RTC Director

Sudan Begins Release of Political Prisoners

Authorities in Sudan have released seven political prisoners, a day after Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir ordered the release of all political detainees.

The six men and one woman were released early Tuesday from Kober Prison in Khartoum. They are all members of country's main political opposition alliance.

They had been held since January, after signing a document in Uganda that calls for the overthrow of President Bashir.

At Monday's opening of parliament, Mr. Bashir ordered the release of all political detainees as part of efforts to hold a dialogue with rebel and opposition groups on a new constitution.

Authorities in Sudan are believed to be holding hundreds of other protesters and opposition figures.

The government has been fighting rebel groups in Darfur since 2003 and other rebels in two southern states since 2011.

It was not clear when other prisoners may be released.

The move comes as tensions begin to ease in Sudan after it reached an agreement last month with South Sudan to end hostilities and resume cross-border oil flows. The two neighbors came close to war a year ago.

President Bashir has led Sudan since seizing power in a 1989 coup. He has said he intends to step down when his current term as president ends in 2015.

by RTC Director

North Korea nuclear: US vows to 'defend self and South'

The US will defend itself and its "treaty ally" South Korea in the face of North Korean threats, Secretary of State John Kerry has said.

Mr Kerry made the pledge while speaking at a news conference with his South Korean counterpart Yun Byung-se.

Pyongyang has taken a series of defiant measures in the wake of its third nuclear test in February.

On Wednesday, the North delayed the opening of the jointly-run Kaesong industrial zone, the South said.

Pyongyang has previously threatened to close the complex as part of its standoff with Washington and Seoul.

North Korea has been angered by UN sanctions imposed after its nuclear test and joint US-South Korea annual military drills.

Mr Kerry described recent rhetoric from the North Korean government as "unacceptable".

The Pentagon said two missile destroyers, the USS Decatur and the USS McCain, had been deployed to the region.

"They will be poised to respond to any missile threats to our allies or our territory," Pentagon spokesman George Little said.

On Tuesday Pyongyang announced plans to restart its main Yongbyon nuclear complex, which Mr Kerry said would be a "provocative and serious" move.

Earlier, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the crisis had "gone too far" and called for urgent talks with the North.

"Things must begin to calm down, there is no need for the DPRK [North Korea] to be on a collision course with the international community. Nuclear threats are not a game," Mr Ban said.

The US has urged China and Russia to apply pressure on Pyongyang to change its Yongbyon plans.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei called for restraint from all sides to resolve the "complex and sensitive" situation.

Russia's foreign ministry, meanwhile, warned against escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula.

"The main objective is to avoid the forceful military scenario. It is not acceptable to use the situation there (on the Korean peninsula) to try to reach someone's specific military and political aims," said ministry spokesman Grigoriy Logvinov.

The complex offers Pyongyang two ways of making nuclear bombs - a uranium enrichment facility, and a nuclear reactor, from which the spent fuel can be turned into plutonium.

Restarting it gives the regime several cards to play: it secures more material for its nuclear programme, and also re-focuses world attention on how to stop it, our correspondent says.

The reactor at Yongbyon - which was the source for plutonium for North Korea's nuclear weapons programme - was closed in July 2007 as part of a disarmament-for-aid deal.

The cooling tower at the facility was later destroyed, but then the disarmament deal stalled.

Part of the reason the agreement fell apart was because the US did not believe Pyongyang was fully disclosing all of its nuclear facilities - a suspicion later bolstered when North Korea unveiled a uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon to US scientist Siegfried Hecker in 2010.

While it appeared to be for electricity generation purposes, Mr Hecker said the facility could be readily converted to produce highly-enriched uranium for bombs.

In a November 2010 report following his visit to Yongbyon, Mr Hecker said that based on what he saw, he believed North Korea could "resume all plutonium operations within approximately six months" at Yongbyon if so inclined.

by RTC Director

UN Passes Landmark Arms Treaty

The United Nations has overwhelmingly approved (154-3 with 23 abstentions) a landmark treaty regulating trade in conventional arms.

The legally binding treaty sets international standards to regulate the import, export and transfer of conventional weapons - from battle tanks, warships and attack helicopters to small arms and light weapons. Major arms exporters, such as the United States and Russia, as well as major importers like China, India and Pakistan, took part in the negotiations.

Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association, an independent research firm, said the treaty is "historic in the sense that it is the first time that there will be international standards to guide how countries authorize weapons transfers - and the first time that there will be annual reporting on those transfers by all of the state signatories of the new arms trade treaty.”

Human Rights Part of Arms Treaty

Martin Butcher, arms policy adviser with the international humanitarian organization Oxfam, said the treaty also establishes key human rights criteria.

“It’s really important that this treaty puts human rights and humanitarian law in control of the arms trade," said Butcher. "The states will now have obligations not to transfer weapons to countries where human rights are being abused, where for example civilians are being killed by a government - that’s a strong obligation.”

Paul Holtom, arms transfer expert with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), said the treaty also regulates the transfer of ammunition.

Ammunition Regulated by Treaty

“The case has been made very strongly by states from Latin America and Africa that they feel it’s one thing to control the weapons, to control items," said Holtom, "but they feel that it’s the small munitions that are a key problem in terms of the fuel for many of the conflicts.”

Daryl Kimball agreed, saying "we have to remember that AK-47s last a long, long time - these are durable weapons. But they can’t function without a fresh supply of ammunition. So these requirements on the export of ammunition are very important."

Some experts pointed out that the treaty does not have any enforcement mechanisms. But Oxfam’s Martin Butcher said other means can be used to make states accountable for their actions.

“There will be a lot of moral pressure on countries. They will come together on a regular basis and scrutinize what each other is doing," said Butcher. "And we shouldn’t underestimate the power of that moral pressure on countries to make them change their behavior.”

The United Nations approval of the treaty brings to a close seven years of negotiations. The pact will now be open for signature and will become part of international law once 50 countries ratify it.

by RTC Director

Macular degeneration: Cholesterol drugs 'may save sight'

Eye drops designed to lower cholesterol may be able to prevent one of the most common forms of blindness, according to US researchers.

They showed how high cholesterol levels could affect the immune system and lead to macular degeneration.

Tests on mice and humans, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, showed that immune cells became destructive when they were clogged with fats.

Others cautioned that the research was still at an early stage.

The macula is the sweet spot in the eye which is responsible for fine detail. It is essential for reading, driving and recognising people's faces.

Macular degeneration is more common in old age. It starts in a "dry" form in which the light-sensing cells in the eye become damaged, but can progress into the far more threatening "wet" version, when newly formed blood vessels can rapidly cause blindness.

Fatty clues

Doctors at the Washington University School of Medicine investigated the role of macrophages, a part of the immune system, in the transition from the dry to the wet form of the disease.

One of the researchers, Dr Rajendra Apte, said the role of macrophages changed and they triggered the production of new blood vessels.

"Instead of being protective, they accelerate the disease, but we didn't understand why they switched to become the bad cells," he told the BBC.

Normally the cells can "eat" fatty deposits and send them back into the blood.

However, their research showed that older macrophages struggle. They could still eat the fats, but they could not expel them. So they became "bloated", causing inflammation which in turn led to the creation of new blood vessels.

Dr Apte said: "Based on our findings, we need to investigate whether vision loss caused by macular degeneration could be prevented with cholesterol-lowering eye drops or other medications that might prevent the build-up of lipids beneath the retina."

Clara Eaglen, from the charity RNIB for the visually impaired, said: "This new research is very interesting as it shows that cholesterol-lowering drugs could be used to prevent thousands of people losing their sight unnecessarily from conditions such as AMD [age-related macular degeneration] - the biggest cause of sight loss in the UK.

"The more aggressive of the two forms, wet AMD, can take your central vision in as little as three months if left untreated.

"Clearly this research is still at an early stage but it will be exciting to watch how it progresses and at some point cholesterol-lowering eye drops may become part of a growing army of treatments for sight-threatening eye conditions.

by RTC Director

European data watchdogs target Google over privacy

Six European data protection agencies are contemplating legal action over Google's privacy policy.

The threat comes as a four-month deadline to change the policy expires with Google making "no change" to the policy.

Google's perceived failure to act is being looked in to by data watchdogs in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK.

In a statement, Google said its privacy policy "respects European law".

'Full engagement'

In late October 2012, a European Commission working party reported that Google's privacy policy did not meet Commission standards on data protection.

The report said Google should do more to let users see what information was held about them, provide tools to manage this data and take more care to ensure it did not store too much data about users.

The investigation was kicked off by Google's decision to update its privacy policy so it had one set of guidelines for every service it ran.

Google was given four months to comply with the working party's recommendations to bring the policy into line with European law.

"After this period has expired, Google has not implemented any significant compliance measures," said French data watchdog CNIL in a statement. CNIL headed the probe into the privacy policy.

In addition, said CNIL, Google was warned about the potential for action on 19 March in a meeting with officials from six data watchdogs. "No change," was seen following this meeting, said CNIL.

As a consequence, all six data protection bodies were now opening new investigations into Google and how it handled privacy. The UK's Information Commissioner confirmed it was looking at whether the policy complied but said it could not add further comment because the investigation was ongoing.

A Google spokesman said: "Our privacy policy respects European law and allows us to create simpler, more effective services."

"We have engaged fully with the DPAs involved throughout this process, and we'll continue to do so going forward," added the spokesman.

News of the action comes as Google's privacy director, Alma Whitten, steps down from her job. Ms Whitten was appointed as the search giant's first privacy director in 2010, following a series of mistakes by Google that had led to user data being exposed.

--BBC 

by RTC Director