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Obama seeking congress nod for Syria action
Obama seeking congress nod for Syria action (Agencies) / 1 September 2013 Delaying what had loomed as an imminent strike, President Barack Obama abruptly announced on Saturday that he will seek congressional approval before launching any military action meant to punish Syria for its alleged use of chemical weapons in an attack that killed hundreds. With Navy ships on standby in the Mediterranean Sea ready to launch their cruise missiles, Obama said he had decided the United States should take military action and that he believes he has “the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorisation.” At the same time, he said, “I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course and our actions will be even more effective.” Congress is scheduled to return from a summer vacation on September 9. The president didn’t say so, but his strategy carries enormous risks to his and the nation’s credibility, which the administration has argued forcefully is on the line in Syria. Obama long ago said the use of chemical weapons was a “red line” that Syrian President Bashar Assad would not be allowed to cross with impunity. British Prime Minister David Cameron, who suffered a humiliating defeat when the House of Commons refused to support his call for military action against Syria, said on Saturday that he understood President Barack Obama’s decision to ask the US Congress to authorise military action against Syria. “I understand and support Barack Obama’s position on Syria,” the British prime minister said in a tweet. The developments marked a stunning turn in an episode in which Obama has struggled to gain international support for a strike, while dozens of lawmakers at home urged him to seek their backing. Halfway around the world, Syrians awoke on Saturday to state television broadcasts of tanks, planes and other weapons of war, and troops training, all to a soundtrack of martial music. Assad’s government blames rebels in the August 21 attack, and has threatened retaliation if it is attacked. Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he was appealing to a Nobel Peace laureate rather than to a president, urged Obama to reconsider. A group that monitors casualties in the long Syrian civil war challenged the United States to substantiate its claim that 1,429 died in a chemical weapons attack, including more than 400 children. The new timetable gives time for UN inspectors to receive preliminary lab results from the samples they took during four days in Damascus. Fully assessing the evidence collected by weapons inspectors could take up to three weeks, the organisation in charge of the investigation said on Saturday. United Nations inspectors arrive at the headquarters of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), in The Hague, on August 31. -AFP The team, which included nine experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and three from the World Health Organisation, arrived at the OPCW’s Hague headquarters on Saturday evening after leaving Syria early in the morning. “The evidence collected by the team will now undergo laboratory analysis and technical evaluation according to the established and recognised procedures and standards,” the OPCW said in a statement. The group’s leader was expected to brief Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday. Republicans expressed satisfaction at Obama’s decision, and challenged him to make his case to the public and lawmakers alike that American power should be used to punish Assad. “We are glad the president is seeking authorisation for any military action in Syria in response to serious, substantive questions being raised,” House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and other House Republican leaders said in a joint statement. “In consultation with the president, we expect the House to consider a measure the week of September 9th. This provides the president time to make his case to Congress and the American people.” It appeared that effort at persuasion was already well underway. The administration arranged a series of weekend briefings for lawmakers, both classified and unclassified, and Obama challenged lawmakers to consider “what message will we send to a dictator” if he is allowed to kill hundreds of children with chemical weapons without suffering any retaliation. While lawmakers are scheduled to return to work September 9, officials said it was possible the Senate might come back to session before then. Obama said on Friday that he was considering “limited and narrow” steps to punish Assad, adding that US national security interests were at stake. He pledged no US combat troops on the ground in Syria, where a civil war has claimed more than 100,000 civilian lives. With Obama struggling to gain international backing for a strike, Putin urged him to reconsider his plans. “We have to remember what has happened in the last decades, how many times the United States has been the initiator of armed conflict in different regions of the world, said Putin, a strong Assad ally. “Did this resolve even one problem?” Even the administration’s casualty estimate was grist for controversy. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization that monitors casualties in the country, said it has confirmed 502 deaths, nearly 1,000 fewer than the American intelligence assessment claimed. Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the organisation, said he was not contacted by US officials about his efforts to collect information about the death toll. “America works only with one part of the opposition that is deep in propaganda,” he said, and urged the Obama administration to release the information its estimate is based on. In the hours before Obama’s Rose garden announcement, he was joined at the White House by top advisers. Vice-President Joseph Biden, who had planned a holiday weekend at home in Delaware, was among them. So, too, were Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel, Secretary of State John Kerry and other top administration officials. Continue reading
It’s school time again
Sarah Young As school gets back in session and new shoes are on the agenda, getting the right fit is a must for children, says a long-time shoe fitter. An expert on feet and shoe fitting for 44 years, Clarks International global children’s consultant Bob Hardy is visiting Dubai to provide training for Clark store managers, and parents with advice on shoe fitting for children, as school begins. It was extremely important for parents to get the right shoes given the wrong size could do a lot of harm when worn for the whole year, he said — especially considering children would walk about a million steps and spend 1,000 hours in those shoes – absorbing 50 litres of perspiration by the time the year is out. The development of children’s feet was ‘a total mystery’ to many parents, he said, who did not realise how quickly they grew. In the first year alone, a child’s feet would grow 25 millimetres, while from age one to five, they would grow 16mm each year, and then eight to 10mm per year from school age to mid-teens when the feet stopped growing, he said. Shoe companies offered half sizes, and width options, as well as integrating ‘growing room’ into the shoes, he said. Children often did not feel pain from ill-fitting shoes due the large amounts of fatty tissue in their feet, but the damage was still being done and would be felt when they were older, he said. Seventy per cent of adults would have had some sort of serious foot problem by the time they were 30, he said. Only 30 per cent of people actually had a standard fitting, he added. Hardy said a ‘geographical blip’ led him to his profession, as he was born one kilometre from the Clark headquarters. He left school in 1970 at the age of 16 and ended up standing in the Clark’s shoe factory “wondering what the hell I had done”. But it has proved a long love affair taking him on training trips to 45 countries. “I’ve been to so many different countries and met so many people … and it’s nice to see people using the things you’ve passed on or taught them on a daily basis.” His first visit to Dubai was in 1989, and much has changed since that time when a tractor drove up to the plane to collect their luggage. The UAE was one of the most challenging markets, given it was one of the most diverse in the world, and like a “mini-United States” in terms of the various population groups and differing lifestyle choices and tastes, he said. The warm weather and the amount of time spent in air conditioning meant customers could want from sandals to heeled, long boots. And, traditional local preferences meant styles exclusive to the Middle East had to be catered for, such as the men’s Arabic style sandal, he said. The biggest mistake he saw here was the tendency for people to wear ill-fitting sandals, and the number of people he saw “shuffling around and not walking properly, curling their toes up to hold their shoes on,” was worrying, he said. Traditional, natural materials such as leather and rubber were still the best for breathing, flexibility and toughness, he added. So what about his most challenging shoe-fitting experience? An Englishman who was convinced he had size 13 feet that were very wide, and no amount of measuring his feet or fitting shoes would make him believe his feet were actually a narrow size 11. “The shoes he walked in with could have held both his feet. “Although this probably wasn’t a foot problem….” sarah@khaleejtimes.com Continue reading
UN experts quit Syria as Obama weighs strike
UN experts quit Syria as Obama weighs strike AFP / 31 August 2013 UN experts probing a suspected chemical weapons attack quit Syria on Saturday, opening a window into a possible US strike after Washington concluded the Damascus regime unleashed posion gas on civilians. The 13 inspectors, led by Ake Sellstrom , left their Damascus hotel before dawn and crossed early morning into Lebanon at the town of Chtaura in a convoy of vehicles, an AFP reporter said. They are due to report back immediately to UN chief Ban Ki-moon , who has appealed to the West to allow time for their findings to be assessed. Their departure heightened expectations of a US-led military strike on the Syrian regime, after US President Barack Obama on Friday gave his clearest indication yet that an attack was imminent. “We cannot accept a world where women and children and innocent civilians are gassed on a terrible scale,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We are looking at the possibility of a limited, narrow act,” he said, while stressing no final decision had been taken on unleashing military strikes against Bashar Al Assad’s regime. His remarks came after the United States released an intelligence report that concluded the regime had launched a chemical onslaught in the suburbs of Damascus last week, killing 1,429 people, including at least 426 children. “This kind of attack is a challenge to the world,” Obama said. “The world has an obligation to make sure we maintain the norm against the use of chemical weapons,” the president said, slamming the failure of the UN Security Council to agree on action. Obama said he was looking at a “wide range of options” but had ruled out “boots on the ground” or a “long-term campaign.” France gave its backing to the US plans, saying a “strong message” should be sent to the Assad regime, but British lawmakers have voted against any involvement in military action and other close US allies said they would not sign up. Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, has questioned US intelligence about the August 21 gas attacks and has warned against any military strikes without UN backing. US Secretary of State John Kerry cited “multiple streams of intelligence” indicating that the Syrian government had carried out the chemical attack and that Assad himself is the “ultimate decision maker”. Kerry said failure to act would not only erode the nearly century-old norm against the use of chemical weapons, but would embolden Syrian allies Iran and Hezbollah. But the United States, faced with an impasse at the Security Council and the British parliament’s shock vote Thursday, has been forced to look elsewhere for international partners. While Germany and Canada ruled out joining any military strikes, French President Francois Hollande — whose country was a strident opponent of the US-led war on Iraq — said the British decision would not affect his government’s stance. Hollande said he and Obama “agreed that the international community cannot tolerate the use of chemical weapons, that it should hold the Syrian regime accountable for it and send a strong message.” Turkey, Syria’s neighbour, went further still, demanding not just surgical strikes to send a message about chemical weapons but a sustained campaign to topple the regime. Gruesome pictures of some of the reported victims of the attacks, including children, have shocked the world and piled on the pressure for a response that could draw a reluctant West into the vicious Syrian civil war. But Russia and Iran, and even some US allies, have warned against any intervention, saying it risks sparking a wider conflict. The military buildup continued, with US warships armed with cruise missiles converging on the eastern Mediterranean. In Damascus, the mood was heavy with fear and security forces were making preparations for possible air strikes, pulling soldiers back from potential targets. The capital’s streets were largely empty on Saturday with few cars or pedestrians, although this is normal for the second day of the Syrian weekend. Residents were seen stocking up with fuel for generators in case utilities are knocked out in any military strike. The sound of bombardments in the distant suburbs could be heard, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reporting shelling near Beit Sahem, on the way to the international airport; Al Nabak in the north and in East Ghouta, one of the sites of the suspected poison gas attacks. Syria has denied using chemical weapons and the foreign ministry said that the US intelligence report was “entirely fabricated stories” spread by “terrorists” — its term for rebels. More than 100,000 people have died since the conflict erupted in March 2011 and two million have become refugees, half of them children, according to the United Nations. Continue reading
