Tuesday, June 11, 2013
LE POINT: En grève depuis le début du mouvement, les avocats s'étaient rassemblés pour protester contre l'évacuation par la force de la place Taksim.
La police a interpellé mardi une cinquantaine d'avocats qui protestaient contre l'intervention dans la matinée des forces de l'ordre contre les manifestants occupant la place Taksim d'Istanbul, a annoncé leur association. En grève depuis le début de la fronde qui vise le Premier ministre Recep Tayyip Erdogan il y a douze jours, ces avocats se sont réunis dans l'enceinte du palais de justice d'Istanbul pour dénoncer la police, qui a repris manu militari le contrôle de la place Taksim, aux cris de "Taksim est partout", "la résistance est partout", a raconté à l'AFP une avocate ayant requis l'anonymat. La police est alors intervenue dans le palais de justice pour les en déloger. Après de brèves échauffourées, une cinquantaine de manifestants ont été interpellés, a rapporté l'Association des avocats contemporains. (+ vidéo) » | Source AFP | mardi 11 juin 2013
Edward Snowden steht hinter den Enthüllungen des Prism-Überwachungsprogrammes des US-Geheimdiensts NSA. Über Jahre war Snowden für den CIA in der Schweiz tätig und stiess dabei auf Brisantes: Durch ihn kam ans Licht, wie CIA-Agenten einen Schweizer Banker absichtlich betrunken gemacht haben. Als der Banker in eine Polizeikontrolle geraten sei, hätten sie ihm ihre Hilfe angeboten. Im Gegenzug habe der Banker die CIA mit Informationen versorgt. (+ Audio) » | Dienstag, 11. Juni 2013
THE GUARDIAN: Leader is used to having things his own way but, civil society movement can no longer be suppressed, says Luke Harding
The assault was as brutal as it was predictable. On Friday and Saturday Erdoğan had hosted a European Union meeting in Istanbul. Rumour had it that Turkey's prime minister would send in riot police to clear away the demonstrators from Taksim Square – which they had peacefully occupied for 12 days — once his European guests had flown home.
And so it proved, with police encircling the square at 6am on Tuesday, firing rubber bullets and teargas, and ripping down banners calling for Erdoğan's resignation. By happy coincidence, Turkey's state media, which for days had blithely ignored the country's massive anti-government demonstrations, was on hand to record the event.
Turkish TV viewers witnessed this: a small group of four or five "demonstrators" throwing molotov cocktails at police. At one point they advance on police lines in a comic Roman-style phalanx while holding the flag of a fringe Marxist party. The "protesters" were in fact middle-aged undercover police officers, staging a not very plausible "attack" on their own for the benefit of the cameras.
But the violence meted out against the genuine protesters camped out under the plane trees of nearby Gezi Park was real enough. Dozens were left choking or injured as teargas billowed across central Istanbul. Meanwhile, some 50 lawyers acting for detained activists were themselves dragged away by police and roughed up at Istanbul's Çağlayan court.
Faced with a choice between engaging with this new, vibrant civil society movement, or crushing it, Erdoğan has picked the latter course. Indeed, his reaction to the nationwide citizens' revolt reveals ominous parallels with another autocratic leader who has recently found himself in a tight spot: Vladimir Putin.
None of this bodes well for Turkey's already tortuous EU accession prospects, for relations between secular and religious Turks, or for the country's democratic future. » | Luke Harding | Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Tommy Robinson denied claims his group had firebombed an Islamic community centre in London, where the letters EDL were sprayed on the building.
He admitted some of its tactics were "completely questionable", but said "working class people" had no choice.
The Muslim Women's Network UK said it had seen a rise in verbal abuse and intimidation since the Woolwich murder.
Mr Robinson was speaking after six men were jailed for planning to bomb an EDL rally in West Yorkshire.
The men, who all lived in or near Birmingham, were each jailed for more than 18 years. Their bomb plot failed because they arrived two hours after last year's rally in Dewsbury had finished.
'Completely questionable'
Mr Robinson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he condemned all acts of violence by EDL members and the group was about peaceful protest.
He denied his group was behind the blaze in Muswell Hill last week and said the graffiti could have been placed there to make it look as if the group was responsible.
"If something was set fire and someone wrote David Cameron on the side of it, does it mean he did it?" he said. (+ BBC audi) » | Tuesday, June 11, 2013
BBC: EDL protest policing 'the price of democracy' » | Len Tingle | Political editor, Yorkshire | Monday, June 10, 2013
BBC: Six Islamic extremists were jailed for up to 19 and half years each on Monday for plotting to attack an English Defence League rally.
The English Defence League's initials were scrawled on the mosque that was burnt down in north London last week and the Met Police has said there has been a rise in Islamophobic attacks following the Woolwich murder.
EDL Leader Tommy Robinson told the Today programme's Sarah Montague: "Our tactics are completely questionable... But what choice do we have?"
He said that he "utterly condemns" a violent act "by anyone" but also admitted that he had been "arrested for assaulting someone" after they had given a Nazi salute.
He said that he wanted "all aspects of Sharia outlawed" in the UK and explained that the idea that EDL initials were written on a mosque by his members "seems ridiculous". Listen to BBC audio » | Tuesday, June 11, 2013
The girl Snowden left behind »
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: How much monitoring is too much and at what point does freedom become compromised? With its Prism spy program, the US has crossed the line.
Shortly before US President Barack Obama's visit to Berlin, Germans are troubled by questions regarding the extent to which the United States monitors Internet traffic worldwide. Is it true, as the media claim, that the United States can access and track virtually every form of communication on the Internet at the source? The Guardian and the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) could gain direct access to and read user data with the so-called "Prism" program. An unnamed intelligence officer was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that the NSA could "quite literally … watch your ideas form as you type."
Internet giants like Facebook and Google were quick to issue denials, saying that they do not release any information without a court order. But doubts remain.
These reports are deeply disconcerting. When viewed in its entirety, this massive effort to acquire information, if it is true, would be dangerous.
On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.
I don't share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom. » | A Commentary by German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger | Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Barack Obama was facing a mounting domestic and international backlash against US surveillance operations on Monday as his administration struggled to contain one of the most explosive national security leaks in US history.
Political opinion in the US was split with some members of Congress calling for the immediate extradition from Hong Kong of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden. But other senior politicians in both main parties questioned whether US surveillance practices had gone too far.
Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the national intelligence committee, has ordered the NSA to review how it limits the exposure of Americans to government surveillance. But she made clear her disapproval of Snowden. "What he did was an act of treason," she said.
Officials in European capitals demanded immediate answers from their US counterparts and denounced the practice of secretly gathering digital information on Europeans as unacceptable, illegal and a serious violation of basic rights. The NSA, meanwhile, asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and said that it was assessing the damage caused by the disclosures.
Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden's leak as even more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history. » | Dan Roberts in Washington, Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong and James Ball in New York | Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Monday, June 10, 2013
TELEGRAPH – BLOGS – DAMIAN THOMPSON: "They could pay off the Triads," says Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower interviewed by the Guardian in his Hong Kong hideout. Meaning: the CIA could use a proxy to kill him for revealing that Barack Obama has presided over an unimaginable – to the ordinary citizen – expansion of the Federal government's powers of surveillance over anyone.
Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment. Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter:
Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowdenSnowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:
NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible… Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and its stores them for periods of time … While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…Read on and comment » | Damian Thompson | Sunday, June 09, 2013
The iconic stand-up and star of the beloved sitcom The Cosby Show routinely weighs in on cultural matters.
This past weekend, Cosby penned an op-ed for The New York Post in which he detailed some of the flaws in modern society. He also suggested we should take a page out of the Koran if we want to have healthier families, less crime and more productive people. » | Breitbart News | Monday, June 10, 2013
South of Utah's Great Salt Lake, the National Security Agency (NSA), aUnited States foreign intelligence service, keeps watch over one of its most expensive secrets. Here, on 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 square feet) near the US military's Camp Williams, the NSA is constructing enormous buildings to house superfast computers. All together, the project will cost around $2 billion (€1.5 billion) and the computers will be capable of storing a gigantic volume of data, at least 5 billion gigabytes. The energy needed to power the cooling system for the servers alone will cost $40 million a year.
Former NSA employees Thomas Drake and Bill Binney told SPIEGEL in March that the facility would soon store personal data on people from all over the world and keep it for decades. This includes emails, Skype conversations, Google searches, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, bank transfers -- electronic data of every kind.
"They have everything about you in Utah," Drake says. "Who decides whether they look at that data? Who decides what they do with it?" Binney, a mathematician who was previously an influential analyst at the NSA, calculates that the servers are large enough to store the entirety of humanity's electronic communications for the next 100 years -- and that, of course, gives his former colleagues plenty of opportunity to read along and listen in.
James Clapper, the country's director of national intelligence, has confirmed the existence of a large-scale surveillance program. PresidentBarack Obama further explained that Congress authorized the program -- but that American citizens are exempt from it.
…
'Total Surveillance of Germans is Inappropriate'
On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed through a spokesman that she plans to discuss the NSA's controversial data surveillance program with President Obama during his visit to Berlin next week. A spokesperson for the German Justice Ministry also said that talks are currently underway with US authorities. The discussions will include implications to Germany and "possible impairment of the rights of German citizens."
German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has called for "clear answers" from the companies implicated in the document, and the German Green Party has demanded that the government investigate the circumstances of Prism immediately.
"Total surveillance of all German citizens by the NSA is completely disproportionate," Volker Beck, secretary of the Green Party group in parliament, said on Monday. The party has proposed that the topic be discussed at next week's parliamentary session.
Mormon Roots, International Reach
The program's Utah compound is full of security fences, watchdogs and surveillance cameras, as well as biometric identification system equipment. Two informants say the location for the server facility was by no means an accident. Utah is home to the largest number of Mormons in the world. This highly patriotic religious community sends its young members around the world as missionaries -- and many are then recruited by the Utah Army National Guard, whose 300th Military Intelligence Brigade employs 1,600 linguists. The NSA has access to these linguists at all times, and one insider believes they are used in "analyzing international telecommunications."
…
Read the whole article here » | Marcel Rosenbach, Holger Stark and Jonathan Stock | Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein | Monday, June 10, 2013
MAIL ONLINE: Helen Rumbali was dragged from her home tortured and beheaded in public / Villagers said fire flies led them to her house - a sign she was a witch / They accused her of killing another villager - who died from sickness - with her sorcery / Experts say disparity in wealth and jealousy are main reasons for increases in such attacks
A teacher has been tortured and beheaded by her neighbours in a Papua New Guinea village because they say she was a witch responsible for the death of a sick villager.
The angry mob brandishing guns, machetes and axes surrounded her house and pulled Helen Rumbali, her sister and two nieces away. They then burnt down the house.
They say a swarm of fire flies led them from the deceased person's grave to her house - sure evidence they say that she was a sorcerer and was practicing black magic.
Helen's older sister and younger nieces were slashed with knives, then released after negotiations with police. But the mob went on to torture the former teacher, in her 40s, and then publicly cut off her head.
The sickening and heinous act is one of many horrific similar stories coming out from the island, often considered a paradise in the Pacific. » | Helen Collis | Monday, June 10, 2013
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: In its annual report on extremist activity in Germany, the country's domestic intelligence agency has identified a surge in support for Islamists and growth in the number of influential neo-Nazi music groups.
During the past year, Islamist organizations experienced a surge in support in Germany according to an annual report from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution obtained by SPIEGEL in advance of its planned public release on Tuesday.
The report states that the number of members and supporters of groups like Milli Görüs, the largest Islamist organization in the country, or Hezbollah in Germany rose from 38,080 in 2011 to 42,550 last year.
The largest growth was seen among members and supporters of Salafists, which increased from 3,800 to 4,500, the government agency stated. Last year, German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich of the conservative Christian Social Union moved to ban three Salafist groups. » | dsl/SPIEGEL | Monday, June 10, 2013
Verwandt »
And even in Isparta, a religiously conservative region that is a wellspring of support for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a small group of residents, drinks in hand, gathered outside the office of the local governor who is an ally of the embattled prime minister and chanted, “Cheers, Tayyip!”
Drinking is far from the only issue held up in the intense antigovernment protests that have convulsed Turkey for more than a week. But it has become closely intertwined with the broader complaints of demonstrators fighting what they see as the rising authoritarianism of the Turkish government.
It also cuts to the heart of Turkish identity, as both sides have cast it as a clash of Islamic and secular values. While protesters have held up new limits on drinking as an affront to the secular values of modern Turkey, Mr. Erdogan has said that “religion demands” curbs on drinking. He has gone so far as to implicitly refer to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey and a notoriously heavy drinker, as a “drunkard,” and in one of a series of speeches he delivered Sunday to cheering supporters, accused protesters of taking beer into mosques. » | Tim Arango | Sunday, June 09, 2013
JNS.ORG: LOS ANGELES—Europeans “need to follow the example of the Jewish people and re-establish their nation-state” to counter the growing Islamization of their countries, Dutch politician Geert Wilders said Sunday in Los Angeles.
“My friends, what we need today is Zionism for the nations of Europe,” Wilders, founder and leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, said at the “Europe’s Last Stand?” conference, organized by the American Freedom Alliance.
Wilders described that Europe’s inner cities “have come to resemble Northern Africa and the Middle East” because they are ruled by Islamic Sharia law, noting that Islamic areas border the European Union headquarters in Brussels and that “largely Islamic suburbs” surround Paris.
“Europe is in a terrible state,” Wilders said. “Bit by bit, European countries are losing their national sovereignty.” » | JNS.org | Monday, June 10, 2013
THE GUARDIAN: Snowden's whistleblowing gives us a chance to roll back what is tantamount to an 'executive coup' against the US constitution
In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that includes the Pentagon Papers, for which I was responsible 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.
Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.
The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, and with the broadest possible interpretation. This makes mockery of the rule of law, let alone of the bill of rights. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp."
For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is a nonsense – as is the oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. The fact that their leaders were briefed on this and went along with it, without question, only shows how broken the system of accountability is in this country. As the founder James Madison wrote:
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."» | Daniel Ellsberg | Monday, June 10, 2013
THE GUARDIAN: US members of Congress ought to be seeking the earliest opportunity to learn what this brave whistleblower is saying
Edward Snowden is a very modern spy – neither gun-blazingly dashing nor cat-strokingly sinister. He is young, tech-savvy, quietly articulate and intensely interested in human rights. His work did not involve high-speed car chases or elaborate gadgets – just a desk and a computer. Using these simple tools he could spy on anyone, anywhere.
There are many people like him, and they are, on his account, potentially frightening figures. "We hack everyone everywhere," he told the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald in the foreign hotel where he has taken refuge. "I had the authorities to wiretap anyone – you, a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email." He describes a "horrifying" infrastructure where he and other analysts could intercept the vast majority of human communications around the world. » | Editorial | Monday, June 10, 2013
Sunday, June 09, 2013
"Je n'ai aucune intention de me cacher parce que je sais que je n'ai rien fait de mal", a déclaré Edward Snowden dans un entretien publié sur le site internet du journal. Le Guardian explique que c'est Edward Snowden lui-même qui a demandé de révéler son identité. Le Washington Post a confirmé que l'ancien employé de la CIA, informaticien aujourd'hui exilé à Hong Kong, était également sa source.
Snowden travaillait depuis quatre ans pour l'Agence de sécurité nationale (NSA) – dont il a révélé des documents confidentiels – en tant qu'employé de divers sous-traitants, dont Dell ou Booz Allen Hamilton, son dernier employeur. "Mon unique objectif est d'informer les gens de ce qui est fait en leur nom et de ce qui est fait contre eux", assure-t-il au Guardian. Il y a trois semaines, il a donc quitté sa compagne alors qu'il menait une vie très confortable à Hawaï pour se rendre à Hong Kong avant la révélation de ses fuites. "Je suis prêt à sacrifier tout cela parce que je ne peux, en mon âme et conscience, laisser le gouvernement américain détruire la vie privée, la liberté d'Internet et les libertés essentielles pour les gens tout autour du monde avec ce système énorme de surveillance qu'il est en train de bâtir sécrètement", explique-t-il. » | Le Monde.fr avec AFP | dimanche 09 juin 2013
Visionnez la vidéo ici
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: NSA surveillance: American authorities launch investigation into Edward Snowden's leak of project: American officials have launched an investigation into how a government contractor authored the leak of a vast covert surveillance project. » | Harriet Alexander | Monday, June 10, 2013
THE GUARDIAN: Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower: 'I do not expect to see home again': Source for the Guardian's NSA files on why he carried out the biggest intelligence leak in a generation – and what comes next » | Ewen MacAskill | Sunday, June 09, 2013
Sur une tribune dressée dans la matinée au milieu de la place, les harangues dénonçant la politique du gouvernement et les brutalités policières se succèdent, entrecoupées de morceaux de musique et immanquablement ponctuées de "Tayyip, démission !" ou "Gouvernement, démission !", scandés par la foule. » | Le Monde.fr avec AFP | dimanche 09 juin 2013
Fires were started at a community centre in Muswell Hill on Wednesday, and a Chislehurst school on Saturday.
An increased police presence has now been put in place around potentially "vulnerable" locations, said Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.
He called on Londoners not to be divided by the death of Lee Rigby. » | Sunday, June 09, 2013
THE GUARDIAN: US shock jock lambasted by BBC TV presenter after interrupting fellow guest to warn viewers over 'Bilderberg Group puppeteers'
The BBC's Sunday Politics show is generally a rather sedate affair, heavy on serious interviews and light on controversy. But viewers were treated to a highly charged confrontation between host Andrew Neil and US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, which saw the latter labelled the worst person to be interviewed on the show and an idiot. » | Alexandra Topping | Sunday, June 09, 2013
Turkey's prime minister has climbed on top of a bus to give a fiery speech to thousands of his supporters, challenging increasingly angry anti-government protesters to beat his party at the ballot box after they flooded the streets for a 10th day of demonstrations. On Sunday Recep Tayyip Erdoğan visited two cities where unrest has occurred and again condemned his detractors as a handful of looters and vandals.
In the southern city of Adana, where pro- and anti-government protesters clashed on Saturday night, Erdoğan greeted supporters before lashing out at his opponents in the polarised country.
"We won't do what a handful of looters have done. They burn and destroy …They destroy the shops of civilians. They destroy the cars of civilians," Erdoğan told supporters who had greeted him at the local airport. "They are low enough to insult the prime minister of this country."
He urged his supporters to avoid violence and predicted that his Islamic-rooted party would defeat his opponents during local elections in March. "I want you to give them the first lesson through democratic means in the ballot box," he said. Read on and comment » | Associated Press in Ankara | Sunday, June 09, 2013
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Islamistische Organisationen haben im vergangenen Jahr deutlich mehr Unterstützer gewonnen - das geht nach SPIEGEL-Informationen aus dem Bericht des Verfassungsschutzes hervor. Beim Rechtsextremismus sieht die Behörde widersprüchliche Tendenzen - die NPD schrumpft, Neonazi-Bands bleiben einflussreich.
Am Dienstag stellt das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) den Jahresbericht vor, erste Details sind schon jetzt bekannt. Demnach stieg die Zahl der Mitglieder und Anhänger von Gruppierungen wie der türkischen Milli Görü oder der arabischen Hisbollah in Deutschland von 38.080 (2011) auf 42.550. Eine Gruppe hatte besonders viel Zulauf. Am stärksten wuchs im Beobachtungszeitraum die Zahl der Unterstützer derSalafisten von 3800 auf nun 4500. » | Sonntag, 09. Juni 2013
THE INDEPENDENT: One driver said 'Of course people stare at you a little when you are on the platform'
Male train drivers in Stockholm have rebelled against a ban on wearing shorts by turning up for work in skirts.
Temperatures in the train cab can reach 35C during the summer, and now a group of 13 employees working for the Roslagsbanan railway system have ditched trousers for skirts to keep cool.
According to Sweden’s The Local website, the train company Arriva reportedly insists that staff cannot wear shorts. » | Liam O’Brien | Saturday, June 08, 2013
THE INDEPENDENT: World View: The PM's inability to counter unrest within and enemies without make any talk of a 'new Ottoman empire' absurd
There is something almost comic in the way the missteps of the Turkish government turned a small demonstration aimed at preserving sycamore trees in Taksim Square from the developers' bulldozers into the biggest and most widespread popular protest ever seen in Turkey. The Turkish security forces made the classic mistake of being pictured on television and social media publicly assaulting peaceable protesters with water cannon and pepper spray. Just enough violence was used to enrage and provoke while wholly failing to intimidate.
There was a time when brutality by the security forces was easier to keep off TV screens by censorship or frightening journalists and media-owners. But these mechanisms no longer work when people have a multitude of TV channels inside and outside the country to choose from. Running documentaries on penguins, as CNN Turkey notoriously did, simply creates a vacuum of information which is rapidly filled by protesters. The government's version of what is happening becomes self-marginalised and is ignored.
It is astonishing that skilled politicians such as the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and those around him should make so many mistakes in such a short time. It is easy to why Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt should have miscalculated popular reaction to repression at the start of the Arab uprisings in 2011, because as rulers of police states their approach to public opinion was to ignore it. Read on and comment » | Patrick Cockburn | Sunday, June 09, 2013
BBC: Swiss voters have overwhelmingly backed a controversial move to tighten asylum restrictions amid a spike in the number of refugees in the country.
Almost 80% of voters approved changes made to the asylum law last September, final results of a referendum said.
Under the new rules military desertion is no longer a reason for granting asylum, and people cannot now apply through Swiss foreign embassies.
About 48,000 people are in the process of seeking asylum in Switzerland.
The BBC's Imogen Foulkes, in Geneva, says Switzerland has a long tradition of generosity towards asylum seekers - its proportion of refugees per head of population is twice the European average.
But the number of asylum seekers is rising sharply and is at its highest in a decade.
That, coupled with sharp rises in immigration overall, has led to public concern that too many people are coming to Switzerland, our correspondent says. » | Sunday, June 09, 2013
Verwandt »
The 30-year-old returned to the Swedish capital from New York, where she met Mr O'Neill two years ago.
Some 500 guests were invited to the ceremony at the Royal Chapel in Stockholm.
Sweden's royal family enjoys wide public support and the ceremony was broadcast live on state TV.
Princess Madeleine's elder sister, Crown Princess Victoria, married her personal trainer Daniel Wesling in Stockholm three years ago. But Saturday's wedding was not considered as big an occasion.
In June 2010, the whole of the Swedish capital was transformed for the celebrations.
Along with representatives from many European royal families present for Princess Madeleine's wedding, John Taylor of UK pop group Duran Duran was among the guests.
The couple tied the knot in a ceremony that was part in Swedish and part in English. They then travelled in a horse and carriage procession through the city centre. (+ BBC video) » | Saturday, June 08, 2013
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