Month: April 2014

A US deadline for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians has come to an end without the two side reaching any agreement, BBC reported Monday.

Direct talks had resumed in July after a three-year hiatus but quickly became strained.

The latest round was halted last week following the main Palestinian factions announcement of a political pact.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, who brokered the talks, has meanwhile issued a statement denying he called Israel “an apartheid state”.

The Mexican army has started registering the weapons carried by vigilantes in the western state of Michoacan, BBC reported Monday.

The registration exercise has begun nearly four months after the “self-defence groups” launched an offensive against the Knights Templar drug cartel.

The vigilantes will be allowed to keep their weapons, but will be banned from publicly carrying assault rifles.

Most of the drug cartel leaders in Michoacan state have been killed or arrested since this January.

The New Zealand government is to increase defence spending by 100.9 million NZ dollars (about $86 million) over the 2014-2015 financial year in the first of four annual staged increases in funding for the military, Xinhua reported..

Defence Minister Jonathan Coleman said Tuesday the first stage of an allocation of 535.5 million NZ dollars ($456 million) in new funding over the next four years would be included in the government Budget to be published next month.

The investment would address a long-term funding gap for the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF), Coleman said in a statement.

One Ukrainian serviceman has been killed and another injured, when an improvised explosive device went off at a military base in the country’s east, the defence ministry said in a statement Monday.

The blast occurred, when two soldiers of the Ukrainian army were conducting an inspection of engineering obstacles at the base in Donetsk region, Xinhua quoted the ministry’s press service as saying in a statement.

he injured serviceman was rushed to hospial in a serious condition, it said.

A total of 150 soldiers from the US 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team arrived Monday at the Estonian Amari air base near its capital city of Tallinn, local media said.

Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves went to the air base to receive the soldiers, accompanied by the US Ambassador to Estonia Jeffrey Levine and an Estonian Scouts Battalion company, Xinhua reported.

The soldiers will participate in major annual spring exercises, reports said.

Media reported that same amounts of the US airborne soldiers had also arrived in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia.

–IANS

Russia will retaliate for the new sanctions imposed by the US over alleged Moscow involvement in the crisis prevailing in Ukraine, deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Monday.

“We will respond, of course. There are possibilities for such a response and there is a wide set of measures,” Xinhua quoted the diplomat as saying in a media report.

Ryabkov assured the Russian response would be “painful for Washington”, because “no one has a right to speak to Moscow in the language of sanctions”.