Rival Libyan tribes sign ceasefire deal

Rival tribes from southern Libya have signed a ceasefire agreement in Qatar, ending 14 months of fighting in the city of Obari in southern Libya.

The deal between the Tebu and Tuareg tribes, which calls an immediate ceasefire and the return of thousands of people displaced by the conflict, was signed in Doha on Monday.

"Signing this deal means the start of the construction and development period, and reconciliation. After 14 months of war, I think all of us are convinced that no one has interest in war," Tuareg representative Mustafa Salem told Al Jazeera.

"The implementation is important and we hope neighbouring countries will help us, because the spark of war can reach all countries, including Europe."

Tebu tribe representative Mohammed Sundo said: "The Tebu and Tuareg lived side by side in the desert for many years. But after this war, there was external interference and hidden fingers instigating.

"There are fingers of regional powers and competing political orientations and ideologies...it is not a merely tribal conflict."

Hopes for stability 

Tribal and ethnic fighting in southern Libya increased since the topple of colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. 

In July, clashes between the two tribes reached Sebha, the biggest city in southern Libya, forcing hundreds of families to flee their homes.

Efforts to negotiate a truce in September halted because the ceasefire was violated.

The Qatari mediator hoped the deal would help stabilise the rest of Libya, where two competing governments are fighting for power. 

"We have seen the importance of stability of the south as the corner stone for the stability of the entire country, because Libya has open space and can be fertile land for different extremist and armed groups," said Mohammed bin Jassim Al Thani, minister's assistant for International Cooperation Affairs.

Libya's legally installed government in Tripoli welcomed the signing of the ceasefire deal in a statement and thanked Qatar for mediating the process.

"The General National Congress looks forward to this as being the right step towards conclusive reconciliation in the South of Libya and subsequently in the whole of Libya," the statement said.

Southern Libya, where unemployment is high, is home to African, Tuareg, Arab and Amazigh tribes and some extend into neighbouring countries.

Youssef Cherif, a Tunis-based political analyst specialising in North Africa, said: "the situation remains fragile".

"While the Tripoli government welcomes the news, [on] the other side - the [UN-recognised] Tobruk government and Khalifa Haftar - there is a lot of criticism," he said, referring to the self-appointed defence minister recognised by the Tobruk administration.

Lawyer reveals details of arrest of ‘clock kid’ Ahmed

Two months after “clock kid” Ahmed Mohamed made international headlines, new details of his controversial arrest emerged Monday in a letter his attorney has sent to school and city officials in Irving, Tex.

As many as seven adults teamed up to interrogate the 14-year-old boy after a teacher mistook his homemade clock for a bomb and pressured him to sign a confession, according to the “letter of demand” from his lawyer warning of plans to file a $15 million suit.

Ahmed’s September arrest, deemed an overreaction by many observers, drew waves of sympathy and extensive news coverage; President Obama invited him to join several other science-inclined students at the White House’s “Astronomy Night” last month.

But his family, which shortly thereafter took up a benefactor’s offer to relocate to Qatar, argued in the letter that the boy’s reputation has been “permanently scarred.” They are seeking not only financial reparations but written apologies from the city’s mayor and police chief.

“Everyone in the country and around the world believes this has been a wonderful experience for Ahmed’s family, and in some ways, it has been,” said Anthony Bond, a family friend. “But now they are settled in Qatar, they have realized they are tremendously traumatized.”

The letters elaborate on the timeline of the arrest, which set the Internet into a frenzy and changed a 14-year-old boy’s life forever. Though the family left the United States in October, the story is still reverberating in Ahmed’s hometown, where a group carrying guns and anti-Muslim signs staged a protest outside a mosque this past weekend.

Religion and race were at the center of the controversy over Ahmed’s arrest. For some, it amounted to the unfair profiling of a young Muslim of Sudanese descent, while others saw his case as a bid for media attention.

The letter of demand alleges that officials at Ahmed’s school never really thought that his homemade clock, assembled from “spare parts and scrap pieces he had around the house,” was a bomb. Attorneys claim that Ahmed showed it to another teacher earlier in the day without consequence. But in his English class, a teacher told him it “looked like” a bomb.

“The basis for Ms. West’s actions is unclear. She certainly did not treat the clock as though it were dangerous. Ms. West initially placed the clock on her desk,” the letter states.

Ahmed was escorted out of class and taken to a room where five Irving Police Department officers, the principal and assistant principal performed an “interrogation,” attorneys said. He was not permitted to contact his parents and was “pressured to sign a written statement admitting that he intended to bring a ‘hoax bomb’ to school.” The letter states that the principal threatened that he would be expelled if he did not sign the confession.

An Irving School District spokeswoman said the district received the letter of demand this morning and that its own lawyers would “respond as appropriate, as with any legal matter,” but otherwise offered no comment.

Attorneys blame the school district and the city for “stoking the flames” and placing blame on Ahmed even after it was decided he would not be criminally charged and his “suspicious-looking item” was not a threat.

A week after the arrest, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne told Glenn Beck that another side of the story was not being told. She referred to the item as a “hoax bomb,” not a clock, and said that Ahmed was not cooperative during questioning by police.

“He told a lot more to the reporters than he ever told to the police,” Van Duyne said. “There’s a problem with that. If your child was in that school and you saw something like this come in, you would want to make sure it is our priority to make our children safe in school, period.”

The family is demanding an apology from Van Duyne and others involved because they would like to return to Irving, attorney Kelly Hollingsworth said.

“Qatar is nice, but it is not Texas. That is their attitude toward this,” Hollingsworth said. “They are citizens of Irving, Texas, USA, first. Are they devout people devoted to their faith? Absolutely. But they are Texans, too, and they want to come home. What we are seeking is for them to be able to do that with their heads held high.”

Hollingsworth’s letter paints a picture of the unpredictable consequences of going viral in 2015. When Ahmed woke up on Sept. 14, he was a normal, unknown teenager. By that evening, he had been recognized by President Obama, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and thousands of people who chimed in on the Twitter hashtag #IStandWithAhmed.

But the Internet backlash was loud and persistent: The demand letter states that one blog post superimposed Ahmed’s face on an image of Osama bin Laden and described him as a “little terrorist in training”; other people posted the Mohamed family’s home address on Twitter.

Meanwhile, some detractors have claimed that the entire incident was a publicity stunt planned by Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan, a former candidate for the presidency of Sudan — or that the “homemade clock” was actually a store-bought model, not a work of precocious ingenuity.

“The generosity and support Ahmed has received has been very much appreciated, but what the system has to do is try to find a way to redress him,” Hollingsworth said. “What’s the effect of this young man having his reputation in the global community scarred for the rest of his life?”

Terrorism: 16 Arrests in Belgium

 After a dramatic security sweep late Sunday marked by the deployment of soldiers in the historic center of the Belgian capital, the authorities here announced early Monday that 16 people had been arrested in a joint police and military operation to try to head off what the prime minister earlier described as a “serious and imminent” threat of a Paris-style terrorist assault.

Belgian security forces conducted 19 raids in the Brussels region on Sunday and three in the southern town of Charleroi, Eric Van der Sijpt, a magistrate and spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office, said at a late-night news conference. Backed by heavily armed soldiers, the police also sealed off at least two areas of central Brussels, including streets around the city’s medieval central square, the Grand Place, a major tourist attraction.

But the main target of the clampdown, Salah Abdeslam, suspected to be one of the gunmen in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, was not among those arrested, Mr. Van der Sijpt said. The raids also uncovered no weapons or explosives, he added. 

The Belgian news media reported Sunday that Mr. Abdeslam, a resident of the Brussels borough of Molenbeek whose brother was a suicide bomber in Paris, had been seen in the eastern city of Liège but then vanished again. Mr. Van der Sijpt declined to take questions on that or other aspects of the Belgian investigation into the links between the Paris attacks and Belgium.

He said several shots were fired by the police in Molenbeek late Sunday when, during a raid on a snack bar, a car drove toward officers. One person was wounded, he added.

Sunday’s raids and show of force in the center of Brussels escalated what had been mostly low-key precautions into a highly visible and often jittery military-style operation in a city usually associated with the somnolent activity of the European Union.

The operation, the biggest in the Belgian capital since the Paris attack, began shortly after a government meeting on the crisis and a decision to maintain for a second day the highest possible alert level in Brussels.

“We fear an attack similar to the one in Paris,” Prime Minister Charles Michel said Sunday at a news conference. “A number of individuals could launch an attack on several locations in Brussels simultaneously.” He spoke amid a growing mood of crisis as the authorities extended the hunt for Mr. Abdeslam, believed to be the only known survivor from three terrorist squads that attacked Paris, and for a widening number of suspects in Belgium linked to it.

Police officers and soldiers in camouflage blocked roads around the central headquarters of the Brussels police, near the Grand Place, and around the offices of the federal police. 

Mr. Michel did not elaborate on what information the government had received of a possible assault, saying only that it had “indications that the targets of such an attack will be areas that attract large crowds like commercial centers.”

Belgium’s interior minister, Jan Jambon, said that threat was wider than that posed by Mr. Abdeslam, suggesting that the Paris attacks may have involved a far broader network than originally thought. “There’s no point in hiding it; there is a real threat,” Mr. Jambon earlier told a Sunday program on the Belgian broadcaster VRT. 

A former French intelligence official close to the investigations said that the Belgians were looking for eight to 10 people who were heavily armed with weapons and explosives, in addition to Mr. Abdeslam.

With the country’s threat level at 4, the highest possible, the United States Embassy in Brussels continued to advise citizens to “remain at home” and avoid public gatherings. The authorities announced that schools and subways in Brussels would remain closed on Monday.

A railway station under the headquarters of the European Union’s executive branch remained sealed off on Sunday, and all traffic on the Brussels metro system was suspended. Soldiers with automatic weapons patrolled malls. Several big stores stayed closed. A huge Sunday market near the Brussels-South railway station that usually draws as many as 50,000 shoppers was canceled.

Mr. Michel said Saturday that the threat level had been raised because of “information, relatively precise, of a risk of an attack similar to the one that unfolded in Paris.”

Bernard Clerfayt, the mayor of Schaerbeek, a commune of Brussels, was more loose-tongued. On Sunday, he told the Belgian television network RTBF that “there are two terrorists on the ground in the Brussels region.”

At the same time, the French authorities published a new call on Sunday for witnesses related to the attacks in Paris and last week’s raid in St.-Denis, appealing for more information about the suicide bomber who was the second of three attackers to detonate explosives vests outside the Stade de France.

The call for witnesses, published by the French national police on Twitter, included a picture but not a name, and asked anybody who had information on the person to contact the authorities. The second suicide bomber detonated his vest near Gate H of the stadium, killing only himself.

The first detonated his explosives near Gate D, killing one other person. A Syrian passport for a 25-year-old man named Ahmad al-Mohammad, from Idlib, Syria, was found near his body, but the French authorities believe the passport may have been stolen.

On Friday, the Paris prosecutor’s office said that fingerprints for both the first and second bombers were taken at the same check for migrants in Greece on Oct. 3. The third bomber, identified as Bilal Hadfi, 20, a French citizen living in Belgium, detonated his explosives on the nearby Rue de la Cokerie but did not kill anybody else.

The appeal for help and the extraordinary security measures in Brussels came amid fresh revelations about another suspect, Abraimi Lazez, 39, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, who was arrested Thursday and charged with helping Mr. Abdeslam after his return to Belgium following the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris.

The authorities arrested Mr. Lazez after finding a handgun and an unspecified amount of blood in his car, his lawyer, Sokol Vljahen, said. Mr. Lazez, who grew up in the same Molenbeek neighborhood as some of the Paris attackers, denied any link to the attacks, his lawyer said.

Mr. Abdeslam was stopped by French police officers on Nov. 14, a few hours after the attacks, during a routine traffic check as he drove back to Brussels with two friends, both of whom have since been arrested. He had a criminal record but no warrant linked to his file, and he had not yet been tied to the attacks, so he was allowed to drive on.

One of the two men traveling with him and now under arrest has since told the police that Mr. Abdeslam had been wearing a big jacket, “with something underneath,” according to the suspect’s lawyer, Carine Couquelet. While he did not know what it was, the lawyer said, the sight of it “made him scared.”

According to Mr. Lazez’s lawyer, his client never met Salah or his brother, Ibrahim Abdeslam, one of the suicide bombers in Paris. Mr. Lazez was not friends with Abdelhamid Abaaoud either, he said. Mr. Abaaoud, another Molenbeek resident, was the presumed ringleader of the Paris attacks and was killed in a police raid just north of the French capital on Wednesday.

Mohamed, another brother of Salah Abdeslam who was detained briefly after the attacks but released, appealed for Salah to turn himself in.

“We wish for him to turn himself in,” he told RTBF television in an interview on Sunday. “To answer us. For our family, for the family of victims, for all the others. We prefer to see him in prison than in a cemetery.”

He said he had not paid attention when the attitudes of his two brothers began to change six months ago. “They started praying,” Mohamed said. “Or they stopped drinking alcohol, but it’s not a radical change. For me it’s the sign of people who wanted to chasten themselves, and to be more respectful of their religion.”

When asked whether his brother Salah might have been reluctant to participate in the attacks, Mohamed said: “It is my hope that he stepped back at the last minute.”

“Maybe he saw or heard something that made him turn back. After, did he kill victims? Was he at the exact location? Was he there until the end? We don’t know.”

Clock Boy' Seeking $15m From City And School

representing Ahmed Mohamed sent letters on Monday demanding $10m (£6.7m) from the city of Irving, Texas, and $5m from the Irving Independent School District.

The attorneys, who also threatened to pursue legal action, said the teenager deserves the money and an apology because he was publicly mistreated.

Ahmed took a homemade clock to his school in September to show a teacher, but another teacher thought it could be a bomb.

The school contacted police, who handcuffed the teenager.

Ahmed, the son of Sudanese immigrants, was suspended from school for three days.

In the wake of his story going viral, Ahmed received multiple job offers and visited the headquarters of Google and Facebook.

He even chatted with President Barack Obama while attending an Astronomy Night event at the White House in October.

Ahmed and his family have since moved to Qatar, where the family accepted a foundation's offer to pay for Ahmed's high school and college tuition in Doha.

Security for Pope Francis almost doubles ahead of Africa trip

The security team for Pope Francis nearly doubled in size last week, just before his visit to Africa, which begins Wednesday.

The extra security was already evident Sunday at the Vatican. The ramped up security was in place long before the faithful even began to arrive. Armed police from Italy's' numerous forces were on every corner. 

Everyone who arrived for the pope's weekly "angelus" was checked, bags opened, and there were random pat-downs. And that was just to get into the street in front of St Peter's Basilica.

The lines stretched for several blocks for those wanting to enter the square itself. That involved another layer of security, including metal detectors. The security wasn't just a reaction to the Paris attacks.

Some months ago the cover of the ISIS online magazine had a doctored photo showing their flag flying from the obelisk in the center of the main Vatican square.

The implied threat didn't worry Ernest and Joanne Morelli from St Petersburg Florida, however.

"We feel as if the Carabinieri are doing a pretty good job, they're all over the place. I mean we don't feel as if anything could happen at this point," the Morellis said. "I mean obviously it always could, but we feel fairly safe."

Pope Francis is known to be indifferent to his own security, but aides say he is deeply concerned for those who flock to see him.

The only way to absolutely ensure security in a place like this is to stop the terrorists well before they reach their target. But as both sides know only too well, the police have to get it right every time, while the terrorists only have to get lucky once.

Belgians Help Terror Police With Cat Tweets

Belgian prosecutors were concerned that some social media users would update their followers about sensitive operations - disclosing information which could be useful for suspects still evading capture.

Hours after the police's appeal, the #BrusselsLockdown hashtag had been flooded with cat pictures, some accompanied with defiant captions to warn suspects they would not win.

Others were more humorous, and showed felines getting involved in the investigation "to catch the bad guys".

One user posted a picture of a cat masquerading as a dog, accompanied by the caption: "You can't keep hiding."

The Twitter trend was a light-hearted moment for Belgians, who still face on going anti-terror operations following the Paris attacks. 

Schools and the Metro transport network in Brussels will remain closed on Monday over fears of a similar incident.

The country's reaction to the "radio silence" appeal has inspired cat owners around the world to upload photographs of their animals in solidarity with the people of Brussels.

And at a news conference, federal prosecutor Eric Van der Sypt thanked the public for complying with their request for discretion.

The five ways U.S. politics changed after Paris

During a more carefree era — last Friday afternoon — the click-me clip sitting atop CNN.com featured Donald Trump doing his routine about Ben Carson’s knife-and-belt story. The big moment was Trump stepping away from the lectern to exhibit his buckle, and with it an expanse of Italian dress shirt approximately the size of a casino-roof chopper pad. 

Then, in a flash, the frivolity vanished — displaced by real reality TV, the ghastly news from Paris that at least 129 innocents had been murdered in the heart of the city by teams of terrorists.

Elections aren’t just about policy, candidates or the national mood — they are about events, by their nature unanticipated, that shift the paradigm of a race. The massacre in Paris, which portends a widening threat here and an expanding conflict in Syria and Iraq, has sobered up the campaign in a hurry (though not entirely) with hard-to-predict implications.

Hare are five ways the attacks changed the 2016 political landscape:

1. Even Bernie Sanders wants to “destroy” ISIL. One of the most significant domestic political developments of the past seven days was among the least noticed: The most liberal candidate in the 2016 race, a Vermont Socialist who railed against the Iraq War from the jump, instantly accepted the new reality that the group known as ISIL or ISIS needed to be wiped out after the attacks during the Saturday night Democratic debate. Then, on Friday, he reiterated his call “to destroy the brutal and barbaric ISIS regime” with the caveat that military action should be “the last resort, not the first resort.” This he would accomplish in conjunction with a large international coalition that would include a new never-gonna-happen NATO-type organization that includes Russia, site of his first honeymoon.

truth, Sanders is not the unequivocal dove most people assume him to be: One of his House staffers resigned in 1999 when he backed Bill Clinton’s action in Kosovo, and he consistently backed war funding bills for Afghanistan and Iraq. But it’s telling. The guy occupying the furthest-left flank of the 2016 field has not categorically ruled out using ground forces if, and only if, the threat to the homeland is high enough. Democratic voters, who are overwhelmingly opposed to any boots-on-the-ground deployments, may not be as open to deeper entanglements, but the anti-war party’s leadership increasingly is.

2. The GOP finds a wedge issue: You don’t have to live with a refugee. The velocity of the American political synapse is a wonder to behold. Within hours of the attacks, the discussion in the GOP (and the right-most quarters of the Democratic party) quickly flipped from a muddy, depressing and terrifying discussion of military decisions to be made to the vastly more comfortable debate over what to do about the Syrian refugees Obama promises to resettle in the heartland. 

Sure, bottom-dwellers in the polls like Lindsey Graham and Jeb Bush were carping on and on about the new reality, and the need to confront ISIL immediately on the ground.

(“This is the war of our time,” Bush told “Morning Joe” early in the week. “We cannot do this by leading from behind, this requires American leadership, it doesn’t require us to be the world’s police, but it does require us to lead.”)

But the smarter play — and one that dovetails with the party base position in immigration in general — was to assail the (very real) threat of terrorists infiltrating the U.S. Chris Christie, who couldn’t buy a headline for weeks, out-trumped Trump — declaring that he wouldn’t even allow a “5-year-old orphan” into Jersey; not to be outdone, Trump suggested a national registry tracking all Muslims and tweeted: “Refugees from Syria are now pouring into our great country. Who knows who they are — some could be ISIS. Is our president insane?” Then Ben Carson compared some of the refugees to a “rabid dog.”

The difference this time, however, is that a lot of Democrats are on board with the GOP no-refugees policy, if not the rhetoric. And the issue of the Syrian refugees is becoming that rarest of 2016 rarities: A genuine wedge issue Republicans can use against Democrats. Forty-seven Democrats voted Thursday for a bill (sure to be vetoed by Obama) that suspends the program allowing Syrian and Iraqi refugees into the country pending security upgrades.

3. Trump is in no man’s land. Nobody body-surfs a headline better than Donald Trump — and his tough talk in the wake of the attacks seems to have delivered yet another spike in popularity, especially at the expense of a less than sure-footed Carson. But Trump’s less gung-ho than he projects. Foreign policy has proved to be an area where he has exhibited a kind of bombast-cloaked nuance: He was a proud Iraq War skeptic and was one of the few Republicans to publicly welcome Russia’s intervention in the Syrian theater — the better to keep U.S. from putting its troops in harm’s way. 

But his big plan for ISIL-killing — a limited use of ground troops coupled with bombing oil fields owned by the Islamic State — is more a placeholder than a bold, comprehensive policy — and it’s been dismissed by many military analysts. Moreover, it falls far short of the more decisive — if not necessarily popular — calls for ground-troop intervention by Bush and Lindsey Graham, two opponents he’s dismissed as wimpy. 

This will likely be the issue voters use to decide whether he’s a serious candidate —— so he better get serious, and fast.

4. Clinton is in no woman’s land. In theory, the Paris attacks ratify Clinton’s hawkish, calibrated, moderately interventionist world view — and mark her (in the eyes of supporters) as the most battle-ready candidate in the field. It’s an issue that should ultimately play to her advantage (Clinton and Trump score the highest marks on the issue, according to a poll earlier this week) but it’s also complicated. 

Clinton’s 2003 support of the Iraq invasion cost was, arguably, the most important — and damaging —— moment of her legislative career. It cost her dearly in 2008 — she was forced to hold hands with then-opponent Barack Obama in a bid to limit funding for the war when things went south, and she reluctantly apologized for the original war vote after the campaign. But as secretary of state, Clinton was among those pressing Obama to adopt a more forceful approach in Libya and still views herself as the person you want on the Washington end of that 3 a.m. phone call.

Her speech to the Council of Foreign Relations on Thursday illustrated her command of the issues, but it also was an exercise in Trump-style fence-straddling. “It’s time to begin a new phase to intensify and broaden our efforts, to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria,” she said.