go”, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said, as Washington and its European and Middle Eastern partners honed plans to punish Assad for a major poison gas attack last week that killed hundreds of civilians. Several sources who attended a meeting in Istanbul on Monday between Syrian opposition leaders and diplomats from Washington and other governments said that the rebels were told to expect military action and to get ready to negotiate a peace. “The opposition was told in clear terms that action to deter further use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime could come as early as in the next few days, and that they should still prepare for peace talks at Geneva,” one of the sources said. Ahmad Jarba, president of the Syrian National Coalition, met envoys from 11 states in the Friends of Syria group, including Robert Ford, the US ambassador to Syria, at an Istanbul hotel. United Nations chemical weapons investigators, who finally crossed the frontline to take samples on Monday, put off a second trip to rebel-held suburbs of Damascus. Washington said it already held Assad responsible for a “moral obscenity” and President Barack Obama would hold him to account for it. However, with Russian and Chinese opposition complicating efforts to satisfy international law - and Western voters wary of new, far-off wars - Western leaders may not pull the trigger just yet. British Prime Minister David Cameron called parliament back from its summer recess for a session on Syria tomorrow. He and Obama, as well as French President Francois Hollande, face tough questions about how an intervention, likely to be limited to air strikes, will end - and whether they risk handing power to anti-Western Islamist rebels if Assad is overthrown. Continued on Page 15
AT SEA: A picture released by the US Navy shows aircrafts assigned to Carrier Air Wing 7 fly in formation above the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D Eisenhower (CVN 69) in the Mediterranean Sea. US forces are ‘ready to go’ if called on to strike the Syrian regime, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the BBC yesterday. (Inset) Russian air defense missile system Buk-M2 is on display at the opening of the MAKS Air Show in Zhukovsky outside Moscow yesterday. Russia has supplied similar missiles to Syria. — Agencies
Govts seek Facebook info Qatar confirms new MERS case
DEIR EZZOR: A general view shows a heavily damaged street in Syria’s eastern town of Deir Ezzor. — AFP
Kuwaiti student in Australia faces trial
PAGE
DOHA: Health authorities in Qatar announced the second confirmed case in a week of the MERS coronavirus in the Gulf state, with a 29-year-old man infected and in intensive care. The Qatari patient suffers from asthma and has been in contact with another patient infected with MERS. He is “in a critical condition and is under intensive care,” the Supreme Health Council said in a statement late Monday. On August 20, the authorities announced the first infection in the Gulf state of a 59-year-old Qatari. Another Qatari national with the infection died in a London hospital on June 28. The virus has killed 47 people worldwide since September, 41 of them in Saudi Arabia which neighbors Qatar. MERS is considered a cousin of the SARS virus that erupted in Asia in 2003 and infected 8,273 people, nine percent of whom died. Like SARS, it is thought to have jumped from animals to humans, and shares the former’s flu-like symptoms-but differs by causing kidney failure. Researchers have pointed to the Arabian camel, or dromedary, as a possible host of the virus. Scientists studying the new virus have found older patients, men and people with underlying medical conditions are those particularly at risk. — AFP
SAN FRANCISCO: Governments sought information on over 38,000 Facebook users in the first half of 2013 and the No 1 social network complied with most requests, the firm said in its first report on the scale of data inquiries it gets from countries around the world. The report follows allegations by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden that practically every major Internet company including Facebook, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp - routinely hands over troves of data on potentially millions of users to national intelligence agencies. Facebook has more than 1 billion users worldwide. US law enforcement authorities were by far the most active in mining Facebook, seeking information on about 20,000 to 21,000 users between January and June. That represents a slight rise from the six months between June and December 2012, when US agencies requested information on roughly 18,000 to 19,000 Facebook accounts, according to figures previously released by the company.
India rupee sinks as Asian stocks plunge
PAGE
Boy’s eyes gouged out in gruesome attack
Al-Qaeda rebuffs US ‘propaganda’ AQAP denies plots DUBAI: Al-Qaeda in Yemen has denied US allegations it is plotting massive attacks that prompted the closure of Western missions in the country this month, in a statement posted online. The extremist network also denied reports confirmed by Yemen’s President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi that US intelligence services had intercepted a conversation between Al-Qaeda chief Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Nasser Al-Wuhayshi, head of the Yemen-based Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “Hadi repeated the nonsense and propaganda published by US intelligence on telephone calls between jihadist leaders to justify the US plot to kill Muslims in Yemen through continued raids,” AQAP said in the statement posted on jihadist Internet forums. Hadi had “claimed the jihadists were plotting to target oil terminals in the country using bomb-laden trucks,” said AQAP. “We deny what he said and regard it as an attempt to justify US criminal practices. Continued on Page 15
Facebook has at least partially complied to about 80 percent of those requests, the company acknowledged yesterday. Authorities in other countries with large Facebook user bases, including India, the United Kingdom and Germany, also requested information on thousands of users. Facebook, which disclosed the figures in its first “Global Government Requests Report,” said it individually scrutinized every information request and required governments to meet a “very high legal bar” to receive user data. Continued on Page 15
TAIYUAN: A boy lies on his hospital bed with his eyes covered with bandages in a hospital in Taiyuan, north China’s Shanxi province yesterday. — AFP
BEIJING: A six-year-old boy in China had his eyes gouged out, blinding him for life, reports said yesterday, in a gruesome attack that may have been carried out by a ruthless organ trafficker. Family members found the boy covered in blood some three to four hours after he went missing while playing outside, according to a television report posted online. The child’s eyes were found nearby but the corneas were missing, reports said, implying that an organ trafficker was behind the harrowing attack. Police offered a 100,000 yuan ($16,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of the sole suspect, who they said was a woman. “He had blood all over his face. His eyelids were turned inside out. And inside, his eyeballs were not there,” his father told Shanxi Television. Its report showed the heavily-bandaged boy being taken from an operating theatre and placed in a hospital bed, writhing in agony as family members stood at his bedside weeping. The boy was drugged and “lost consciousness” before the attacker removed his eyes, state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) said on its account on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Continued on Page 15