Al Jazeera journalist detained in Berlin on Egyptian warrant

FILE - Journalists wait outside court adjacent to Tora Prison as 20 Al-Jazeera employees are on trial accused of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood and also for aiding it, in Cairo, Egypt. (Source: AP)

A prominent Al-Jazeera Arabic journalist was detained on Saturday in Germany over an Egyptian arrest warrant, the Qatar-based broadcaster reported, the latest in a long series of legal entanglements between Egypt and its satellite news channels.

Ahmed Mansour, a senior journalist with its Arabic service, was detained at 1320 GMT (9 am EDT) while trying to board a Qatar Airways flight at Berlin’s Tegel airport heading to Doha, the station reported. It said he previously had been sentenced in absentia in Egypt to 15 years in prison over allegedly torturing an unnamed lawyer in Tahrir Square in 2011, a charge both he and the channel rejected.

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While not identifying Mansour by name, German police spokesman Meik Grauer said authorities detained a 52-year-old Egyptian-British journalist and that prosecutors would look into the arrest warrant on Sunday.

In October, Al-Jazeera said Interpol had rejected an Egyptian request to put out a “red notice” for Mansour’s arrest.

The network’s Acting Director General Mostefa Souag called for Mansour’s immediate release, in a statement released Saturday evening.

“Other countries must not allow themselves to be tools of this media oppression, least of all those that respect freedom of the media as does Germany,” Soaug said.

Mansour recently conducted an interview with the head of the Nusra Front, the al-Qaida branch fighting in Syria’s civil war. In a Facebook post Saturday night, he said showed German authorities an email from Interpol saying he was not wanted by them.

Egypt and Qatar have had tense relations since 2013, when the Egyptian military ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi amid massive protests. Doha is a strong backer of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Cairo accuses Al-Jazeera of being a mouthpiece for Morsi’s supporters, charges denied by the broadcaster.

In December 2013, Egyptian security forces raided a hotel room used by Al-Jazeera English, arresting three journalists and later convicting of them of being part of a terrorist group and airing falsified footage intended to damage national security in a widely criticized trial.

Acting bureau chief Mohamed Fahmy, who has Canadian citizenship, and Egyptian producer Baher Mohammed are free on bail amid a retrial. Australian journalist Peter Greste was deported in February.

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Analysis: Obama Asia policy faces toughest test on trade

President Barack Obama looks out as he sits on stage as Attorney General Loretta Lynch speaks during her investiture ceremony at the Warner Theatre in Washington. (Source: AP)

Critics have long predicted that President ’s policy to shift America’s focus toward Asia is doomed. The legislative battle over his trade agenda could prove the acid test.

Legislation to smooth the way for a free-trade pact with 11 other Asia-Pacific nations hit a wall in last week. A fresh vote in the House was set for Thursday to try to reverse that setback. Formidable obstacles remain— principally, opposition from Obama’s fellow Democrats who believe trade deals cost American jobs.

The Obama administration itself has always presented the Trans-Pacific Partnership as crucial to its “pivot” toward the increasingly prosperous Asian region, after a post-9/11 preoccupation with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Officials have been at pains to point out the policy means more than ramping up America’s military presence to counter rising-power China.

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But the administration was slow off the blocks in the politically prickly task of getting congressional support for “fast track” authority for the president to negotiate trade pacts that lawmakers can approve or reject but not amend. That’s viewed as essential for winning eventual US ratification for TPP.

The upshot is the current logjam in Congress. Obama and his legislative allies — which in this case are mostly Republicans — were consulting Wednesday to find a way a way through it.

While plans were yet to be finalized, officials said the House could have a stand-alone vote on fast track on Thursday. A package of aid for workers who lose their jobs because of imports would become part of a separate bill. The two measures were originally combined into one, to sweeten the deal for union-backed Democrats, who voted against it anyway last Friday.

That political setback was greeted with anguish by Asia experts in Washington and former administration officials.

Larry Summers, a former director of the National Economic Council in the Obama White House, wrote that unless the trade legislation votes were successfully revisited, it would “doom” the TPP. “It would leave the grand strategy of rebalancing US foreign policy toward Asia with no meaningful nonmilitary component,” he said.

Obama, who was born in Hawaii and spent some of his childhood in Indonesia, has described himself as “America’s first Pacific President.” He took office believing that in no small measure, America’s future is tied to Asia’s, as the center of global economic growth has shifted eastward.

His grand strategy to elevate America’s profile in the region has been welcomed both in Washington and in Asia, where China’s assertive behavior in disputed maritime territories has unnerved its neighbors.

But skepticism has grown.

Preoccupation with crises in the Middle East, cuts to the US aid and defense budgets, and domestic political

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WikiLeaks starts publishing over 5,00,000 Saudi documents; 60,000 files already leaked

WikiLeaks said in a statement that it has already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic.

WikiLeaks is in the process of publishing more than 500,000 Saudi diplomatic documents to the Internet, the transparency website said on Friday, a move that echoes its famous release of US State Department cables in 2010.

WikiLeaks said in a statement that it has already posted roughly 60,000 files. Most of them appear to be in Arabic.

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There was no immediate way to verify the authenticity of the documents, although WikiLeaks has a long track record of hosting large-scale leaks of government material. Many of the documents carried green letterhead marked “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” or “Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Some were marked “urgent” or “classified.” At least one appeared to be from the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

If genuine, the documents would offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the notoriously opaque kingdom. They might also shed light on Riyadh’s longstanding regional rivalry with Iran, its support for Syrian rebels and Egypt’s military-backed government, and its opposition to an emerging international agreement on Tehran’s nuclear program.

One of the documents, dated to 2012, appears to highlight Saudi Arabia’s well-known skepticism about the Iranian nuclear talks. A message from the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran to the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh describes “flirting American messages” being carried to Iran via an unnamed Turkish mediator.

Another 2012 missive, this time sent from the Saudi Embassy in Abu Dhabi, said the United Arab Emirates was putting “heavy pressure” on the Egyptian government not to try former president Hosni Mubarak, who had been overthrown in a popular uprising the year before.

Some of the concerns appear specific to Saudi Arabia.

In an Aug. 14, 2008 message marked “classified and very urgent,” the Foreign Ministry wrote to the Saudi Embassy in Washington to warn that dozens of students from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries had visited the Israeli Embassy in the US capital as part of an international leadership program.

“They listened to diplomats’ briefings from the embassy employees, they asked questions and then they took pictures,” the message said, asking the embassy for a speedy update on the situation.

Another eye-catching item was a document addressed to the interior and justice ministers notifying them that a son of Osama bin Laden had obtained a certificate from the American Embassy in Riyadh “showing (the) death of his father.”

Many more of the dozens of documents examined by The Associated Press appeared to be the product of mundane administrative work, such as emails about setting up a website or operating an office fax machine.

The AP was able to partially verify a handful of documents’ authenticity

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Bahrain’s opposition leader, Ibrahim Sharif released from prison after 4 years

Ebrahim Sharif (L), president of the secular Al Waad Society (National Democratic Action Society), is greeted by friends after being released from jail, at his residence in Manama, Bahrain June 20, 2015. Sharif was pardoned by Bahrain's King Hamad bin Issa al-Khalifa in the early hours of Saturday. (Source: Reuters)

A top Bahraini opposition leader was released after more than four years in prison for his role in protests calling for reform in the Gulf kingdom.

The WAAD (National Democratic Action Society) group confirmed on its official Twitter account that Ibrahim Sharif was released yesterday. Sharif was sentenced in June 2011 to five years in prison for plotting to overthrow Bahrain’s 200-year-old monarchy.

Sharif was one of 20 prominent pro-democracy activists calling for political reforms who were convicted by a military-led tribunal after the government cracked down on them. He was leading WAAD at the time of his arrest in March 2011.

Bahrain’s majority Shiites, inspired by Arab Spring protests elsewhere, launched an uprising seeking to limit the wide-ranging powers of the ruling Sunni dynasty. The strategic island nation is home to the US Navy’s 5th Fleet.

Brian Dooley, a program director with Human Rights First, applauded the release.

“More than four years after President Obama called for the release of peaceful opposition leaders in Bahrain Ebrahim Sharif is finally out,” he said in a statement. “This is a long overdue move, and he should never have been jailed in the first place.”

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California balcony collapse: Experts point to likely wood rot

A worker measures near the remaining wood from an apartment building balcony that collapsed in Berkeley, Calif., Wednesday, June 17, 2015. (Source: AP)

Wood rot from exposure to excess moisture likely weakened the horizontal beams supporting an apartment balcony that collapsed in Berkeley, California, killing six people, several independent experts said a day after the tragedy.

But the consensus among structural engineers interviewed by Reuters on Thursday was that the balcony should otherwise have been sturdy enough, under normal circumstances, to safely bear the weight of the 13 people who were on the deck at the time.

All 13, mostly college students from Ireland working in the San Francisco Bay Area for the summer on temporary visas, were hurled to the street below when the fourth-floor balcony gave way during a birthday celebration on Tuesday.

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Splintered wooden support joists, which experts said were visibly decayed, were left protruding from where the platform detached from the building’s outer wall as it crashed onto a vacant third-floor balcony just below.

Three men and three women in their early 20s, including an American friend of the Irish students, died in the collapse, and seven others were hospitalized.

The integrity of the stucco-over-wood frame construction at the Library Gardens apartment complex, near the University of California at Berkeley, immediately came under scrutiny as city inspectors began to examine the accident site.

Municipal officials declined to discuss the condition of the balcony’s underlying structure or speculate on what caused the collapse.

But three Bay-area structural engineers and a veteran building inspector from New York who examined pictures from the site all agreed that wood rot from moisture seeping into the balcony’s support beams was a likely factor in the failure of the deck.

“It appears that decay in the structural members probably played a role,” said Derrick Hom, the Oakland-based president of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California.

Hom and others said it would take a thorough physical inspection of the site to determine the source of water that led to decay of the wooden beams.

Alvin Ubell, founder and chief inspector of Accurate Building Inspectors in New York City, said internal moisture from condensation was the most likely culprit, citing high humidity in coastal regions like the Bay Area.

He and other experts agreed that defects in the design, installation and maintenance of waterproofing, flashing materials and ventilation could leave untreated wood framing especially vulnerable to decay.

Otherwise, they said the use of wooden timbers to support cantilevered platforms in such construction was commonplace.

Still, structural failures accounted for an estimated 5,600 injuries from balcony-related falls from 1990 to 2006, according to data collected by the Center for Injury Research and Policy in Columbus, Ohio, and published in 2009 by the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.

As for questions of weight, Hom said the crowd on the deck may have put the balcony close

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Denmark’s center-right opposition wins election

With all votes counted, preliminary official results showed the opposition bloc led by Lars Loekke Rasmussen would get the 90 seats needed to secure a majority in the 179-seat legislature. (Source: Reuters photo)

Denmark’s center-right opposition won a parliamentary election after strong gains by an anti-immigration party that wants to limit the European Union’s influence over the small Nordic country.

With all votes counted, preliminary official results showed the opposition bloc led by Lars Loekke Rasmussen, a former prime minister, would get the 90 seats needed to secure a majority in the 179-seat legislature.

“Four years ago we handed over the keys to the prime minister’s office. I then said it was only a loan,” he told supporters in Copenhagen.

“There is a majority that believes that Denmark needs a new government and gives us a possibility to get the keys back.”

His main opponent Helle Thorning-Schmidt conceded defeat, saying she would resign as prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party on Friday.

“We were beaten on the finish line,” said Thorning-Schmidt, Denmark’s first female leader. “I know that Lars Loekke (Rasmussen) loves Denmark and he should be happy that he takes over a Denmark that is in great shape.”

Loekke Rasmussen’s own Liberal Party lost 7 percent of its support and was surpassed by one of its allies, the Danish People’s Party, as Denmark’s second biggest political group.

That party, which is opposed to immigration and skeptical of the EU, surged to 21 percent, helping the opposition get 51.5 percent of the vote, the results showed.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether his party would seek Cabinet posts or try to use its leverage in Parliament to influence the government, like it did before 2011.

“The most important for the Danish People’s Party is to get political influence,” party leader Kristian Thulesen Dahl said.

Loekke Rasmussen was expected to become prime minister, because he has the support of the other members of the bloc.

Before the vote, the opposition parties endorsed British Prime Minister David Cameron’s bid for EU reforms, which suggests that Denmark, too, may consider a looser relationship with the union.

The Danish People’s Party has called for Denmark to take back more authority from the EU headquarters in Brussels and for border controls to be reintroduced on the boundaries with Germany and Sweden. That’s controversial among many EU members who feel it would challenge the spirit of a borderless Europe.

Election campaigns focused on welfare spending, the economy and immigration, with both Thorning-Schmidt and Loekke Rasmussen promising to further tighten Denmark’s controls on immigration.

“I want an open Denmark, but I also want a Denmark that is efficiently shut for people who don’t want our country,” Loekke Rasmussen told reporters when he voted Thursday.

Thorning-Schmidt, who is married to British Labour lawmaker Stephen Kinnock, lost the election even though her Social Democratic Party improved slightly and remained Denmark’s

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Increase in beach goers reason for increase in shark attacks

Vacationers walk in the surf in Oak Island, NC, the day after a 12-year-old girl from Asheboro lost part of her arm and suffered a leg injury, and a 16-year-old boy from Colorado lost his left arm about separate shark attacks off Oak Island. (Source: AP)

Federal wildlife protections are helping sharks rebound, but they aren’t the sole reason for the uptick in encounters between sharks and humans. Expanding human populations and growing use of beaches are major factors too, scientists say.

Recent shark attacks in North Carolina and Florida have made headlines as the summer beach-going season gets into gear. Such attacks have become more common in recent years — the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File says the number of unprovoked shark attacks has grown in every decade since the 1970s.

Shark researcher George Burgess, who publishes the file, said this decade is almost certain to set a record for shark attacks.

“The fact of the matter is, while shark populations rebound and hopefully come to where they once were, the human population is rising every year,” Burgess said. “We’re not rebounding, we’re just bounding.”

Americans made 2.2 billion visits to beaches in 2010, up from 2 billion in 2001, according to a US Army Corps of Engineers estimate. A spokesman for the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association said the figure is likely still rising because of the improving economy.

Populations of some shark species have grown due in part to conservation efforts, such as a 1997 US law that prevented the hunting of great white sharks. Dr. Bob Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory & Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida, said preservation and management have also helped repair populations of species like the sandbar shark and blacktip shark.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 also has helped increase the population of seals, which are a favorite prey of white sharks. In Massachusetts, the growing number of seals has raised concerns in recent years about the animals attracting sharks to beaches favored by humans.

Hueter said the rebounding white shark population justifies vigilance, but he added that it’s presumptive to assume there are more shark attacks because there are more sharks in the ocean.

“Sharks are fairly sophisticated. If they are hunting for seals, they are going to concentrate their efforts near a seal colony,” he said. “Are you going to go swimming in a seal colony? Of course not.”

There were 72 shark attacks worldwide in 2014, three of them fatal, according to the International Shark Attack File. The deadliest recent year was 2011, when 13 of 79 attacks were fatal.

Greg Skomal, senior scientist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said encounters with marine animals such as sharks are inevitable as long

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