West cutting Moscow out of coalition
THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Seeking to isolate Russia, the U.S. and Western allies said Monday they are indefinitely cutting Moscow out of a major international coalition and warned they stand ready to order tougher economic penalties if Vladimir Putin presses further into Ukraine.
The moves came amid a flurry of diplomatic jockeying as the West grappled for ways to punish Russia for its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and prevent the crisis from escalating.
President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan met in the Netherlands for an emergency meeting of the Group of Seven. In a joint statement after their 90-minute meeting, the leaders said they were suspending their participation with Russia in the Group of Eight major industrial nations until Moscow “changes course.”
The G-7 leaders instead plan to meet this summer in Brussels, symbolically gathering in the headquarters city of the European Union and NATO, two Western organizations seeking to bolster ties with Ukraine.
“Today, we reaffirm that Russia’s actions will have significant consequences,” the leaders’ statement said. “This clear violation of international law is a serious challenge to the rule of law around the world and should be a concern for all nations.”
Jimmy Carter ditching email for snail mail
NEW YORK – Former President Jimmy Carter said Monday that U.S. intelligence monitoring has run out of control since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and he now hand-writes and mails sensitive letters to foreign and American leaders because he can’t trust his email or telephone to be secure.
He had begun this practice well before National Security Agency contract worker Edward Snowden leaked a trove of documents last year. The documents disclosed that the NSA was archiving the meta-data on telephone calls and emails and had secretly tapped into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt now that the NSA or other agencies monitor or record almost every telephone call made in the United States, including cellphones, and I presume email as well,” Carter told The Associated Press in an interview. “We’ve gone a long way down the road of violating Americans’ basic civil rights, as far as privacy is concerned.”
Phone calls to the National Security Agency for comment on Carter’s remarks were not immediately returned.
Morsi backers sentenced to death
CAIRO – An Egyptian court Monday sentenced to death nearly 530 suspected backers of ousted President Mohammed Morsi over a deadly attack on a police station, capping a swift, two-day mass trial in which defense attorneys were not allowed to present their case.
It was the largest single batch of death sentences in the world in recent years, Amnesty International said. The U.S. State Department said it “defies logic” that so many people could get a fair trial in just two sessions.
The verdicts by a court in the city of Minya are subject to appeal and are likely to be overturned.
But the outcome stunned human rights activists and raised fears that the rule of law is being swept away in the crackdown waged by the military-backed interim government against Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood since his overthrow last summer.
The government is conducting a series of mass trials of Brotherhood supporters, some with hundreds of defendants.
“It turns the judiciary in Egypt from a tool for achieving justice into an instrument for taking revenge,” said Mohammed Zarie, a Cairo-based human-rights lawyer.
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry brushed off the criticism, saying in a statement that the judiciary is “entirely independent and is not influenced in any way by the executive branch of government.”
Associated Press
