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Monday, December 31, 2012

U.S. Offers Assistance to Blunt Spread of Violent Extremism | IIP Digital

U.S. Offers Assistance to Blunt Spread of Violent Extremism | IIP Digital:
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U.S. Offers Assistance to Blunt Spread of Violent Extremism

By Phillip Kurata | Staff Writer 31 December 2012

Officials examining bomb-making materials (AP Images)
The head of Indonesia’s national police forensic laboratory, Brigadier General Andayono, second from right, displays bomb-making materials seized from terrorist suspects in 2011.
Washington — The U.S. government is providing training to police agencies, prosecutors and prison officials in dozens of countries to blunt the appeal of violent extremism, according to the State Department’s outgoing chief of counterterrorism, Daniel Benjamin.
Looking ahead to the work in 2013 of quelling violent extremism, Benjamin said harsh practices used by security forces are among the most potent factors that contribute to radicalization. ”The goal of our counterterrorism assistance is and must be to help countries move away from repressive approaches toward developing true rule-of-law frameworks,” Benjamin said December 18 at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
U.S. officials from the departments of Justice, Defense and Homeland Security are dispatched abroad to train host countries to deal with criminals and to secure their borders in ways that do not cause a backlash and radicalization, he said.
The U.S. government’s premier program for helping criminal justice agencies to upgrade their counterterrorism capacities is the Anti-Terrorism Assistance program, Benjamin said. The program covers a wide spectrum of skills, from bomb detection and crime-scene investigation to border security, aviation security and cybersecurity, he said.
During the 2012 fiscal year that ended September 30, more than 9,800 people from more than 50 countries received counterterrorism training through this program, Benjamin said.
The U.S. government also puts Justice Department officials, known as resident legal advisers, in U.S. embassies to mentor host-country prosecutors and law enforcement officials in complex cases, including terrorist crimes, he said.
Indonesia is an example of a country that has made “extraordinary strides” in developing civilian legal structures and law enforcement institutions to fight terrorism effectively and within the rule of law, he said. Benjamin said Indonesia has recorded more than 160 convictions in terrorist cases and the national police has had major successes in breaking up terrorist cells linked to Jemaah Islamiya and other violent extremist organizations. “Capacity building can work, and we must continue to innovate to improve the efficacy,” he said.
Benjamin added that the U.S. government is working with the United Nations and a Dutch entity, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, to reform prison practices so that extremist ideologies do not spread while prisoners are incarcerated.
“Many incarcerated terrorists will eventually be released, and we need to take steps to decrease the likelihood that they will return to violence when they’re back on the streets,” Benjamin said. When jailed terrorists are cut off from their previous extremist contacts, their time in prison can be used to induce positive changes in an environment of good correctional practices, he said. More than 35 nations, along with multilateral organizations and independent experts, are participating in the prison initiative. “We believe that we’ve made an enormous amount of progress in tackling this vital … issue over the past several years, but there’s still much that can and should be done in this area,” he said.
Benjamin said the Global Counterterrorism Forum, supported by 29 countries plus the European Union, has produced recommendations for the rule of law, combating kidnapping for ransom — the primary means of funding terrorist groups — and prison deradicalization. The forum recently opened the Center of Excellence for Countering Violent Extremism in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. In 2013, the forum will open a similar institution, the International Institute for Justice and Rule of Law, in Tunis, Tunisia, where the Arab Awakening began, he added.


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Live video: NYC's Times Square revs up for New Year's Eve, worldwide celebration | Nation/World | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

Live video: NYC's Times Square revs up for New Year's Eve, worldwide celebration | Nation/World | Detroit Free Press | freep.com:
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Live video: NYC's Times Square revs up for New Year's Eve, worldwide celebration

6:37 PM, December 31, 2012  |  
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New York City police officers stand guard during the Times Square New Year's Eve celebration, Monday, Dec. 31, 2012 in New York. / AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
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NEW YORK — From teeming Times Square to an Asian capital hosting its first public New Year’s Eve countdown in decades, the world looked to the start of 2013 with hope for renewal after a year of economic turmoil, searing violence and natural disasters.
Fireworks, concerts and celebrations unfolded around the globe to ring in the new year.
“With all the sadness in the country, we’re looking for some good changes in 2013,” Laura Concannon, of Hingham, Mass., said as she, her husband, Kevin, and his parents took in the scene in bustling Times Square on Monday.
A blocks-long line of bundled-up revelers with New Year’s hats and sunglasses boasting “2013” formed hours before the first ball drop in decades without Dick Clark, who died in April and was to be honored with a tribute concert and his name printed on pieces of confetti.
Security in Times Square was tight, with a mass of uniformed police and plainclothes officers assigned to blend into the crowd. With police Commissioner Raymond Kelly proclaiming that Times Square would be the “safest place in the world on New Year’s Eve,” officers used barriers to prevent overcrowding and checkpoints to inspect vehicles, enforce a ban on alcohol and check handbags.
Elsewhere hours earlier, lavish fireworks displays lit up skylines in Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai. The United Arab Emirates city of Dubai then took up the baton with a spectacular display featuring multicolored fireworks dancing up and down the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. In Russia, Moscow’s iconic Red Square was filled with spectators as fireworks exploded near the Kremlin.
Organizers said about 90,000 people gathered in a large field Yangon, Myanmar, for their first chance to do what much of the world does every Dec. 31 — watch a countdown. The reformist government that took office last year in the country, long under military rule, threw its first public New Year’s celebration in decades.
“We feel like we are in a different world,” said Yu Thawda, a university student who went with three of her friends.
The atmosphere of celebration was muted in some places with concern.
Europe planned scaled-back festivities and street parties, the mood restrained — if hopeful — for a 2013 that is projected to be a sixth straight year of recession amid Greece’s worst economic crisis since World War II. Hotels, clubs and other sites in New Delhi, the Indian capital, canceled festivities after the death of a rape victim on Saturday touched off days of mourning and reflection about women’s safety. In the Philippines, where many are recovering from devastation from a recent typhoon, a health official danced to South Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style” video in an effort to stop revelers from setting off huge illegal firecrackers, which maim and injure hundreds of Filipinos each year.
And even in Times Square, some revelers checked their cellphones to keep up with news of lawmakers’ efforts to skirt the fiscal cliff combination of expiring tax cuts and across-the-board spending cuts that threatened to reverberate globally. And the elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., and Superstorm Sandy mingled into the memories of 2012.
“This has been a very eventful year, on many levels,” Denise Norris said as she and her husband, the Rev. Urie Norris, surveyed the crowd seeking to jam Times Square for a countdown show with Ryan Seacrest as host and musical acts including Taylor Swift, Carly Rae Jepsen, Neon Trees, Flo Rida and Pitbull.
The Norrises usually spend New Year’s Eve at the suburban Pittsburgh church where he’s an associate pastor. But they’d booked a night at a Times Square hotel “just to experience this energy,” she said. To her, that energy is a pulse of “putting behind the past and pressing ahead to the high calling.”
About a block away, Army Sgt. Clint Evanoff waited in a black suit, red vest and red tie to get into Times Square with a couple of his friends from his unit at Fort Drum, N.Y. Evanoff, 20, is scheduled to leave for Afghanistan, his first deployment, in about two weeks.
Looking ahead to the new year, “I’m just hoping to make it back,” he said.
Elsewhere, too, hopes for 2013 were a mix of personal and political. In Boston, communications writer and editor Colin O’Brien, 25, said he was optimistic that the nation had realized it was time to make tough decisions about its finances and policy and that there might be “more common ground than people are willing to admit or accept.” In Harrisburg, Pa., warehouse worker Adam Gassner, 43, had more internal goals: “hoping to continue to get myself back on my feet.”
Back in Times Square, Elvis Rivera, of Manhattan, was taking photos to capture the moment. He wasn’t planning to ring in the new year there but went by to take pictures.
How did he feel about the end of 2012?
“Relieved,” Rivera said, adding that there had been a death and job losses in his family this year.
His hopes for 2013?
“A better life” and more money, he said.
Associated Press writers Colleen Long in New York; Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pa.; Jay Lindsay in Boston; Aye Aye Win in Yangon, Myanmar; Rod McGuirk in Sydney; Silvia Hui in London; Ashok Sharma in New Delhi; and Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, contributed to this report.

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