Rome, Italy (AHN) – Students in Italy staged a nationwide demonstration Wednesday to protest the passage of an education reform bill. The demonstrations, staged in several cities including Rome, Naples, Turin, Palermo and Salermo, were generally peaceful. There was one reported clash between students and police in Palermo and scuffles in Milan.

In Naples, a sit-in on railway tracks disrupted rail service. Another sit-in in Rome and Turin blocked roads.

The protesters are calling on MPs to reject the bill fearing that a provision increasing links between universities and businesses will cause the privatization of state education. Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini denied this and said the education reform bill will streamline a bloated system and rationalize the number of teachers.

Last week, demonstrations against the bill turned violent as students and police clashed and rioted in Rome’s main shopping streets.

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Kampala, Uganda (AHN) – Just a day after a bomb blast killed three on a Kampala-bound bus in Kenyan capital Nairobi, Ugandan police said that both the neighboring countries tightened their security on Tuesday ahead of Christmas amid fears of more terror attacks.

Monday’s explosion hit the passengers at a time when they were being screened before taking a night bus in Nairobi.

Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki promised to bring the perpetrators to justice and also vowed detailed investigations of the blast. The officials could not yet determine the exact nature of the blast.

“The security of our people is paramount. No efforts will be spared to ensure that security is beefed up,” Kibaki said in a statement. “It is unfortunate that people can be so inhuman as to plan to use deadly devices to harm the innocent,” he added.

Uganda’s Inpector General of Police Kale Kayihura suspects Somalia’s al Qaeda-linked Shebab insurgents’ role in Monday’s attack. “I am yet to get details about the explosion in Nairobi, but it is most likely that Shebab may be behind this incident,” Kayihura told reporters in Kampala. “On our part as police, we have put in place extra measures in form of foot patrols, motorised patrols and general vigilance to prevent not only terrorism, but also other violent crime,” he added.

However, his Kenyan counterpart is not keen on coming to conclusions without thorough investigation.

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London, United Kingdom (AHN) – Relations between the United Kingdom and Russia chilled as a diplomat accused of spying has officially left London, according to officials.

The British Foreign Office asked for an unnamed Russian diplomat serving in the capital to leave due to “clear evidence of activities by the Russian intelligence services against U.K. interests.”

Russia denied the claims, and six days later, Russian officials made the same allegation against a British diplomat serving in Moscow. Now, both diplomats have returned to their home states.

Relations between the two Cold War adversaries continue to chill amid espionage claims and criticism from London of Russian leaders Putin and Medvedev.

Nonetheless, “We remain open to a more productive relationship with Russia, as with any other country, on the basis of respect for our laws,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague tells the BBC.

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Tehran, Iran (AHN) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s office said he has telephoned Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and urged him to arrest and hand over “known terrorists.”

The call came in the wake of last week’s suicide attack on southeastern Iranian city of Chabahar, which killed 39 people during a Shiite mourning procession.

Sunni militant group, Jundallah or Army of God claimed the responsibility of the attack. Iran believes that Pakistan, the U.S. and the U.K. support this group with their intelligence services.

“The perpetrators of this act are not only non-Muslims, but belong to no religion,” Ahmadinejad reportedly told Zardari.

Responding to Iranian claims, Jundallah said that the main aim of the group is to fight for the rights of ethnic Sunni Baluchis in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province, which is a border town near Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Zardari assured Ahmadinejad that Pakistan would do all it can to help eradicate terrorism from its soil.

On Monday, Iran executed 11 Jundallah members in Sistan-Baluchestan’s capital Zahedan, where its fighters carried out several attacks in the past.

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Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Lawmakers in the House and Senate have passed legislation ending the controversial military policy, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now, President Barack Obama is planning to sign the legislation repealing DADT on Wednesday.

According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Obama is preparing for a press conference this week to outline his reasoning behind allowing openly gay servicemembers in the U.S. Armed Forces.

“It is time to recognize that sacrifice, valor and integrity are no more defined by sexual orientation than they are by race or gender, religion or creed,” Obama said Saturday. “It is time to allow gay and lesbian Americans to serve their country openly.”

Obama campaigned on furthering rights for the GLBT community. In 2008, he promised to overturn DADT if he became president. Now, Democrats scrambled to pass the legislation while in a lame duck session before the arrival of a Republican House majority in January.

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Abidjan, Ivory Coast (AHN) – Tensions have escalated in Ivory Coast after supporters of incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo called for the exit of United Nations peacekeeping forces by Friday.

The fresh call came after Gbagbo rejected a U.N. call to step down and give power to his main rival, Alassane Ouattara, whom the U.N. and the international community say won the presidential election run-off last month.

The international community is also pressing Gbagbo to resign, with the U.S. hinting the leader should even leave the country and take shelter in one of the countries where he has his residence.

Responding to all these calls, Gbagbo ordered 900 French soldiers and 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers to leave the west African nation immediately.

However, the U.N. has refused to pull its troops, saying it does not recognize the Gbagbo government. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesman said that the U.N. was also adamant in finishing their mission in Ivory Coast.

The spokesman added that the world body would continue to check for any human rights violations, incitement to hatred and violence, or attacks on U.N. peacekeepers.

In response, Gbagbo and his supporters blamed foreign forces for interfering in their internal affairs and threatening its sovereignty.

His comments came over the weekend in Abidjan where he was addressing a rally of thousands of his supporters. He called on them to “completely liberate” Ivory Coast from foreign forces by Dec. 24.

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Damascus, Syria (TML) – Dismissing calls to leave the region amid increased sectarian attacks, Christians in Syria are heeding their clerics and are holding fast to their communities.

“Life here in Damascus is more than perfect,” Father Gabriel Dawood, a priest at the Syriac Orthodox Church in Damascus told The Media Line. “The good atmosphere here isn’t fake like in other places. Here people are united as one.”

Religious leaders in Syria at a government-sponsored conference called on Christians to remain in the Middle East despite recurring attacks against them, blaming Israel and the West for their suffering.

The appeal was made last week at the opening of the Islamic-Christian Fraternity Conference in Damascus. An annual event, the conference was organized by the Ministry of Islamic Endowments and local Syrian churches.

A terrorist attack against the Our Lady of Deliverance Syriac church in Baghdad in late October which killed 58 Christians weighed heavy on the minds of participants in the Syrian capital. The church raid was the last in a chain of anti-Christian attacks which have dispersed the once thriving Christian community of Iraq.

“I urge Christians of the East, from Palestine and Iraq, to cling to the land of our nation,” Patriarch Ignatius Zakka ‘Iwas, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church, was quoted as saying by the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai.

“What is happening in Palestine and Iraq is the best proof of attempts by the enemies of good to divide our united house in order to control it and plunder its riches, with the support of Western countries,” ‘Iwas added.

But a different message, less defiant and steadfast, came from one of the Church’s representatives in Europe.

Archbishop Athanasios Dawood, head of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Great Britain, called on Christians to leave Iraq en mass. In a televised interview with BBC last month, Archbishop Dawood warned that “if (Christians) stay, they will be finished one by one.”

But in Damascus, Father Gabriel Dawood said that Christians felt safer in Syria than elsewhere in the Middle East due both to the people’s mentality and to policy directed from above.

“People here in Syria believe in peace,” Father Gabriel said. “In addition, the President has instilled the principle of ‘religion is for God, but the nation is for everyone’.”

Since the start of the war in Iraq, many Iraqi refugees have found haven in neighboring Syria, including an unusually high proportion of Christians. According to Farah Dakhlallah, UNHCR Public Information Officer in Syria, 11% of Iraq’s 152,000 refugees living in Syria were Christian. Some 12,000 Christian Iraqi refugees live in and around Damascus.

Many Christians view the secular approach of Syria’s Ba’ath regime, led by President Bashar Al-Assad, as a guarantee for their religious freedom. The socialist and pan-Arab ideology of Ba’ath was outlined in the early 1940s by its founder Michel Aflaq, himself a Syrian Greek Orthodox Christian.

According to the State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2010, Christians constitute between 8 and 10 percent of Syria’s population of 21 million. Christians reside around the urban centers of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Latakia. The largest Christian group is the Greek Orthodox Church.

The Syrian constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and government documents such as passports or identity cards do not give religious affiliation. Legally, Christians can fill all positions in politics except the post of president.

Severios Hazail Soumi, a native of Syria and Syriac Patriarch of Belgium and France, said that Syria’s relative safety explained the sense of security of Syrian Christians.

“The first victims of war [in the Middle East] are always the Christians,” Soumi told The Media Line. “Syria is a safe country, and Christians have their place in it. Up until now, no Christian was discriminated against in Syria.”

Soumi acknowledged an influx of Christian emigration from Syria, but said it was due to economic rather than political reasons.

“If a Christian leaves Syria, it’s only for economic reasons, or to unite with his family abroad,” he said.

Hundreds of clerics from over 30 countries attended the Damascus conference that was called to discuss Christian-Muslim relations. Yet, virulent Israel and America bashing readily surfaced.

“The West is behind the killing of Christians in the church ‘Our Lady of Deliverance’, not Muslims,” Grand Mufti of Syria Ahmad Hassoun told the assembly. “The West is clashing with civilizations while the East is building civilizations.”

Sheikh Na’im Qassem, deputy secretary general of Hizbullah, Lebanon’s armed Shiite faction, implied that Israel was behind the killing of Iraqi Christians.

“Those who killed the Christians in Iraq are no different than those who are killing children in Palestine,” he said, calling on Christians and Muslims to unite and cooperate in “combating the conspiracies that target the region.”

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Milan, Italy (AHN) – In what could be seen as a shocking blow to the United States, an Italian court has increased the sentences of 23 CIA agents for kidnapping an Egyptian imam from a Milan street in 2003.

The Milan appeals court had originally sentenced the CIA men in absentia in November last year in one of the biggest cases against the U.S. “extraordinary rendition” program.

At that time, they had been sentenced to 5-8 years of imprisonment. The court, however, upped their sentence to nine year following an appeal – a move strongly appreciated by Human rights campaign group Amnesty International.

“The Italian courts have acknowledged that the chain of events leading to such serious abuses cannot go unanswered,” Amnesty said in a statement.

The court also ordered the agents to $2 million in compensation to the imam, whom they abducted on suspicion of him being a terrorist and tortured him during his detention after the 2003 abduction.

The U.S. has already refused Italy’s extradition request for the agents, who have not been detained yet but now risk arrest, if they visit Europe.

The CIA and the Italian military intelligence agency SISMI, in a coordinated operation, kidnapped Osama Mustafa Hassan, also known as Abu Omar, from Milan street in 2003 and taken him to Egypt where Nasr claims he was tortured in a prison.

The intelligence agencies suspected Omar of employing Muslim fighters for Afghan training. He was released in 2007 and currently stays in the Egyptian city of Alessandria.

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New York, United States (AHN) – The United Nations Security Council has lifted most of the sanctions it imposed on war-torn Iran during former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In a vote on Wednesday, the members agreed to end sanctions to stop Iraq from constructing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

The West had feared that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction and that was the reason why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.

The voting came to recognize Iraq’s political progress after the Saddam era. The Security Council, in a statement, said that the current Iraqi situation is far better than what existed when they adopted resolution 661 in 1990.

The council also agreed to return Iraq’s oil and natural gas revenue’s control to the local government by June next year.

Along with this, the U.N. will also end all its oil-for-food program activities it started to help the ordinary man to cope with the sanctions.

“Today Iraq will be liberated from all sanctions caused by wars and misdeeds of the former regime,” Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who was the chairperson of the meeting, also praised Iraq’s progress and said that the violence incidents witnessed a sharp decline in recent months.

“Iraq is on the cusp of something remarkable – a stable, self-reliant nation,” Biden said.

Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has told Baghdad that if it wants them to end all the remaining sanctions, Iraq must take efforts to settle a border dispute with neighbor Kuwait.

Responding to Ban’s call, Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari assured that the new Iraqi government would focus on normalization of their relations with Kuwait.

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Havana, Cuba (AHN) – Cuba has launched an online encyclopedia that presents a “decolonized” version of history.

The website, ecured.cu, is operated by the communist nation’s Youth Club of Computing and Electronics. Similar to Wikipedia, its content is updated by users after approval from a moderator, who remains unidentified.

Unlike the U.S.-based Wikipedia, however, EcuRed does not aim to provide a neutral point of view. It seeeks to “to create and disseminate knowledge from a standpoint of decolonization,” it says.

The encyclopedia describes its North American counterpart as “the sixth most visited website in the world today” and “considered by many today the largest and most popular online reference work.” But it also warns that Wikipedia’s “reliability in contemporary and historical issues has been questioned from biased or biased approaches.”

EcuRed describes the United States, which ended diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961, as “the empire of our time… the most powerful nation of all time.”

“Emerging as an independent nation in 1776, it has achieved remarkable economic, scientific and military development. It has been historically characterized by forcibly stripping other nations and countries of territories and natural resources in order to make them serve its companies and monopolies. Consumes 25% of the energy produced on the planet, and despite its wealth over a third of its population has no guaranteed medical care.”

Washington maintains a trade embargo on Cuba as well as a travel ban, although the Obama administration last year revised its policy on the Caribbean nation.

The changes, which were criticized by Florida Republicans, included lifting restrictions against Cuban-Americans wishing to travel and to send remittances to relatives in Cuba, and allowing U.S. telecommunications companies to provide services in the communist nation.

EcuRed describes American relations with Cuba, which gained independence from the United States in 1902 after being colonized by Spain, as an ongoing “fight with… the U.S. political culture that sees Cuba as an extension of the mainland of the American nation.”

“From very early times, the late eighteenth century, the founding fathers of the American nation looked to Cuba with greed like those admiring a beautiful ripe fruit falling into their hands,” the encyclopedia also said.

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