World

ROME — Italian Prime Minister-designate Matteo Renzi said he expected his new government to be in place in time for a formal vote of confidence in parliament on Monday, after he wrapped up consultations with the main political parties.

“I’m convinced that the conditions are in place to do good work,” Renzi told reporters on Wednesday after completing talks with parliamentary groups.

He said he expected to give President Giorgio Napolitano his formal acceptance of the mandate to form a government on Saturday, when he is likely to present his Cabinet.

Renzi, who met Bank of Italy governor Ignazio Visco after his meetings with the parties, said he planned to spend Thursday working on a policy document and would continue to work on naming his future ministers.

However he declined to answer questions about the possible identity of his Cabinet following media speculation that he was having trouble filling key posts including the vital economy ministry portfolio.

A source close to Renzi said that contacts were continuing with both Napolitano’s office and the European Central Bank to ensure that a person capable of representing the government to Italy’s European partners was selected.

But there was no word on whether he would pick a politician with experience in running a large administration or a technocrat similar to the outgoing incumbent, former Bank of Italy official Fabrizio Saccomanni.

“We need a high profile figure. Whether it’s a politician is not the main issue,” the source said.

Renzi has promised a radical policy programme with reforms to the electoral and constitutional system, to the labour market, and to the public administration and tax systems within the first four months of taking office.

However details have been sketchy and there has been particular attention on his likely attitude to EU budget rules, following several public statements suggesting he would like to breach strict deficit limits to gain more room for his reform agenda and investment in infrastructure.

Opposition

Renzi was given a mandate to form a government after his centre-left Democratic Party forced his rival Enrico Letta to resign as prime minister last week following heavy criticism over the slow pace of economic reform. After years of tight austerity policies aimed at controlling a 2 trillion euro public debt, Italy’s stagnant economy is barely growing with unemployment, particularly among young people, at record levels.

Renzi is expected to form a coalition based around his own centre-left Democratic Party and the small centre-right NCD Party which supported Letta but he has also met parties expected to be in the opposition.

On Wednesday he met both former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, with whom he has already reached an agreement on reforms to the electoral and constitutional system, and Beppe Grillo, leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement.

Both will go into opposition but the reaction from the two leaders was starkly different with Berlusconi emerging from the meeting in conciliatory mood.

“We will be in opposition but we will support individual measures if we consider they are good for the country,” Berlusconi, with whom Renzi has already reached an accord on electoral law reform, told reporters.

By contrast Grillo delivered a blistering attack on the would-be prime minister during a 10-minute meeting that was broadcast live, in keeping with the 5-Star Movement’s insistence on transparent negotiations.

“You’re not a credible person. Whatever you say isn’t credible,” Grillo told the 39-year-old Renzi, who struggled to get a word in. “You say a thing one day and then go back on it the next day. You’re a young boy but at the same time you’re old,” he said.

KIEV — Western powers threatened sanctions on Wednesday over the death of 26 people in the worst violence since Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union, pressuring President Viktor Yanukovich to compromise with his pro-European opponents.

Yanukovitch, backed by Russia, denounced the overnight bloodshed in central Kiev as an attempted coup and his security service said it had launched a nationwide “anti-terrorist operation” after arms and ammunition dumps were looted.

In the western bastion of Ukrainian nationalism, a regional assembly declared self-rule and crowds seized public buildings.

European Union leaders condemned what they called “the unjustified use of excessive force by the Ukrainian authorities” and said they were urgently preparing targeted sanctions against officials responsible for the crackdown.

EU officials said Yanukovich himself would not be on the list to keep channels of dialogue open. The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland will visit him on Thursday, hours before an emergency EU meeting to decide on the sanctions.

The United States, going head to head with Russia in a dispute heavy with echoes of the Cold War, urged Yanukovich to pull back riot police, call a truce and talk to the opposition.

Neighbouring Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said Ukraine faced civil war, even partition, if dialogue fails: “What if no compromise is achieved?” he asked in parliament. “We will have anarchy and perhaps division of the state or civil war, the beginning of which we may now be witnessing.”

Protesters have been occupying central Kiev for almost three months since Yanukovich spurned a far-reaching trade deal with the EU and accepted a $15-billion Russian bailout instead.

The sprawling nation of 46 million, with an ailing economy and endemic corruption, is the object of a tug-of-war at a global level between Moscow and the West. But the struggle was played out at close quarters, hand to hand, in fighting through the night on Kiev’s Independence Square, or Maidan.

After night fell, fires blazed along the barricaded frontline between the protesters and riot police but there was no immediate sign of a repetition of Tuesday’s violence.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Yanukovich spoke by telephone during the night, and both denounced the events as an coup attempt, a Kremlin spokesman said.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blamed the West for encouraging opposition radicals “to act outside of the law”.

Moscow announced on Monday it would resume stalled aid to Kiev, pledging $2 billion hours before the crackdown began. The money has not yet arrived and a Ukrainian government source said it had been delayed till Friday “for technical reasons”.

Ukraine’s hryvnia currency, flirting with its lowest levels since the global crash five years ago, weakened to more than nine to the dollar for the second time this month.

Battle zone

After a night of petrol bombs and gunfire on Independence Square, a trade union building that protest organisers had used as headquarters stood blackened and gutted by fire.

Security forces occupied about a third of the square — the part which lies closest to government offices and parliament — while protesters reinforced their defences on the remainder of a plaza they have dubbed “Euro-Maidan”.

In a statement posted online in the early hours, Yanukovich said he had refrained from using force during three months of unrest but was being pressed by “advisers” to take a harder line: “Without any mandate from the people, illegally and in breach of the constitution of Ukraine, these politicians — if I may use that term — have resorted to pogroms, arson and murder to try to seize power,” the president said.

He declared Thursday a day of mourning for the dead. The state security service said it had opened an investigation into illegal attempts by “individual politicians” to seize power.

One opposition leader, former world champion boxer Vitaly Klitschko, walked out of a overnight meeting with Yanukovich, saying he could not negotiate while blood was being spilt.

When fighting subsided at dawn, the square resembled a battle-zone, the ground charred by Molotov cocktails. Helmeted young activists used pickaxes and elderly women their bare hands, to dig up paving to stock as ammunition.

The Health Ministry said 26 people were killed in fighting in the capital, of whom 10 were police officers. A ministry official said 263 protesters were being treated for injuries and 342 police officers, mainly with gunshot wounds.

The interior ministry said five of the dead policemen were hit by identical sniper fire in the head or neck. Journalists saw some hardline protesters carrying guns at the barricades.

EU weighs sanctions

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said the 28-nation EU, at an emergency meeting on Thursday, would impose asset freezes and visa bans on those blamed for the bloodshed.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, on a visit to Paris, said Washington was ready to impose similar sanctions.

The European Investment Bank, the EU’s soft-loan arm, said it had frozen its activities in Ukraine due to the violence.

The leaders of Germany and France said after talks in Paris that the sanctions were only part of an approach to promote a compromise leading to constitutional reform and elections.

“What is happening in Ukraine is unspeakable, unacceptable, intolerable,” French President Francois Hollande told a joint news conference. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said targeted sanctions against Ukraine’s leaders would show the EU was serious in pressing for a political solution. She made clear they were talking to all sides in the crisis, including Russia.

Diplomats cautioned that any sanctions would be largely symbolic, noting that similar Western measures had long failed to sway or unseat the rulers of Belarus or Zimbabwe.

In staunchly pro-European western Ukraine, opponents of Yanukovich declared political autonomy after seizing regional administrative buildings in Lviv overnight and forcing police to surrender. Protesters also took over regional offices in Ivano-Frankivsk, blocked a road to a border crossing to Poland and torched the main police station in the city of Ternopil.

Many in the west, parts of which were first ruled from Moscow in World War Two, view Yanukovich as a corrupt ally of Russia and of business oligarchs in the Russian-speaking east.

On the central Kiev square, opposition speakers harangued thousands of protesters, some masked and in combat fatigues.

Priests intoned prayers from a stage while young protesters in hard-hats improvised forearm and knee pads to protect themselves against baton blows. Others prepared petrol bombs.

“They can come in their thousands but we will not give in. We simply don’t have anywhere to go. We will stay until victory and will hold the Maidan until the end,” said a 44-year-old from Ternopil who gave only his first name of Volodymyr.

Traffic entering Kiev were restricted and the capital’s metro was closed to prevent protesters getting reinforcements.

Demonstrations erupted in November after Yanukovich bowed to Russian pressure and pulled out of a planned far-reaching association agreement with Brussels. Western powers urged him to turn back to the EU and the prospect of an IMF-supported economic recovery, while Russia accused them of meddling.

Ukraine has been rocked periodically by political turmoil since independence from the Soviet Union more than 22 years ago, but it has never experienced violence on this scale.

KIEV — Ukrainian protesters hurled petrol bombs, fireworks and stones at riot police on Tuesday, and at least nine people died in the worst day of violence since demonstrations erupted against President Viktor Yanukovich 12 weeks ago.

Western powers warned Yanukovich against trying to smash the pro-European demonstrations and opposition leader Vitaly Klitschko, fearing an assault, urged women and children to leave Kiev’s central Maidan square “to avoid further victims”.

A police spokeswoman said seven civilians and two policemen had died in Tuesday’s clashes.

Forces loyal to the Russian-backed leader broke through front-line barricades near the Dynamo Kiev soccer stadium and marched to the edge of occupied Independence Square (Maidan). They moved in hours after Moscow gave Ukraine $2 billion in aid which it had been holding back to demand decisive action to crush the protests.

Nationwide protests against Yanukovich erupted in November after he bowed to Russian pressure and pulled out of a planned far-reaching trade agreement with the European Union, deciding instead to accept a Kremlin bailout for the former Soviet republic’s heavily indebted economy.

In what has become a geo-political tussle redolent of the Cold War, the United States and its Western allies are urging Yanukovich to turn back to Europe, and the prospect of an IMF-supported economic recovery, while Russia accuses them of meddling.

Clashes raged for several hours on Tuesday outside the parliament building, where opposition lawmaker Lesya Orobets said three demonstrators were killed and taken to a nearby officers’ club used as a medical centre. More than 100 people were injured, she said.

“Three bodies of our supporters are in the building. Another seven are close to dying [because of wounds],” she said on her Facebook page. Two more bodies were lying in front of a Metro station on the southeastern side of the square, a photographer told Reuters.

The police spokeswoman said the two officers and three protesters died of gunshot wounds. Two more protesters suffered heart attacks while one died in a fire and another in a traffic accident.

The State Security Service (SBU), in a joint statement with the interior ministry, set protesters a 6pm (1600 GMT) deadline to end street disorder or face “tough measures”.

“If by 6pm the disturbances have not ended, we will be obliged to restore order by all means envisaged by law,” the statement said.

The defence ministry issued a separate warning to protesters to evacuate the officers’ club near parliament.

Klitschko, a former world heavyweight boxing champion who leads one of three main opposition groups, told protesters on the occupied square: “We cannot exclude the possibility of use of force in an assault on the Maidan.”

Western alarm

Right Sector, a militant far-right group, added to tension by calling on people holding weapons to go to Independence Square, centre of the revolt, to protect it from a possible offensive by security forces.

As protesters and police battled on the streets of Kiev, Russia called the escalation a “direct result of connivance by Western politicians and European structures that have shut their eyes... to the aggressive actions of radical forces”.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who has tried to broker a power-sharing transition in Ukraine, said she was deeply concerned about the escalating violence and casualties.

“I urge the leadership of Ukraine to address the root causes of the crisis,” she said. “Political leaders must now assume their shared responsibility to rebuild trust and create the conditions for an effective solution to the political crisis.”

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen called on all parties to refrain from violence. Germany’s foreign minister telephoned his Ukrainian counterpart to warn against sliding back into violence and keep working for a political solution.

And neighbouring Poland, an EU member, summoned the Ukrainian ambassador to express concern at the clashes and call for immediate dialogue.

Monday’s $2 billion cash injection, a resumption of the $15 billion aid package, was seen as a signal that Russia believes Yanukovich has a plan to end the protests and has dropped any idea of bringing opposition leaders into government.

In another apparent gesture towards Moscow, a Ukrainian government source said state gas company Naftogaz has paid back $1.3 billion of its 2013 debt to Russian gas monopoly Gazprom , although it still owes $1.5 billion.

Ukraine’s hryvnia currency fell towards five-year lows after the fresh outbreak of violence, with importers clamouring for dollars.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have won the battle for influence in Ukraine for now, protesters who have occupied the centre of the capital are not going quietly.

“I think Russia received some kind of assurances from the Kiev leadership that were satisfactory, because only a day before there was nothing like it,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, former Kremlin adviser and political analyst in Moscow.

“I think Yanukovich showed he would stick firmly by his position in talks [with the opposition], he would not make excessive concessions, he would fight the radicals who are getting stronger in the opposition... and that the [new] prime minister would not be a member of the opposition.”

Yet rather than boosting Yanukovich, Moscow’s move may have helped to provoke a more violent turn in the protests, especially from those demonstrators who have a strong anti-Kremlin agenda.

Several thousand protesters torched vehicles and hurled stones in the worst violence to rock the capital Kiev in more than three weeks. Police replied by firing rubber bullets, and stun and smoke grenades from trucks, and from the tops of buildings, forcing the protesters back by about 100 metres.

“The authorities do not want to compromise on any issue... We understand that yet another odious candidate will be put forward [for prime minister], one who will be unable to restore the economy or end the political crisis,” said Vyacheslav Kyrylenko, an opposition deputy.

Inside parliament, opposition leaders brought proceedings to a halt by blocking the speaker’s tribune and opposition leader Klitschko urged Yanukovich to take riot police off the streets to avert further “conflict in society”.

The protesters had marched to parliament to back the opposition leaders’ calls for Yanukovich to relinquish what they call his “dictatorial” powers and particularly his control of the economy and the security forces.

When they were blocked by a line of trucks about 100 metres from the building, they threw stones at police, a Reuters witness said, and set three trucks ablaze with petrol bombs.

As the clashes extended into early afternoon, protesters ransacked a nearby office of Yanukovich’s Party of the Regions.

BANGKOK — Thailand’s embattled premier will be charged with neglect of duty, anti-graft officials said Tuesday, as clashes between police and opposition protesters left four dead, and dozens wounded in central Bangkok.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission said that if found guilty of the accusations — which relate to a controversial rice subsidy scheme — Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra could be removed from office.

The announcement came hours after gunfire and explosions shook an area of the city’s historic district just a short walk away from major tourist attractions, as riot police moved to clear sites of protest rallies.

A policeman was shot dead and three civilians were killed, according to the Erawan emergency centre, while 64 others were injured. Police said 24 of its officers were among those hurt.

The protesters have staged more than three months of mass street rallies demanding Yingluck’s resignation, occupying major state buildings and preventing civil servants going to work.

Police launched another operation to reclaim besieged government buildings and clear rally sites in the capital Tuesday, tearing through razor wire and sandbag barricades.

They met fierce resistance from protesters and were eventually forced to retreat amid volleys of gunfire. It was unclear who was shooting.

“The government cannot work here anymore,” a spokesman for the protesters, Akanat Promphan, said from a rally site near Yingluck’s headquarters.

“The will of the people is still strong. The government is trapped. It has no way forward,” he added.

Bemused tourists caught up in the chaos were seen taking photos of the aftermath of the clashes near the backpacker haven of Khaosan Road.

“I heard there were political problems in Thailand but I came anyway,” said Jerome Dennehy, 45, from Ireland.

“It’s not good to see but this is one part of Bangkok, in a country of millions. It won’t stop my holiday.”

Around 150 opposition demonstrators were arrested at a different rally site at an energy ministry complex in the capital on charges of violating a state of emergency — the first mass detentions after the current protests began.

Years of rival protests

Thailand has been periodically rocked by mass demonstrations staged by rival protest groups since a controversial military coup in 2006 that ousted then-premier Thaksin Shinawatra — Yingluck’s brother.

Fifteen people have died and hundreds have been injured in political violence linked to the latest round of rallies.

Yingluck’s opponents say she is a puppet for her brother Thaksin, a billionaire tycoon-turned-politician who fled overseas in 2008 to avoid jail for a corruption conviction.

The protesters are demanding Yingluck hand power to a temporary, unelected government that would carry out reforms to tackle corruption and alleged misuse of public funds before new elections are held.

Pro-Thaksin parties have triumphed at the ballot box for more than a decade, helped by strong support in the northern half of the kingdom.

But many southerners and Bangkok residents accuse Thaksin and his sister of using taxpayers’ money to buy the support of rural voters through populist policies such as the rice farm subsidy scheme.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission said Yingluck had ignored warnings that the flagship rice policy was fostering corruption and causing financial losses. It summoned her to hear the charges on February 27.

Yingluck defended the scheme in a televised press conference Tuesday, accusing her opponents of causing the delays in payments to farmers.

“It’s a pity that Thai rice farmers’ dreams of a better life were destroyed by political games,” she said.

There was no immediate comment from Yingluck on the charges, but a spokesman for her Puea Thai Party questioned why the anti-graft panel was apparently giving priority to the rice scheme allegations over other corruption cases against the opposition Democrat Party.

“It is likely to be a process to overthrow Yingluck’s government,” said the spokesman, Pormpong Nopparit.

For more than a month demonstrators have blocked major intersections in a self-styled “shutdown” of Bangkok, although attendance has dropped sharply compared with December and January — when at the peak tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of people took to the streets.

Yingluck’s government held a general election on February 2 to try to ease tensions but the opposition boycotted the vote, saying it would not end the long-running political crisis.

The deployment of security forces has revived memories of a military crackdown on mass pro-Thaksin “Red Shirt” rallies in 2010 under the previous government that left dozens dead. 

ANKARA — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday urged youngsters not to become “slaves to the Internet” as he handed out free tablet computers to students.

The premier also used the occasion to again defend his government’s controversial push to tighten control of the Internet, a move that has drawn widespread criticism.

“The Internet is a very important tool but it can become the biggest threat of our time at the hands of evil-minded people,” Erdogan told a group of primary and secondary school pupils, and teachers in Ankara.

“Don’t become slaves to the Internet, don’t become the slaves of computers,” he said at a ceremony marking a government initiative to hand out 100,000 tablets to students across the country.

Turkey’s parliament triggered a storm of protest at home and abroad earlier this month after it approved restrictions to the Internet which include giving authorities the power to block webpages deemed insulting or as invading privacy.

Critics of Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party say the legislation is an attempt to stifle dissent.

The timing of the law has also raised eyebrows as it comes as Erdogan is grappling with a high-level corruption investigation that has implicated key allies, and some of the details of the probe have been leaked online.

But Erdogan has vehemently denied accusations of online censorship, and on Monday said the proposed Internet curbs were vital to protect the privacy of young people.

“We do not aim to limit the freedom of anyone. On the contrary, we want to protect our youth from blackmailers, usurpers and crooks,” he said.

Rights groups have urged President Abdullah Gul not to sign the Internet bill into law.

Erdogan has long been suspicious of the Internet, branding Twitter a “menace” last year for helping organise mass anti-government protests in which six people died and thousands were injured.

His tough stance on the Internet as well as his crackdown on police and prosecutors in response to the corruption probe has raised questions internationally about the state of democracy in Turkey.

GENEVA/ADDIS ABABA — The co-pilot of a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines flight surrendered to Swiss authorities in Geneva on Monday after commandeering his aircraft to seek asylum in Switzerland, police said.

The plane’s second-in-command, named by Ethiopia as Hailemedhin Abera Tegegn, 31, took control of the plane when the pilot left the cockpit to use the toilet.

After landing, Hailemedhin left the aircraft via a cockpit window, without harming passengers or crew, police spokesman Pierre Grangean told a news conference. He was not carrying a weapon.

“Just after landing, the co-pilot came out of the cockpit, and ran to the police and said, ‘I’m the hijacker.’ He said he is not safe in his own country and wants asylum,” Grangean said.

The opposition and rights campaigners in Ethiopia accuse the government of stifling dissent, and torturing political detainees. But it is rare for state officials and employees — Ethiopian Airlines is run by the state — to seek asylum. The last senior official to do so fled to the United States in 2009.

Ethiopia said Hailemedhin had worked for Ethiopian Airlines for the past five years and had no criminal record.

“So far it was known that he was medically sane, until otherwise he is proven through the investigation which is going on right now,” Redwan Hussein, spokesman for the Horn of Africa’s government, told a news conference.

Redwan said Ethiopia may ask for his extradition.

Ethiopian Airlines pilots had visas to travel freely to Europe, he said, adding that it made no sense to hijack one’s own plane given “that the anti-hijacking law in any country is severe” and can lead to up to 20 years in prison.

Redwan said among the 193 passengers on board the Boeing aircraft were 139 Italians, 11 American and four French nationals.

Code ‘hijack’

Flight ET702 departed the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Sunday evening and was bound for Rome. The plane was hijacked at about 0330 GMT while over northern Italy, Grangean said. It landed at Geneva at 6:02am (0502 GMT).

He said the co-pilot, an Ethiopian born in 1983, locked the flight deck door when the pilot went to the toilet. He then asked to refuel at Geneva, landed the plane, climbed down on an emergency exit rope from a cockpit window and gave himself up.

Robert Deillon, CEO of Geneva airport, said air traffic controllers learnt the plane had been hijacked when the co-pilot keyed a distress code into the aircraft’s transponder,

“There is... a code for hijack. So this co-pilot put in the code for ‘I just hijacked the aircraft’,” he said. As the plane was over Italy at the time, two Italian Eurofighters were scrambled to accompany it, he said.

The brief drama in Geneva on Monday morning caused the cancellation of some short-haul flights and some incoming flights were diverted to other airports. Hundreds of passengers booked on disrupted flights sought to change their tickets.

In an apparent recording of a radio communication between the Ethiopian plane and air traffic control posted on social media site Twitter, a demand for asylum was made.

“We need asylum or assurance we will not be transferred to the Ethiopian government,” the voice in the recording, apparently the co-pilot, said.

Reuters could not independently verify the authenticity of the recording.

Ethiopian nationals and the country’s flag carrier have been involved in several hijackings in the past. At least 50 people were killed when a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet crashed in the Indian Ocean in 1996.