Jan. 31 Photo Brief: Tent city for hackers, snow in Kiev, troops in Timbuktu, art of reflection, a homemade ventilator
Sao Paulo hosts Campus Party for hackers and geeks, heavy snow hits Kiev, French troops and relative calm in Timbuktu, art of reflection, a home made ventilator keeps man alive for years in China and more in today’s daily brief.
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- A Brooklyn Nets cheerleader slam dunks a ball during a break while entertaining the crowd during the Nets’s game against the Miami Heat during their NBA game at the Barclays Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. (Emmanuel Dunand/Getty Images)
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- View of hundreds of tents with accommodations for 6000 people during the Campus Party event, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. About 8,000 hackers, developers and geeks are expected to attend the annual weeklong, 24-hours-a-day technology event which first started in Spain in 1997 and now spread into various countries. (Yasuyoshi CHiba/Getty Images)
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- Bahraini Shiite Muslim women gather for a demonstration against the death of a child, in the village of Daih, west of Manama. The child, Qassim Habib Marzooq, died in hospital after developing respiratory complications and his relatives claim that his death is due to the inhalation of poisonous tear gas that riot police used during a protest in January 2013. (Mohammed Al-Shaikh/Getty Images)
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- Mourners gather near the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh as the country prepares for the funeral procession of Cambodia’s late King Norodom Sihanouk which begins tomorrow. Sihanouk died at age 89 of heart failure on October 15, 2012 and his body will cremated on February 4, 2013. (Damir Sagolj/Reuters)
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- A young boy runs through a group of Pigeons in front of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Former King Norodom Sihanouk died of a heart attack last October in Beijing at the age of 89. For the past three months his body has been lying in state at the Royal Palace. Officials expect more than one million people to line the streets tomorrow to witness the funeral procession. The former kings body will be transported to a cremation site where it will be kept for three days before his wife and son are expected to light the pyre. (Chris McGrath/Getty Images)
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- A man looks over a building destroyed by French aerial bombing.Troops from Niger and Mali entered the town of Ansongo which along with Gao was recaptured by French-led soldiers over the weekend in a lightning offensive against radicals holding Mali’s north. (Sia Kambou/Getty Images)
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- A Malian man smokes a cigarette with another lit cigarette placed in his ear to celebrate the arrival of French and Malian troops in Gao. Radical Islamist group MUJAO, which held Gao until French and Malian forces chased them out of the town four days ago, had banned smoking cigarettes according to their interpretation of the sharia Islamic law. (Adama Diarra/Reuters)
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- Women sort fish caught in the Timbuktu region at a port in Mopti. (Joe Penney/Reuters)
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- French Foreign Legion troops work under a deployed parachute at Timbuktu airport two days after freeing the northern Malian desert city. French troops on January 30 entered Kidal, the last Islamist bastion in Mali’s north after a whirlwind Paris-led offensive, as France urged peace talks to douse ethnic tensions targeting Arabs and Tuaregs. (Eric Feferberg/Getty Images)
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- A French Army sniper watches with his FR 12/7 PGM rifle the area around Timbuktu airport two days after French-led forces recaptured the northern Malian desert city. French troops on January 30 entered Kidal, the last Islamist bastion in Mali’s north after a whirlwind Paris-led offensive, as France urged peace talks to douse ethnic tensions targeting Arabs and Tuaregs. (Eric Feferberg/Getty Images)
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- Fu Xuepeng, a former mechanic who was paralyzed in a road accident when he was 23 years old, breathing with the aide of a home-made ventilator (R) while his mum Wang Lanqin (L) looks at him at their home in Taizhou, east China’s Zhejiang province. According to state media, a local hospital has decided to help Fu’s parents after reports that they have kept their son alive for more than five years using a hand pumped PVC resuscitator bag and a ventilator made by a local DIY expert. They took turns compressing their son’s bag 24-hours a day, seven days a week, until they had someone making them a medical ventilator with a motor, a speed controller, a pushing bar and an air bag, which cost 200 yuan (32 USD). But to minimize the electricity bill, which adds up to 5 to 6 yuan a day if the machine is left running all day, the couple still compresses the bag by hand during the day and turns on the machine only at night. (Getty Images)
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- Afghan school children walk home after classes near an open classroom in the outskirts of Jalalabad. Afghanistan has had only rare moments of peace over the past 30 years, its education system being undermined by the Soviet invasion of 1979, a civil war in the 1990s and five years of Taliban rule. (Noorullah Shirzada/Getty Images)
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- An Afghan girl looks out of her window near an open classroom on the outskirts of Jalalabad. Afghanistan has had only rare moments of peace over the past 30 years, its education system being undermined by the Soviet invasion of 1979, a civil war in the 1990s and five years of Taliban rule. (Noorullah Shirzada/Getty Images)
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- Spanish model Natalia Calixte, 19, wearing a creation by Virginia Herrera, poses backstage during the International Flamenco Fashion Show (SIMOF) in the Andalusian capital of Seville. (Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters)
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- Journalists walk through the installation ‘Mirrors, Razor mesh’ (2008) of South African artist Kendell Geers during a press tour of the exhibition ‘Kendell Geers 1988-2012’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, southern Germany. (Andreas Gerbert/Getty Images)
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- A member of staff poses next to a work entitled ‘Untitled’ by British artist Anish Kapoor in which her face is reflected at Sotheby’s auction house in central London. Due to form part of the Contemporary Art Evening Sale on February 12, it is expected to fetch between 450,000-650,000 GBP (560,000-810,000 EUR – 725,000-1,050,000 USD). (Carl Court/Getty Images)
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- A couple walks during heavy snow fall in front of frescos of Mykhaylo Gold Domes Cathedral in the center of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. (Sergei Supinsky/Getty Images)
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- A man, dressed in a military uniform, begs for money at an intersection where cars are stopped, during a snowfall in Kiev. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
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- An Indian sadhu – holy man – takes a ‘holy dip’ at the ‘Sangam’, the confluence of the rivers Ganges, Yamuna and mythical Saraswati during the Maha Kumbh festival in Allahabad. The Kumbh Mela in the town of Allahabad will see up to 100 million worshippers gather over 55 days to take a ritual bath in the holy waters, believed to cleanse sins and bestow blessings. (Sanjay Kanojia/Getty Images)
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- A hand of the one week young Drill baby is held by its mother Kaduna in the primate enclosure in the zoo of Munich Hellabrunn, southern Germany. The Drill’s are in danger of extinction in Africa. (Christof Stache/Getty Images)
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- Pakistani gypsy children enjoy playing on a swing near their makeshift tents in Lahore. Year-on-year inflation stood at 6.9 percent in November, the State Bank of Pakistan said in a statement, a faster fall than had been estimated. Food inflation dropped to 5.3 percent and non-food inflation to 8.1 percent. (Arif Ali/Getty Images)
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- A cleaner sweeps the floor as she walks past an illuminated sign depicting people walking, at Spain’s Santander headquarters in Boadilla del Monte outside Madrid. Santander, the largest lender in the euro zone, has sharply raised provisions against bad loans after defaults rose in its home market and key earnings-driver Brazil, while writedowns on rotten Spanish real estate also contributed to a 59 drop in yearly net profit. (Sergio Perez/Reuters)
Malian president offers Tuareg rebels talks
Benoit Tessier and Vicky Buffery | Reuters
2:27 p.m. EST, January 31, 2013
TIMBUKTU, Mali/PARIS (Reuters) – Mali’s president offered talks to Tuareg rebels on Thursday in a bid for national reconciliation after a French-led offensive drove their Islamist former allies into desert and mountain hideaways in the country’s vast north.
France’s three-week ground and air campaign has dislodged al Qaeda-linked fighters from northern Mali’s major towns, ending the first phase of an operation designed to prevent Islamists using the region as a launchpad for attacks on neighboring West African countries and Europe.
France is now due to gradually transfer the military mission to a U.N.-mandated African force of some 8,000 soldiers, tasked with securing northern towns and pursuing militants into their mountain redoubts near the Algerian border.
French air strikes have destroyed the Islamists’ training camps and logistics bases but Paris says a long-term solution hinges on finding a political settlement between Mali’s restive northern Tuareg community and the distant capital Bamako.
Under pressure from Paris, Mali’s interim President Dioncounda Traore said he was ready to open talks with the Tuareg rebel MNLA provided it honored a pledge to drop its claims of independence for northern Mali.
The MNLA seized control of north Mali in April before its revolt was hijacked by the better armed and financed Islamists.
“Today, the only group that we could think of negotiating with is certainly the MNLA. But, of course, on condition that the MNLA drops any pretence to a territorial claim,” Traore told French radio RFI, ruling out talks with any Islamist groups.
MNLA reoccupied its former northern stronghold of Kidal on Monday after al Qaeda-linked fighters fled French air strikes. It has offered to battle the Islamists in the nearby desert and Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, amid fears that the Malian army would carry out reprisals against Tuaregs in recaptured towns.
Any dialogue could anger Mali’s powerful and meddling military, which toppled the civilian government last year in frustration at its handling of the Tuareg uprising and is still smarting from the massacre of some 80 soldiers by Islamists at the northern town of Alguelhoc.
“We agree to negotiate but not with people who have committed crimes,” said one senior Malian military source.
Many ordinary Malians, particularly in the country’s south, also blame the MNLA for the current crisis. Traore, installed in office after the March military coup, has called national elections for July 31 to complete a political transition.
France, which seized Kidal’s airport on Tuesday, has been careful to maintain good relations with Tuareg chieftains. Its forces have not entered the town of Kidal but carried out airstrikes on Islamist training camps and logistics depots to the north at Aguelhoc and to the south at Almoustarat.
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