Ex-governor, jilted wife eye same seat

This 2006 photo shows Mark Sanford after winning his second term as South Carolina governer. He is joined by his family, from the left, sons Bolton; Landon; his then wife, Jenny; and son Marshal. Picture: AP Source: AP

FORMER South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who left public life two years ago after mysteriously disappearing to visit his then-mistress in Argentina, is poised to re-enter the political arena.

Acknowledging reports that he is seriously weighing a congressional bid for the seat he once held, Mr Sanford wrote in an email to The Associated Press: "To answer your question, yes the accounts are accurate." Mr Sanford promised "further conversation on all this" later.

The two-term governor was a rising Republican political star before he vanished from South Carolina for five days in 2009. Reporters were told he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, but he later tearfully acknowledged he was visiting Maria Belen Chapur, which he told everyone at news conference announcing his affair. He later called her his soul mate in an interview and the two were engaged earlier this year.

The opening for Mr Sanford comes after congressman Tim Scott was appointed to fill the remaining two years of Senator Jim DeMint's seat. Senator DeMint announced earlier this month he was resigning.

News that Mr Sanford, 52, may be interested in the seat comes days after his ex-wife, Jenny, appeared to be dipping her toe into the state's political waters.

She was reportedly on Governor Nikki Haley's short list of candidates to fill the seat that went to Mr Scott. Jenny Sanford later said she would think about a run for Mr Scott's seat representing the coastal 1st Congressional District, the seat her ex-husband is now considering.

"I'd be crazy not to look at the race a little bit," she said on Tuesday, before reports about Mark Sanford surfaced.

State Republicans said Scott plans to submit his letter of resignation from the House on January 2, triggering a process of candidate filing and primaries leading up to a special election in May.

Mr Scott, in a taped interview airing on CBS' Face the Nation, said he thinks there may be 25 or 30 candidates running for the seat.

"This is going to be a very active primary," he told Bob Schieffer when asked about Mr Sanford's run.

"The citizens of the 1st District will have an opportunity to have their voice heard through the vote and then two weeks later there will obviously be a runoff because with that many candidates we'll have a lot to say grace over."

Mark Sanford knows the 1st District well. Elected to the seat in 1994 - Jenny Sanford managed his first campaign and was a close adviser for most of his career - he served three terms before voters elected him governor in 2002.

The former governor would bring name recognition and money to the race - two things especially important due to the short campaign season and wide-open field.

Whether voters are ready to welcome Mr Sanford back to politics is another issue.

"It's absolutely absurd. He just has so much baggage. He was such an embarrassment to the state, we don't need that," said Gloria Day, a retired attorney in Charleston.

He avoided impeachment but was censured by the Legislature. He also had to pay more than $US70,000 ($67,000) in ethics fines - still the largest in state history - after AP investigations raised questions about his use of state, private and commercial aircraft.

Others said Mr Sanford's fiscal record is what's important, and Mr Sanford is known as a libertarian-leaning ideologue who railed against spending and bucked Republican Party leaders before anyone even coined the tea party movement.

"Mark Sanford is a reliable fiscal conservative so I, like many conservatives, would be delighted to see him in the race," said Joanne Jones, vice chairman of the Charleston Tea Party, though she noted she'll wait to see the entire field before throwing her support behind a candidate.

Mr Scott will be sworn in January 3 to replace Senator DeMint, who announced his resignation earlier this month to lead The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Mr Scott, who would have to seek election in 2014, will become the state's first black US senator and the first black Republican US senator from the South since Reconstruction.

Candidates for Mr Scott's seat must file by the end of January. Primaries will be held in March, with the general election in May.

State Republican Chairman Chad Connelly said as of Friday, 14 Republicans had expressed interest.

"Governor Sanford getting in would certainly alter the dynamics. That list would go down significantly," he said.

Sanford has $US1.2 million left in his state campaign coffers.

John Dietz of Daniel Island said the affair wouldn't affect his vote.

"He said he found his soul mate, and at one point in my life that's exactly how I felt. I empathised," said Mr Dietz, a retiree who characterises himself as a moderate.

Mr Dietz said he was disappointed that Sanford could not work with his fellow Republicans in the Legislature.

"I did not necessarily agree with a lot of things he did politically," he said. "I'm very much neutral at this point."

Retired Presbyterian minister Dick Giffen of Mount Pleasant said he wouldn't support Mr Sanford, but added that it was unrelated to the affair.

"He wasn't able to bring people together and get action done," Mr Giffen said. "He didn't produce anything. ... I really wasn't impressed with him."
 

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Peace envoy Brahimi back in Syria

INTERNATIONAL peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has arrived in the Syrian capital on a new mission to try to resolve a brutal conflict that has raged for almost two years.

Officials said the UN-Arab League envoy, seen at the Sheraton Hotel in central Damascus on Sunday, travelled overland to Syria from neighbouring Lebanon for a previously unannounced visit.

"The international envoy crossed the Lebanese-Syrian border at about 2pm (2300 AEDT)," one official said, after reports that Brahimi had flown into Beirut International Airport.

Brahimi last visited Syria on October 19, since when fighting has broken out between government forces and rebels on the road to Damascus airport.

During his last visit, which lasted five days, he met with President Bashar al-Assad and other top officials over a temporary ceasefire for the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha. Despite pledges, the truce did not hold.

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Second-hand exporters mimic charity

CHARITIES are reportedly having millions of dollars diverted away from them by second-hand clothing exporters who are imitating appeals and donation bins.

According to an investigation by Fairfax published on Monday, the exporters launch appeals that imply the goods will either be recycled or go towards charitable causes by using a variety of methods, including a network of bins and pictures of children in Third World countries.

To stay within the law, some even include a declaration in small-print, stating they are a commercial business but others reportedly use collection bags for fake charities.

National Association of Charitable Recycling chief executive Kerryn Caulfield said the losses to charities amounts in "the tens of millions".

"It's taking stock away from charities, it skews the lines of governance, puts doubt in the minds of the community and impacts on the employment opportunities for people with disabilities in these charities," she told Fairfax.

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Korea says North 'rocket' could reach US

NORTH Korea's recent rocket launch amounted to the test of a ballistic missile capable of carrying a half-tonne payload as far as the US west coast, the South Korean defence ministry says.

North Korea launched its three-stage Unha-3 rocket on December 12, insisting it was a purely scientific mission aimed at putting a polar-orbiting satellite in space.

Sunday's estimate was based on analysis of an oxidiser container - recovered from the rocket's first-stage splashdown site - which stored red fuming nitric acid to fuel the first-stage propellant.

"Based on our analysis and simulation, the missile is capable of flying more than 10,000 kilometres with a warhead of 500-600 kilograms," a defence ministry official told reporters.

The estimated range of 10,000 kilometres covers the whole of Asia, eastern Europe and western Africa as well as Alaska and a large part of the US west coast including San Francisco.

Without any debris from the second and third stages to analyse, the official said it could not be determined if the rocket had re-entry capability - a key element of inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) technology.

Most of the world saw the North's rocket launch as a disguised ballistic missile test that violates UN resolutions imposed after Pyongyang conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

The success of the launch was seen as a major strategic step forward for the isolated North, although missile experts differed on the level of ballistic capability demonstrated by the rocket.

The debris collected by the South Koreans was made of an alloy of aluminium and magnesium with eight panels welded manually.

"Welding was crude, done manually," the ministry official said, adding that oxidiser containers for storing toxic chemicals are rarely used by countries with advanced space technology.

The South's navy later recovered three more pieces of the rocket - a fuel tank, a combustion chamber and an engine connection rod - from the Yellow Sea and has been analysing them since Friday, Yonhap news agency said.

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Kenya arrests 61 over tribal violence

KENYAN police have arrested 61 suspects over a brutal attack on a remote village in the southeast involving two rival communities that left 45 people dead including women and children.

Villagers were hacked to death and their homes torched in Friday's attack on Kipao village in the Tana River delta region, an area where deadly tribal violence killed another 100 people earlier this year.

Police said on Saturday they had arrested 56 people, including a policeman, in the wake of the onslaught, which they feared could further inflame tensions between the rival Orma and Pokomo communities in the area.

Another five were arrested in a late-night "security operation", a police officer said on condition of anonymity on Sunday.

Police attributed the killings to a disarmament operation in the area but the violence could also be linked to the election being held next March, the first since Kenya was gripped by deadly inter-ethnic killings after a December 2007 vote.

Police said the dead in Kipao included 16 children, five women and 10 men, along with 14 assailants.

The United States said on Saturday it condemned "in the strongest terms" the renewed violence between the communities in the Tana area, where conflicts have flared intermittently over access to land and water points.

Kenya votes on March 4 in its first election since the disputed 2007 vote, which led to the worst inter-ethnic violence since independence with more than 1100 people killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Two of the candidates running for the presidency are Prime Minister Raila Odinga, who lost his bid in the 2007 vote, and Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his alleged role in the violence which shattered Kenya's image as a beacon of regional stability.

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NRA: Public wants armed guards in schools

NATIONAL Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre says the American people think it would be "crazy" not to put armed guards in every school, as the group has suggested in the wake of the massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

Mr LaPierre also contends that any new efforts by Congress to regulate guns or ammunition would not prevent mass shootings.

Mr LaPierre's comments on NBC's Meet the Press reinforced the position that the largest gun-rights lobby took on Friday when it broke its week-long silence on the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

That stand has described by some lawmakers as tone-deaf.

Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, says Mr LaPierre blames everything but guns for a series of mass shootings in recent years.

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Air strike on Syria bakery kills dozens

AN air strike near a bakery in the rebel-held town of Halfaya in the central Syrian province of Hama has killed dozens of people, a monitoring group says.

"Dozens of people were killed in an air strike on Halfaya," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, while activists in Hama said Sunday's raid had targeted a bakery in the town.

"In Halfaya, regime forces bombarded a bakery and committed a massacre that killed dozens of people, including women and children, and wounded many others," said the Local Co-ordination Committees, a grassroots network of activists.

"A MiG (jet) has attacked! Look at (President Bashar al-) Assad's weapons. Look, world, look at the Halfaya massacre," says an unidentified cameraman shooting an amateur video distributed by the Observatory.

The footage showed a bombed one-storey block, and a crater in the road beside it.

Bloodied bodies lay on the road, while others could be seen in the rubble.

Men carried victims out on their backs, among them at least one woman, the video showed.

On Monday, rebels launched an all-out assault on army positions across Hama, which is home to strong anti-regime sentiment.

Earlier in the year, rights groups accused government forces of committing war crimes by dropping bombs and using artillery on or near several bakeries in the northern province of Aleppo.

One of the bloodiest attacks was on a bread line in the Qadi Askar district of Aleppo city on August 16 that left 60 people dead, according to local hospital records.

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Turkey lifts NATO Israel veto

NATO member Turkey has agreed to lift its veto on non-military co-operation between the alliance and Israel, which it imposed over a deadly raid on a Turkish aid ship to Gaza in 2010, a diplomat says.

Ankara took the retaliatory measure after the Israeli army stormed the ship carrying humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip while it was in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, leaving nine Turks dead.

The decision to renew NATO links came at a December 4 meeting in Brussels of the 28-member alliance on a proposal by its Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the diplomat said on Sunday.

In return, several NATO allies of Israel agreed to drop a veto against co-operating with Turkey-friendly countries notably in the Arab world.

Turkey will agree to Israeli involvement in certain NATO activities but will maintain its ban on joint military manoeuvres, and Ankara reserves the right to bar activities with Israel on its own soil.

The agreement comes after NATO agreed early this month to deploy Patriot anti-aircraft missiles along the Turkish border with Syria.

Turkey's relations with its former ally Israel deteriorated sharply after the Gaza ship raid.

Israel has rejected Ankara's demands for an apology and compensation.

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