Syria scorns EU criticism, says it sows chaos (Reuters)

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syria on Wednesday scorned the European Union's criticism of Damascus over its violent crackdown on popular unrest, saying this showed Europe wanted to sow chaos in the country.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said he was confident that despite mounting international pressure on Syria, three months into an uprising against the Assad family's 41-year rule, there would be no foreign military intervention in his country, nor a no-fly zone of the kind NATO has imposed over Libya.

"The reactions from European Union officials to President Assad's speech (show) they have a plan and they want to continue with it, (they want) to plant strife and chaos in Syria," Moualem told a news conference in Damascus.

"Stop intervening in Syria's affairs, do not stir chaos nor strife, the Syrian people ... are capable of making their own future away from you ... Any external intervention is rejected."

EU states reached a political agreement on Wednesday to extend sanctions against Syria to four military-linked entities and seven individuals, including three Iranians, linked to suppression of dissent.

"There is a political agreement on extending the list," an EU diplomat said, adding that the new sanctions would take effect on Friday, once all 27 EU states have written on Thursday to give their formal approval.

Moualem warned that Syria would turn to other regions for trade and support.

"We will forget that Europe is on the map, and we will turn to the east, to the south and all directions that extend a hand to Syria. The world is not only Europe. Syria will remain steadfast," he told a news conference in Damascus.

Before the uprising, Western countries had been re-cultivating relations with Damascus after a period in which they isolated it to try to weaken its strategic alliance with Iran.

Reuters monitored the televised broadcast from outside the country, since Syria has expelled its correspondents.

In a speech on Monday, only his third since the outbreak of protests in which rights groups say 1,300 civilians have been killed, Assad promised reforms and called for national dialogue.

Many Syrians and world leaders dismissed his pledges as stale and inadequate. Violence continued on Tuesday with the killing of seven people by gunmen in two cities during rival protests by Assad loyalists and opponents, an opposition activist said.

Moualem said his country would not accept demands from "outside Syria" and blamed American sanctions in 2003 for the delay in reforms in Syria.

He urged Turkey, once a close ally but now an increasingly vocal critic of Assad, to reconsider its frosty response to his speech and said Syria wanted the "best relations with Turkey."

Syria's ambassador to Turkey, Nidal Kabalan, said on Wednesday Turkey-Syria ties were a "strategic relationship" for both countries and for the whole region, but added Damascus expected a more "even-handed approach" from its neighbor.

"We believe that some of the statements that have been voiced were a little bit too strong," Kabalan told Reuters.

"Those (protesters) are Islamic fundamentalists, al Qaeda-types, who have their own agenda and foreign affiliations and programs. We have seen what they have done in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in some other Gulf countries," he said.

HUNDREDS ARRESTED AFTER AMNESTY

Residents and activists said hundreds of Syrians were arrested since Tuesday despite Assad's announcement of a general amnesty, the second in three weeks.

The arrests concentrated on the coast, the city of Homs and the eastern province of Deir al-Zor, which borders Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland. Tens of students were also beaten and arrested overnight at Damascus University dormitories, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

"The human rights situation in Syria is becoming even worse, with security forces and gangs increasingly attacking neighborhoods and more arbitrary arrests of Syrian citizens," the Observatory said in a statement.

After Assad's first amnesty, authorities freed hundreds of political prisoners but rights groups have not reported any releases after the second amnesty.

Rights groups say Syria has more than 14,000 political prisoners. Around 10,000 have been arrested during the uprising. Hundreds have gone missing after seen last being taken by secret police.

Authorities say more than 200 police and security forces have been killed by armed gangs.

Syria, a country of 20 million, has a Sunni majority, and the protests demanding political freedoms and the departure from power of the Assad family, which belongs to the Alawite sect, have been biggest in mostly Sunni rural areas and towns and cities, as opposed to mixed areas.

Fears are growing that Syria, a mosaic of Alawites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druzes and other groups, could implode into sectarian savagery similar to the conflict that ripped through Iraq after Saddam's ousting.

Syria, which borders Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan, also exerts regional influence because of its alliance with Iran and its continued role in Lebanon, despite ending a 29-year military presence there in 2005.

It also has an influence in Iraq.

The new sanctions list was drawn up by Britain and France the brought the total number of individuals and entities targeted by EU sanctions on Syria to 34.

The EU diplomat said the Iranians were involved in providing equipment and technical support to help Syrian authorities suppress dissent.

Moualem denied that Iran or its Lebanese ally Hezbollah had intervened to confront Syrian protesters, and said that the killings of some police and soldiers indicated that Islamist group al Qaeda might be behind some of the violence.

"I cannot hide (the fact) that some of the practices that we have seen in the killings of security personnel gives an indication that these acts were carried out by al Qaeda," he said, without elaborating.

In May, the European Union added Assad and other senior officials to a list of those banned from traveling to the EU and subject to asset freezes.

(Additional reporting by Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, David Brunnstrom and Julien Toyer in Brussels, Tulay Karadeniz in Ankara; editing by Mark Heinrich)

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Ash cloud causes Europe travel chaos

London (CNN) -- A cloud of ash from Iceland's Grimsvotn volcano spread toward central Europe late Tuesday, spurring German authorities to announce two airports will close and prompting British airlines to cancel hundreds of flights.

Hamburg International Airport will shut down at 6 a.m. Wednesday (midnight Tuesday ET), while Bremen's airport will close at 5 a.m., Germany's Aviation Safety Agency announced. Berlin's airport could be affected by the falling ash by noon Wednesday, the agency said.

A portion of the ash from Saturday's eruption in Iceland had spread over Britain by Tuesday afternoon, with the cloud reaching London's Heathrow airport -- the world's busiest international air travel hub -- around lunchtime, a computer model indicated. The European air traffic control organization Eurocontrol reported about 500 flights in British airspace were canceled Tuesday, roughly double the number expected earlier in the day.

The ash cloud was projected to cover all of British airspace by early Wednesday morning and will be densest over Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England, according to Britain's weather agency, the Met Office. But British Airways, which sent a test flight into the region Tuesday evening, said it expects service to return to normal by Wednesday.

That may help passengers like Karen Bryan, who was unable to return to the Scottish city of Edinburgh from the Mediterranean island of Malta on Tuesday.

"It's bad not knowing what's happening, being on standby and not knowing when and if you'll get back," Bryan said.

The number of flights affected was a small proportion of the 29,000 or so that had been expected across the continent, Eurocontrol noted. But Germany's meteorological agency projected that the cloud would spread across the country's north and could reach Berlin around midnight Tuesday, raising the possibility of more cancellations. And there was a "strong possibility" it could also affect Denmark and parts of Scandinavia by the end of the day, Eurocontrol reported.

The Grimsvotn eruption came about 13 months after Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano belched smoke and ash into the skies over the continent, forcing the cancellation of thousands of flights per day at the peak of the problem. The ash can be a serious hazard to aircraft, reducing visibility, damaging flight controls and ultimately causing jet engines to fail.

Grimsvotn's eruption was more than 10 times larger and put more ash into the air in 36 hours than last year's burst did in a month, University of Iceland geophysicist Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson told CNN -- but the main eruption is now over, he said.

"We expect it to behave and slowly decline," Gudmundsson told CNN. "It will, however, last for several more days. The ash does continue to cause huge problems on the ground, but no new ash is coming into the high altitudes."

Gillian Foulger, a geophysicist at Britain's Durham University, told CNN that the disruptions from the larger eruption are likely to be smaller than they were in 2010. Most of the ash is blowing northwest, toward sparsely populated Greenland, and the European aviation industry collected valuable safety data during last year's event.

"It's much better able to set the safety thresholds accurately, so I think things are probably going to turn out very well for us," Foulger said.

Airlines have been making the case that it is safe to fly through ash clouds of medium density, Britain's Civil Aviation Authority said Tuesday. Carriers including British Airways, Virgin and EasyJet are now free to fly through clouds of up to 4,000 micrograms per cubic meter if they feel it is safe to do so, Richard Taylor of the CAA told CNN.

The budget airline Ryanair, one of Europe's biggest carriers, announced that it had canceled its remaining flights from Scottish airports Tuesday after arguing against closures. The airline said it had conducted a test flight that found no ash, but Taylor told CNN that Ryanair's claims were "not true" and that the test flight did not go where the airline claimed.

British Airways canceled all flights to and from Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland and Newcastle in northern England until at least 7 p.m. Tuesday, though service to Aberdeen, Scotland, continued. Dutch airline KLM also canceled dozens of scheduled Tuesday flights to and from locations in Scotland. And British Midlands International canceled its Tuesday evening flights into Glasgow and Edinburgh but resumed service to Aberdeen, the carrier announced.

U.S. President Barack Obama left Ireland for England on Monday, a day earlier than planned, to make sure the ash cloud would not affect his flight plan. Barcelona's soccer team also announced on Twitter that it would fly early to London for its Saturday match against Manchester United in the Champions League Final.

The ash forced the closure of Icelandic airspace over the weekend, but the island nation's main airports were open Tuesday. Flights to London were canceled, but flights to North America and Scandinavia were still scheduled.

Britain's CAA said new arrangements have been put in place since last year's eruption, and those changes should reduce the number of flights that have to be canceled if the ash cloud spreads.

Grimsvotn lies beneath Iceland's Vatnajokull glacier, a sheet of ice more than three times the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island -- larger than any on mainland Europe. It is the country's most active volcano and last erupted in 2004, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.

In 1783, a 16.7-mile fissure system from the volcano produced the world's largest known historical lava flow over a seven-month period, damaging crops and livestock, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. A resulting famine resulted in the loss of one-fifth of Iceland's population, according to the museum.

CNN's Ayesha Durgahee, Adam Reiss, Claudia Rebaza, James Partington and Brianna Keilar contributed to this report.

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Arrest of IMF Chief on Attempted Rape Charges Throws French Presidential Race Into Chaos (Time.com)

The news of the arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, was shocking in its own right: late Saturday afternoon, Port Authority police took Strauss-Kahn from the First Class cabin of an Air France flight at Kennedy Airport about to depart for Paris amid allegations he attempted to rape a midtown Manhattan hotel maid earlier in the day. But considering the fact that the former French finance minister Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to run against President Nicolas Sarkozy next year, the turn of events was particularly stunning.

In fact DSK, as the French call one of the country's leading political figures, happens to be on the cover of virtually every French magazine this week as the country's possible next President, and several have recently featured photos of him with his wife Anne Sinclair, a U.S.-born veteran French television journalist. So it didn't take long for the news, which broke at about 2 a.m. Paris time, to throw next May's French presidential race into upheaval by quite possibly removing the only candidate clearly capable of beating Sarkozy. (See a brief history of the IMF.)

On Sunday French liberal politicians urged people not to rush to judgment. Strauss-Kahn's close associate and spokesman Jean-Marie le Guen, told Europe 1 radio that "this episode does not resemble the Dominique Strauss-Kahn I know." SEgolEne Royal, who beat out Strauss-Kahn for the party nomination in 2006 beore her poorly-run presidential race was blamed for having buried the Socialists' chances, said on Sunday that "there must be a presumption of innocence."

The New York Police Department claims that at about 1 p.m. on Saturday, a hotel maid entered a $3,000-a-night suite at the Sofitel near Times Square, believing that it was empty. Strauss-Kahn then emerged naked from the bathroom, and grabbed her, pulled her into the bedroom and threw her on to the bed, before trying to lock the suite's main door, according to New York Police Dept. Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, who outlined the charges to reporters. "She fights him off, and then he drags her down the hallway to the bathroom, where he sexually assaults her a second time," he told Reuters.

The maid, 32, finally managed to push Strauss-Kahn away and escape, according to Browne, and her colleagues called 911. Strauss-Kahn had checked out by the time police arrived at the hotel, leaving behind his cell phone. Strauss-Kahn was arrested on charges of attempted rape, conducting a criminal sexual act, and unlawful imprisonment of the woman. Early Sunday, Strauss-Kahn's lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, told Reuters his client, who was still in NYPD custody and was expected to appear in state court sometime Sunday, would plead not guilty. (See how Strauss-Kahn has helped save Europe's troubled economies.)

For Strauss-Kahn's Socialist Party, the timing could hardly have been worse. After years in the political wilderness, the party is getting set to nominate its contender, and in Strauss-Kahn, it appeared to have finally found a winner. Recent French opinion polls put him far ahead of Sarkozy in next year's race. The recent photos of Strauss-Kahn's high-altitude lifestyle - which this week included him stepping out of a Porsche - has provoked discomfort among many French leftists, who feared that he was too rich and privileged to appeal to their traditional working-class base. Yet even that appeared to be little political obstacle to Strauss-Kahn, who had seemed to have a solid chance of victory.

The ramifications of Strauss-Kahn's arrest extend way beyond the gilded government palaces in Paris, however.

In Washington, it could raise questions about why the IMF gave him a free pass in 2008 after he began an affair with a Hungarian economist, who was his subordinate at the organization. While concluding he had shown poor judgment, the IMF decided not to censure or remove Strauss-Kahn, at a time when the world faced the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression; for his part, Strauss-Kahn issued a statement declaring that "I am grateful that the board has confirmed that there was no abuse of authority on my part, but I accept that this incident represents a serious error of judgment." (See Strauss-Kahn's alleged 2008 abuses of power.)

Since then, Strauss-Kahn has won praise for his handling of the global meltdown. This time, however, IMF officials have immediately distanced themselves from their chief. A two-sentence IMF statement on Sunday said that Strauss-Kahn's arrest was a matter for the NYPD and his personal attorney, and that the organization "remains fully functioning and operational." Nonetheless, the IMF could face an internal crisis now, since Strauss-Kahn's deputy, John Lipsky, announced last Thursday that he was leaving the organization in August.

Across Europe, too, Strauss-Kahn's arrest will have a major impact. It could impact critical negotiations over the E.U.'s deep debt crisis, in which Strauss-Kahn has been a key - if not the key - player. He was due to be at emergency debt meetings in Brussels this week, and perhaps mindful that he could soon be one of the E.U.'s most powerful leaders, as French President, he has cautioned for months against harsh austerity measures for debt-ridden countries Portugal and Greece.

That now seems like a comparatively simple challenge. Rather than fighting to move into the Elysee Palace, Strauss-Kahn suddenly will have to fight to keep himself out of jail, perhaps for years.

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