CARACAS: Venezuelan authorities were holding an American journalist from the Miami Herald for a third day yesterday after he was picked up near the border with Colombia reporting on economic shortages and an upcoming local election, his colleagues said. Bogota-based Jim Wyss was believed to have been transferred to Caracas from the border area, his newspaper said. “We are very concerned,” Aminda Marques Gonzalez, the Herald’s executive editor, said in a story on its website. “There doesn’t seem to be any basis for his detention and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. We are asking that Jim Wyss be released immediately.” Officials from President Nicolas Maduro’s government had no comment on the case.
Mali names new army chief
BAMAKO: Mali’s government said yesterday that it had named a new army chief of staff, two months after the country’s new president took office seeking to restore stability following a rebellion and coup. The government named General Mahamane Toure, previously the director of a peacekeeper training academy in the capital, to take over from Ibrahim Dahirou Dembele, without giving a reason for the replacement. It also formally dissolved a committee on military reform that had been criticised as a golden parachute for the leader of the March 2012 coup that helped plunge the country into chaos.
US must update Cuba policy: Obama
MIAMI: The United States must continue to update its policy towards communist Cuba, US President Barack Obama said late on Friday, speaking at the home of a prominent Cuban-American activist. Freedom in Cuba will come from the work of activists, Obama said, but the United States can help in “creative” and “thoughtful” ways. “And we have to continue to update our policies,” said Obama, speaking at a political fundraiser at the home of Jorge Mas Santos, head of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF). “Keep in mind that when Castro came to power, I was just born. So the notion that the same policies that we put in place in 1961 would somehow still be as effective as they are today in the age of the Internet and Google and world travel doesn’t make sense.” Washington broke diplomatic ties with Havana in 1961, after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and nationalized US-owned properties. An official embargo was imposed in 1962. Agencies
