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BBC NEWS
Bali Nine: Australian gallery removes Joko Widodo portrait
By Wendy Frew Australia editor, BBC News Online
30 April 2015
From the section Australia
Could a photo be a bellwether for the Australian public's reaction to the Bali Nine executions?
Australia's National Portrait Gallery has removed a portrait of Indonesian President Joko Widodo from its walls.
The image, taken by Australian photographer Adam Ferguson, was a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize.
It was shot well before Indonesia executed Australian drug traffickers, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
But the gallery says it had to remove the photo - not to protest against the executions but to protect it from the public who might want to register their protest by damaging it.
Australians are angry Indonesia ignored pleas for clemency for the two men, who appear to have undergone a dramatic rehabilitation while in jail over the past 10 years.
Some held candle-lit vigils for Chan and Sukumaran, others waged social media campaigns on their behalf. Some even threatened to boycott Bali on the tourist trail.
But would anyone really stoop so low as to deface the President's image?
"My feeling yesterday, on Wednesday morning, was that in view of the circumstances and our operations, and my best assessment of the risk of damage to the work of art, it was necessary to remove it from public display,' said the gallery's director Angus Trumble, explaining that there had been some negative reaction from visitors.
There is now a blank space on the gallery's wall where the image once hung. The gallery has even removed the photo from its website.
But Ferguson thinks the decision is misguided. Speaking from Nepal where he is shooting for Time magazine, he said he would have preferred the image was left on display to make it's own statement.
"It seems to act in anger against the picture, it seems quite ridiculous," he told Fairfax Media.
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Yahoo!7
Respect our sovereignty: Widodo
AAP
April 29, 2015, 4:56 pm
Indonesia's president has told reporters that his country's sovereignty must be respected.
Indonesia's President Joko Widodo has raised his nation's sovereignty when asked about Australia withdrawing its ambassador.
"Our sovereignty must be respected," he told reporters.
"We're ready to respect the sovereignty of other countries as well."
Australia's move follows the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran despite repeated requests from Australia to commute their sentences.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla said withdrawing an ambassador was a normal diplomatic protest.
"Within a month or two, they will come back," he said.
"That's the signal of protest, we did that too."
Indonesia withdrew its ambassador to Australia in 2013 over a phone tapping scandal.
Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said the Indonesian government had no plan to pull out its ambassador to Australia.
"This is a legal case," she said.
"This is not a political case. At this very stage we don't have any plan to call our ambassador back from Canberra.
"We want to really assure that this is a legal case, it is not against a national of a country."
AAP
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Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
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USA TODAY
Syrian opposition, activists report chemical attack
AP
1:14 a.m. EDT April 30, 2015
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Syrian activist groups on Wednesday reported another suspected chemical attack in the northwestern province of Idlib, with one group tweeting that a dozen people were "suffocating."
Several Idlib-based groups said government helicopters dropped at least two barrel bombs containing chlorine on the town of Saraqeb, triggering cases of suffocation.
The Syrian Network for Human Rights, which is based outside the country, tweeted that 12 people were "suffocating."
The reports could not be independently verified. A call to Syria's mission to the U.N. rang unanswered Wednesday evening.
The head of Syria's main opposition group in exile said he received the reports during his informal meeting with the U.N. Security Council behind closed doors.
Khaled Khoja with the Syrian National Coalition said he urged the council to act on its resolutions, including one adopted last month that threatens action against the use of chemical weapons in Syria.
Activists have reported several attacks since then, and the council earlier this month heard from a Syrian doctor who treated victims from a half-dozen of them. "Everyone smelled bleach-like odors" and heard the sound of helicopters, Mohamed Tennari said of one incident.
The U.S. and other council members have repeatedly blamed the Syrian government for such attacks, saying no one else in the four-year civil war has helicopters to deliver the toxic chemicals.
But the U.N.'s most powerful body seems stuck in taking further action because there is no way to formally assign blame.
Neither the U.N. nor the global chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, has that kind of mandate, though the OPCW this year condemned the use of chlorine in Syria as a breach of international law. Council members have asked the OPCW to look into the latest attacks.
The council found rare agreement on Syria in the fall of 2013 to order the removal and destruction of Syria's chemical weapons, but chlorine was not declared as a chemical weapon. The chemical does not have to be declared because it is also used for regular purposes in industry.
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Karam reported from Beirut.
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Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
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