DT e-Paper 21 March 2017
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World<br />
Britain’s May to launch EU divorce<br />
proceedings on <strong>March</strong> 29<br />
• Reuters, London<br />
Prime Minister Theresa May will<br />
trigger Britain’s divorce proceedings<br />
with the EU on <strong>March</strong> 29,<br />
launching two years of negotiations<br />
that will reshape the future<br />
of the country and Europe.<br />
May’s government said her permanent<br />
envoy to the EU had informed<br />
European Council President<br />
Donald Tusk of the date when Britain<br />
intends to invoke Article 50 of its<br />
Lisbon Treaty, the mechanism for<br />
starting its exit after a referendum<br />
last June in which Britons voted by<br />
a 52-48% margin to leave the bloc.<br />
The EU said it was ready to begin<br />
the negotiations and within 48<br />
hours of the trigger on <strong>March</strong> 29,<br />
Tusk will send the other 27 member<br />
states his draft negotiating<br />
guidelines, which means that talks<br />
could start in May.<br />
Sterling fell half a cent against<br />
the dollar on what Brexit minister<br />
David Davis described as a move<br />
taking Britain to “the threshold of<br />
the most important negotiation for<br />
this country for a generation”.<br />
May, 60, hopes to negotiate<br />
terms that keep trade, financial<br />
and political relations with EU<br />
member states as close as possible<br />
after Brexit, but also satisfy eurosceptics<br />
in her Conservative Party<br />
who demand a complete break<br />
from an institution they say has<br />
stolen British sovereignty.<br />
It will be a difficult and ambitious<br />
balancing act. Talks on departing<br />
the prosperous club Britain<br />
joined in 1973 are likely to be the<br />
most complex London has held<br />
since World War II, with other EU<br />
leaders saying they will not give<br />
May an easy ride.<br />
With nationalism and anti-establishment,<br />
anti-immigrant sentiment<br />
spreading across Western Europe,<br />
the EU leadership in Brussels is anxious<br />
to avoid encouraging others in<br />
the 28-member bloc to bolt.<br />
At the same time, May faces<br />
threats by Scottish nationalists to<br />
call a new independence referendum<br />
that could break up the UK<br />
and fears in Northern Ireland that<br />
a “hard border” with EU member<br />
Ireland will return after Brexit. •<br />
EU citizens in UK anxiously seek security before Brexit<br />
• Tribune Desk<br />
Sam Schwarzkopf, a German neuroscientist<br />
at University College London,<br />
was startled to receive a letter from the<br />
British government telling him that his<br />
application for permanent residence<br />
had been rejected and he should prepare<br />
to leave the UK.<br />
As a EU citizen, he is legally entitled<br />
to live in UK, and last year’s decision by<br />
UK voters to leave the 28-nation bloc<br />
hasn’t changed that. But he is one of<br />
hundreds of thousands of Europeans<br />
battling British bureaucracy to confirm<br />
their legal status, and sometimes discovering<br />
that the process only increases<br />
their uncertainty.<br />
Before last year’s EU membership<br />
referendum, most people didn’t even<br />
know the cards existed. Residents of<br />
EU nations can live and work across<br />
the bloc, no special visas or paperwork<br />
are needed for Europeans living<br />
in Britain.<br />
That will change once Britain leaves<br />
Anger, frustration in Kurdish<br />
southeast to shape Turkey’s<br />
referendum<br />
• Reuters, Diyarbakir, Turkey<br />
Thronged with shoppers and men<br />
sipping tea on a warm day in early<br />
spring, the main streets of Turkey’s<br />
Diyarbakir show few signs of the<br />
devastation wrought by months of<br />
fighting last year between Kurdish<br />
militants and security forces.<br />
But nearby in Sur, the historic<br />
district that saw some of the worst<br />
violence, the narrow back alleys<br />
simmer with anger. Many residents<br />
blame both the state and Kurdistan<br />
Workers Party (PKK) militants.<br />
How voters in Sur and across<br />
the largely Kurdish southeast<br />
view the 33-year-old conflict could<br />
shape the outcome of an April referendum<br />
intended to give President<br />
Tayyip Erdogan sweeping<br />
new powers. In a close race, pollsters<br />
say Kurdish voters, about a<br />
Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May<br />
fifth of the electorate, could tip<br />
the balance.<br />
One resident, Serkan, gestures<br />
toward bombed-out buildings and<br />
fields of rubble. “Our homes, our<br />
memories and our past have been<br />
erased, and both sides are to blame<br />
for that,” he says.<br />
A 2-1/2-year ceasefire between<br />
the government and the PKK broke<br />
down in July 2015, pitching the<br />
southeast into the worst violence<br />
in decades. During the months of<br />
security operations that followed,<br />
about 2,000 people were killed and<br />
up to a half a million displaced, the<br />
United Nations has estimated.<br />
Diyarbakir is seen by many of<br />
Turkey’s 15 million Kurds as their<br />
cultural capital, and Sur is the warren<br />
of streets in its ancient heart,<br />
encircled by towering Roman-era<br />
basalt walls. •<br />
the EU, after a two-year divorce process<br />
due to begin by <strong>March</strong> 31. But no<br />
one is sure exactly how.<br />
Britain says it will end free movement<br />
and impose controls on EU immigration,<br />
but has given no details.<br />
Officials in both the UK and the EU say<br />
the 3m EU citizens living in Britain, and<br />
the 1m Britons who reside elsewhere in<br />
the bloc, should be allowed to stay. But<br />
there has not been a formal guarantee,<br />
or a decision on when the cutoff date<br />
for legal residence could be.<br />
That leaves Europeans in Britain<br />
anxious, and gives the previously obscure<br />
residence cards new value as<br />
proof of immigrants’ legal status.<br />
The number of residence cards issued<br />
by the British government shot<br />
up sevenfold between the final quarter<br />
of 2015 and the same period in 2016.<br />
There were 240,000 applications in all<br />
of 2016, a number that has stressed the<br />
civil service, which at the end of 2016<br />
was working through 90,000 unprocessed<br />
applications. •<br />
Pakistan PM orders reopening<br />
of border with Afghanistan<br />
• AFP, Islamabad<br />
REUTERS<br />
Pakistan on Monday ordered the<br />
border with Afghanistan to be reopened<br />
“immediately”, a month<br />
after it was closed amid soaring<br />
tensions as Islamabad and Kabul<br />
accused one another of providing<br />
safe haven for militants.<br />
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif<br />
ordered the two main crossings<br />
on the long, porous border be reopened<br />
as a gesture of “goodwill”,<br />
a statement from his office said.<br />
The crossings, Torkham at the<br />
famed Khyber Pass, and Chaman<br />
in Balochistan province, were<br />
closed last month after a wave of<br />
militant violence killed 130 people<br />
across Pakistan.<br />
Afghanistan has long accused<br />
Pakistan of providing safe haven<br />
to the Afghan Taliban, and<br />
the claim sparked a diplomatic<br />
furore as both countries traded<br />
allegations.<br />
The two nations are divided<br />
by the “Durand Line”, a 2,400-<br />
km frontier drawn by the British<br />
in 1896 and disputed by Kabul,<br />
which does not officially recognise<br />
it as an international border. •<br />
9<br />
TUESDAY, MARCH <strong>21</strong>, <strong>2017</strong><br />
<strong>DT</strong><br />
USA<br />
Pressure builds on Trump to<br />
back off wiretap accusations<br />
US lawmakers from both parties said<br />
on Sunday they had seen no proof<br />
to support the claim by President<br />
Donald Trump that his predecessor<br />
Barack Obama had wiretapped him<br />
last year, adding pressure on Trump<br />
to explain or back off his repeated<br />
assertion. Several Republicans last<br />
week urged Trump to apologise for<br />
the allegations he made in a series<br />
of tweets on <strong>March</strong> 4. REUTERS<br />
THE AMERICAS<br />
Mexican authorities<br />
find more bodies in<br />
clandestine graves<br />
Mexican authorities said Sunday<br />
they found the remains of nearly 50<br />
bodies in clandestine graves in the<br />
convulsed state of Veracruz, lashed<br />
for years by organised crime, where<br />
a few days ago it was reported that<br />
other 250 corpses. In eight graves<br />
within a perimeter of 120sq meters<br />
in the municipality of Alvarado so<br />
far have been extracted 47 skulls<br />
plus multiple body parts, state prosecutor<br />
Jorge Winckler said. REUTERS<br />
UK<br />
May starts UK tour before<br />
pulling Brexit trigger<br />
UK Prime Minister Theresa May<br />
will visit Wales on Monday as part<br />
of a plan to engage with all the nations<br />
before she formally launches<br />
Brexit. May is due to trigger Article<br />
50 of the EU’s Lisbon Treaty, by the<br />
end of this month, and her office<br />
said she would be visiting Wales,<br />
Scotland and Northern Ireland to<br />
hear people’s views. REUTERS<br />
EUROPE<br />
Merkel warns Germany<br />
could ban Turkish<br />
campaign events<br />
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday<br />
warned that Germany could<br />
ban future campaign events by<br />
Turkish politicians on its soil unless<br />
Ankara stopped “Nazi” jibes aimed<br />
at Berlin. Merkel stressed that<br />
such insults must stop, “no ifs, no<br />
buts”, and that Germany reserved<br />
the right to “take all necessary<br />
measures, including reviewing the<br />
permissions” for campaign events it<br />
had already granted. AFP<br />
AFRICA<br />
10 killed in latest Kenya<br />
drought clash<br />
At least 10 people have been killed<br />
in the latest clashes in drought-hit<br />
Kenya between rural communities<br />
fighting over pasture to graze their<br />
animals, police said Monday. Herders<br />
from the Borana and Samburu<br />
communities fought a gun battle<br />
on Sunday in an area in the centre<br />
of the country called Kom, where<br />
both groups had taken their livestock<br />
to graze. AFP