A person answering the phone at the embassy said she couldn’t confirm the reports by the ANSA and Apcom news agencies.

The reports said the explosion occurred as soon as the package was opened by an embassy staffer who was subsequently injured and taken to the hospital.

There have been growing concerns in Europe about holiday season attacks following a suicide bombing in Sweden and security services’ fears of an assault on a European city modeled on the deadly shooting spree in Mumbai, India.

On Tuesday, there was a bomb scare in the Rome subway after authorities discovered a suspicious package with wires and powder under a subway seat. The device was fake, with police determining there was no trigger mechanism and that the powder was inert, cement-like material. AP

Gelson Fernandes scored on a rare Swiss attack, giving his team a stunning 1-0 upset Wednesday over European champion and tournament favourite Spain.

The loss ended Spain’s run of 12 straight wins and handed the Spanish just their second loss in 50 games — the other was to the United States at the Confederations Cup in South Africa last year.

It also provided a thrill at a tournament that has seen few surprises and just 25 goals after the first game for all 32 teams.

“To be fair, I’m not used to scoring goals, so I was a bit surprised,” said Fernandes, who got just his second in international play. “It was a bit of luck.”

And tenacity. Eren Derdiyok created Switzerland’s big chance in the 52nd minute by surging through the centre of Spain’s defence and rounding Iker Casillas. Gerard Pique’s desperate tackle stopped Derdiyok, but Fernandes pounced on the loose ball and forced it into the net.

“It’s just a special moment,” he said.

Spain badly outshot the Swiss and held the ball 63 per cent of the time, but could find no way through Switzerland’s determined defence.

“Today wasn’t our day,” Spain coach Vicente del Bosque said. “We have two games ahead of us. We have to find a way to win them.”

It won’t be easy. Well-regarded Chile beat Honduras 1-0 in the other Group H opener Wednesday.

The win was Switzerland’s first over Spain.

“It was a match we tried to play without abandoning our style,” Del Bosque said. “We tried to play heroically and they fell back and tried to stop us.”

At the final whistle, Fernandes fell to his knees and raised both arms to the sky. The entire team then went to the small section of Swiss fans in the Moses Mabhida Stadium and saluted them as they cheered and rang alpine cow bells.

“These were three unexpected points,” Switzerland coach Ottmar Hitzfeld said before defending his team’s defensive play as the only way to nullify Spain.

“If you play an attacking game against Spain, you’ll lose and suffer one goal after the next,” he said.

History was not on Spain’s side: Only two of the last eight reigning European champions had won their opening match at the World Cup _ France in 1986 and Germany in 1998. And Spain has not advanced past the World Cup quarter-finals since its best finish of fourth in 1950.

“We had plenty of chances but they defended very well,” Pique said. “I don’t think we adapted adequately to their game.”

Derdiyok nearly doubled the Swiss lead in the 75th minute when he shrugged off Carlos Puyol’s tackle and poked the ball past Casillas only to see the shot rebound off the post.

Spain was lifted before kickoff by the return of Andres Iniesta, but the Barcelona midfielder could not provide the spark to ignite his country’s attack. He was taken out in the 77th minute after a crunching tackle from Stephan Lichtsteiner.

Del Bosque brought on Liverpool striker Fernando Torres in the 62nd minute, but he, too, could find no way through the Swiss wall of defenders.

Midfielder Xabi Alonso came closest to equalizing when his powerful drive in the 70th minute slammed into the crossbar.

David Villa was Spain’s most dangerous forward, but the top scorer from the European Championships in 2008 repeatedly saw his efforts blocked or go wide.

Villa got by Lichtsteiner in the 10th minute, but goalkeeper Diego Benaglio dived at his feet to snuff out the chance. Then his free kick deflected wide off the wall after Stephane Grichting pulled down Iniesta just outside the penalty area.

With Spain’s forwards sputtering, it was centre back Pique who came closest to breaking the stalemate when Iniesta’s through ball in the 24th minute set him free and he fired low — only to see Benaglio save the shot.

“He’s a world class keeper with one-on-one situations,” Hitzfeld said. “He was decisive to our win.”

Fernandes put it even more simply. “We defend very well,” he said.

The numbers back him up.

Switzerland was knocked out of the last World Cup on penalty kicks by Ukraine in the round of 16 without conceding a goal in the tournament and has now gone 490 minutes in World Cup play without being scored upon.

The Spaniards now have other things to worry about.

“This is just the first match, everyone agrees that we have to fight to get out the group,” Del Bosque said. “No one in the team has ever talked about getting to the final or winning. We hit an obstacle and we’ll get over it.”

Photo: Switzerland’s Gelson Fernandes, right, celebrates with his teammate Tranquillo Barnetta after scoring during the World Cup group H soccer match between Spain and Switzerland at the stadium in Durban, South Africa, Wednesday, June 16, 2010.
CP

Impossible in a modern Western democracy? Apparently not.

The Washington Post’s Edward Cody reported that in a referendum last month, 57.5 percent of Switzerland’s voting citizens endorsed adoption of a law banning minarets, and only minarets, the often elegant towers attached to mosques throughout the Islamic world.

A majority of the Swiss electorate seems to believe that minarets are visually intrusive power symbols of a religious minority composing less than 6 percent of Switzerland’s 7.6 million population. Evidently voters fear that minarets represent an architectural challenge to church steeples punctuating Switzerland’s traditional town and city skylines. Yet Switzerland, like the United States, guarantees religious freedom. Something’s wrong with this picture.

Wholesale banning of a specific architectural element, such as a tower or minaret, is terrible public policy, akin to burning books and censoring newspapers. The minaret prohibition is especially illogical because Swiss law bans neither mosques nor Islam. Clearly this misguided vote is driven by irrational phobia, by perception eclipsing reality, and by misunderstanding of Islamic architecture and mosque building traditions.

I know those traditions well, having worked as a mosque designer when I was a Peace Corps volunteer architect in Tunisia, and having visited scores of mosques throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

Like a steeple, a minaret historically was both symbolic and functional.

Its practical purpose was to enable a man — the muezzin — to ascend a ladder or stair within the minaret and vocally summon the faithful to prayer five times daily, one of the pillars of Islam.

Minarets, like church steeples, rise and point symbolically heavenward, giving identity to mosques while announcing their location. As vertical landmarks often visible from afar, minarets are indispensable aids to orientation and way-finding for everyone in a community.

The notion that a minaret symbolizes Islamic power is nonsense, as nonsensical as suggesting that a church steeple is a power symbol. That Switzerland — where real power resides in banking, dairy products and chocolate — is worried about the power and menace of minarets is even more nonsensical.

On the other hand, wisely regulating the height, footprint and construction soundness of a minaret, or any other tower built in a town or city, is not unreasonable. Structural stability, fire resistance, safety and environmental impact are legitimate public concerns.

Apparently none of these concerns or regulatory aims motivated Switzerland’s anti-minaret voters. Nor were voters swayed by the Swiss government and business communities, both of which strongly opposed the measure.

During this holiday season of glad tidings and goodwill, perhaps the Swiss will reconsider their reactionary vote. Rather than outlawing minarets, a fundamental component of mosque architecture, the Swiss should do the right thing: ensure that a mosque and its minaret comply with the same laws and standards as churches and other buildings serving citizens of the community.

*Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland.

Source: Washington Post

By Michael Weiss*
Switzerland’s decision Sunday to adopt a referendum banning the construction of minarets – the tall spires with variously adorned tops that accouter some mosques – is hard to see as anything other than an act of bigotry against Muslims.

Ostensibly sold to voters as a weapon against Islamism, an all-too-real political phenomenon in Europe, this new law in fact makes no distinction between religion and ideology, instead choosing to alienate the primary victims of Islamic fundamentalism and the best allies of Western liberals – moderate Muslims.

The minaret ban also marks the first instance in which a European constitution has had to be revised for purposes of civil architecture. Take that, Osama.

As ever, context is important. The referendum was the brainchild of the Swiss People’s Party and the Federal Democratic Union, which must be the only xenophobic parties on the Continent to express themselves quadrilingually. The populist right in Switzerland may position itself as anti-immigrant, but it will inevitably confront an electorate consisting of German, Italian, French and Romansche communities – muddy terrain indeed in which to launch a war of bourgeois cultural purity.

Despite assurances from the Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf that the referendum, passed by 57.5% of voters, “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies,” the posters lobbying for the ban were not so much Islamophobic (a meaningless term) as they were Islamoridiculous. In one, a veiled woman stands athwart a Swiss flag dotted with missile-shaped minarets, as if Katyusha rockets were being launched from call-to-prayer towers in Montreux. (Though there are hundreds of mosques in Switzerland at present, there are only four minarets, a statistic that makes the new law as pointless as it is provocative.)

Another poster features a trio of white sheep booting their one black cohort off the flag. If this is a metaphor for anti-jihadism, it’s too euphemistic to be taken seriously. If this is racist propaganda, it’s too inclusive to work, evoking a cliché description of an obnoxious or unruly family member rather than an enemy alien.

The Swiss minaret proscription has been likened to the French government’s decision to “oppose” the burka, the head-to-toe garment worn by many Muslim women by choice or, as is more likely the case, by male coercion. It is a false analogy.

For starters, France has so far passed no law prohibiting the burka; a National Assembly inquiry was inaugurated in late June, and its findings may or may not lead to actual legislation. But there is also the fact that classical Islam carries no justification for the burka, which predates the religion itself, appears nowhere in the Koran, and is rightly seen by many modern Muslims as a theologically improvised form of sexual slavery (the idea is to keep women under wraps and men away from temptation). There is nothing anti-social or oppressive about minarets, which occupy a place in the Islamic tradition tantamount to basilicas in Christianity or bimahs in Judaism.

No doubt Europe has been too quiescent toward homegrown confessional threats: See, for instance, the British government’s persistent indulgence of imams and Islamic “charities” and “inter-faith” groups that espouse the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamma’at Islami, the Pakistani terror cabal, and promote anti-Semitism, homophobia and the mass murder of civilians. But the sensible alternative to runaway multiculturalism is not reactionary exclusion.

Passing laws that target Muslims for being Muslims is not part of any clash of civilizations, it is a failure of one.

*Michael Weiss is a contributing editor of Tablet Magazine and a culture blogger for The New Criterion.

Source: The New York Daily News