24 November 2011
Last updated at 21:31 ET

Syria is a few hours away from a deadline to allow an Arab League observer mission into the country or be subjected to sanctions.

The Arab League wants 500 observers to enter the country.

If Syria fails to sign an agreement in Cairo by 11:00 GMT, the Arab League says it will meet on Saturday to decide what sanctions to impose.

More than 3,500 people have died since anti-government protests began in March, the United Nations estimates.

The government of President Bashar al-Assad blames the violence on armed gangs and militants.

At least 40 people, including six children, have been killed across Syria in the past three days, activists say.

These reports are difficult to verify as foreign journalists are unable to move around Syria freely.

‘Unified position’

The options for sanctions include a suspension of commercial flights to Syria and a halt to all dealings with its central bank.

Earlier this month, the Arab League voted to suspend Syria and warned of unspecified sanctions for not implementing a peace plan.

One of the main sticking points was Damascus’ demand to amend the proposal for the 500 observers to be allowed in to Syria.

Damascus reportedly wanted to reduce the number to 40 – a request rejected by the 22-member League.

In addition, a deadline for Syria to end its crackdown passed last Saturday night with no sign of the violence abating.

“Syria has not offered anything to move the situation forward,” a senior league diplomat was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency on Thursday.

“The position of the Arab states is almost unified,” he said, adding that all agreed there should be no civil war or foreign intervention.

The diplomats also appealed to the United Nations to prevent further violence, asking UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon “to take all measures to support the efforts of the Arab League to resolve the critical situation in Syria”.

The venue of Thursday’s meeting in Cairo had to be moved away from the Arab League headquarters because of the continuing protests against Egypt’s ruling military council in Tahrir Square.

‘Humanitarian zones’

Meanwhile, the head of opposition Free Syrian Army (FSA) group told the BBC that President Assad was now “finished”.

Speaking from a refugee camp in Turkey, Riyad al-Asad said: “Even if the outside world doesn’t help us or stand with us, the Syrian nation is determined to bring down this dictator.”

“The system is rotten to the core. It looks strong, perhaps, on the outside but it is weak at the heart,” the former colonel in the air force added.

The FSA was formed in August 2011 by army deserters.

Meanwhile, France has suggested that some sort of humanitarian protection zones be created inside Syria, the BBC’s Jon Leyne in Cairo reports.

It is the first hint that international military intervention is under consideration, our correspondent adds.

SAN FRANCISCO – A California university placed two of its police officers on administrative leave Sunday because of their involvement in the pepper spraying of passively sitting protesters, while the school’s chancellor accelerated a task force’s investigation into the incident amid calls for her resignation.

The president of the 10-campus University of California system also weighed in on the growing fallout from Friday’s incident at UC Davis, saying that he is “appalled” at images of students being doused with pepper spray and plans a far-reaching, urgent assessment of law enforcement procedures on all campuses.

“I implore students who wish to demonstrate to do so in a peaceful and lawful fashion. I expect campus authorities to honor that right,” UC President Mark G. Yudof said. All 10 chancellors would convene soon for a discussion “about how to ensure proportional law enforcement response to non-violent protest,” he said.

Officials at UC Davis refused to identify the two officers who were place on administrative leave but one was a veteran of many years on the force and other “fairly new” to the department, the school’s Police Chief Annette Spicuzza told The Associated Press. She would not elaborate further because of the pending probe.

Videos posted online of the incident clearly show one riot-gear clad officer dousing the line of protesters with spray as they sit in a line with their arms intertwined. Spicuzza told the AP that the second officer was identified during an intense review of several videos.

“We really wanted to be diligent in our research, and during our viewing of multiple videos we discovered the second officer,” Spicuzza said. “This is the right thing to do.”

Both officers were trained in the use of pepper spray as department policy dictates, and both had been sprayed with it themselves during training, the chief noted.

Meanwhile, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi said she has been inundated with reaction from alumni, students and faculty.

“I spoke with students this weekend and I feel their outrage,” Katehi said in a statement Sunday.

Katehi also set a 30-day deadline for her school’s task force investigating the incident to issue its report. The task force, comprised of students, staff and faculty, will be chosen this week. She earlier had set a 90-day timetable.

She also plans to meet with demonstrators Monday at their general assembly, said her spokeswoman, Claudia Morain.

On Saturday, the UC Davis faculty association called for Katehi’s resignation, saying in a letter there had been a “gross failure of leadership.” Katehi has resisted calls for her to quit.

“I am deeply saddened that this happened on our campus, and as chancellor, I take full responsibility for the incident,” Katehi said Sunday. “However, I pledge to take the actions needed to ensure that this does not happen again. I feel very sorry for the harm our students were subjected to and I vow to work tirelessly to make the campus a more welcoming and safe place.”

The incident reverberated well beyond the university, with condemnations and defenses of police from elected officials and from the wider public on Facebook and Twitter.

“On its face, this is an outrageous action for police to methodically pepper spray passive demonstrators who were exercising their right to peacefully protest at UC Davis,” Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said in a statement Sunday. “Chancellor Katehi needs to immediately investigate, publically explain how this could happen and ensure that those responsible are held accountable.”

The protest Friday was held in support of the overall Occupy Wall Street movement and in solidarity with protesters at the University of California, Berkeley who were jabbed by police with batons on Nov. 9.

Nine students hit by pepper spray were treated at the scene, two were taken to hospitals and later released, university officials said. Ten people were arrested.

Some defended the officers’ tactics. Charles J. Kelly, a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department’s use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a “compliance tool” that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters.

Meanwhile Sunday, police in San Francisco, about 80 miles south of Davis, arrested six anti-Wall Street protesters and cleared about 12 tents erected in front of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Across the bay in Oakland, police made no arrests after protesters peacefully left a new encampment set up in defiance of city orders.

Oakland police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said about 20 tents were erected late Saturday after several hundred protesters tore down a chain-link fence surrounding a city-owned vacant lot and set up a new encampment on Telegraph Avenue.

WASHINGTON – A special deficit-reduction supercommittee appears likely to admit failure on Monday, unable or unwilling to compromise on a mix of spending cuts and tax increases required to meet its assignment of saving taxpayers at least $1.2 trillion over the coming decade.

The panel is sputtering to a close after two months of talks in which the members were never able to get close to bridging a fundamental divide over how much to raise taxes to address a budget deficit that forced the government to borrow 36 cents of every dollar it spent last year.

Members of the bipartisan panel, formed during the summer crisis over raising the government’s borrowing limit, spent their time on Sunday in testy performances on television talk shows, blaming each other for the impasse.

In a series of television interviews, not a single panelist seemed optimistic about any last-minute breakthrough. And it was clear that the two sides had never gotten particularly close, at least in the official exchanges of offers that were leaked to the media.

Aides said any remaining talks had broken off.

“There is one sticking divide. And that’s the issue of what I call shared sacrifice,” said panel co-chair Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“The wealthiest Americans who earn over a million a year have to share too. And that line in the sand, we haven’t seen Republicans willing to cross yet,” she said

Republicans said Democrats’ demands on taxes were simply too great and weren’t accompanied by large enough proposals to curb the explosive growth of so-called entitlement programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

“If you look at the Democrats’ position it was `We have to raise taxes. We have to pass this jobs bill, which is another almost half-trillion dollars. And we’re not excited about entitlement reform,’ ” countered Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Under the committee’s rules, any plan would have to be unveiled Monday, but it appeared that Murray and co-chair Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas would instead issue a statement declaring the panel’s work at a close, aides said.

“Put a bow on it. It’s done,” said an aide to a supercommittee Republican.

Failure by the panel would trigger about $1 trillion over nine years in automatic across-the-board spending cuts to a wide range of domestic programs and the Pentagon budget, starting in 2013, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This action, called a “sequester,” would also generate $169 billion in savings from lower interest costs on the national debt.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the required cuts of up to $454 billion to the Pentagon would be “devastating” and leave a “hollow force.” Defense hawks of Capitol Hill promise they won’t allow them to be that deep.

But that effort will be complicated by the insistence of other lawmakers that the overall amount of the budget cuts be left in place.

“I can’t imagine that, knowing of the importance of national defense, that both Democrats and Republicans wouldn’t find a way to work through that process so we still get the $1.2 trillion in cuts, but it doesn’t all fall on defense,” said supercommittee Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona.

The panel’s failure also sets up a fight within a battle-weary, dysfunctional Congress over renewing a payroll tax cut and jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, both of which are set to expire at the end of the year. Both proposals are part of President Barack Obama’s $447 billion jobs plan.

Extending the current 2 percentage point payroll tax cut isn’t a popular idea with many Republicans, but allowing it to expire could harm the economy, economists say. So too would a cutoff of unemployment benefits averaging about $300 a week to millions of people who have been out of work for more than six months.

Serious negotiations ended Friday after Democrats rejected a $644 billion offer comprised of $543 billion in spending cuts, fees and other non-tax revenue, as well as $3 billion in tax revenue from closing a special tax break for corporate purchases of private jets. It also assumed $98 billion in reduced interest costs.

Officials familiar with the offer said it would save the government $121 billion by requiring federal civilian workers to contribute more to their pension plans, shave $23 billion from farm and nutrition programs and generate $15 billion from new auctions of broadcast spectrum to wireless companies.

Democrats said the plan was unbalanced because it included barely any tax revenue.

“Our Democratic friends are unable to cut even a dollar in spending without saying it has to be accompanied by tax increases,” Kyl said.

On Saturday, Sen. Rob Portman floated an even smaller plan, said a lawmaker directly familiar with the panel’s work. It, too, was rejected. The lawmaker required anonymity because of the secrecy of the talks.

The committee faces a Wednesday deadline. But members would have to agree on the outlines of a package by Monday to allow time for drafting and assessing by the Congressional Budget Office.

Over the past couple of weeks, the two sides have made a variety of offers and counter-offers, starting with a more than $3 trillion plan from Democrats that would have increased tax revenues by $1.3 trillion in exchange for further cuts in agency budgets, a change in the measure used to calculate cost-of-living increases for Social Security beneficiaries, and curbs on the growth of Medicare and Medicaid.

“We put on the table a proposal that required tough compromises on both sides, and they never did that,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the only House Democrat on the panel to participate in late-stage bipartisan talks.

Republicans countered with a $1.5 trillion plan that included a potential breakthrough — $250 billion in higher taxes gleaned as Congress passes a future tax reform measure. The plan was trashed by Democrats, however, who said it would have lowered tax rates for the wealthy too far while eliminating tax breaks that chiefly benefit the middle class.

NEW YORK – An “al-Qaida sympathizer” who plotted to bomb police and post offices in New York City as well as U.S. troops returning home has been arrested on numerous terrorism-related charges, city officials said Sunday.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced at a news conference the Saturday arrest of Jose Pimentel of Manhattan, “a 27-year-old al-Qaida sympathizer” who the mayor said was motivated by terrorist propaganda and resentment of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The mayor said Pimentel, a U.S. citizen originally from the Dominican Republic, was “plotting to bomb police patrol cars and also postal facilities as well as targeted members of our armed services returning from abroad.”

Authorities have no evidence that Pimentel was working with anyone else, the mayor added.

“He appears to be a total lone wolf,” the mayor said. “He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad.”

Instead, Bloomberg said, Pimentel represents the type of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller has warned about as U.S. forces erode the ability of terrorists to carry out large scale attacks.

Pimentel, also known as Muhammad Yusuf, is accused of having an explosive substance Saturday when he was arrested that he planned to use against others and property to terrorize the public.

The charges accuse him of conspiracy going back at least to October 2010, and include first-degree criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism, and soliciting support for a terrorist act. He was to be arraigned later Sunday.

“This is just another example of New York City because we are an iconic city … this is a city that people would want to take away our freedoms gravitate to and focus on,” Bloomberg said.

The New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division was involved in the arrest. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Pimentel spent most of his years in Manhattan and lived about five years in Schenectady.

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Associated Press writer Colleen Long contributed to this report from New York. AP writer Samantha Gross contributed to this report.

20 November 2011
Last updated at 21:14 ET

A resident of New York has been arrested on suspicion of planning to bomb targets including police cars and postal offices, the city’s mayor said.

Jose Pimentel, 27, was charged with terrorism-related offences, Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference in New York.

Mr Pimentel was described as a “lone wolf” who also allegedly planned to target US troops returning from abroad.

He was inspired by al-Qaeda, Mr Bloomberg said.

Mr Bloomberg was speaking at a briefing along with New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and District Attorney Cyrus Vance, the chief prosecutor for Manhattan.

‘Acted alone’

Mr Pimentel allegedly got instructions on how to build a pipe bomb from al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, published by radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a US drone attack in Yemen in September.

One of the articles was entitled “How to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom”, according to Mr Kelly.

Mr Pimentel spoke about “killing US servicemen returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly US army and marine corps personnel”, Mr Kelly said.

“He talked about bombing post offices in and around Washington Heights and police cars in New York City, as well as a police station in New Jersey,” the police chief added.

But officials said Mr Pimentel was “not part of a larger conspiracy”.

The mayor said police had constructed a duplicate of an explosive device he alleged the suspect had built, before showed a videotape of it blowing up an unidentified car.

Mr Pimentel, who had been monitored since May 2009, was charged with three terrorism-related counts and two other counts.

According to court documents cited by AP news agency, Mr Pimentel told police he “took active steps to build the bomb, including shaving the match heads and drilling holes in the pipes” and was “one hour away from completing it”.