Pakistan-Taliban peace talks falter on start

Agence France-Presse . Islamabad 

Pakistan’s planned peace talks with Taliban insurgents stumbled as they began Tuesday, with government negotiators missing a preliminary meeting citing doubts over the militants’ team.
The faltering start will fuel scepticism about whether negotiations with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) can achieve a meaningful and lasting peace accord.
The prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, caused surprise last week by announcing a team to begin dialogue with the TTP, which has been waging a violent insurgency since 2007.
Many observers had been anticipating a military offensive against TTP strongholds in Pakistan’s tribal areas, following a bloody start to the year. More than 110 people were killed in militant attacks in January, many of them military personnel.
Tentative efforts towards peace talks last year came to an abrupt halt in November when the TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in a US drone strike.
Teams representing the Taliban and government had been due to gather in Islamabad at 2:00 pm (0900 GMT) on Tuesday to chart a ‘roadmap’ for talks.
But the government delegation did not show up. One of its members, senior journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai, said they wanted to clarify who was on the Taliban team and what powers they had.
The TTP initially named five negotiators but cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan declined to take part and another was pulled out by his political party.
‘We told them we are ready to meet them after we get an explanation about one issue, that their committee will consist of three members,’ Yusufzai told AFP.
‘We also seek explanations on other issues, like how powerful this committee is.’
The head of the Taliban team, hardline cleric Maulana Sami-ul-Haq, accused the government of not taking the talks seriously.
‘Today it has been exposed how serious the government is about talks,’ Haq told AFP.

Big winter storm hits US East, disrupts travel

Associated Press . Philadelphia 

A woman walks down a street during a snowstorm in the Brooklyn borough on Monday in New York City. — AFP photo

Another round of snowy weather hit the eastern United States on Monday, killing at least two people, disrupting thousands of flights and hurting travel plans for people trying to return home from the Super Bowl football championship in the New York City area.
The snow neared 8 inches in Philadelphia and New York, according to the National Weather Service.
By late afternoon, the flight-tracking website FlightAware reported more than 4,300 delayed flights and 1,900 cancelled flights nationwide in cities including Philadelphia, Newark, New Jersey and New York. Inbound flights to Newark, LaGuardia and Kennedy airports were delayed two to three hours because of snow and ice.
At least two deaths and one serious injury were blamed on the storm. In Kentucky, a 24-year-old man died Sunday when his car skidded into a snowplow. On Monday, a 73-year-old New York City man was fatally struck by a backhoe that was moving snow.
A 10-year-old girl was in serious condition after she was impaled by a metal rod while sledding north of Baltimore.
Government offices, courts and schools closed in parts of Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia; scattered power outages were reported throughout the region.
Another storm is likely to hit the same region beginning Tuesday night, bringing a combination of rain, freezing rain and snow, said Gary Szatkowski, a weather service meteorologist in New Jersey.

Syria barrel bombs kill 85 in Aleppo

At least 85 people were killed in 24 hours of Syrian regime air raids on the city of Aleppo, a monitoring group said Sunday, after 10 days of inconclusive peace talks.
The deaths came as a suicide car bombing in a Hezbollah stronghold across the border in Lebanon killed four people on Saturday, in the latest regional spillover of the conflict.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said regime helicopters hit rebel-held areas of Aleppo with barrels packed with explosives.
The so-called barrel bombs are a controversial weapon, condemned by rights groups as indiscriminate.
‘At least 85 people were killed, including 65 civilians, 10 of whom were children,’ on Saturday, the Observatory said.
Attacks targeted several areas of the city, with 34 killed in the southeastern Tariq al-Bab area alone, among them six children.
Another 22 civilians, including another six children, were killed in the Salhine, Ansari and Marjeh districts, with nine others killed in other parts of the city.
The Britain-based Observatory said 10 jihadists from Al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, were also killed in a local headquarters in the city.
Ten other deaths in the attacks were recorded but the identities of the dead had not been confirmed.
Once Syria’s economic hub, Aleppo is now divided between regime and rebel-held areas, with large swathes of the city devastated by the fighting that began there in mid-2012.
In December, government aircraft launched a sustained blitz on the city that killed hundreds of people, most of them civilians.
Regime forces recently launched an offensive on rebel-held areas in the east of the city, with defence minister General Fahd al-Freij visiting the province on Friday.
The latest aerial assault came the day after Syrian government and opposition delegations wrapped up peace talks in Geneva.
The 10 days of talks yielded no tangible results and the government team said it was unsure whether it would return to the negotiating table.
On Sunday, SANA carried scathing remarks from deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Moqdad, who accused the opposition of being ‘mercenaries manipulated by foreign forces.’
He said they bore ‘full responsibility for the lack of results at Geneva because of their refusal to engage on the basis of principles that no Syrian could refuse: the unity of Syria, its independence and its sovereignty.’ 
Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar al-Jaafari, was equally critical of the opposition, accusing them of having ‘no vision or political programme,’ SANA said.
Al-Watan added, however, that the conflict has ‘transferred to the political and diplomatic field, which is one that the Syrians know well.’ Agence France-Presse . Damascus