Samsung Electronics suspends production of the smartphone a month after recall over explosive batteries, reports say.

The announcement saw Samsung’s share price plunge by 4 percent [Reuters]

Samsung Electronics has temporarily suspended production of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones following reports of fires in replacement devices, according to South Korean media.

Monday’s move is a further setback for the technology giant in the midst of its worst ever phone recall crisis.

“[Samsung] still hasn’t confirmed that it has definitely halted production of the Galaxy Note 7 but it has released a statement for the first time today, Monday, in the last hour or so, saying that it is ‘temporarily adjusting the Galaxy Note 7 schedule to take further steps to ensure quality and safety matters’,” Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett said, reporting from Seoul.

The Yonhap News Agency reported that Samsung’s decision to halt Note 7 production was done in cooperation with authorities in China and the United States, citing an unnamed source at a Samsung partner company.

“If the Note 7 is allowed to continue it could lead to the single greatest act of brand self-destruction in the history of modern technology,” Eric Schiffer, brand strategy expert and chairman of Reputation Management Consultants, told Reuters news agency.

“Samsung should arrest the sale of Note 7’s and protect the safety of their clients before profits and ultimately as a byproduct protect Samsung. Samsung needs to take a giant write-down and cast the Note 7 to the engineering hall of shame next to the Ford Pinto.”

On Sunday, US telecommunications firm AT&T and German rival T-Mobile said they would halt exchanges of recalled Samsung Galaxy Note 7s pending further investigations.

The announcement saw Samsung’s share price plunge by as much as 4 percent in early morning trade on Monday – even before the Yonhap report came out.

Shares fall

At midday, Samsung shares were trading at 1.65 million won – down 3.2 percent from Friday’s close.

AT&T said it would still offer customers the option to exchange Galaxy Note 7s for another Samsung smartphone or another device of their choice.

T-Mobile said it was halting sales of the smartphone, as well as the exchanges.

Australia’s largest carrier, Telstra Corp, said Samsung had paused supply of new Note 7s to the company.

“Analysts are saying [the recall] could cost between $2bn and $5bn, and that was even before this latest development,” said Fawcett, adding that some 2.5 million phones worldwide would need to be replaced.

Major airlines and airport authorities again urged passengers to stop using the phone on board.

“In light of recent incidents and concerns raised about Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices, passengers are strongly advised not to turn on or charge these devices on board aircraft and not to stow them in any checked baggage,” Hong Kong International Airport said on its website on Monday.

Singapore Airlines also said on Monday that the powering up and charging of Note 7s is prohibited on all its flights.

Colombia president awarded one of world’s most prestigious prizes for efforts to end 52 years of war with FARC rebels.

Santos has brought Colombia’s bloody conflict significantly closer to a peaceful solution, said the Nobel committee [Reuters]

Efforts by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos to end five decades of war in his country were recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

The award came despite a shock referendum defeat for a proposed peace deal Santos had reached last month with FARC chief Rodrigo Londono, also known as Timoleon “Timochenko” Jimenez, after nearly four years of talks.

Santos was awarded the prestigious prize “for his resolute efforts to bring the country’s more than 50-year-long civil war to an end”, said Kaci Kullmann Five, chairwoman of the The Norwegian Nobel Committee.

“There is a real danger that the peace process will come to a halt and that civil war will flare up again. This makes it even more important that the parties, headed by President Santos and FARC guerrilla leader Rodrigo Londono, continue to respect the ceasefire,” she said.

In a televised address from the Colombian capital Bogota, Santos declared: “I infinitely appreciate this honorable distinction with all my heart.

“I receive it not in my name, but in the name of all Colombians, especially to the millions of victims left by this conflict that we have suffered for more than 50 years. Colombians, this prize is yours.”

Flanked by his wife Maria Clemencia Rodriguez, Santos called on his countrymen to support the peace process, “and start to construct a stable and long lasting peace.”

Following the committee’s announcement, FARC leader Londono, who was left out of the 2016 award, said that he only wants peace and not a Nobel prize.

“The only prize to which we aspire is that of peace with social justice for a Colombia without paramilitarism, without retaliation nor lies,” he wrote on his personal Twitter account after the award went only to Santos.

The Colombian civil war between the government and the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has claimed more than 220,000 lives and displaced almost five million people during half a century of conflict.

‘A welcome shock’

On Sunday, slightly more than 50 percent of Colombian voters ticked “No” on their ballots which asked whether they supported the terms of the September 26 peace deal. Opponents of the deal believed the truce accord was too lenient on the rebels.

Al Jazeera’s Alessandro Rampietti, reporting from Colombia’s capital, Bogota, said the decision to award the prize to Santos would come as an unexpected but welcome result.

“I don’t think Colombians would have accepted” if the prize was jointly awarded to FARC rebels given the referendum result, Rampietti said.

“It works as an encouragement for peace … to encourage the entire process,” he added.

Al Jazeera’s Andrew Simmons, reporting from London, also described Santos’ win as “something of a surprise.

“It’s been decided by the judges that he has done a remarkable job in showing some light at the end of a long, very bloody, awful tunnel with this 52-year conflict with the leftist rebels of FARC,” said Simmons.

Stiff competition

Santos won in a competitive year, with a record 376 candidates vying for the award.

Of the candidates, 228 were individuals and 148 were organisations. The previous record was set in 2014, with 278 nominations.

Santos beat competition from individuals and groups including: Pope Francis; the Syrian White Helmets; German Chancellor Angela Merkel; doctor Denis Mukwege, Jean Nacatche Banyere, Jeannette Kahindo Bindu – a DRC group working with survivors of sexual violence; Russian activist Svetlana Gannushkina; the people who negotiated the Iranian nuclear deal; whistle-blower Edward Snowden; and Greek islanders who work to help refugees when they arrive from perilous journeys across the Mediterranean.

“I think it’s interesting that the committee has once again concentrated on a big leader. It was President Santos, not everybody involved in peace, that was awarded,” Mike Harris, head of 89up – an agency that advises NGOs – told Al Jazeera.

The US State Department considers FARC a foreign “terrorist” organisation.

“My personal favourite was The White Helmets, a grassroots group in Syria who are doing volunteer action on the ground in rebel-held areas,” added Harris.

Underlining the difficulty of predicting the winner, last year’s prize went to four Tunisian groups who were instrumental in the country’s transition to democracy – none of whom had been mentioned in any of the pre-announcement speculation.

Santos joins a list of 129 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates including US President Theodore Roosevelt; three-time recipient International Committee of the Red Cross; US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr; South African President Nelson Mandela; and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman.

The prize was first awarded in 1901.

Japanese professor worked on how cells break down and recycle content, which could shed light on range of diseases.

Ohsumi is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology [Reuters]

A Japanese professor has won the 2016 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for his discovery of how cells break down and recycle their content, which could lead to a better understanding of a range of diseases, including cancer, Parkinson’s and type 2 diabetes.

“[Yoshinori] Ohsumi’s discoveries led to a new paradigm in our understanding of how the cell recycles its content,” the Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a statement on awarding the prize of $933,000.

“His discoveries opened the path to understanding … many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection,” the statement added.

Ohsumi’s work on cell breakdown, a field known as autophagy, is important because it can help explain what goes wrong in an array of diseases.

“Mutations in autophagy (‘self eating’) genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease,” the statement said.

Ohsumi, born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009. He received a PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1974.

“I am extremely honoured,” he told Kyodo News agency.

Autophagy is essential for the orderly degradation and recycling of damaged cell parts and its failure is believed to be responsible for ageing and cell damage.

Researchers first observed during the 1960s that the cell could destroy its own contents by wrapping them up in membranes and transporting them to a recycling compartment called the lysosome.

“Difficulties in studying the phenomenon meant that little was known until, in a series of brilliant experiments in the early 1990s, Yoshinori Ohsumi used baker’s yeast to identify genes essential for autophagy.”

He also explained the underlying mechanisms for autophagy in yeast and showed that similar sophisticated machinery is used in human cells.

Last year, Irish-born William Campbell of the US, Satoshi Omura of Japan and China’s Tu Youyou won the prestigious award for their discoveries of treatments against parasites.

Saudi Arabia says new report “vastly exaggerated” and that rebels used schools, hospitals and mosques as bases.

The research says that the coalition hit more non-military sites than military in five of the past 18 months [Reuters]

More than a third of Saudi-led air strikes on Yemen hit civilian sites including schools, hospitals and mosques, according to a new study.

The findings came from the Yemen Data Project, a group of security and human rights researchers, who looked into more than 8,600 air raids in the campaign between March 2015 and the end of August this year.

The results of the study were published by British newspaper The Guardian on Friday.

Out of the air raids examined, the study found that 3,577 were listed as hitting military sites and 3,158 non-military, while 1,882 strikes were classified as unknown, according to The Guardian.

Over the course of the campaign led by Saudi Arabia, the survey listed 942 air raids on residential areas, 114 on markets, 34 on mosques, 147 on school buildings, 26 on universities and 378 on transport.

The study, which the report said was based on open-source data including research on the ground, said that one particular school building was hit nine times, and one market was hit 24 times.

The project said the coalition hit more non-military sites than military in five of the past 18 months.

Riyadh dismisses report

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir was quoted by The Guardian dismissing the report as “vastly exaggerated” and challenging its methodology.

He said rebel fighters had “turned schools and hospitals and mosques into command and control centres.”

“They have turned them into weapons depots in a way that they are no longer civilian targets … They are military targets. They might have been a school a year ago. But they were not a school when they were bombed,” he said.

Saudi Arabia, along with a coalition of other Arab states, intervened in Yemen in March 2015 in support of the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi after Houthi rebels took over the capital Sanaa.

Since then the conflict has killed more than 6,600 people, most of them civilians, and displaced at least three million others, according to the UN.

A United Nations report in June found the coalition responsible for 60 percent of the 785 deaths of children in Yemen last year.

Fighting has intensified since the collapse of UN-backed peace talks in Kuwait on August 6.

New president Temer promises “new era” for Brazil, hours after senators voted to remove Dilma Rousseff from office.

by Al Jazeera

Michel Temer, Brazil’s former vice president, has been sworn in as the country’s new president, a few hours after the country’s Senate voted to remove Dilma Rousseff from office.

Temer, 75, raised his hand and swore to uphold the constitution, drawing loud applause from his conservative supporters at Wednesday’s ceremony in a packed Senate chamber.

He is expected to stay in power until the next scheduled election in late 2018.

Temer promised a “new era” of government for Brazil.

“Today we inaugurate a new era of two years and four months” to see out the current presidential mandate, Temer told his ministers at a televised cabinet meeting.

Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman, reporting from the capital, Brasilia, said the new president now carried “all the weight of this country on his shoulders.

“We are talking about a massive $60bn deficit, the worst recession this country has been in, double-digit inflation and millions of people out of work.”

Earlier on Wednesday, 61 of 81 senators voted to impeach suspended president Rousseff, after a five-day trial and a lengthy overnight debate.

“They decided to interrupt the mandate of a president who had committed no crime. They have convicted an innocent person and carried out a parliamentary coup,” Rousseff said in a statement following the Senate vote.

Speaking to reporters, Jose Eduardo Cardozo, Rousseff’s lawyer, said the former president would appeal against her impeachment.

But several motions filed to the country’s highest court throughout the impeachment proceedings have failed.

In a separate vote later on Wednesday, senators decided not to ban Rousseff from seeking a public office for the next eight years.

Rousseff, from the leftist Workers’ Party, is accused of taking illegal state loans to patch budget holes in 2014, masking the country’s problems as it slid into its deepest recession in decades.

Earlier this week, she told the Senate that she was innocent, saying the impeachment trial amounted to a right-wing “coup d’etat”.

Rousseff asserted that impeachment was the price she paid for refusing to quash a wide-ranging police investigation into the state oil giant Petrobras, saying that corrupt politicians conspired to oust her to derail the investigation into billions in kickbacks at the company.

She said it was “an irony of history” that she would be judged for crimes she did not commit, by people accused of serious crimes.

The Workers’ Party under Rousseff and her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is credited with raising around 29 million Brazilians out of poverty.

But many now blame the party, and Rousseff in particular, for the country’s multiple ills.

by RT

Potential civil war is the number one threat to Israel’s national security, a former Mossad chief said in his first public appearance since leaving office. Tamir Pardo named divisions within society and the triumph of hatred as the main driving forces of internal conflict.

Pardo said at an annual event to honor fallen Druse soldiers in the north. Claiming that Israel is already on the path towards civil war, the former chief of the national Israeli intelligence agency warned that soon Israelis could cross a “certain line in its division and hatred” that could spill over into the State of Israel had a population of over 8,500,000 inhabitants as of May 2016. Some 74.8 percent of them are Jews, 20.8 percent Arab, while the remaining 4.4 percent are defined as “other”.

While Jews and Arabs are technically afforded equal rights under the Israeli law, in many ways, the two sectors live in separate societies – attending different schools, living in different cities, reading different newspapers and pursuing different political goals.

To aid the state of society Pardo called for a diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying without it “we will never be able to achieve normalization with our Arab neighbors.”

“The prime minister has said there will be two states between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the [River] Jordan and he’s right,” Pardo said. “In my opinion, we won’t be able to reach any agreement with any country beyond what we have now if we don’t solve the Palestinian issue.”

As far as internal Jewish societal disagreements, the former Mossad chief said that some people in Israel sought the intensity of the existing division.

Former Mossad chief: End is near for ‘fearmonger’ Netanyahu’s govthttps://t.co/E16V0sLiia pic.twitter.com/qVIneu27Ba

— RT (@RT_com) June 1, 2016

Besides the Jewish-Arab divisions in society, according to the latest Pew Research Center studies, Israel is also divided along Orthodox Jewish lines and those who are more contemporary followers of Judaism.

Suspension of ‘illegal ban’ is temporary until court takes more time to issue definitive ruling.

The League of Human Rights requested the suspention of the ban in Villeneuve-Loubet [File: Stringer/Reuters]

France’s highest administrative court has suspended a controversial ban on full-body “burkini” swimsuits, pending a definitive ruling.

The State Council gave the ruling on Friday following a request from the League of Human Rights to overturn the ban in the Mediterranean town of Villeneuve-Loubet on the grounds it contravenes civil liberties.

The court said in a statement the decree to ban burkinis in Villeneuve-Loubet “seriously, and clearly illegally, breached the fundamental freedoms to come and go, the freedom of beliefs and individual freedom”.

Under the French legal system, temporary decisions can be handed down before the court takes more time to prepare a judgement on the underlying legality of the case.

The ruling is likely to set a precedent for about 30 French towns which have banned the burkini, mostly along the southeast coast.

A court in the Riviera resort of Nice upheld the ban this week.

A fierce debate

The burkini bans have triggered a fierce debate about the wearing of the full-body swimsuit, women’s rights and the French state’s strictly guarded secularism.

President Francois Hollande said on Thursday that life in France “supposes that everyone sticks to the rules and that there is neither provocation nor stigmatisation”.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Thursday condemned any “stigmatisation” of Muslims, but maintained that the burkini was “a political sign of religious proselytising”.

“We are not at war with Islam… the French republic is welcoming (to Muslims), we are protecting them against discrimination,” he told BFMTV.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who announced he will run in the election in 2017, said if he becomes leader again he would ban the full-body swimsuit.

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says a ban on the burkini swimsuit must not lead to “stigmatisation”.

The burkini ban have sparked a heated debate about Muslim integration and French secular values [Tim Wimborne/Reuters]

French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve warned against stigmatising Muslims as a furore over the banning of burkinis grew with the emergence of pictures of police surrounding a veiled woman on a beach.

“The implementation of secularism, and the option of adopting such decrees must not lead to stigmatisation or the creation of hostility between French people,” said Cazeneuve on Wednesday, after a meeting with the head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM).

Dozens of French towns and villages, mostly on the Cote d’Azur, have banned beachwear that “conspicuously” shows a person’s religion, a measure aimed at the full-body swimsuit dubbed “burkini” but which has also been used against women wearing long clothes and a headscarf.

CFCM president Anouar Kbibech requested an urgent meeting with Cazeneuve after pictures emerged of a veiled woman sitting on a beach in Nice removing her tunic, watched by four policemen.

The images, which went viral on social media, were interpreted as showing the woman being pressured by police into removing the garment.

Nice mayor’s office, however, denied she had been forced to remove clothing, telling AFP that the woman was showing police the swimsuit she was wearing under her tunic, over a pair of leggings, when the picture was taken.

The police issued her with a fine and she then left the beach, the officials added.

The bans, which follow a string of attacks around France, including a massacre in Nice on Bastille Day last month, have sparked a heated debate about Muslim integration and French secular values.

While the burkini bans have been presented by the mayors as necessary to defend secularism and public order, police have also fined women for being fully clothed and having their heads covered, out of the water.

On Tuesday, a 34-year-old mother, who gave her name only as Siam, told AFP she was fined on the beach for wearing leggings, a tunic and a headscarf.

“I had no intention of swimming,” the woman, who was accompanied by her children at the time, said.

A witness to the scene, journalist Mathilde Cusin, said some onlookers had applauded the police and shouted at Siam to “go home”.

Kbibech referred to her case in a statement ahead of his meeting with Cazeneuve.

The CFCM was “concerned over the direction the public debate is taking,” citing the “growing fear of stigmatisation of Muslims in France”, he said.

Burkini furore on Twitter

The photos of the woman on the beach in Nice, first published by Britain’s Daily Mail, caused a furore on Twitter, with the hashtag #WTFFrance becoming a top trending topic.

“Just let this sink in. Men with guns forcing a women to undress, with the weight of the law behind them,” read a tweet by user Abdel-Azim, who is described as the editor of a religious magazine, which was retweeted more than 26,000 times.

“I am so ashamed,” French feminist Caroline De Haas tweeted.

On Thursday, France’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, will examine a request by the Human Rights League to scrap the ban.

Lower courts have upheld the bans, with a tribunal in Nice, where a Tunisian man used a truck to mow down a crowd of Bastille Day revellers on July 14, saying the burkini could “be felt as a defiance or a provocation exacerbating tensions felt by” the community.

France enforces a strict form of secularism, aimed at keeping religion out of public life.

Islamic dress has long been a subject of debate in the country, which was the first in Europe to ban the Islamic face veil in public in 2010, six years after outlawing the headscarf and other conspicuous religious symbols in state schools.

However, ordinary citizens are allowed to wear the headscarf in public.

Former leader may step down from helm of Republicans to focus on 2017 re-election bid at “turbulent moment in history”.

Sarkozy ended a five-year term in 2012 mired in unpopularity [Vincent Kessler/Reuters file]

by Al Jazeera

Nicolas Sarkozy has launched a bid to win back the French presidency, announcing he will seek his party’s nomination to run in next year’s election.

The 61-year-old conservative’s plan became apparent on Monday.

“I have decided to be a candidate in the 2017 presidential election,” Sarkozy wrote in a new book, Tout pour la France (All for France), due out this week.

“France demands that you give her your all. I feel I have the strength to lead the fight at such a turbulent moment in our history,” he wrote in an extract seen by AFP news agency, alluding to the attacks that have rocked the country since January 2015

“The next five years will be filled with danger but also with hope.”

In 2012, Sarkozy ended a five-year term mired in unpopularity, had made no secret of his ambition to reconquer the top office.

Major challenges

Sarkozy’s aides told AFP he was expected to step down as the leader of the centre-right Republicans to focus on his bid.

Party primaries take place on November 20 and 27.

Sarkozy’s first campaign stop will be on Thursday at Chateaurenard, near the southern French city of Avignon.

Sarkozy itemised major challenges in the years ahead, including strengthening respect for “French identity”, restoring lost competitiveness and enforcing state authority.

On the economic front, he pledged to reduce payroll charges, scale back unemployment payments for those who have been jobless for more than one year and slash income tax by 10 percent.

On immigration, he proposed “suspending” the right of family members to join a migrating relative in France.

“The big problem with our immigration policy is firstly that of numbers,” he said.

‘Minority blackmail’

Sarkozy’s announcement coincides with a resurgent debate on the place of Islam in French society, encapsulated in the row over the Islamic burkini swimsuit.

He said France’s “principal battle” was over how “to defend our lifestyle without being tempted to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world”.

The opposition leader, who has repeatedly dismissed Socialist President Francois Hollande as weak, said he would also restore authority in neighbourhoods where he said “minorities are successfully blackmailing the current authorities”.

Sarkozy was defeated in his bid for re-election in 2012 after conducting a campaign seen by many in his own camp as too right-wing.

Sarkozy becomes the 13th person to put their name forward for the French presidency, a job that has sweeping powers.

He faces several challengers within conservative ranks.

His chief rival, Alain Juppe, the former premier and Bordeaux mayor, is seen as a moderate and is the favourite to win the party’s nod.

But Juppe’s lead in opinion polls has shrunk in recent weeks as Sarkozy steps up his rhetoric on conservative Muslims and immigration following the July 14 lorry attack in Nice.

‘Best candidate’

Sarkozy has already won the support of a Republican heavyweight, Christian Estrosi, who is president of the southern region that includes Marseille.

“He is the best candidate,” Estrosi told the Journal de Dimanche.

If Sarkozy wins, he could face a rematch against Hollande, who has said he too has the “desire” for a second term.

But opinion polls overwhelmingly show the French wanting neither man as their leader.

Hollande has even surpassed Sarkozy to become the most unpopular president in post-war France.

READ MORE: France probes Sarkozy over 2012 campaign funding

Sarkozy would also face far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who is tipped to make it to a second round of voting.

His reputation remains tainted by two major inquiries, into alleged influence-peddling and into suspected illegal funding of his 2012 election campaign.

But true to his famous self-belief, these scandals have failed to dent his ambition of returning to the Elysee Palace.

Hollande, on a trip to southern Italy for talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, declined to comment on Sarkozy’s bid, or on another challenge for the presidency launched by left-wing Socialist Arnaud Montebourg.