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World | Australias Prime Minister Mocked President Trump in Leaked Audio | The phone calls between Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and President Donald Trump are probably not going to get any better. During a speech in Australia's capital city of Canberra on Wednesday evening, Turnbull reportedly imitated the American president and alluded to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Nine News in Australia published audio and footage of the event, which typically is kept off the record. Referring to online polls, Turnbull joked, imitating Trump "They are so easy to win. I have this Russian guy. Believe me, it's true.", "The Donald and I, we are winning and winning in the polls," Turnbull said jokingly. "We are winning so much. We are winning like we have never won before.", , After the speech, Turnbull called his imitation "affectionately light-hearted," the BBC reports. Just days after Trump took office in January, he and Turnbull reportedly reportedly had a testy phone call in which Trump bragged about his election win and abruptly hung up. Trump had slammed the refugee deal organized by the two nations during the Obama Administration, in which 1,250 refugees in Australia could come to the U.S. calling it "the worst deal ever.", The two leaders met for the first time in New York City in May. "We have a fantastic relationship, I love Australia, I always have," Trump said at the time. |
World | Teen in Australia Accused of ISIS Plot to Bomb Cops Using Kangaroo | A teenager discussed packing a kangaroo with explosives, painting it with the ISIS symbol and setting it loose on police, according to local media reports citing prosecutors. Sevdet Besim, 19, is accused of plotting a terror attack in Melbourne on Anzac Day an annual public commemoration of Australia's war dead. Besim denied four charges of planning a terrorist act during a court appearance on Thursday, the Melbourne Age newspaper reported. Prosecutors also accuse Besim of communicating with a teenager overseas, as well as planning to run over and behead a police officer on Anzac Day, it said. |
World | Paris Attacks Suspect Salah Abdeslam Refuses to Answer Questions in Court | Salah Abdeslam, the last surviving suspect in the Paris attacks, remained silent during his first court session of questioning by an anti-terror judge Friday, his lawyer said. After the quick hearing, Abdeslam's counsel Frank Berton told the AFP, "he did not want to say anything." French authorities had been hopeful Abdeslam would provide information about the Nov. 13 violence that killed 130 and whether there were any others involved with carrying out the attacks, according to the AFP. Abdeslam cited his right to remain silent in court Friday morning, but "is prepared to speak at a later date" to explain himself, his lawyer said. Berton added, "We need to give him time.", The Belgian-born suspect remained at large after the attacks until authorities arrested him during a March 18 raid in Brussels. AFP |
World | North Korea Accuses US of Plot to Assassinate Kim Jong Un | North Korea has accused the United States and South Korea of a plot to kill leader Kim Jong Un. North Korean state news agency KCNA released a report Friday that claims intelligence agencies in the U.S. and South Korea conspired with a "hideous terrorist group" to "commit bomb terrorism targeting the supreme leadership," CNN reports. It says the plot was "recently uncovered and smashed.", The document says a North Korean citizen was involved and the assassination would have involved "biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance.", Tensions have been escalating between North Korea and the U.S. in recent weeks, with a Trump Administration official saying in April that military preparations are "underway" for a potential conflict with the nation. |
World | Car Crash Victim Woke from Coma Speaking French and Thinking He Was Matthew McConaughey | A 25-year-old British man awoke after a car crash believing he was Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey and speaking fluent French, despite only having a very basic grasp from school. Rory Curtis, a former semi-professional soccer player, suffered a severe brain injury after an accident in August 2012. He was in an induced coma for six days while doctors tried to save his life. When he woke up, he began speaking to nurses in French. Curtis told the Daily Mail "I can't explain how it happened. It's incredible reallyI was just casually chatting away about how I was feeling in this perfect French accent.", He added "I wasn't really that good at it at school, so I don't how my brain has managed to do what is has. I don't know how I know it I just do.", "Also, in my head I thought I was Matthew McConaughey At times I was in hospital thinking, I can't wait to get out of here and back to filming movies.'", Thanks to an experimental drug, Curtis has now recovered and has retrained as a barber. But while he now knows he isn't a famous Hollywood actor, he is still able to speak perfect French more than two years later. Daily Mail |
World | France Throws the Bums Out and Votes for a New Political Reality | No matter whether centrist economist Emmanuel Macron or far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen wins France's presidency in two weeks' time, Sunday's first-round election made history in France ripping up the political system that has governed for generations over the world's sixth biggest economy and a powerhouse of the European Union. Both the ruling Socialists and the conservative Republicans suffered crushing defeats, as millions of French voters expressed years of exasperation, fear and disillusion by voting for insurgent or extremist candidates. The runoff round between Macron and Le Pen Sunday's two top vote getters is on May 7. As the polls closed at 8 p.m. the results appeared to be a collective cri de coeur against the establishment. "This is huge," says Pierre Haski, political columnist for the news magazine L'Obs, speaking to TIME after the vote. "The two parties that have dominated the political landscape for three or four decades have collapsed.", The next President of France now seems highly likely to be Macron, who captured the most votes among 11 candidates on Sunday. That itself is a stunning new reality. Macron, just 39, would be France's youngest-ever president by far if he is inaugurated in the ornate lyse Palace on May 15. What is more, he has never held elective office and has no traditional political party to call his own he quit President Franois Hollande's government as Economy Minister last September to create his own political movement, called En Marche! On the Go!, and drafted thousands of young French to knock on doors across the country, polling 100,000 people about how they wanted their country to change. It was a gamble that seems to have paid off and now, it could catapult this newcomer into power. It is hard to overstate the extraordinary and surprising nature of that accomplishment. "In one year we have changed the face of French politics," Macron told his ecstatic supporters at his victory party in Paris late Sunday night, saying that his win brought "new hope for our country, and for Europe." Amid the crowd of giddy supporters were many young French voting for the first time, who said in interviews they had been drawn to a candidate that appeared young and modern a striking change from the fairly small group of grandees who have run the country for many years. The preliminary results Sunday night put Macron at 23.9, Le Pen at 21.7 and the Republicans' candidate Franois Fillon around 19. The Socialist candidate Benot Hamon polled a disastrous 6 a potential death knell for the party that has ruled France for five years. Fillon and Hamon, in somber concession speeches, admitted they were facing an entirely new political situation as outsiders. Both called on supporters to back Macron in the second round vote on May 7. Standing in a hall in southern Paris, hundreds of Macron's young campaign volunteers broke into wild applause and cheers of "Macron Prsident!" as Fillon, projected on a large-screen monitor on stage, said, "I will be voting for Emmanuel Macron.", Indeed, Macron's lead over Le Pen on Sunday could potentially increase once all the votes are counted. That is because the early estimates do not include big cities like Paris, which are bastions of support for the former Rothschild investment banker, who is intent on modernizing the country and unraveling generations of state-heavy intervention. When TIME profiled Macron last July, while he was still serving in Hollande's Cabinet, he said he believed the current system was "sclerotic" and could not survive. "I am a newcomer," he told us then. "I want to remain a newcomer. It is in my DNA.", Read more Emmanuel Macron Has Big Plans for France. Is It Ready for Them?, Now, however, he will need to become the ultimate insider Piecing together a coalition to smash Le Pen's National Front in the runoff round, and then to force through an agenda that could well spark violent protests. That includes loosening the way companies hire and fire employees, cutting back on steep wealth taxes for the richest French and luring hundreds of thousands of French expats back home those include countless high-skilled professionals in Silicon Valley and London's financial hub, who left France in recent years, frustrated by the lack of growth. Macron's ability to push through his programs will depend heavily on the parliamentary elections in June. His political movement, which currently has no representation, has scrambled in recent weeks to find candidates for the June vote. "En Marche! has received 15,000 people who want to be deputies," Macron campaign spokeswoman Laurence Haim told TIME earlier this week. "We have commissions that are looking at each candidate, and we want parity and diversity, to completely transform the face of political life in France.", That is just one challenge, however Le Pen. The 48-year-old won the biggest-ever support for the National Front in Sunday's election. She has spent six years remaking the party from her father's far more rabidly racist and anti-Semitic movement into an electable force. In some ways, she succeeded in that on Sunday. Tapping into deep unease over the migrant crisis and the terrorist threat, Le Pen stormed through the country arguing that France needed to close its borders and virtually halt all immigration, promising to hold a referendum to pull France out of the E.U. and drop the use of the Euro. Speaking to her supporters on Sunday night after the vote, Le Pen vowed she would take her support all the way to the lyse."Globalization puts our country in danger," she thundered, to a packed hall in the northern France town of Hnin-Beaumont. That message clearly hit home with millions of voters on Sunday. When TIME traveled the hard-hit Rust Belt of Northern France in February, many Le Pen supporters said they believed global free trade, which Macron supports, had failed French workers. "We don't think that finding workers that are cheaper and cheaper, with worse working conditions, is a good thing for the people of the world," National Front activist ric Richermoz, 24, told TIME then. "The National Front is the only party that gives people hope in these elections," he said in the northern town of Amiens. Now, Macron will need to reckon with that furyeven if he succeeds in winning the presidency. And there is fury too on the other side of the political spectrum 19.2 voted for the far-left politician Jean-Luc Mlenchon, who fought to nationalize major industries and to reconsider France's E.U. membership. "He has to take into account the anger of people who voted for Le Pen and Mlenchon," Haski says. In addition, he says, Le Pen has attempted to cast herself as France's Trump the candidate of change vs. a Hillary Clintontype opponent the embodiment of an old establishment. She has said frequently, including to TIME in recent months, that she regarded Trump's victory as a sign that she too could prevail against all odds. "She portrays this election as a replay of the U.S. election, Trump vs. Clinton," Haski says. "That is a trap that Macron does not want to fall into." |
World | North Korean Missile Alerts Are Now the New Normal in Japan | First came the threat, then the warning shot. On Friday morning, people in Japan were yet again sent scurrying for cover after a second North Korean missile in just three weeks was fired over its northern island of Hokkaido, triggering a series of SMS alerts, television broadcasts and loudspeaker announcements advising of an possible attack. The launch is seen as direct retaliation for new U.N. sanctions spearheaded by Tokyo and Washington following Pyongyang's sixth nuclear test on Sept. 3. Following the sanctions, Pyongyang said, "The four islands of the Japanese archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche." Juche is the state's ideology, a kind of socialist and ultra-nationalist self-reliance., The statement, attributed by state media to its ironically named Korea Asia-Pacific peace committee, added that the U.S. should be "beaten to death like a rabid dog.", Such threats are becoming less idle by the day. Friday's missile likely reached an altitude of about 480 mi. 770 km and traveled some 2,300 mi. 3,700 km, according to South Korea's military. The launch was considerably further than the Aug. 29 test and, notably, traveled far enough to reach the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, which is 2,100 mi. 3,400 km from Pyongyang. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga called Friday's test an "intolerable" act of provocation, though said that there was no evidence of missile fragments across Hokkaido. The stated goal of North Korea's escalating weapons tests is a nuclear-armed ballistic missile capable of striking the continental U.S. However, Japan is feeling the heat more than anyone. The 22 missiles Pyongyang has tested this year were all fired toward the nation of 126 million, which has the world's third largest economy. Considered an ancient foe by North Korea, owing to Tokyo's annexing of the Korean peninsular in 1910 and abuses under colonial rule, the Japanese people increasingly feel they would be the first line of attack in the breakout of hostilities not least because Japan hosts around 50,000 American troops. "The U.S. bases are here to provide protection for Japan, but many Japanese are now thinking these bases are essentially bullseyes," Prof. Jeffery Kingston, director of Asian Studies at Temple University in Japan, tells TIME. In response, the Japanese public have been placed on high alert. Schools across the country have been told to conduct missile defense drills, and many local authorities are following suit, responding to the worries of their constituents who didn't know what to do when the Aug. 29 drill sounded. Although that meant many people were better prepared on Friday, the official guidelines of "duck and cover" are hardly reassuring for a people schooled from a young age on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and who are still mopping up after the calamitous Fukushima Nuclear Plant meltdown that followed an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. In response to the deteriorating security situation, some Japanese have taken to installing emergency shelters in the homes or offices. Orders from the U.S. have spiked and domestic manufacturers are taking to ingenious adaptions to meet demand. Shiro Yokozawa, president of Japan's Cellup medical supplies firm, recently started marketing medical hyperbolic chambers as missile defense shelters. He says the steel design, which can withstand 15 tons of crushing force, and closed air filtration, system make them ideally suited for the task. "Vastly more people have made inquires since the Aug. 29 missile test," he told TIME earlier this week. |
World | Croatia Closes Its Border Crossings With Serbia as Thousands of Refugees Enter the Country | Croatia closed seven out of eight border crossings with Serbia Thursday after 10,000 refugees entered in two days. Croatia's Interior Minister Ranko Ostojic told reporters that the country was "absolutely full" and could no longer take any more refugees, reports the BBC. "Don't come here anymore," he said. "Stay in refugee centers in Serbia and Macedonia and Greece. This is not the road to Europe. Buses can't take you there. It's a lie.", According to the BBC, Croatia has been overwhelmed by the new arrivals. On Thursday, crowds of people tried to break through police lines at two towns on the border with Serbia, in the hope of getting to the Croatian capital, Zagreb. Scuffles broke out at Tovarnik and Batina, two of the crossings that are now closed. Buses arrived to take the refugees to a registration center, but there was not enough transport to take everyone, and thousands of people reportedly spent Thursday night sleeping on the roadside or in fields. Hungary sealed off its southern border with Serbia on Wednesday, forcing thousands of desperate people to turn to neighboring Croatia in order to attempt to make their way to northern Europe and their preferred destination Germany. In chaotic scenes at the Serbian border town of Horgos, riot police on the Hungarian side of the border used tear gas and water cannons to repel crowds of refugees back into Serbia. Hungary has defended its actions and has vowed to continue to forcefully defend its border, reports the Guardian. The border closures in Croatia and Hungary mean the main land route from Greece to northern Europe has effectively been cut off, reports the BBC. Meanwhile, Slovenia said it stopped a group of refugees on a train at the border and would return them to Zagreb. Slovenia, which lies to the north of Croatia and shares a border with Austria, is part of the E.U. border-free Schengen area. On Thursday, Slovenian officials told the European Commission that its border with Hungary would be closed for at least 10 days. BBC |
World | Watch Jamie Dornan Take on World No1 Golfer Rory McIlroy at Soccer | One of the best golfers in the world gives Christian Grey a thrashing in a new game of soccer. The world's top golfer Rory McIlroy took on Fifty Shades of Grey actor Jamie Dornan in a match of Circular Soccer, which is a new new style of game that is played around a central point with a three-dimensional goal, rather than being played end-to-end. It is currently being trialed by FIFA as way of encouraging greater technical skills among young people learning the game. Though Dornan put up a good fight, McIlroy proved the better sportsman. You can check out the game highlights in the video above. |
World | Burma Is Pursuing Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya Muslims UN Official Says | Burmese authorities are carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya Muslim minority in the country's western Arakan state, a senior U.N. official said, as the military continues to sweep the area for what it has labeled Islamic militants. The BBC reports that John McKissick, a representative of the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said Burmese troops have been "killing men, shooting them, slaughtering children, raping women, burning and looting houses, forcing these people to cross the river" into neighboring Bangladesh. Thousands of Rohingya have already sought refuge in Bangladesh, the BBC cited the country's Foreign Ministry as saying. Thousands more are reportedly turning up at the border hoping to escape. Bangladesh does not view the Rohingya as refugees, and its official policy is to not allow them in. The Rohingya are denied citizenship in Burma, officially called Myanmar, and are viewed by many as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, which also does not accept them. The group, numbering about 1.1 million people, is viewed as one of the world's most persecuted minorities. Tens of thousands have poured across the border for decades to seek refuge in one of several refugee camps near Cox's Bazaar. Read more The Rohingya, Burma's Forgotten Muslims by James Nachtwey, "Now it's very difficult for the Bangladeshi government to say the border is open because this would further encourage the government of Myanmar to continue the atrocities and push them out until they have achieved their ultimate goal of ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority in Myanmar," McKissick told the BBC. According to Amnesty International, the Bangladeshi government has begun forcibly repatriating the asylum seekers by the thousands, in defiance of international law. UNHCR and Amnesty have accused the Burmese government of "collective punishment," as the Burmese military carries out counterterrorism operations in the remote and conflict-torn state. Parts of northern Arakan, also known as Rakhine, have been on military lockdown since Oct. 9, when nine border police guards were killed in what appear to have been coordinated attacks on three security posts. The government said the assailants were Islamic militants, and began its search for what it said were hundreds of Rohingya jihadists. Read more Something Shocking is Happening to Burma's Rohingya People. Take a Look at This Timeline, Humanitarian aid workers and independent journalists have been barred from the area since the start of the lockdown. More than 150,000 people who normally receive life-saving assistance have received no food or medical aid for more than six weeks. Over 3,000 children diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition have not received treatment as many as half of them are at serious risk of death. Reports of atrocities have surfaced over the past few weeks. Reuters reported that dozens of women claim to have been raped by Burmese soldiers, and Human Rights Watch this week revealed satellite images that appear to show more than 1,200 buildings that had been burned to the ground. More than 100 people have been killed and hundreds of others detained by the army, which has admitted to using helicopter strikes against alleged lightly armed suspects. The Burmese government vehemently denies all allegations of wrongdoing. Presidential spokesman Zaw Htay told the BBC that he was "very, very disappointed" by the remarks made by McKissick, saying he should "only speak based on concrete and strong evidence on the ground." That would be an impossible task given the complete lack of access to the area. Read More We Cannot Believe Aung San Suu Kyi' Why Many in Burma Are Losing Hope of Peace, The U.N. and the U.S. have called for an independent investigation into allegations of abuse. The past six weeks have been the deadliest in the state since riots between Buddhists and Muslims killed more than 100 in 2012, most of them Rohingya. About 100,000 are still confined to squalid displacement camps where they are denied movement, education and healthcare. The government's de facto leader, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has made few public remarks on the crisis. While human-rights advocates have criticized her silence, political analysts say the issue has exposed the limits of her power the military still controls the key Ministries of Home Affairs, Border Affairs and Defense. Her party took power in April after winning elections last year, bringing an end to decades of military rule. Recent events in Arakan state, as well as renewed conflict in the country's east between the Burmese army and ethnic rebels, have led many to question who is ultimately in control. |
World | This Syrian Refugee Wants to Swim to Europe | Each morning since the start of September, when he arrived on the Turkish coast with plans of escaping to Europe, Hasan Musally, a 42-year-old welder from Syria, has come to Fener Beach to practice swimming. He starts each time by looking out at his destinationthe northern tip of Kos, a Greek island about six km 3.7 miles awayand then he swims toward it through the choppy waters, going as far as he can before the fear and the pain in his lungs makes him turn back. Two weeks into this daily ritual, Musally feels he can just about make it across. "But wind is a big problem," he said on a recent evening, when the gusts prevented him from attempting to swim the entire channel for the first time. As the seasons change, the waves are also getting higher, and even migrants who can afford to pay human traffickers or to buy their own inflatable boat for this journey often fail to make it across. On Sept. 13, 34 migrants drowned in the Aegean Sea after their dinghy deflated in the water, joining more than 2,000 others who have died trying to cross to Greece this year. Yet up and down the western coast of Turkey, there are still hundreds of thousands of migrants preparing for the trip to Greeceand according to Turkish authorities, they are resorting to ever more desperate means of doing so. "They swim, they paddle, they buy a little outboard motor, with maybe three or four horsepower, and see what they can do," says a senior maritime official in the Turkish seaside town of Bodrum, who agreed to discuss the migrant crisis only on condition of anonymity. "We found one couple from Syria who tried seven times to go across. Every time they failed." The Turkish coast guards would turn back their boat, or human traffickers would simply rob them. But each time the couple would try again. Through the window that faces his desk, the official can see a vast harbor crowded with the sailing and fishing boats, which wealthier migrants from Syria have used to get safely across the waters to Greece. Some have paid as much as 4,000 to hide in the hold of a luxury yacht for a journey of no more than 15 km 9.3 miles, said one local businessman who helped arrange such a crossing. But the poorest asylum seekersnot Syrians, but more typically Afghans or migrants from other parts of South and Central Asiahave meanwhile been turning to cheaper and deadlier methods. Their logic, though desperate, is simple enough They believe Germany has opened its doors to all asylum seekers, and most of them seem unawareor unwilling to acceptthat those doors are quickly closing. On Monday, about a week after easing its own migration rules in order to welcome Syrian refugees, Germany imposed emergency controls along its border with Austria, and the government announced that it has reached "the limit of its capabilities" in managing the influx of migrants coming across that frontier. "It is not just a question of the number of migrants, but also the speed at which they are arriving that makes the situation so difficult to handle," Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel told a German newspaper on Sunday, when 13,000 migrants arrived in Munich over the course of 24 hours. But whether or not the Germans are ready, many others are already on their way from the Turkish coast, having interpreted Berlin's initial hospitality as proof that Syriansif not all migrantsare welcome to settle in Germany. Among them is Mazin Awad, a 47-year-old asylum seeker from Damascus who has been camping outside a mosque in the center of Izmir, Turkey's third largest city, for the last two weeks. Last week he saw the footage of cheering crowds greeting asylum seekers in Munich, and he has since had trouble understanding why the German government cannot just send a bus to pick him up. "If Germany takes people," he asks, "why not take us from here?", It is a common sentiment among the dozens of down-and-out migrants TIME spoke with on the Turkish coast last week. On social networks, a growing movement has emerged among them calling for unrestricted passage for Syrian migrants to Europe. One Arabic-language Facebook group"We Are Just Passers-by"is urging Syrians to gather at Turkey's land border with Greece and demand safe passage into the European Union. That would allow many thousands of migrants to avoid using those overcrowded boatsor more even perilous methodsto get across. But the E.U. isn't likely to be so generous. In Hungary, Poland and other Eastern European nations, governments have called for member states to stop the migrants before they enter the E.U. Hungary has gone so far as to declare a state of emergency, sealing off its southern border and detaining migrants who cross it illegally. In a warning to his peers last week, Polish President Andrzej Duda said accepting asylum seekers would only encourage others to leave their homelands in a "vicious circle" of migration to Europe. That doesn't seem far from the truth on the Turkish coast. Though Syrians still make up the largest share of people headed to Greece by boat, they have been joined by at least as many migrants from impoverished or war-stricken countries in Asia and Africa. In Bodrum, at the edge of the main bus terminal, hundreds of men from Pakistan have been camping out for weeks on a craggy slope, sleeping on scraps of cardboard with no protection from the sun. One of them, a 38-year-old from Lahore named Mohamed Rizwan, says he and several of his friends intend to buy an inflatable paddleboat and row it all the way to Greece. "We have no money for food," he said. "How can we buy a motor?", Though still verging on the suicidal, their plan for getting to Europe is at least a better one than swimming. The winds on the Turkish coast were fierce last week, and temperatures are steadily dropping. But Musally, who hails from the Syrian city of Aleppo, has no intention of going back to Istanbul, where his wife and three children are waiting for him to make it to Germany. Earlier this month, on the beach where he's been honing his breast stroke, the body of a three-year-old Syrian migrant named Aylan Kurdi washed ashore, and Musally witnessed the ensuing commotion as police and foreign journalists descended on the scene of the tragedy. That, too, did not dissuade him from going in the water. "Allah," he said. "Allah will protect us. That is what I hope.", As of Tuesday, when a reporter last spoke with him on the phone, Musally had yet to attempt the crossing. The winds were still too high., |
World | Pussy Riot Was Immediately Detained After Their Release From Prison for World Cup Stunt | Four members of the Russian punk band and activist group Pussy Riot were arrested again on Monday, the same day they were released from prison over their World Cup protest. The second detention stems from charges over organizing and holding "public events without prior written notice," Pussy Riot said on Twitter. The activists face up to 10 additional days of detention, the Tweet added. , Fifteen days earlier, Petya Verzilov, Nika Nikulshina, Olya Kurachyova and Olya Pakhtusova rushed the the pitch during the World Cup final in Moscow dressed in old-style police uniforms. They said the stunt was a demonstration against human rights abuses in Russia. Following the field rush, Pussy Riot released a list of demands, including that the Russian government allow political competition, free political prisoners and end arrests at protests. The four involved in the World Cup disruption were sentenced to "15 days of administrative arrest" and banned from attending sporting events for three years. On Monday, they were set to walk free but wound up back in jail as they tried to leave. Initially, it appeared as if there were no charges. "The Luzhniki police station says that there's an order to keep us in overnight until some procedures take place in the morning," Verzilov tweeted, according to a BBC translation. With the civil code violation now being cited, it's unclear how long the four will be actually detained. |
World | Here are Some of the Heartbreaking Messages Sent By Desperate Aleppo Citizens | Helpless citizens trapped in eastern Aleppo have been posting heartbreaking messages and videos on social media as pro-government forces renewed airstrikes and artillery shelling this week following the collapse of plans for a ceasefire. If the ceasefire had gone ahead, the remaining Syrian civilians and rebel forces were likely to have been evacuated from the city. Instead, reports have emerged of pro-government forces shooting civilians on sight, killing at least 82 people including 11 women and 13 children, and U.N. spokesperson Jens Laerke has described the situation as a "complete meltdown of humanity." A spokesmen for three rebel groups told the Associated Press on Wednesday afternoon that the cease-fire was back on and would go back into effect later Wednesday night. Meanwhile, desperate citizens, journalists and activists have been sharing goodbye messages as government forces continue to close in on the last rebel-held pockets of the city. Activist Lina Shamy uploaded a video on Twitter from Aleppo, in which she said "To everyone who can hear me, we are here exposed to a genocide in the besieged city of Aleppo. This may be my last video.", , In another video, posted by Salah Ashkar, something that sounds like bombing can be heard in the distance. "We are still here under siege," he said. "There are a lot of children and people helpless. The world has to act now, please, please." He later posted another clip begging viewers to "go to the U.N. headquarters and block the way. Please, don't let them sleep. Do it now. There is no minute to spare.", , Journalist documentary filmmaker Bilal Abdul Kareem posted what he said was "probably" his final message from eastern Aleppo, also on Twitter. "I am not coming to you at this time as a representative of On the Ground News, I am coming to you as an average person of besieged Aleppo. We may not be able to post any more messages so this might be close to if not the last communication," he said. , Teacher-turned-activist Abdulkafi Alhamdo streamed a video called The last call from Aleppo' live on Periscope. "I hope I can speak on Periscope to you again," he said. "I really don't know what to say but I hope you can do something for Aleppo people, for my daughter, for the other children.", , , Seven-year-old Bana Alabed, whose eye-opening tweets about life in eastern Aleppo have captivated the world, wrote on Twitter that it was her "last moment to live or die." She had posted a message the day before saying her father was injured and she was crying. , An activist in the besieged area spoke to Jared Malsin, TIME's Middle East bureau chief over WhatsApp. "Our last scream from last free neighborhoods in Aleppo. The agreement has been broken. Hundreds of shell bombs fell on us dire medical situation. No ambulance cars. People are dying in the streets," he wrote. Rami Zien, a Syrian journalist based in eastern Aleppo, tweeted goodbye on Dec. 12. "Thanks all who stand for us and pay for us. But it's almost over and they are just hours away of killing us," he wrote. Zien has continued to tweet in the 48-hour period that has passed since. His most recent message read "Sorry everyone I am offline due to situation in Aleppo is extremely bad Every single meter being shelled.", , An English-speaking activist called Monther Etaky thanked those who stood up for the besieged citizens of Aleppo, telling them "I will never forget you." Etaky, who describes himself as a "journalist, artist, graphic designer, media trainer and photographer" on Twitter has continued to tweet and upload videos since news of the failed ceasefire broke. In one of his most recent posts, sent on Dec. 13, Etaky said "We are facing mass executions and there are a lot of families, women and children living here who are afraid about what will happen if the city is captured.", , A journalist and student based in London thanked the Syrian citizens for staying to document what was happening in the city. "To those who stayed to document Aleppo and now send final goodbyes thank you. You did more than your part, we didn't do ours," she tweeted. |
World | President Trump Is Visiting Saudi Arabia to Cement a Friendship | Before he became president, Donald Trump once accused a Saudi prince of wanting to "control U.S. politicians with daddy's money." He claimed Saudi Arabia "blew up the World Trade Center" and also claimed that the kingdom "wouldn't exist" without American assistance. At the end of this week, Trump will fly to Saudi Arabia in the first overseas trip of his presidency. He will arrive having set aside the combative, Saudi-bashing stance he adopted as a political candidate, on a mission to instead reinforce America's decades-old alliance with the Saudi monarchy. Accordingly, the U.S. President is expected to arrive in Saudi Arabia bearing gifts a package of weapons deals totaling more than 100 billion, which if confirmed would be one of the largest single arms sales in American history. The agreement includes ships, missile defense, and maritime security systems, according to a White House official quoted by Reuters. The arms sale would herald the end of a brief period during which the United States signaled disapproval of the conduct of Saudi Arabia's military adventure in neighboring Yemen. In March, the Trump administration reversed a decision made in 2016 under President Barack Obama to halt some sales of weapons linked to the killings of civilians in Saudi Arabia's two-year old military assault on Yemen, where at least 10,000 people have died. The revitalized friendship now stands to benefit both Trump and the Saudi monarchy. The U.S. president and key members of the royal family now appear united behind a more aggressive approach to a series of crises throughout the Middle East. Both Trump and key Saudi officials favor intensified military action in Yemen, where a U.S. commando raid resulted in the deaths of 30 civilians and an American Navy SEAL in January in the opening days of Trump's presidency. Trump has also become more confrontational with Iran, which has long been the Saudi's arch-rival in a region-wide, sectarian contest for power and influence. The White House's decision to increase the flow of weapons suggests that the two governments have laid the foundations for a tight partnership. "I don't think the Saudis are alarmed by the way Trump is behaving or his past remarks. I think they see this as an opportunity to roll back the clock a little bit. I think they see him as a moldable character," says Toby Craig Jones, a historian at Rutgers closely studying Saudi Arabia. At the center of Trump's evolving relationship with the kingdom is a rising star within the Saudi royal family Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who met the U.S. president in March. The 31-year-old prince has emerged as one of the most prominent faces of the Saudi government. As defense minister, he oversees the war in Yemen and he is also responsible for a massive overhaul of the Saudi economy that intends to privatize part of the state oil company and increase sources of non-oil revenue. According to Rosie Bsheer, a historian at Yale and an expert on the Saudi state, the young prince is "attempting to ingratiate himself with the Trump administration in order to gain leverage over his cousin, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Nayef, with the hopes of replacing him as Washington's darling and contender for the Saudi throne.", "The young de facto ruler needs to bolster his legitimacy and prove himself capable of running the kingdom's affairs," she tells TIME in an email. "He will therefore seek a more belligerent U.S. policy in the region with the hopes that he may at once fulfill some of his foreign policy promises and, importantly, create a hostile environment for Iran, a major thorn in Saudi Arabia's side.", U.S.-Saudi relations frayed towards the end of Obama's time in office. The former president's administration moved to limit some arms deliveries following a catastrophic airstrike on a funeral hall in Sanaa that killed about 140 people in October 2016. With the proposed arms deal in the pipeline, the Trump now appears poised to accelerate U.S. support for the Saudi campaign in Yemen to the horror of human rights groups. The U.N. says the war has created one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, with more than three million displaced and millions facing starvation, while the Saudi-led military offensive has also launched numerous airstrikes on schools, hospitals, housing and other civilian targets. "It seems to make clear that the U.S. does not care about the fact that not only is the Saudi-led coalition committing war crimes in Yemen, but they're using U.S. weapons to do so," says Kristine Beckerle, a researcher on Yemen with Human Rights Watch. "It's not only alarming, it's incredible in a terrible way," she adds. Trump's visit to Saudi Arabia also comes at a precarious moment in U.S. relations with Iran. He flies to Riyadh on the same day as the Iranian presidential election, in which reformist President Hassan Rouhani faces challenges from conservative candidates who are less inclined to support negotiation and accommodation with the United States. Trump campaigned against the Obama administration's diplomacy with Iran, which resulted in a historic, multi-nation agreement to halt the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for a reduction in sanctions. Trump introduced new sanctions on Iran in February, and National Security Advisor Michael Flynn warned that the administration put Iran "on notice," shortly before he resigned in connection with the expanding investigation into Trump's ties to Russia. This will have pleased the Saudis, who accuse Iran of supporting their opponents in the war in Yemen, Houthi rebels who seized much of the country in 2014 and 2015. Trump has articulated few specific positions on the complex politics of Iran and the Arabian peninsula, but he has shown signs that he is prepared to halt his past bombast with regard to Saudi Arabia's role in the region and the world. |
World | Vietnam Begins Life Under New Strongman President Nguyen Phu Trong | Hanoi's notorious traffic was its usual bedlam Wednesday morning, as swirling eddies of motorbikes and taxis raced past harried commuters with psychotic abandon. But away from the orderly anarchy, one man in the sprawling Vietnamese capital was waking up to unparalleled control Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, who was confirmed by the Southeast Asian nation's rubberstamp parliament as also its new President late Tuesday, making him the first person to hold both titles since founding father Ho Chi Minh in the 1960s. "Many heavy tasks and duties are waiting ahead of us," Trong told his confirmation hearing, vowing to be "absolutely loyal to the nation, people and the constitution.", The 74-year-old Trong's ascent confirmed by 99.8 of lawmakers, with only one token dissenter follows the death last month of President Tran Dai Quang and adds to the recent resurgence of strongman politics across the globe. It also undercuts Vietnam's convention of consensus leadership. Of the traditional "four-pillar" top positions designed to diffuse power, Trong now holds half. The remaining two are the posts of National Assembly chair and prime minister., Trong's confirmation also raises questions regarding the U.S. role in Southeast Asia given his close ties with China's communist leaders, and Washington's perceived retreat from the trade-reliant region under the "America First" policy of President Donald Trump. "Standing up to China is even more difficult for Vietnam under Trump than it has been," says Carlyle Thayer, emeritus professor at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Nevertheless, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Daniel Kritenbrink was quick to congratulate the silver-haired Trong on his appointment. "We look forward to continuing to work closely with President Trong on further strengthening and expanding the U.S.-Vietnam Comprehensive Partnership," he said in a statement. Trong's merging of the two key leadership roles has raised comparisons with China's strongman leader Xi Jinping, who late last year engineered the removal of presidential term limits, effectively allowing him to rule for life. Like Xi, Trong has mercilessly pursued a sweeping anticorruption campaign, which has netted top figures from business, the military and within the paramount Communist Party. But unlike Xi, who held various provincial administration jobs across China, Trong has little practical governing experience prior to his confirmation, Trong's main role was as the party's chief ideologue. A Hanoi native, he was elected to the all-powerful Politburo in 1997, served as the party's chief in Hanoi and was National Assembly chairman before gaining the post of general secretary in 2011. He was elected to a second five-year term in 2016 after facing down influential Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, who was subsequently forced out of government. While Dung was perceived as friendly with the West, Trong has instead prioritized better ties with Beijing, sending young cadres over to China for exchange programs. This can be, of course, problematic given the fervent Sinophobia that grips Vietnamese society following thousands of years of conquest and acrimony. Vietnam last fought a border war with China in 1979. Anti-China protests flare up regularly across the 95 million-strong nation, despite heavy penalties for participants, most recently against plans for 99-year lease special economic zones SEZs likely to be dominated by China that opponents saw as selling Vietnamese sovereignty. "Antipathy toward China is so extreme because it goes to the heart of Vietnamese identity," says William Nguyen, a Yale graduate from Texas who was arrested at a protest against the SEZs and a draconian new cybersecurity law in Ho Chi Minh City on June 10 and subsequently deported. This would seem to make Vietnam a natural partner in Washington's efforts to counter China's rise, despite the former foes' own turbulent history. Earlier this month, White House National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Mattis condemned Beijing's "predatory economic behavior" against smaller nations while en route to Vietnam for an official visit. "We remain highly concerned with continued militarization of features in the South China Sea," he said on a flight to Ho Chi Minh City, according to AFP. Vietnam has been among the strongest in standing up to China's militarization of rocks and reefs in the strategic waterway, through which passes almost a third of all maritime trade, worth 5.3 trillion annually. Both nations have competing claims on resource-rich island chains. However, Trump's decision to pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade group reenforced Vietnam's reliance on Beijing. Bilateral trade between China and Vietnam is set to reach 100 billion this year, according to Vietnamese state media, with Vietnam experiencing a 22.76 billion trade deficit in 2017. With Vietnam increasingly under China's orbit, human rights are also unlikely to improve under Trong, who analysts say sees China's authoritarian governance as a model to be replicated. According to Human Rights Watch, at least 119 people were in jail as of January for political crimes. A separate investigation by news wire AFP found more than 55 people had been jailed this year alone. Last week, dissident blogger Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, known as "Mother Mushroom," was deported to the U.S. after two years in prison. "Before he was the president he was already the most powerful man in Vietnam and under his leadership many people were sent to jail," says activist musician Mai Khoi, who won the 2018 Vclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent. "How can I think now he will give us more freedom?", Correction, Oct. 24, The original version of this story misstated Jim Mattis' role in the Trump Administration. He is the Secretary of Defense, not the National Security Advisor. |
World | Twitter Has a Big Problem in Southeast Asia Bots Before the Ballot in Malaysia and Beyond | At around 130 p.m. on April 16, Joe Lee, a social media consultant, sat down for a television interview about Malaysia's May 9 election. When he left the studio two hours later and glanced at his phone, he realized something had gone terribly wrong. Bots, thousands of them, appeared to be gathering speed across Malaysian Twitter. "I flicked on my phone and just saw a bunch of bots flooding the timeline. And they were flooding it with pro-government literature," Lee tells TIME. Earlier that month, just after the midweek election date was announced, Lee launched the social media campaign pualangmengundi, or "go home to vote." Within hours of launching, it was the top-trending hashtag on Twitter. The campaign's purpose was to connect voters too poor to afford plane and bus tickets home with "angel" sponsors stepping in to fund their travel. Click on the hashtag and a would-be sponsor could find hundreds of requests from voters many of them students and first-time voters registered in home states hundreds of kilometers away. But when the bots came, they jumped on the hashtag, overwhelming the timeline and disrupting attempts to match sponsors with voters, Lee says. "They were flooding it with pro-government literature. How that affected the timeline was very simple because there were people asking for help and they were being drowned out by thousands and thousands of messages.", Lee says over the next three days he blocked almost 4,000 bots. "I spent a total of six hours clicking, clicking, clicking," he says. Malaysians are set to hit the polling booths on May 9 in what many believe to be the country's most fiercely contested election since the country gained independence in 1963. The ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional, or The National Front, has been in power for 61 years, with current prime minister Najib Razak now running for a third term. The last time Malaysia had an election, in 2013, Razak's party lost the popular vote and squeaked by to win a majority of seats. Since then public opinion against him has continued to wane. The intervening years have seen a rise in living costs and stunning levels of corruption, particularly in the 1MDB scandal, in which billions of dollars went missing from a state-run investment fund. More than 700 million was traced into the bank account of Prime Minister Najib Razak, who has denied any wrongdoing and was exonerated by the country's attorney general in 2016. The opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan, or The Alliance of Hope party, has vowed to investigate 1MDB and scrap an unpopular goods-and-service tax. The coalition is headed by 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamed, who was Malaysia's prime minister between 1981 and 2003. The tweets, which began to appear on April 12 two days after the election date was announced circulated the hashtags SayNOtoPH and KalahkanPakatan defeat Pakatan. Others circulated photographs and videos of ruling coalition rallies and the prime minister Najib. Donara Barojan, a digital forensic research associate at the Washington DC-based Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, found that more than 44,000 pro-government and anti-opposition messages were tweeted by upwards of 17,000 bots in the space of a week, according to Reuters. Read More Inside Russia's Social Media War on America, "It seems that they came from different groups and networks of bots, what we refer to as botnets. Each botnet has a different herder. We think Cyrillic handles came from Russian-speaking bot herders," Barojan tells TIME, referring to "herders," or hackers who find vulnerable systems in which to install their bot program. "It is a business and a very lucrative one that is used by PR companies and political campaigns. So a lot of people are creating Twitter bots and then selling them either the bot themselves or tweets on their accounts.", Malaysia's Communications Minister Salleh Said Keruak said his ministry would look into the issue. Stressing that bots are a "technology that can be used anonymously by anybody," he wrote on Twitter. "As a regulator MCMC will work closely with providers such as Twitter and Facebook upon complaints.", In a lengthy email, a Twitter spokesperson declined to address specifics of the Malaysia case, but stressed the company was improving its verification process, and limiting bot activity by "prohibiting simultaneous posts of identical or substantially similar content to multiple accounts, including bulk, aggressive, or very high-volume automated retweeting.", The Malaysian election tweets give rise to fears that thousands of bots that have appeared on social media across Asia could be weaponized. In recent weeks, users throughout the region have reported huge spikes in suspect followers. Twitter has downplayed the problem, with those familiar with the matter suggesting they are "organic users as the platform grows in popularity in the region," but few who study Twitter give credence to that explanation. "The first step is to acknowledge there is a goddamn problem here," says Sanjana Hattotuwa, a senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives, in Sri Lanka and the co-author of a study released this week entitled Weaponizing 280 characters What 200,000 tweets and 4,000 bots tell us about state of Twitter in Sri Lanka. Though Sri Lanka and Malaysia are the only two countries in Southeast Asia whose bots have been studied by researchers thus far, a surge in anonymous accounts have been spotted in Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand, Hong Kong, and China. Pointing out that bots don't "naturally appear," Hattotuwa warned that there must be a "strategy" behind them as in the apparent case of the Malaysian election. In recent months, attention has focused on Facebook following its failure to stop the platform being co-opted by those seeking to influencing voters or stoke violence. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg faced a congressional inquisition over revelations the data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica accessed the personal information of 87 million users to try and influence elections. In March, the U.N. investigators found that Facebook played a "determining role" in conflict particularly with regards to spreading hate speech and inciting violence. More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar since the military's crackdown last August. In Sri Lanka, false rumors spread on Facebook incited deadly mob violence against Muslim minorities. Read More Could Facebook Have Helped Stop the Spread of Hate in Myanmar?, While Facebook has faced arguably the fiercest criticism, Twitter is hardly unblemished, the CPA researchers say in their report. Already, Twitter bots are known to have played no small role in major elections. Earlier this year, Twitter notified 1.4 million users that they had engaged with content created by Russian accounts ahead of the 2016 U.S. election. The company had found more than 50,000 bots, which independent researchers discovered were responsible for one in five election-related tweets. The tweets spread disinformation and propaganda in an attempt to sway the result of the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump. Hattotuwa fears that unless the company takes decisive action, it is only a matter of time before something similar happens with the Twitter bots in Asia. While the Malaysian bots appear to have caused little long-term damage, they are likely the tip of the iceberg. "That the scale and scope which we thought when we started the study was just a Sri Lankan phenomenon is actually a Southeast Asian phenomenon as well, suggests that Twitter really does have a serious problem on its hands," Hattotuwa says. |
World | Israeli Police Confirm Netanyahu Suspected of Bribery and Fraud | Israeli police acknowledged publicly for the first time that a criminal investigation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu involves suspicion of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The disclosure was made in a court-issued gag order prohibiting news media from reporting details of negotiations with a former Netanyahu aide to testify against him. A photograph of the document was sent by police in a message to reporters' mobile phones. Police investigators have questioned Netanyahu several times at his residence, and have also spoken to some of the prime minister's friends and associates, including billionaires Sheldon Adelson, chairman and majority owner of Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Arnon Milchan, the Hollywood producer of films such as Fight Club and The Big Short. Details of the investigations have been regularly leaked to Israeli media, but the court order was the first time the possible charges were made public by the police. One of the cases involves suspicions that Netanyahu, 67, received gifts including expensive cigars and champagne from wealthy businessmen, according to Channel 2 and other Israeli media. In a second case, Netanyahu is suspected of conspiring with the owner of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper to undermine a competing free daily backed by Adelson, according to Channel 2. Investigators also are looking into suspicions that Netanyahu associates improperly profited from Israel's purchase of nuclear submarines from Germany's ThyssenKrupp AG in a deal worth more than 1.5 billion, although Netanyahu himself isn't a suspect in that case. Netanyahu, Israel's second-longest serving prime minister, denies all wrongdoing and says the investigations are a witch hunt set off by political opponents. His office declined to comment on the police disclosures in Thursday's gag order. |
World | There Has Been a Change in the Mood Britains Vince Cable Leads the Charge to Reverse Brexit | London has a reputation for bad weather, but on Oct. 20 at about midday, the sky was a perfect blue. That was good news for Vince Cable, the leader of the U.K.'s centrist Liberal Democrats party. Buoyed by the lack of rain, he and roughly 700,000 others marched on the Houses of Parliament to call for a "People's Vote," or second referendum, on Britain's withdrawal from the European Union. "We're all here," Cable told the assembled marchers, "because we can see that Brexit is a potential disaster and because we believe it can be stopped." Although he spoke alongside politicians like London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Green Party former leader Caroline Lucas, it was his line that drew some of the wildest cheers "It's not inevitable.", Cable, 75, is an unlikely revolutionary. Between 2010 and 2015, he was a high-ranking minister for the "Lib Dems" for years, the UK's third largest party in a coalition government with the Conservative party. One of his colleagues back then became the prime minister, Theresa May, whose ongoing efforts to negotiate a deal in the E.U. capital of Brussels he is now trying to unravel. May's progress has been fraught. A snap election in June 2017 was meant to strengthen her position but returned her a reduced parliamentary majority, which has made it even harder to satisfy all parties. Senior cabinet resignations and fears of what a failure to secure a deal would mean for the country have bred an anxious mood. In April this year, in response, a number of lawmakers from across the political spectrum established the campaign for a People's Vote on whether or not to accept the Brexit deal. Support grew over the summer, and the Oct. 20 march was its greatest show of strength so far. A week and a half on from the march, Cable is sitting in his Westminster office looking out on a significantly colder and wetter vista. Just like the London weather, he believes there has been a profound shift in the outlook of the U.K. voting public on Brexit since the referendum, when 52 of the electorate voted for Britain to leave the E.U. "There is a general sense that the government has made a mess of the negotiation," he tells TIME. "Brexit is not remotely like what we were told at the time.", The solution Cable supports is another referendum, a national vote on the final terms of Britain's exit in which the electorate could choose to take whatever deal May brings back to London, or remain within the E.U. effectively halting Brexit forever. "It seems to me to be absolutely right that the public are given a choice whether they want to accept what's been negotiated on their behalf, or to remain within the E.U," he says. Before the October march, such views were dismissed as fringe. To some extent, they still are. Both the ruling Conservative Party and the main opposition Labour Party have accepted Brexit as "the will of the people" and have committed to seeing it through. And despite having been a key player in the government until 2015, Cable's party is now a diminished force. It has only a dozen lawmakers in Britain's parliament of 650, down from 57 when they were in government, and has slipped from third largest party to fourth, after the Scottish National Party. When Brexit came along, they saw their chance to rebrand themselves as the only major anti-Brexit party in Britain. "Critics of the People's Vote campaign thought there would be a token march with a few thousand people," Cable says of the recent 700,000-strong protest. "But it was on a scale that far surpassed any realistic expectations." That, he thinks, reflects a broader change in Britain one that could simultaneously reverse Brexit and sweep the Liberal Democrats to relevance once again. It might sound like wishful thinking, but Cable is confident. "It's very clear that there has been a change in the mood," he says. He is borne out by the polls, but only just. Recent surveys by YouGov show the public is still deeply divided on whether the U.K. was right or wrong to vote to leave in 2016. However, that balance has shifted from a slight majority for "right" just after the referendum to a consistent 3 lead for "wrong" in 2018. In July, a greater proportion of people polled 42 said they believed there should be a second referendum than those 40 who thought there should not the first time the balance has tipped since the vote. Cable's Liberal Democrats may see good fortune ahead by aligning themselves with the People's Vote project, but they are also driven by staunch liberal convictions, as their opponents love to point out. Cable doesn't necessarily hide that. "It's very difficult to see how Brexit can have a positive impact on Britain's role in the world," he says. "Britain was seen as a progressive force and it was influencing the whole of Europe, and we've lost that or will be losing it.", As the U.K.'s traditional centrist party, the Lib Dems have always struggled to stake out their own ground independent of their larger, domineering neighbors to the left and right. But, in the U.K. and across the world, Cable says the polarization of politics just might eventually allow centrist parties to thrive. "Brexit is one manifestation of this populist movement which is very damaging to international cooperation," he says. "It's certainly true that moderate, liberal social democratic parties have been under pressure in recent years but it's very far from a simple story.", President Emmanuel Macron in France and prime minister Justin Trudeau in Canada, he points out, are both moderates who have both benefited from the new hyperconnected political environment of the late 2010s. "The successful movements," he says, "have realized they've got to adapt their way of communicating to the electorate.", Trudeau's Canadian Liberals, in particular, are an example he's keen to emulate, and he confirms to TIME that the two parties have been cooperating. "What captured our attention was the fact they came from third to first," Cable says, of the Canadian party's re-emergence after being nearly wiped out at the polls in 2011. "They were written off as a failed liberal party, and actually they defeated and confounded all their critics.", Their secret weapon, Cable says, was turning their party into a mass movement as well as a formal political party, with fewer barriers to entry. He can only hope the People's Vote campaign provides an opportunity for the Lib Dems to do the same. |
World | Pope Francis Plans to Make It Easier for Couples to Have Marriages Annulled | Pope Francis announced one of the most significant reforms of his papacy on Tuesday changes to how Catholics can nullify a marriage. The changes are radical. An annulment is a finding by Catholic officials that a marriage between a man and a woman was not a real marriage for a variety of reasons. An annulment is not a divorce marriage in the Catholic church is an indissoluble bond, and so technically there isn't such a thing as "Catholic divorce," but Catholics can have their marriage annulled if Church leaders deem that the marriage was never valid in the first place. An annulment declares that a marriage did not meet the standard of a binding union, including being open to having children or being based on deceit. Previously, annulments could take years but the new process will reduce time, eliminate most fees, and increase the authority of the local bishop. Pope Francis is not favoring annulments he is streamlining the annulment process. His concern is spiritual, the salvation of souls, which as he explained in his introduction to the announcement remains the "supreme goal" of the Catholic Church's laws and institutions. He also is not unfamiliar with divorce his sister Maria Elena is divorced and not remarried and he has repeatedly said that the Church must find ways to embrace divorced people. Unlike changes in tone, annulment reform changes actual church laws. Pope Francis announced that starting December 8, 2015 non-coincidentally the same day that the Pope's declared Jubilee Year of Mercy begins the new laws about the nullity of marriage go into effect. The new laws are the most sweeping changes to the annulment process in 300 years, according to Pope Francis biographer Austen Ivereigh. Pope Francis' strategic timing is as interesting as the actual reforms. Francis made the announcement a month before the upcoming Synod of the Bishops on the family, a worldwide gathering of bishops to continue to discuss family and marriage issues that began last October at the Extraordinary Synod. The bishops last year called for faster and more accessible annulment process, Francis said in his announcement. Instead of waiting to announce annulment reform as a conclusion of this year's gathering, Francis preempted the process. He cleared the way for this next synod to discuss other issues of marriage and family everything from how to better embrace gay people to how to help families separated by migration, poverty, war, and economic realities. It is another sign that Pope Francis is thinking large about his papacy. Last week Pope Francis announced that priests can forgive the Catholic sin of abortion during the Year of Mercy. He also announced that the Vatican will, and every parish in Europe should, host refugee families. Families are at the core of his mission, and that topic will be central when he visits the United States late September for the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia. |
World | Swazilands King Declares His Country Will Now be Called the Kingdom of eSwatini | Exercising one of the perks of being Africa's last absolute monarch, Swaziland's King Mswati III announced Thursday that he would officially change the name of his country to the Kingdom of eSwatini. He declared the surprise decision during a joint celebration of the 50th anniversary of Swazi independence as well as his own 50th birthday, according to Reuters. On several previous occasions, the king has referred to Swaziland using his preferred term eSwatini, meaning "land of the Swazis" in the Swati language, including during a 2017 address to the U.N. General Assembly. Speaking to a stadium audience east of the capital on Wednesday, Mswati described the change as reverting back to the country's original name before colonization by the British, Reuters reports. The country gained independence in 1968. , The king added that the renaming would also help resolve an international branding issue. "Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland," he said. Mswati, who is the son of the previous monarch Sobhuza II and reportedly has 15 wives, was crowned in 1986 and rules by decree. He has elicited criticism for his regime's human rights records, and for living a lavish lifestyle in a small, landlocked nation that has the world's highest HIV/Aids rates and where most of the population relies on subsistence agriculture. |
World | A Series of 15 Grenade Bomb and Gun Attacks Rock Southern Thailand | Two suspected insurgents have been reported dead after a series of apparently coordinated attacks rocked 15 separate locations in Thailand's southern border provinces Wednesday. The attacks occurred between 730 p.m. and 830 p.m. local time in the restive Malay Pattani region's Narathiwat, Pattani and Songkhla provinces, according to the Thailand's the Nation, which cited local police reports. In 12 attacks reported in Narathiwat and Pattani, grenades were fired or hurled at military personnel, police stations, and villagers' homes. Suspected insurgents also opened fire on a unit of troops. A bomb reportedly killed two attackers in Songkhla province when it fell and exploded before they reached their target. A low-level separatist insurgency has persisted in Thailand's Muslim South for decades but intensified in the early 2000s, with attacks in Bangkok and Phuket blamed on southern militants. On August 11 and 12 last year, a wave of bomb and incendiary device attacks killed at least four people and injured more than 30, including about a dozen foreign nationals. Unlike Wednesday evening's attacks, those had targeted areas popular with tourists such as Phuket and the resort town of Hua Hin. The Nation |
World | Scotlands Vote Signals Big Change for the UK and Europe | At 7.30 am on Sept. 19, the Prime Minister of the still united United Kingdom appeared on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street. "The people of Scotland have spoken. It is a clear result," said David Cameron, and it was 55 in favor of the union against 45 for Scottish independence. "They have kept our country of four nations together. Like millions of other people, I am delighted.", But the Conservative Party leader didn't stop there. Ahead of the referendum, the three main parties in Westminster Cameron's Conservatives, their Liberal-Democrat coalition partners, and the opposition Labour Party had joined together to make a series of pledges to Scottish voters. In return for Scotland's fealty to the union, there would be a fast-tracked process to ensure a further devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament on tax, spending and welfare. And the formula by which public spending is allocated by the U.K. Treasury to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would remain unchanged. In other words, Scotland's population of 5.2 million would continue to enjoy public spending that is 2,671 higher per person than in England. The Guardian offers an explainer here about how and why the formula disadvantages the English., With Scotland now secure within the union, Cameron pink cheeked and bright eyed despite a sleepless night issued a fresh pledge, of "a balanced settlement fair to people in Scotland and importantly to everyone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well.", How might such a settlement be possible with Scots getting more from the public purse than their counterparts South of the border? The answer, as prominent members of his own party have already pointed out, is that it might not be. But Cameron's vision of fairness revolves not around funding mechanisms but British constitutional arrangements. "Just as Scotland will vote separately in the Scottish Parliament on their issues of tax, spending and welfare so too England, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, should be able to vote on these issues and all this must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland," he said. At first glance this appears a political masterstroke. The U.K. faces a general election in May 2015, with polls showing a lead for the Labour Party. Cameron's move not only seizes the initiative putting him firmly at the helm of a Big Idea to make Great Britain greater but it potentially damages his rivals too. The Conservatives are deeply unpopular in Scotland and hold only one Westminster seat there. Labour, by contrast, has 41 Scottish MPs. If those Labour MPs were no longer able to vote on English-only issues, a Labour majority at a general election could count for nothing on day-to-day votes in the House of Commons. The promise of English devolution also steals thunder from a party that in many respects poses a greater threat to the Conservatives than Labour the United Kingdom Independence Party UKIP, which campaigns on greater rights for English voters and also channels many of the sentiments that were in play in Scotland. UKIP appeals to voters who believe that the best way to protect self-interest against the sorts of global forces that saw subprime mortgage lending in the U.S. trigger a series of financial and economic crises across the world is to repudiate big alliances in favor of more localism. In May, UKIP gained more votes than the Conservatives and Labour in the elections to the European Parliament the first time in British modern history a national poll was lost by both of the largest parties. Though UKIP snatched votes from both parties, the Conservatives have most to fear, because UKIP's strongly euroskeptic, anti-immigration line not only appeals to many traditional Tory voters but has also opened splits in the Conservative Party. It was in an effort to hold his party together that Cameron in January 2013 suddenly promised an in-out referendum on the U.K.'s membership of the European Union before the end of 2017. This is a promise Cameron can only keep by winning the forthcoming general election. His gambit in the aftermath of the Scottish referendum appears to bring that prospect closer. But that depends on his being able to match grand words with grander deeds. One reason the U.K. system enshrines so many obvious unfairnesses it that any change to the system requires the consent of that system. Cameron needs to find consensus in both the House of Commons and House of Lords and among political parties that will understand only too well how the deal he is proposing could damage them. There is also the problem that in fixing one unfairness, it's easy accidentally to create another. Whatever happens, it now seems likelier that U.K. voters will eventually get a say on E.U. membership. Either Cameron will prevail in his audacious bid to overhaul Britain's democracy, providing a fillip to Tory chances, or and more likely the spectacle of the three main parties squabbling among themselves will deliver a fresh boost to UKIP, in turn pushing mainstream parties to become more euroskeptic. As Scotland has just demonstrated, increasing numbers of people believe smaller is better. The Scottish referendum may have strengthened one union but it has quite possibly weakened another. |
World | Central Italian Town Isnt Here Anymore After Earthquake | An earthquake with an initial magnitude of 6.2 and a series of powerful aftershocks rocked central Italy early on Wednesday, leaving at least 120 people dead and several small towns in ruins. Amatrice, near the quake's epicenter, was one of the hardest hit. An aerial picture over a historic part of town showed a significant portion had been razed. The mayor, Sergio Pirozzi, told the Associated Press "the town isn't here anymore.", The picture was taken by Gregorio Borgia, a photographer who started with AP in 2000. In an email, Borgia said he headed into the news organization's Rome bureau shortly after the quake to coordinate with colleagues and then fan out over the areas with severe damage. He was assigned to fly over Amatrice in a helicopter. "Everything was collapsed except for a few buildings, the more modern ones," he said. "Everything else was covered by the gray powder of debris." From an altitude that wouldn't interfere with rescue helicopters, he said the rescue workers seemed so small amid such destruction. Later in the day, he moved to another area, Pescara del Tronto, that was devastated by the earthquake. Throughout the day, civilians and rescue workers continued to search the rubble for survivors. |
World | More Than Me CEO Katie Meyler Temporarily Steps Down | Katie Meyler, the founder of More Than Me, temporarily stepped down from her position as the American charity's chief executive officer pending the results of a Liberian panel's review of an investigation published by ProPublica and TIME last Thursday. The focus of the article was the rapes of girls by a senior employee of the charity Meyler created to protect them from sexual exploitation. "In reviewing the allegations as published by ProPublica and TIME, we uncovered several statements that were either inconsistent with the information provided to us by More Than Me leadership or that were new information," the charity's Liberian advisory board said in a statement. The charity board's chairman, Skip Borghese, resigned, calling this an "inflection point" for the organization. And a three-person committee of the organization's board of directors said in a statement that it will select a law firm with educational and investigatory expertise to conduct its own "in-depth, independent audit of our organization, including our governing structure.", In response to the story, the charity says it will now provide private, schoolwide HIV testing at its academy. Macintosh Johnson, the former key staffer accused of rape, had AIDS when he died. While 10 girls testified against him, as many as 30 girls were named as potential victims. The 10 who testified were tested for HIV at the time. In a statement released Monday, a committee of seven Liberian government agencies said it was "greatly concerned" by ProPublica's findings and had convened two "emergency meetings" since the story published "with the view to taking the appropriate legal actions to protect the children and ensure they are safe.", The statement noted actions being taken by each of the agencies, "The Ministry of Justice will reopen the rape case against Johnson to determine any new evidence and further culpability.' The Ministry of Education will strengthen the monitoring and evaluation, and ensure that the regulation and compliance surrounding all schools are intensified. The Ministry of Health will work to address all health issues relating to the matter. The Ministry of Labor will investigate to determine whether there was strict adherence to the National HIV/AIDS workplace policy at More Than Me Academy, and whether any labor laws were violated. The Ministry of Youth and Sports will lead the anti-stigmatization efforts to ensure the protection of the survivors and other unrelated persons, who may have otherwise been affected. The Ministry of Finance and Development Planning will work on strengthening the implementation on monitoring, compliance and enforcement to ensure proper processes leading to accreditation of non-governmental organization. The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection will ascertain if there were any lapses in the adherence to the provisions of the Child Law of Liberia.", The government of Liberia wrote, in the statement, that "this will be a full-scale investigation," and it asked the public for information that would be helpful. These announcements came within four days of the publication of a story and documentary that brought to light how the charity missed opportunities to prevent the rape of its students by a key employee. In the years that followed, Meyler and the board deflected responsibility, placing blame entirely on Johnson and the systemic problems of operating in Liberia. Ninety minutes before the article went online, Meyler who had been informed by ProPublica of what the story would contain appeared on a radio show in Liberia with host Henry Costa. "They paid to appear," Costa wrote in response to critics on Facebook, asking why he had given the organization a platform. "What's the crime in hosting a paying customer to appear and discuss their work?", In the interview, Meyler and three charity staff members emphasized the good work the organization was doing. Tenneh Johnson, a staffer at the Liberian Ministry of Justice's sex crimes unit, called in "to confirm what More Than Me is saying. They are doing a very good work." The unit failed to successfully prosecute the case against Johnson and was suspected by jurors of bribery, which the unit denied. Costa then asked Meyler about "this unfortunate incident where one of your staff was involved there was some unfortunate sexual encounter with one of the girls. And you took charge of the situation, got ahead of it, had the authorities informed." Costa went on. "It seems that some people don't want to let it go. Now there is this report out there some guy has apparently made a documentary, clearly meant to profit from it, and he's trying to exploit it, and he's twisting the facts.", "Yep," Meyler said. "What do you make of it?" Costa asked. "Why don't they want to let this go?", "Costa, if you could maybe bring him on the show and ask him. That would be very helpful. I have no idea," Meyler said. "It was June 12, 2014, that I was alerted about the abuse. The perpetrator was in jail by June 16, and he never walked the streets again. And this will not go away.", In her closing comments on the show, Meyler repeated the only mistake she had acknowledged to ProPublica, which was that she was sorry for hiring Johnson. "Come on, Katie," asked Costa. "How could you have known?", The interview contrasted with the charity's official statement, which appeared on its web site the next day, "We are deeply, profoundly sorry. To all the girls who were raped by Macintosh Johnson in 2014 and before we failed you. We gave Johnson power that he exploited to abuse children. Those power dynamics broke staff ability to report the abuse to our leadership immediately. Our leadership should have recognized the signs earlier and we have and will continue to employ training and awareness programs so we do not miss this again. , "We acknowledge the enormous complexity of being responsible for the care of children and that previously we were naive to believe that providing education alone is enough to protect these girls from the abuses they may face strong institutions, safeguarding policies and vigilance are needed to do that.", Charity representatives were expected to attend a town hall meeting in the West Point neighborhood of the capital, Monrovia, announced by a Liberian public relations expert. Liberia's Vice President Jewel Howard Taylor was named as convenor of the discussion involving charity officials, government actors, families of survivors, and "all concerned citizens." But the event was called off. In a Facebook statement, the vice president called ProPublica's reporting "a horrific reminder of what continues to happen to the most vulnerable in our society." Emphasizing the need to care for the victims, she said "I vehemently denounce this act of exploiting our young girls and putting an organization's interest before the lives of our children. I will never condone these acts from anyone, be it foreign or domestic.", Amid a deluge of criticism of the organization and its founder, ProPublica's story has inspired a wider conversation among some Liberians about the prevalence of violence against women in Liberia, and about the lack of accountability of foreign aid groups operating in the country. The independent Liberian panel conducting one of the reviews will include representatives of prominent NGOs and the government of Liberia, and will be overseen by Liberian lawyer T. Negbalee Warner. The panel was convened by the charity's Liberian advisory board, which was formed in 2o15. In its statement on Sunday, the Liberian advisory board members said they met with three different government agencies overseeing justice, child welfare and education the day after the story published and "are willing to fully cooperate with the government in whatever it envisions to do." Girls supported by the charity reached out to the advisory board, fearful that the charity's programs and school could be closed. "They are concerned because they believe that the closure of the program is the end of their hope for a better future," the advisory board statement said. Meyler wrote in her own statement "I support the Advisory Board's decision and will cooperate fully with the investigative firm, and I believe stepping aside while the investigation is underway will further the goal of a thorough and impartial review. I'm confident that the results from this investigation will outline the best way forward for More Than Me.", The board of directors, in announcing its own full audit, said the three-member committee conducting it will be made up only of members who joined since 2015. "We fell short, and we are determined to learn all that we can from this painful chapter and to continue to support the girls who were victimized," the board said in a statement. It said it would direct auditors and investigators to be sensitive in dealing with the girls at risk of being re-traumatized, and said a mechanism would be established for anyone to anonymously submit information to the investigations. "We will be transparent in communicating the findings and recommendations we receive," it said. |
World | Many Ukrainians Want Russia To Invade | To many in Ukraine, a full-scale Russian military invasion would feel like a liberation. On Saturday, across the country's eastern and southern provinces, hundreds of thousands of people gathered to welcome the Kremlin's talk of protecting pro-Russian Ukrainians against the revolution that brought a new government to power last week. So far, that protection has come in the form of Russian military control of the southern region of Crimea, but on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin got parliamentary approval for a broad military intervention in Ukraine. As that news spread, locals in at least four major cities in the east of Ukraine climbed onto the roofs of government buildings and replaced the Ukrainian flag with the Russian tricolor. PHOTOS Crisis in Crimea Unrest in Russian Stronghold, For the most part, what drove so many people to renounce their allegiance to Ukraine was a mix of pride and fear, the latter fueled in part by misinformation from Moscow. The most apparent deception came on Saturday morning, when the Russian Foreign Ministry put out a statement accusing the new government in Kiev of staging a "treacherous provocation" on the Crimean peninsula. It claimed that "unidentified armed men" had been sent from Kiev to seize the headquarters of the Interior Ministry police in Crimea. But thanks to the "decisive actions of self-defense battalions," the statement said, the attack had been averted with just a few casualties. This statement turned out to be without any basis in fact. Igor Avrutsky, who was the acting Interior Minister of Crimea during the alleged assault, told TIME the following afternoon that it never happened. "Everything was calm," he says. Throughout the night, pro-Russian militiamen armed with sticks and shields had been defending the Crimean Interior Ministry against the revolutionaries, and one of the militia leaders, Oleg Krivoruchenko, also says there was no assault on the building. "People were coming and going as normal," he says. But the claims coming from Moscow were still enough to spread panic in eastern and southern Ukraine. On Saturday, pro-Russian activists in the Crimean capital of Simferopol staged a massive demonstration in the city, calling on residents to rally against the "Nazi authorities" who had come to power in Kiev. "What's happening in Ukraine is terrifying," says one of the organizers of the march, Evgenia Dobrynya. "We're in a situation now where the country is ruled by terrorists and radicals.", That is the picture of Ukraine's new government propagated in the Russian media, the main source of information for millions of people in eastern and southern Ukraine. For months, Russian officials and television networks have painted the revolutionaries as a fascist cabal intent on stripping ethnic Russians of their rights. Much of the coverage has amounted to blatant scaremongering. The key posts in the new government, including the interim President and Prime Minister, have gone to pro-Western liberals and moderates, and they have pledged to guarantee the rights of all ethnic minorities. But some of their actions have given Russia plenty of excuses to accuse them of doing the opposite. Within two days of taking power, the revolutionary leaders passed a bill revoking the rights of Ukraine's regions to make Russian an official language alongside Ukrainian. That outraged the Russian-speaking half of the country, and the ban was quickly lifted. But the damage was done. With that one ill-considered piece of legislation, the new leaders had convinced millions of ethnic Russians that a wave of repression awaited them. So it was no surprise on Friday when a livid mob in Crimea attacked a liberal lawmaker who came to reason with them. Struggling to make his case over the screaming throng, Petro Poroshenko was chased back to his car amid cries of "fascist!", Making matters worse has been the role of nationalist parties in the new government, including a small but influential group of right-wing radicals known as Pravy Sektor Right Sector, which embodies some of the greatest fears of Ukraine's ethnic Russian minority. Its leader, Dmitro Yarosh, has openly referred to Russia as the "centuries-old enemy of Ukraine," and has spent years training a small paramilitary force to fight what he calls "Russian imperialist ambitions.", In the past week, Ukraine's new leaders have been scrambling to figure out what to do with Yarosh. His role in the revolution was too significant for them to write him off. Having suffered dozens of casualties in fighting off police during deadly clashes in Kiev last month, his militia members are idolized as heroes by many supporters of the revolution across the country. "It's a real problem," says the pro-Western lawmaker Hrihory Nemiriya, whose fellow members of the Fatherland party now hold the interim presidency and premiership. "Right Sector people are very popular, but they are not in the government.", Yarosh has, however, been offered top positions in Ukraine's security structures. Zoryan Shkiryak, a revolutionary lawmaker involved in the negotiations over Yarosh's role in the government, says the right-wing militant was in the running to become deputy prime minister overseeing the security services. "That was on the table," Shkiryak tells TIME. After much debate, Yarosh was offered the role of deputy head of the National Security Council, but rejected it as beneath him. In his only interview with the Western press, Yarosh told TIME last month that he planned to turn Right Sector into a political party and run for office. "He could run for president," adds Nemiriya. Even that possibility has been enough to horrify the Russians in the east and the south, and Moscow has played on those fears to claim that Nazis are coming to power. On Saturday, when Putin asked his upper house of parliament to allow an invasion of Ukraine, the lawmakers had no trouble coming up with a justification. "What's happening in Ukraine is a true mutiny, a plague of brown-shirts," said one of the senators, Nikolai Ryzhkov. In the Crimean capital of Simferopol, that logic took hold. Thousands of people marched through the streets of the city on Saturday carrying enormous Russian flags and chanting "Fascism will not pass!" Dobrynya, the organizer, said her greatest concern was the role of Right Sector in the new government. "We're supposed to accept these radicals deciding who is going to rule Ukraine? That can't happen. So thank God we have these wonderful guardians now," she said, gesturing toward the battalion of Russian marines who were guarding the Crimean parliament building. In four other cities of eastern Ukraine, major demonstrations called for Russia to send similar contingents to protect them from the "fascists." Now, with the approval of his obedient legislature, Putin seems to ready to oblige, surely comforted by the fact that cheering crowds would come out to greet the Russian tanks if they do roll over the border into eastern Ukraine. |
World | A Dead Man in India Woke Up Just Minutes Before a Postmortem Examination | A man, presumed dead and brought to a mortuary in the Indian city of Mumbai on Sunday, gave the facility's staff a considerable shock when he woke up a few minutes before they were about to conduct a postmortem examination. The 50-year-old homeless man was declared dead by a doctor on Sunday afternoon and sent immediately to the morgue despite rules that stipulate a two-hour waiting period after death, the BBC reported. The head of Mumbai's Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital, Dr. Suleiman Merchant, told reporters on Monday that doctors didn't detect a pulse or heartbeat on the man, whom doctors named only as Prakash. His face was also reportedly covered in maggots, and local media reported that he was found lying at a bus stop. "Maggots eat human tissues. Usually dead bodies have maggots," Merchant said. "He must have been lying around for at least six or seven days.", Prakash is currently stable and is undergoing treatment for malnourishment and an ear infection at the hospital's intensive care unit, the BBC says. BBC |
World | Canadas Ethics Office Is Investigating Justin Trudeau Over Vacation on Aga Khans Island | Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being investigated over the vacation he and his family spent on the private Bahamian island of billionaire philanthropist and spiritual leader Aga Khan over Christmas. The country's federal conflict-of-interest and ethics office is now determining whether Trudeau's visit to Khan's home breached conflict-of-interest rules, a spokeswoman for Mary Dawson, the ethics commissioner, confirmed to the New York Times Monday. Trudeau's press secretary told the paper that the Prime Minister, who also used Khan's private helicopter, is happy to answer "any questions" that the commissioner might have. At a press conference last Friday,Trudeau told journalists "This was our personal family vacation and the questions you're asking, I allow you to reflect on them," the BBC reports. Shah Karim al-Hussayni, the Aga Khan IV of France, had an estimated wealth of 800 million in 2011, according to Forbes. The Aga Khan, who does not rule over a specific geographic territory, is known for extravagant possessions including a lavish yacht club in Sardinia. |
World | 17 Dead at Least 4 Injured as Fire Engulfs New Delhi Hotel | NEW DELHI Seventeen people died in a fire early Tuesday at a hotel in western New Delhi that left at least four others injured, police said. The fire at the Arpit Palace Hotel has been extinguished, but authorities are still investigating what sparked it, Deputy Police Commissioner Mandeep Singh Randhawa said. "We have to check the stability of the structure, check every room," Randhawa said. The hotel is located in Karol Bagh, an area in India's capital city full of shops and budget hotels that is popular with tourists. Twenty-five fire engines responded to the blaze, which had engulfed all but the ground floor of the five-story hotel, fire officer Vijay Paul said. About three dozen people were rescued from the hotel, Paul said. Among those rescued was Sivanand Chand, 43, a hotel guest who was jolted awake around 4 a.m. struggling to breathe. "When I got out of my room, I could hear help, help!' from adjoining rooms," Chand told The Associated Press, adding that he opened the window and saw flames rising very fast. "In 15 minutes, the whole room was black," he said. The rescue took about 30 minutes because fire engine ladders could not initially reach Chand's floor, he said. The injured were taken to hospitals, but their medical conditions were not immediately known. |
World | Philippine Lawmakers Demand Answers About President Rodrigo Dutertes Health | A high-profile lawmaker in the Philippines has called for transparency from her prison cell over the health of President Rodrigo Duterte, who has taken his fourth consecutive day of leave amid an escalating crisis in the country's south. Senator Leila De Lima, the former justice minister and Duterte critic who was imprisoned in February on charges of drug trafficking, said the government should promptly inform the public about the 72-year-old President's condition in order to stem rumors and speculation, calling for a full disclosure as "a matter of public interest and national security.", Her call comes as government forces are trying to reclaim the besieged city of Marawi from militants who claim allegiance to the Islamic State. The Philippine Daily Inquirer reports that De Lima issued a written statement from her cell in a Manila prison. Local news site Rappler reports that several other senators followed suit, citing two other lawmakers' public appeals for answers. Senator Panfilo Lacson said the President's health was "not his or his family's private affair," urging the government to "disclose the current state of health of the President if only to quell any speculation about his health. The public deserves nothing less.", Duterte's spokesperson Ernesto Abella previously told reporters that the President was "just taking some time off to rejuvenate," Agence France-Press reports, though the length of his leave and his absence at several important national events this week have caused concern that his condition could be more serious than Malacaang would let on. Duterte was last seen in public on Sunday, June 11, after visiting soldiers who were injured during the conflict in Marawi City. Read More The Battle for Marawi City, Duterte declared martial law in Marawi and the greater Mindanao district at the outset of the conflict. The city has been under siege by militants for weeks, and reports indicate that the death toll in the battle for Marawi is climbing. The conflict has presented the greatest challenge yet for the Duterte government, which assumed power almost one year ago on a populist platform of ridding the country of drugs and developing the economy. Since taking office, Duterte has launched a brutal war on drugs that has killed more than 7,000 alleged dealers and users, courting harsh condemnation from the U.N. most Western governments and human rights advocates. Inquirer, Rappler |
World | US Continues Airstrikes in Northern Iraq | The Pentagon continued Saturday to direct airstrikes against Iraqi militants and carry out supply drops for vulnerable refugees after President Barack Obama said he doesn't have an end date in mind for American aerial involvement in Iraq. "I don't think we're going to solve this problem in weeks," Obama told reporters before departing Washington for a family vacation. "This is going to take some time.", The U.S. military continued to attack militant targets on Sunday, using both fighters and drones to help defend Kurdish forces near Irbil. Three Islamic State of Iraq and Syria ISIS trucks and a mortar position were destroyed in overnight raids. Obama said that airstrikes, which began Friday, have destroyed weapons that would have been used by ISIS to continue its offensive into northern Iraq. He also announced that France and the United Kingdom have agreed to help provide humanitarian assistance to tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar surrounded by ISIS fighters. "We feel confident we can prevent ISIL from going up the mountain and slaughtering people who are there," Obama said, using an alternative acronym for the militant group. He added that the next step will be securing the refugees a path to safety. Obama's statement came hours before U.S. forces conducted a third successful airdrop involving one C-17 and two C-130 cargo aircraft dropping a total of 72 bundles of supplies, including food and water for thousands of citizens on Iraq's Mount Sinjar. The civilians, largely ethnic Yazidi, sought shelter on the mountain as Kurdish forces have suffered setbacks at the hands of the Islamist militant group. The supply drop included 3,804 gallons of drinking water and 16,128 ready-to-eat meals. "To date, in coordination with the government of Iraq, U.S. military aircraft have delivered more than 52,000 meals and more than 10,600 gallons of fresh drinking water, providing much-needed aid to the displaced Yazidis, who urgently require emergency assistance," the Pentagon said in a statement. American officials said the drops will continue as long as there is a humanitarian need, adding they expect that need to continue for some time. Months after suggesting the group was "JV" compared to core al Qaeda, Obama acknowledged Saturday that ISIS had caught American intelligence officials and lawmakers flat-footed. "I think that there is no doubt that their advance, their movement has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and the expectations of policymakers," he said. Obama said a long-term solution to the crisis requires new political leadership on the part of the Iraqi government, calling on leaders there to form "an inclusive government" and for all ethnic groups to join together to oppose ISIS. "This is going to be a long-term project," he said. The president also defended his administration from critics who argue he should have American ground forces in Iraq. "As if this was my decision," Obama protested. He said "the reason we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq is a majority of Iraqis did not want our troops there.", The third humanitarian airdrop accompanied four airstrike missions carried out by U.S. fighters and remotely piolted aircraft on ISIS forces threatening the Yazidis, destroying four armored armored personal carriers and an armed truck. The United States' military interest in Iraq extends to protecting American military personnel and civilians in the Kurdish city of Erbil, which is the location of a U.S. consulate. President Barack Obama authorized both the humanitarian and military operations Thursday night. "We intend to stay vigilant, and take action if these terrorist forces threaten our personnel or facilities anywhere in Iraq, including our consulate in Erbil and our embassy in Baghdad," Obama said Thursday in a primetime statement from the White House. But Obama ruled out any U.S. ground forces becoming involved in the battle against ISIS. "American combat troops will not be returning to fight in Iraq," he said. Obama also told The New York Times in an interview posted late Friday that the U.S. would not become "the Iraqi air force," while arguing the U.S. has a "strategic interest in pushing back" against the Islamist group. Hundreds of American troops are already in Iraq, advising Iraqi security forces and protecting U.S. facilities. On Friday, U.S. Central Command released footage of the first humanitarian airdrop carried out Thursday night, U.S. Central Command also released video footage of two of the airstrikes carried out Friday, |
World | US May Engage Iran in Talks Over Iraq Crisis | The Obama Administration is "open" to direct talks with Iran over the exploding crisis in Iraq, Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview published Monday, as militants who say they massacred hundreds of Iraqi soldiers continued their march toward Baghdad and the U.S. embassy there evacuated some personnel. Kerry told Yahoo News that drone strikes in the country "may well" be an option. Asked if the military cooperation with Iran might be on the table, Kerry said he wouldn't "rule out anything that would be constructive." State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki later walked back the latter comment, saying on Twitter that the Administration is open to "political conversation with Iran" but "not military cooperation.", U.S. diplomats may discuss the situation in Iraq with their Iranian counterparts as early as Monday while in Geneva for the so-called "P5+1" talks about Iran's nuclear program, a senior Administration official said. "It may be that on the margins of P5+1, but completely unconnected to it, there may be some conversation," the official said. Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan, a national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, were in Geneva on Monday. With the U.S. embassy in Baghdad relocating some employees, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel on Monday ordered another American warship to the Persian Gulf to protect "American citizens and interests in Iraq," a Pentagon spokesman said in a statement. "Its presence in the Gulf adds to that of other U.S. naval ships already thereincluding the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bushand provides the commander-in-chief additional options to protect American citizens and interests in Iraq, should he choose to use them," Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said. The potential outreach to Iran comes as the Islamic Republic has already offered to help Iraq battle Sunni insurgents destabilizing the country and fomenting sectarian unrest. The Guardian, citing an unnamed senior Iraqi official, reports Iran has already sent 2,000 troops across the border. Iran's Shi'ite government is wary of the gains by Sunni militants in Iraq, while the U.S. is watching a country where it invested years, thousands of lives and more than a trillion dollars descend into chaos. That could make common cause for frequent foes already engaged in unprecedented diplomacy over the country's nuclear program. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the possible talks Sunday. Congressional Republicans have criticized the Obama Administration over the situation in Iraq, and Sen. John McCain said Monday that it would be the "height of folly" to work with Iran to stabilize the country. "This is the same Iranian regime that has trained and armed the most dangerous Shia militant groups, that has consistently urged Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki to pursue a narrow sectarian agenda at the expense of national reconciliation, that supplies the rockets that have been fired at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, that has sponsored acts of terrorism throughout the Middle East and the world, and that continues to use Iraq's territory and airspace to send weapons and fighters to prop up Bashar al-Assad in Syria," McCain said in a statement. "The reality is, U.S. and Iranian interests and goals do not align in Iraq, and greater Iranian intervention would only make the situation dramatically worse.", President Hasan Rouhani of Iran said Saturday that he was open to working with the U.S. in Iran, the Journal reports. "When the U.S. takes action, then one can think about cooperation," Rouhani said in Tehran. "Until today, no specific request for help has been demanded. But we are ready to help within international law.", Secretary of State John Kerry signaled Saturday that any talks would be unconnected to the nuclear negotiations. "Whatever dialogue may or may not be taking place with Iran would take place on the sideline or outside the mainstream of the nuclear talks," Kerry said. "We don't want that linked and mixed.", Militants who have captured Iraq's second-largest city Mosul, as well as Tikrit, took over the northern town of Tal Afar on Monday, the Associated Press reports, which sits along the key highway to Syria. |
World | British Muslim Removed From USBound Airplane with No Explanation | A British Muslim math teacher with a valid visa said he was "made to feel like a criminal" when he was prevented from boarding an airplane heading to the United States. Juhel Miah, from Swansea in Wales, was traveling to New York from Reykjavik in Iceland with a group of school children on Feb. 16 when he told he had been selected for a random security check. He was then taken to a room and searched before being informed that he was unable to board the plane, Wales Online reports. Miah, 25, told the news site that his luggage was taken from him and he was forced to stay in an "horrendous hotel" before school officials booked him on a flight back to the U.K.. "As I was getting my luggage the teachers and kids were confused," he said. "I couldn't believe this was happening. All the plane was quiet. I was being escorted out. It made me feel like a criminal. I couldn't speak, I was lost for words.", It is unclear why Miah was refused entry to the U.S. One week before he was removed from the plane, a panel of three judges unanimously upheld a temporary restraining order against President Donald Trump's executive order that banned arrivals from seven Muslim-majority countries. A spokesperson from a local Welsh borough council has written to the Embassy of the United States of America in London demanding an explanation over what they described as "an unjustified act of discrimination.", TIME received no immediate response from the U.S. Embassy in London. Wales Online |
World | A Philippine Volcano May Be About to Blow and 12000 Have Been Evacuated | An ominous glow from the Philippines' most active volcano has prompted the evacuation of more than 12,000 people from its surrounding areas. There have been a series of quakes and rockfalls at Mount Mayon in the country's Bicol region, sparking fears of a possible eruption, Reuters reports. "We are now raising the alert status of Mayon Volcano from alert level 2 to 3," said Renato Solidum, head of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, on Tuesday. Joey Salceda, governor of the Albay province where the mountain is located, said the evacuees would be housed in temporary shelters for up to three months. Salceda said that as of now the 6 to 8 km "danger zone" around the volcano had been cleared, and if it erupts, then villagers facing the southeastern crater rim would also be moved to safer areas. Mayon has erupted nearly 50 times in the past 600 years. Its worst eruption, in 1841, killed 1,200 people. Reuters |
World | White House Says It Will Continue to Challenge China in South China Sea | A White House advisor defended the Obama administration's actions in the South China Sea, saying the U.S. will continue to demonstrate its commitment to "freedom of navigation" in the region. "That's our interest there It's to demonstrate that we will uphold the principle of freedom of navigation," Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said, Reuters reports. The U.S. sent a guided missile destroyer on a sail close to a man-made island in the South China Sea. The move was seen as a challenge to the 12-nautical mile territorial claims China makes around its man-made islands. On Tuesday, Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr. the leader of the U.S. Pacific Command, made similar statements at a small event at a University in Beijing, the New York Times reports. "We've been conducting freedom of navigation operations all over the world for decades, so no one should be surprised by them," Admiral Harris said, according to the Times. "The South China Sea is not, and will not, be an exception.", |
World | Why the Danish Prime Minister Is Campaigning in the UK Election | It's normally a rule-of-thumb that politicians do not get involved in the domestic politics of other nations. Yet the Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was seen on Thursday morning coming out of a polling station in Aberavon in west Wales. On Thursday, the U.K. is voting for a new legislature and government. Thorning-Schmidt was there to support her husband, Stephen Kinnock, who is the left-of-center Labour Party candidate. Kinnock is best known in the U.K. as the son of former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Thorning-Schmidt is best known in the U.S. as the woman who incurred Michelle Obama's displeasure after posing for a selfie with her husband and and U.K Prime Minister David Cameron who is the leader of the right-of-center Conservative Party in 2013 at the funeral of Nelson Mandela. Kinnock said he was hoping for a good result. "We've worked hard for every single vote so I don't think we describe it as a safe seat at all. It's a seat where you have to fight for every single vote. We've had thousands of conversations, almost up to 10,000, walked hundreds of miles, I've had a great team helping." |
World | Iran Launches Plan to Boost Its Uranium Enrichment Capacity | Iran announced it was building a new centrifuge production plant at its Natanz nuclear facility, indicating a possible future restart to enrichment activity following the U.S.'s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement. Iran has vowed to limit enrichment of nuclear material to sub-weapons grade levels under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action JCPOA, but the new plant suggests that the country could be bolstering its ability to ramp up nuclear activity should the agreement collapse further, according to the New York Times. President Donald Trump confirmed that the U.S. would abandon the deal last month, calling it "defective at its core" and reimposing sanctions on Iran's central bank chief. Trump also warned Iran against restarting its nuclear program, threatening "very severe consequences." Other signatories, including Germany, France, and the U.K. are now trying to salvage the deal. Read more Former Israeli PM The Iran Deal Was Flawed. But Trump's Decision Makes the World More Uncertain', Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told Iranian state television that the new centrifuge facility remained "in line with our safeguard commitments" under the deal, according to the Times. In a speech Monday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, called on the country's atomic agency to begin preparations to increase uranium enrichment capacity, reports the Tehran Times. Though he reiterated that the country would abide by the accord's constraints, which limits uranium enrichment to 3.67. Iran's nuclear facilities are regularly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA under the 2015 agreement. It remains unclear if or when the facility will begin making new centrifuges. An IAEA spokesperson said Tuesday that they received a letter from Iran declaring a "tentative schedule" to start production of uranium hexafluoride, the raw material for the centrifuges, the BBC reports. |
World | Duterte is Assassinating Opponents Under the Cover of the Drug War Philippine Rights Groups Say | The assassination of two provincial mayors in two days has raised fresh fears that law and order in the Philippinesalready in a fragile state as the result of a bloody war on drugsis deteriorating further. On Tuesday, motorcycle-riding gunmen ambushed Mayor Ferdinand Bote in his car after he left a meeting in Cabanatuan City, about 100 miles north of Manila. The morning before, a suspected sniper shot Mayor Antonio Halili in the chest as he sung the national anthem in front of Tanauan City Hall in Batangas, about 40 miles south of the capital. Their deaths have brought to at least 10 the number of mayors who have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in 2016. Halili, who had gained local notoriety for parading drug suspects on "walks of shame", was stripped of his powers to supervise anti-drug operations when authorities included him on a list of government officials supposedly linked to narcotics the administration is fond of making such accusations, often without proof. His death came just four days after Duterte publicly joked that vice mayors should kidnap or otherwise depose their bosses. "The earlier you do away with your mayor, the earlier you become the mayor also," he told an audience in Bohol province, where at least two mayors have been killed since he took office. "Duterte's culture of violence is upon us. No one is safe now," opposition senator Antonio Trillanes, said in a statement Tuesday. Trillanes, who last year told TIME he was an assassination target, added that whether or not Halili's killing turned out to be connected to the war on drugs, the president had turned the Philippines "into the murder capital of Asia.", Read more Another Philippine Mayor Accused of Drug Ties Has Been Killed in a Police Raid, The Philippines has a long history of political killings. The 1983 assassination of Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino Jr.a politician and vocal opponent of the dictator Ferdinand Marcoswas one of the driving forces behind the so-called People Power Revolution that ousted the autocrat. In 2009, under then-President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, gunmen killed at least 57 people traveling with supporters of a politician challenging a powerful clan in local elections. But the latest spate of mayoral murders "reflects the persistent climate of impunity" that has been exacerbated by Duterte's drug war, author and analyst Richard Heydarian tells TIME. "To this date, we are yet to see any of the cases of extrajudicial killings resolved, highlighting the disturbing erosion of rule of law," he says. According to some estimates, more than 20,000 people have died in the war on drugs. Human rights groups say Duterte, a former mayor elected on an anti-crime platform, is using the drug war as a cover to crack down on political opponents. The deaths of mayors like Halili strikes fear into the hearts of "politicians, especially in the provinces, who are then forced to toe Duterte's line," says Carlos Conde, Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch's HRW Asia division. Months after his election, the Philippine President read out a list of 158 public officials he accused of being involved in the narcotics trade. This year, his administration put out another list of 600 people, including a UN Special Rapporteur, alleged to be communist terrorists. At least four mayors on government "narco-lists" are now dead. They include Mayor Samsudin Dimaukom who had run on a Liberal Party ticket in the southern town of Datu Saudi Ampatuan. Dimaukom, 53, denied Duterte's accusation that he was involved in narcotics. But in October 2016, Anti-narcotics officers killed him and nine of his men. Also on the list was Mayor Rolando Espinosa of Leyte, who denied involvement in narcotics but surrendered to police to beat a 24-hour deadline on a "shoot on sight" order. In what the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation later deemed a "rub out," a police team shot Espinosa dead while he was awaiting trial, claiming he resisted the officers who had come to search his jail cell. Local authorities had guaranteed Espinosa's safety in return for his signing a highly questionable affidavit that linked 226 police, government officials, and media workers to an illicit drug enterprise supposedly run by his son. The list included Senator Leila de Lima, who led an investigation into Duterte's prosecution of the drug war before she was jailed on implausible drug-related charges in February 2017. De Lima has denied the allegations against her. Read more Duterte Has Brazenly Reinstated 19 Police Who Murdered a Philippine Mayor Last Year, In July 2017, Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog of Ozamiz become the third such official in less than a year to die in a shoot-out with police after being accused of having links to the illegal drug trade. Police gunned down Parojinog, his wife, two of his siblings, and 11 other people in a series of coordinated pre-dawn raids on properties including the mayor's residence. Local authorities claimed officers were attempting to serve Parojinog an arrest warrant when they were "met with a volley of fire" from security guards at his compound. But the mayor's daughter has accused police of planting drugs at the scene, and Philippine Senator Panfilo Lacson said the suspicious circumstances of the mayor's death "create the impression that search warrants are merely being used by the Philippine National Police to facilitate extrajudicial killing.", Strongmen in the Philippines have long used assassination to retain control of their territories, according to HRW's Conde. The difference now is that Duterte has normalized such killings by packaging them as part of the "war on drugs." The fear they have created is quickly eroding opposition. Says Conde "An illustration of this is the fact that most local politicians hitherto aligned with the Liberal Party are now with Duterte's party." |
World | China Has Launched the Robocops You Have Been Waiting For | China has unveiled a robotic crime fighter known as the AnBot. Developed by the National Defense University, this 1.49-m, 78-kg droid patrols at a leisurely 1 km/h albeit with a touted top speed of 18 km/h and "will play an important role in enhancing the country's anti-terrorism and anti-riot measures," the state mouthpiece People's Daily reported Tuesday. Lauding "sensors that mimic the human brain, eyes and ears," the article explains that when people nearby face security threats, "the robot's control personnel can remotely deploy AnBot's electrically charged riot control tool.", , The AnBot was debuted at the 12th Chongqing Hi-Tech Fair on April 21. It is apparently "capable of eight hours of continuous work," says the People's Daily, without specifying how long it takes for a recharge. Also conspicuously absent from the report is any mention of a feature that may prove useful to Chinese terrorists or rioters striving to outwit an indignant AnBot its inability to climb stairs. |
World | Celebrate Prince Georges Birthday with the Cutest Photo Yet | On the eve of Prince George's second birthday, parents Prince William and Kate Middleton shared an adorable photo of Royal Baby 1. The picture, which features a toothy grin from both father and son, was taken at Princess Charlotte's christening on July 5 at the Queen's Sandringham estate. "This photograph captures a very happy moment on what was a special day for The Duke and Duchess and their family," a spokesman for Kensington Palace said. "They are very pleased to share this picture as they celebrate Prince George's second birthday." |
World | Myanmar Military Officials Implicated in Crimes Against Humanity for Role in Rohingya Violence | Amnesty International has identified 13 Myanmar military and police officials as having a key role in recent violent crimes against the country's Rohingya Muslim minority, reiterating calls for the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court. A landmark report released Wednesday says the organization possesses evidence that nine out of 11 Crimes Against Humanity listed in the Rome Statute, including murder, rape and torture, were committed against the minority since late last year in a campaign of violence that has been labeled ethnic cleansing by the U.N. and Washington. Human rights groups say there is evidence of genocide. The 190-page report, based on more than 400 interviews conducted over nine months during research missions to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, describes witness and other accounts of unlawful killings, gang-rape, deprivation of vital resources and the burning of Rohingya villages in a "targeted and deliberate manner.", The Rohingya are a persecuted and mostly stateless Muslim minority from Rakhine state in western Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country. After an insurgent group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army ARSA launched several early morning attacks on state security forces on Aug. 25, 2017, the Myanmar military carried out brutal reprisals targeting Rohingya civilians. , More than 700,000 Rohingya have since fled across the border into Bangladesh, representing roughly 80 of the group's total estimated population in northern Rakhine state. About 200,000 Rohingya were already living in refugee settlements in the Bangladeshi district of Cox's Bazar, having fled earlier violence, and the group has a total estimated population of about 1.1 million. Read more Championing Rohingya Rights in Myanmar Cost Me 12 Years in Prison. It's a Price Worth Paying, Amnesty further alleges that the military abuses occurred both before and after the August attacks by ARSA, which had also launched earlier attacks in October 2016. The report identifies two combat divisions known to have been involved in prior abuses elsewhere in the country Light Infantry Divisions 33 and 99 that were deployed to Rakhine state weeks before the August violence began. In a separate report Tuesday, Reuters detailed the specific role of Myanmar's 33rd and 99th LIDs in carrying out the offensive. "The explosion of violence including murder, rape, torture, burning and forced starvation perpetrated by Myanmar's security forces in villages across northern Rakhine state was not the action of rogue soldiers or units," said Matthew Wells, Senior Crisis Adviser at Amnesty International. "There is a mountain of evidence that this was part of a highly orchestrated, systematic attack on the Rohingya population." , Moreover, Amnesty's report suggests that senior military officials would have been involved in the deployment of troops and equipment linked to serious crimes or subsequent attempts to cover them up, and that they "knew or should have known" the location and activities of ground units on specific days. Amnesty said the country's Senior Command, the office of Commander-in-Chief Sen-Gen Min Aung Hlaing, "appears to have been actively engaged in overseeing the operations.", Since the crisis began, the government of Myanmar, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied atrocities and blocked almost all access to affected parts of Rakhine state on security grounds, allowing only limited visits by diplomats, humanitarian and development actors and journalists on tightly controlled trips. To date, seven soldiers are known to have been investigated and possibly imprisoned for their role in the killing of 10 Rohingya men in one village, but Amnesty says all other military-led inquiries have been "whitewashes.", Wednesday's report represents a major step toward seeking accountability for the violence and consequent humanitarian crisis, and includes recommendations to the U.N. the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the international community, the Myanmar authorities, the leadership of ARSA, the government of Bangladesh and humanitarian actors toward ensuring peace, justice and sustainable livelihoods for those affected. Read more Myanmar's Crisis, Bangladesh's Burden Among the Rohingya Refugees Waiting for a Miracle, On Monday, the E.U. and Canada announced sanctions against seven senior Myanmar military officials accused of involvement in the campaign against the Rohingya, including Maj-Gen Maung Maung Soe, who oversaw the operations as head of the Western Command at the time. Maung Maung Soe was later transferred to another command and was dismissed Monday due to what the military called his underperformance during the crisis in Rakhine, according to Reuters. He is also subject to U.S. sanctions due to his role in the conflict. Earlier this month, Myanmar signed an agreement with U.N. agencies that could lead to the eventual repatriation of Rohingya refugees. The governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed in November to work toward the same goal, though human rights groups remain doubtful that the safe and sustainable return of some 700,000 Rohingya can be guaranteed. |
World | Pope Francis Met With Apple CEO Tim Cook | Pope Francis had a meeting Friday with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Neither party has disclosed what was discussed, but afterward, the Pope spoke about technology and social media, calling modern forms of communicating "a gift of God," according to Reuters. Pope Francis, 79, delivered the message for the Roman Catholic Church's World Day of Communications. "Emails, text messages, social networks and chats can also be fully human forms of communication," he said. "It is not technology which determines whether or not communication is authentic, but rather the human heart and our capacity to use wisely the means at our disposal.", The Pope is admittedly a "disaster" when it comes to technology, but this is his second meeting in a week with a tech industry heavyweighthe sat down with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt last week. Cookor "Signor Timothy Donald Cook, Amministratore Delegato di Apple"met with the Pope in Rome, according to the Pontiff's daily schedule posted to Twitter. , There is no word on whether Pope Francis was able to get the two tech giants to lay down their arms and comes to terms over competing mobile phone platforms. |
World | Despite Trumps One China Pledge Plenty of Obstacles to Smooth SinoUS Ties Remain | On his 20th full day in office, President Donald Trump finally had his first conversation with his Chinese counterpart. He reportedly told Xi Jinping, during what was described as an "extremely cordial" call, that the U.S. would honor the "one China" policy. But while that has eased immediate tensions between the world's top two economies, potential flash points remain. The democratic aspirations of China's freest city, Hong Kong, could be one. A pro-independence group in Hong Kong sent a letter Wednesday to the White House, urging Trump use the power of executive orders to intervene in Beijing's continuous encroachment of rights and freedoms in the city. "Blocking the arrogant, lawless and dishonorable communist regime from harming the world through Hong Kong is of the common interest of the U.S. and the city," read a statement from the Hong Kong National Party. "We can see that the majority of Trump's team take a firm, hawkish and unfriendly stance towards China," convener Chan Ho-tin tells TIME. Read More Hong Kong's Former Governor Slams U.K. for Kowtowing' to China Over Eroding Rights, During his campaign, Trump was markedly more hostile toward China than previous candidates. Trump repeatedly took aim at Beijing on the campaign trail during one debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump not only claimed falsely that climate change was a Chinese-invented hoax but also accused it of "using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild" itself. He also suggested, when President-elect, that the U.S. shouldn't "have to be bound" by its four-decade recognition of China as one single entity "unless we make a deal.", Then there was the call from Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, which Trump took, prompting frantic reactions from people living in the mainland, and a forceful response from Beijing that closer U.S.-Taiwan links were "out of the question.", Then, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson characterized China's construction of militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea as "akin to Russia's taking Crimea" from Ukraine in 2014, and suggested that the U.S. should block China's access to those islands. His comments drew fiery responses from the Chinese state and state-run media alike in the following days. More recently, Defense Secretary James Mattis reassured Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe during his visit to Japan and South Korea that a group of disputed islands in the East China Sea known in Japan as the Senkakus and in China as Diaoyu would remain covered by the joint U.S.-Japan security pact. At one point, there were fears that relations between the U.S. and China may well head toward a downward spiral, with state media in China warning after Tillerson's comments that "the two sides had better prepare for a military clash.", Read More Donald Trump's Top Priority Must Be a Strong China Strategy, But longtime China analyst Willy Lam tells TIME that, judging by Trump's call and his letter to Xi which says he looks forward to a "constructive relationship" the U.S. leader is dialing down his China rhetoric at least for now. These instances "show that Trump might not be carrying out the threats he made during the campaign, for example, labeling China as a currency manipulator and slapping a 25 tariff on Chinese products," Lam says. He suggests that China is "somewhat hopeful" that Trump would climb down from his hard-line posture during the campaign and be willing to talk. "Even though it's difficult to predict anything about Trump, it seems that he's amenable to negotiations first," Lam adds. As for whether a more confrontational Trump administration would be a forceful defender of freedoms in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the face of China, Lam sees the two places as merely the "Taiwan card" and the "Hong Kong card" in Washington's dealings with Beijing. "I don't think he's genuinely committed to backing democratic rights for Taiwan and Hong Kong," he tells TIME. |
World | Trumps Trade War Is Already Hurting American Whiskey Distillers | The consequences of the Trump administration's steel and aluminum tariffs are already being felt across global markets. But the makers of one iconic American product say they stand to suffer more than most bourbon whiskey distillers. The European Union said yesterday that it would impose tariffs on U.S. imports in retaliation for new duties of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminium coming from the E.U. Mexico and Canada. These key allies had initially been exempt from the tariffs, which were applied to other countries in March. Bourbon whiskey is among the U.S. exports on the E.U.'s list of potential targets for retaliatory tariffs, alongside Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Levi's jeans. Distillers and whiskey sellers told TIME the threat of retaliation had already had an impact. "Even before these tariffs are in place, I'm losing business," says Stephen Gould, founder of the Colorado-based Golden Moon Distillery, which sells bourbon to several countries in the E.U. "I've already had customers in Europe that have stopped ordering because they're concerned.", "I'm having to do damage control with partners in Italy and the U.K. I'm going to have to take a cut on my profits, because the people on the other side won't take the hit. If it's more expensive to get American bourbon or rye they'll just go for other products.", The stock markets reacted badly to the U.S. and E.U.'s announcements, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 252 points, or 1, as investors sold off shares in manufacturers and businesses that could be affected. "What the president thinks is helping American business is actually hurting them," says Gould, who spent years directing Ford's Asia-Pacific supply chain before opening his distillery. "It's very frustrating.", Europeans have developed quite a taste for American whiskeys in recent years. Sales to the E.U. account for almost half of all U.S. spirit exports and 85 of these are American whiskey, according to the American Craft Spirits Association. In the U.K. the European country that imports the most bourbon, sales of American whiskey increased by 8 in 2017 and were projected to grow 26 over the next five years. "The new tariffs will hit bourbon's prime attraction in the U.K, which is affordability," says Jolyn Dunn, of Milroy's Whisky Shop in central London. "There's already a disparity between U.S. and U.K. pricing. In the U.S. you can still pick up a bottle of bourbon for around 11 and that's already double over here. So increasing the price more will be very risky.", Bourbon-led cocktails have become a staple in British bars in the last few years, according to Dunn. "The Old Fashioned has become one of those standard drinks you order at a cocktail bar," he says. "Now you won't be able to make a profit using that spirit in drinks. That's a problem for all the consumers that have developed a taste for the product over the last couple of years.", What is bad news for consumers is worse news for distillers in the U.S. says Margie Lehrman, executive director of the American Craft Spirits Association especially small and medium-sized businesses. "The EU is a very important market for craft producers who have really boomed in recent years, creating 20,000 new jobs," she says. "The President should consider the impact not only on the companies but also on the communities that they're working in. These distilleries have often brought life and even tourism to run-down parts of towns, that previously people just didn't go to.", Lehrman also questions the sincerity of Trump's "America First" rhetoric. "It's a shame whiskey has been caught up in this because if you go back to the roots of our country, with George Washington having a distillery at Mount Vernon, it's really American heritage that's being attacked here," she says. "We urge the E.U. and the U.S. to work together to fix this and a stance that is mutually beneficial.", Gould is not optimistic about that happening. "I've discussed the president's rhetoric with senior people in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and the business community," he says. "Everyone agrees that he's not going to be muzzled or change his ways. We're all just along for the ride." |
World | The 100 Most Influential People in the World 2017 | Our annual list of the 100 Most Influential People explores the intersection of accomplishment and renown. As in years past, this year's list includes Presidents and Prime Ministers, CEOs and celebrities but they are joined by others of less fame but great force, in the power of their inventions, the scale of their ambitions, the genius of their solutions to problems that no one before them could solve. Some years the list has the feel of a loose, lively dinner party, people who mostly don't know one another but would get along if they did. This year is a bit more complicated. These past 12 months have sharpened our edges as political debates in the U.S. and Europe, the Middle East and Asia, turned jagged and primal and seem almost perfectly designed to divide us more deeply. The list includes active opponentsnot only U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un but also the Philippines' President Rodrigo Duterte and his nemesis Senator Leila de Lima, whose denunciation of Duterte's bloody crusade against drug dealers has landed her in prison. And there are several people on the list whose influence is the subject of heated debate, from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to FBI Director James Comey to White House adviser Stephen Bannon. Each has champions and critics all are shaping the course of this turbulent year. In divisive times, it's tempting to nestle in a comfort zone, surrounded by people who look like us, think like us, pray like us, vote like us. Yet many of the men and women on this year's list are calling us out, using the technologies that connect us to expand how we see the world. The youngest, Gavin Grimm, 17, took the risk of speaking out about the most impossibly personal subject what bathrooms we use in order to assert the rights of transgender people all the way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the oldest, former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, 87, used her platform to create a new one, iCivics, to teach students to become active citizens it reaches half of all middle school social-studies classrooms in the country. Every year new themes emerge. This year, I am struck by how many people on the list from Kaiser Permanente CEO Bernard J. Tyson to singer Demi Lovato to Broadway star Ben Platt have made mental health a special focus of their work. Likewise, the ongoing refugee crisis has inspired heroic efforts by everyone from Raed Saleh, leader of the Syrian White Helmets, to Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of the Tent initiative, to actor Riz Ahmed and singer Alicia Keys. Some challenges are best explained by those who have shared them, so we asked Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to President Obama, to write about Trump's chief, Reince Priebus. New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English writes on British PM Theresa May and a former U.S. Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, writes about current Defense Secretary James Mattis. In making the list, we seek counsel from the TIME 100 alumni, many of whom contributed to this issue. Common writes on Chance the Rapper, who was inspired by a phone message Common left him long ago. Tina Fey offers a tribute to Donald Glover Meryl Streep to Viola Davis and Sheryl Sandberg to Melinda Gates. In a typical TIME 100 chain reaction, author Colson Whitehead is on the list for his Pulitzer Prizewinning novel, The Underground Railroad, which is being adapted for TV by Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, who is both on the list and author of the profile of filmmaker Jordan Peele. This issue was designed by Carrie Gee, with photo direction by Tara Johnson. Miles Aldridge shot the five cover portraits. The project was overseen for the first time by assistant managing editor Dan Macsai. "It's not every day you're working with writers like Taylor Swift, Tim Cook and Mikhail Gorbachev," he says. "But that's what's so great about the TIME 100. It's not just a list of the world's most influential people it's a conversation among them.", Watch The It List Time's The 100 Most Influential People' available now on People/Entertainment Weekly Network PEN. Go to PEOPLE.com/PEN, or download the PEN app on streaming devices. Barbara Lynch by Padma Lakshmi Bob Ferguson by George Takei Celina Turchi by Tom Frieden Chance The Rapper by Common Conor McGregor by Arnold Schwarzenegger Constance Wu by Lena Dunham Demis Hassabis by Ray Kurzweil Gavin Grimm by Janet Mock Glenda Gray by Alice Park Guus Velders by Leonardo DiCaprio Hamdi Ulukaya by Kenneth Roth Ivanka Trump by Wendi Murdoch Jared Kushner by Henry Kissinger Jordan Peele by Barry Jenkins Kirsten Green by Emily Weiss Natalie Batalha, Guillem Anglada-Escud and Michal Gillon by Alan Stern Riz Ahmed by Lin-Manuel Miranda Samantha Bee by Jane Curtin Tamika Mallory, Bob Bland, Carmen Perez and Linda Sarsour by Kirsten Gillibrand Yuriko Koike by Anne Hidalgo, Alessandro Michele by Jared Leto Alicia Keys by Kerry Washington Ava DuVernay by Venus Williams Barry Jenkins by Kathryn Bigelow Ben Platt by Zac Efron Colson Whitehead by Oprah Winfrey Demi Lovato by Arianna Huffington Donald Glover by Tina Fey Ed Sheeran by Taylor Swift Emma Stone by Brie Larson James Corden by Elton John John Legend by Harry Belafonte Kerry James Marshall by Grant Hill Leslie Jones by Russell Crowe Margot Robbie by Martin Scorsese Ryan Reynolds by Helen Mirren Sarah Paulson by Cate Blanchett, Bernard J. Tyson by John Lewis Daniel Ek by Ed Sheeran Evan Spiegel by DJ Khaled George Church by Stephen Colbert James Allison by Siobhan O'Connor Janet Yellen by Joseph Stiglitz Jason Blum by Harvey Weinstein Jean Liu by Tim Cook Jeff Bezos by Buzz Aldrin LeBron James by Rita Dove Margrethe Vestager by Helle Thorning-Schmidt Rebekah Mercer by Ted Cruz Tom Brady by Conan O'Brien Vijay Shekhar Sharma by Nandan Nilekani, Chuck Schumer by Harry Reid Donald Trump by Paul Ryan Elizabeth Warren by Kamala Harris General James Mattis by Robert Gates James Comey by John McCain Juan Manuel Santos by Ingrid Betancourt Julian Assange by Jack Goldsmith Kim Jong Un by Christopher Hill King Maha Vajiralongkorn by Charlie Campbell Melinda Gates by Sheryl Sandberg Narendra Modi by Pankaj Mishra Pope Francis by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich Major General Qasem Soleimani by Kenneth M. Pollack Recep Tayyip Erdogan by Can Dundar Reince Priebus by Rahm Emanuel Rodrigo Duterte by Cesar Gaviria Sandra Day O'Connor by Sonia Sotomayor Stephen Bannon by Michael Duffy Theo Epstein by John Cusack Theresa May by Bill English Tom Perez by Tim Kaine Vladimir Putin by Mikhail Gorbachev Wang Qishan by Zoher Abdoolcarim Xi Jinping by John Kerry, Ashley Graham by Tyra Banks Biram Dah Abeid by Aidan McQuade Cindy Arlette Contreras Bautista by Susanna Schrobsdorff Cindy Sherman by Miranda July Colin Kaepernick by Jim Harbaugh David Adjaye by Thelma Golden Fan Bingbing by Diane von Furstenberg Fatou Bensouda by Aryn Baker Gretchen Carlson by Katie Couric Jeanette Vizguerra by America Ferrera John Lewis by Cory Booker Leila De Lima by Samantha Power Margaret Atwood by Ann Patchett Neymar by David Beckham Raed Saleh by Mustafa Abu Faisal Raf Simons by AAP Rocky RuPaul by Naomi Campbell Simone Biles by Leslie Jones Thelma Aldana by Jos Ugaz Viola Davis by Meryl Streep |
World | Turkey Catches Fire as ISIS Burns Kobani | Tension over a peace process that has yet to deliver results, fear of a possible bloodbath in a besieged Kurdish enclave in Syria's north, and frustration with the government's unwillingness to confront Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria ISIS jihadists came to a boil in Turkey on Tuesday night, as clashes erupted across the country between Kurdish protesters, Islamist groups and police. What followed were scenes that reminded many here of the 1990s, when war between the Kurdistan Workers' Party PKK and the Turkish army engulfed much of the country's Kurdish-majority southeast. At least 21 people were reported dead, with many more wounded. In Diyarbakir, about 60 miles north of the border with Syria, members of Hizbullah, a local Islamist group allegedly sympathetic to ISIS, traded gunfire with Kurdish protesters, including PKK militants. Ten people were found dead by the morning. More clashes have been reported in a number of other cities across the southeast, as well as in Kurdish neighborhoods in Ankara, Izmir and Istanbul, with security forces firing tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails. A curfew was imposed in six provinces, with soldiers patrolling the streets of several cities on Wednesday. The unrest is largely due to allegations that Turkey's government is turning a blind eye to, or even supporting, ISIS's onslaught against Kurdish militants holed up in Kobani, a city in Syria's north. A day after at least 24 people died in anti-ISIS protests across Turkey, jihadist militants continued to defy U.S. led airstrikes by pounding Kobani with artillery fire, all in plain sight of Turkish tanks deployed on the other side of the border. Leaders of the People's Protection Units YPG, the Kurdish militia protecting the city, warned of a looming bloodbath. Desperately outgunned, they also continued to ask Turkey to open a corridor to deliver heavy arms particularly antitank weapons to Kobani. Such requests have been falling on deaf ears, says Salih Muslim, head of the YPG's political wing. Earlier this week, Muslim personally pleaded with officials in Ankara to allow Kurdish fighters from other areas of Syria cut off from Kobani by swaths of ISIS-controlled land to enter the city via Turkey. "They promised some things," he told TIME. "But they have done nothing.", Since late September, Turkey has opened its doors to 160,000 Syrian Kurds fleeing ISIS. It has also begun delivering humanitarian aid to the city, but has provided nothing, at least not officially, in the way of military assistance. The reason for Turkey's inaction, analysts say, is its fear of empowering the YPG, widely believed to be the PKK's Syrian affiliate. Although the Ankara government and the PKK have been holding peace talks for nearly two years talks that have yielded a tenuous cease-fire, but little more the bad blood between them runs deep. "What ISIS is to us, the PKK is the same," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Oct. 4. The PKK, in turn, accused Erdogan of supporting ISIS to fight the Kurds inside Syria, warning that its negotiations with Ankara were on the verge of collapse. "If this massacre attempt in Kobani achieves its goal, it will end the process," the PKK's jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, said in a statement released on Oct 1. In a recent speech, Erdogan offered to send troops to Syria, but only if the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS pledged to bring down the regime of Bashar Assad after doing away with the jihadists. Turkey's policy towards Kobani, says Atilla Yesilada, a political analyst with Global Source Partners, is fueled just as much by fear as by opportunism. On the one hand, he says, Ankara knows that any move against ISIS would invite retaliation from jihadist cells inside the country. Security forces across Turkey were placed on high alert after the country's parliament gave a green light to possible troop deployments in Iraq and Syria last week. On the other hand, Ankara views Kobani as potential leverage against the Kurdish militants. "They want to bring the PKK down a notch, to teach them a lesson," says Yesilada, "and to put an end to any aspirations that Syria's Kurds might have for autonomy or independence.", Even with the fallout from Kobani reaching Turkey on Tuesday night, some experts believe the peace process with the PKK can still be salvaged. "It's an explosion of rage," says Huseyin Yayman, a Turkish security expert, "but it can be contained.", "The underlying dynamics are still there," says Hugh Pope, of the International Crisis Group, a think tank. "But the rhetoric has to come down. Erdogan has to stop comparing the PKK to Islamic State, and the PKK has to stop doing the same," he says. "It's simply not true.", The Ankara government gave no intimation that it would meet the Kurds halfway, however. "The same people who were silent in the face of the death of 300,000 people in the past three and half years, ignoring the use of chemical weapons, SCUD missiles and barrel bombs, are now trying to make it seem as if Turkey has to solve the problem in Kobani right away and all by itself," Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said late Wednesday. "Those who cooperate with the Syrian regime," he said, referring to the YPG, which Turkey accuses of siding with Assad, "have no right to accuse or to blame Turkey.", |
World | Diplomats Killed in Pakistan Helicopter Crash | The ambassadors to Pakistan from Norway and the Philippines and the wives of the ambassadors from Malaysia and Indonesia have been killed along with two others when a Pakistani military helicopter crashed on Friday morning. The diplomats were traveling as part of a tourism expedition with Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the Naltar valley near Gilgit, about 300 miles north of the capital Islamabad. The prime minister was on a separate aircraft, which turned back and returned to Islamabad upon hearing of the crash. Two diplomats survived and are being treated at an army medical facility,, Government officials say that the military helicopter went down due to a "technical fault". This has been a worrying trend for the past decade in Pakistan's ageing fleet of Russian-made MI-17 helicopters. Three years ago, five people were killed when one of the helicopters crashed in Skardu not far from the location of Friday's crash due to "unknown reasons.", In 2009, 41 people were killed aboard an MI-17 due to what was also said to be "a technical fault". The same reason was given for the deaths of four people in Pakistan-administered Kashmir in 2007, and for 13 people who suffered the same fate in the northwestern tribal areas in 2004. There had initially been fears that the crash may have involved terrorism. The Pakistani Taliban eagerly contacted local reporters to claim responsibility, adding that they had meant to target Sharif, the Prime Minister, in retaliation for military action against them. In the past, Pakistan-based terrorists have targeted foreign diplomats, including attacks on the Danish embassy and the kidnapping of an Iranian diplomat. Government officials deny that terrorism was the cause of the crash and eyewitnesses said the helicopter appeared to spin out of control and crash, without any mid-air explosion. Pakistan has announced a national day of mourning to mark the losses suffered by Norway, the Phillipines, Indonesia and Malaysia, as a stream of condolences appeared from politicians and journalists on social media. Leif Larsen, the 61-year-old veteran envoy from Norway, was a thoughtful and highly-respected member of the Islamabad diplomatic corps. Last week, he had spoken in an interview with Newsweek Pakistan about his affection for the seldom-mentioned "softer side" of Pakistan. Domingo D. Lucenario, Jr. the 55-year-old ambassador from the Philippines, was one of his country's most distinguished diplomats. He had won a series of presidential awards for his service. Before arriving in Islamabad, he also served as Manila's envoy to Afghanistan, Kyrgyztan and Tajikistan, Lucenario had spent four years as an ambassador to a number of African countries. |
World | Hong Kong AntiLittering Campaign Uses DNA From Trash to Shame People | A Hong Kong environmental group has turned to public shaming to end the city's litter problem. The Hong Kong Cleanup Initiative used DNA collected from discarded cigarette butts, gum and condoms to create renderings of the faces of people who left their trash, the South China Morning Post reported. The Face of Litter campaign, which launched on Earth Day, has created 27 facial composites of litterers and splashed them across billboards around the city. The samples came from a six-week challenge in which teams collected more than 4,000 tons of litter from streets. Advertising firm Ogilvy Mather came up with the idea to shame litterers and enlisted a laboratory to analyze samples. The company says that the DNA samples provide enough information to accurately predict ethnicity as well as eye, hair and skin color. Hong Kong produces more than 6.5 million tons of trash each year, much of which ends up on the streets and coastlines, according to the initiative. Morning Post |
World | John Kerry Calls for Global Coalition to Fight ISIS Militants | The United States needs to rally a broad alliance of nations to oppose the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria ISIS, Secretary of State John Kerry wrote in an op-ed published Friday, even as the Pentagon mulls the potential for new airstrikes against Islamic extremists in Syria. In a column published Friday by the New York Times, Kerry wrote that a united response by a determined coalition is necessary in order to prevent "the cancer of ISIS" from spreading. "No decent country can support the horrors perpetrated by ISIS, and no civilized country should shirk its responsibility to help stamp out this disease," Kerry wrote. "Coalition building is hard work, but it is the best way to tackle a common enemy.", Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel are meeting European allies at a NATO summit in Wales next week, and President Barack Obama will aim to rally support at the United Nations Security Council next month for a plan to deal with ISIS. U.S. operations in Iraq against ISIS forces are already costing 7.5 million per day on average, the military has said, as the Pentagon ramps up airstrikes to defend local populations from the invading extremists. Air operations have shifted the calculus of the fight and aided Iraqi and Kurdish forces, Kerry wrote in the Times, but a much broader response is needed. "Airstrikes alone won't defeat this enemy," Kerry wrote. "A much fuller response is demanded from the world. We need to support Iraqi forces and the moderate Syrian opposition, who are facing ISIS on the front lines. We need to disrupt and degrade ISIS' capabilities and counter its extremist message in the media. And we need to strengthen our own defenses and cooperation in protecting our people.", Kerry didn't address the delicate question about putting American or other troops on the ground, but he did call for military aid, among other kinds of assistance. "In this battle, there is a role for almost every country. Some will provide military assistance, direct and indirect. Some will provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance for the millions who have been displaced and victimized across the region," Kerry wrote. "Others will help restore not just shattered economies but broken trust among neighbors.", NYT |
World | Clare Hollingworth Journalist Who Broke the News of World War II Dies at 105 | Clare Hollingworth, the veteran war correspondent who broke the news that World War II had started, has died in Hong Kong at the age of 105. Hollingworth was born in rural Leicestershire in central England on Oct. 10, 1911. Although she grew up on a farm in the countryside, her childhood was still overshadowed by World War I, which began in 1914. As Dominique Rowe recently explored in an in-depth TIME.com profile of Hollingworth and her work, Hollingworth decided from a young age that she wanted to be a writer, but first spent time in Poland, arranging the evacuation of more than 3,500 political and Jewish refugees to Britain in the lead-up to World War II. When she left Poland in 1939, her expertise in that country proved to be essential to what would be the defining moment of her career, as Rowe reported, Hollingworth's important role in her profession continued long after that groundbreaking scoop. As well as writing five books, Hollingworth covered conflicts in Europe, North Africa and Asia for the Telegraph and the Guardian. And, when a ban was imposed on British female correspondents on the front lines in Egypt in 1942, she approached the American press instead and became accredited by TIME., Hollingworth married her second husband Geoffrey Hoare, the London Times Middle East correspondent, in 1951. He died about a decade later. , In 1973, Hollingworth became the first Beijing-based correspondent for the Telegraph, a position she held for three years, and later moved to Hong Kong in the 1980s as the Telegraph's Southeast Asia correspondent. Until her death, Hollingworth lived in Hong Kong, in an apartment near the Foreign Correspondents' Club FCC. Despite the onset of macular degeneration in 1995, Rowe reported, "she never officially retired and Clare's Table' at the FCC was reserved for her every single day, in case she turned up for lunch or dinner.", Tara Joseph, president of the FCC, said in a statement that the organization was "very sad" to hear about Hollingworth's passing. "She was a tremendous inspiration to us all," Joseph said. |
World | Popes Private Conversations Arent Church Policy | The Vatican assured Catholics Thursday that Pope Francis' private conversations will not become church policy after a phone conversation of his stirred controversy. Pope Francis reportedly spoke on the phone to an Argentine woman who had written him for guidance. She said that her priest had not allowed her to take communion because her current husband's previous marriage was never annulled. After the conversation, her husband, Julio Sabetta, claimed that the head of the Catholic Church told the woman she was free of sin. "He said that she has been freed of all sin, that he blessed the whole family, that she's free to take communion from here on out, and he asked that we pray for him," Sabetta said, adding that after they hung up, the whole family hugged and wept together. "It was something amazing," he said. The account, which Sabetta posted on Facebook on April 21, led to speculation that the Pope wanted to changeVatican policy that currently prevent those who have remarried after getting divorced from access to the sacraments. This possibility was fueled by the fact that the pope has called a synod in October to discuss family issues, including contraception and divorce. The Vatican even sent out a questionnaire to all the world's bishops asking for their input before the meeting. But Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi denied that there would be a change in policy, according to the Associated Press "consequences related to the teaching of the Church are not to be inferred" from the pope's private conversations. "Several telephone calls have taken place in the context of Pope Francis' personal pastoral relationships. Since they do not in any way form part of the Pope's public activities, no information or comments are to be expected from the Holy See Press Office.", AP |
World | Two Foreigners in the UAE Face Long Jail Terms For Having Sex Even Though They Are Engaged | A South African man and his Ukrainian fiance have been detained in the United Arab Emirates for having sex outside of marriage. Emlyn Culverwell 29, and Iryna Nohai, 27, were arrested in an Abu Dhabi hospital in late January after a doctor discovered that Nohai, who had been suffering from stomach cramps, was pregnant, the BBC reports. Sex outside of marriage is a criminal offense according to the UAE's strict morality laws, and is punishable by a lengthy prison term and deportation. Culverwell's mother Linda has said that the couple were denied any state-appointed legal representation and have not been allowed to be married in prison as authorities continue to investigate the paternity of the child and how long the couple has been sexually active. In a plea for her son and his fiance's release, Linda Culverwell said that "the only thing they did wrong was fall in love.", BBC |
World | QampA with UN SecretaryGeneral Candidate Vuk Jeremic | TIME foreign affairs columnist Ian Bremmer is sitting down with the candidates to be the next UN Secretary-General. Here is his QA with Vuk Jeremic, Serbia's former Foreign Minister. , What is the single most important thing that a UN secretary general can do to make the United Nations a more effective institution?, Acting decisively to end business-as-usual at the UN. To be clear and transparent as to what I mean by that, I've produced a detailed policy platform containing 53 specific commitments that I intend to implement from Day One. No candidate for SG has ever done this before. But do I believe that without a clear vision and concrete plan of action, there can be little hope for the UN to meet the expectations of humanity in the 21st century. , What aspect of the UN's work do you believe is in greatest need of reform?, To be honest many, but let me focus on one the UN's conflict prevention and peace operations capacities need to be overhauled. We must upgrade the UN's pool of peacemakers and high-level envoys, who will be able to help stave off wars under increasingly complex global circumstances. We also need to establish a new generation of more robust UN stabilization missions that can be deployed wherever a need arises, with updated rules of engagement and a stronger civilian component. , You've written of the need to enhance the UN's counter-terrorism capacity. What can the UN do to more effectively to combat terrorism?, Different people are now in charge of various aspects of the UN System in this field, which creates confusion. So first, we need to have one UN official responsible for counter-terrorism related activities. Second, we need to create expert counter-terrorism advisory teams that may be deployed to provide assistance to countries that ask for it. Third, the UN should use its unique convening power to bring together national and religious leaders, community groups, and communications and technology experts to develop cross-border strategies to counter extremist propaganda. , As a citizen of Serbia, what do you believe are the most important lessons the UN should take from its failings in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s?, As a young man, I witnessed the failure of diplomacy, the absence of the rule of law, and the sudden surge in poverty in my country. I fought for democracy and human rights, and worked hard for reconciliation. As a candidate for Secretary-General, I've stressed the importance of addressing these issues globally. We all remember the tragic failure to defend UN "save havens," which is why we need to strengthen UN peacekeeping. We also need to enhance the UN's early warning systems for preventing genocide and other mass atrocity crimes. , No institution can be all things to all people. What things do you believe the UN should avoid trying to do?, There's a perception that the UN oversteps its boundaries and competences, especially in the developing world. The next Secretary-General will need to support the ambitions of regional organizations that want to work with the UN as genuine partners. The African Union is one example, and so I've proposed a New Deal for African Peace Operations. The UN will have to work closely with African leaders on concrete plans to transition a range of security responsibilities to the AU. , Beyond the use of new tools of communication, what can the secretary general do to engage more young people around the world in the UN's work?, Young people want to live in a safer and cleaner world, with more employment and educational opportunities. This goes to the heart of why the UN needs to make the fulfillment of the sustainable development goals SDGs, especially those related to climate change, its top strategic priority. We've got to better understand young people's priorities and empower them to contribute their ideas at all levels. They're the future, and they need to have a greater say in how it's shaped. |
World | Mike Pompeo Is Calling on Saudi Arabia to Investigate the Disappearance of Journalist Jamal Khashogg | Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday called on Saudi Arabia to investigate the strange disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose case has sparked international outcry over the extent of the kingdom's crackdown on dissent. "We call on the government of Saudi Arabia to support a thorough investigation of Khashoggi's disappearance and to be transparent about the results of that investigation," Pompeo said in a statement. , A Washington Post columnist and prominent newspaper editor in Saudi Arabia, Khashoggi mysteriously vanished last week. He has not been heard from since Oct. 2, when he entered a Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey to receive marriage paperwork. Allegations have since swirled over the whereabouts of Khashoggi, who is a well-known critic of the Saudi government and lives in exile. Friends and officials have blamed Riyadh for the dissident journalist's disappearance and alleged murder. Turkish investigators on Saturday concluded Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate, the Post reports. The Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Khalid bin Salman, who is also the brother of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, denies these claims. In a letter sent Monday evening, the prince said it is "absolutely false, and baseless," to accuse the kingdom of killing or detaining Khashoggi, according to NBC news. The prince emphasized Saudi Arabia is taking "extraordinary" measures to locate Khashoggi, "just as we would if it were any other Saudi citizen.", "Jamal has many friends in the Kingdom, including myself," Khalid wrote. Khashoggi's sudden disappearance has tested U.S.-Saudi ties. The U.S. where Khashoggi has been living since fleeing the kingdom last year, largely kept silent on the diplomatic imbroglio until Monday, when President Donald Trump said he was "concerned" about the case. |
World | Donald Trumps Meeting with Nigel Farage Leaves Britains Leaders RedFaced | Nigel Farage, the British right-wing enemy of the European Union, became one of the first foreign politicians to meet with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump over the weekend, upending the diplomatic order to the embarrassment of the U.K's ruling Conservative Party. A photo of Trump posing at Trump Tower with Farage, the interim leader of the smaller U.K. Independence Party UKIP, was pictured on the front of many Sunday newspapers and was widely dissected online. The meeting with Farage ahead of British Prime Minister Theresa May or her main opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party comes as the British government seeks to foster ties with Trump to secure a strong trading relationship after it leaves the European Union. Now, many in Westminster are coming to terms with the fact a politician long seen as a fringe figure in British politics can command the attention of the leader of the free world. On his return, Farage reported that Trump and his aides are unhappy at the attacks leveled at the President-elect during the campaign by some government figures. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, he offered to "provide introductions and to start the necessary process of mending fences.", , May has said the government will not be taking Farage up on his offer, but some in the party think it's not a bad idea. A Conservative member of the House of Lords, the unelected upper chamber of the Parliament, said Farage should be used as a "salesman" for British business. "Anything we can do at any level to rebuild that relationship will be to Britain's advantage," said Lord Marland to the BBC, "and if Mr. Farage happens to be one of the people who encourages that relationship then so be it.", The diplomatic coup by Farage gives the UKIP leader a status that is neither reflected by his electoral success nor his party's. Farage has failed seven times to be elected as a Member of Parliament MP for UKIP, and is currently a legislator in the European parliament. His party has only one MP, Douglas Carswell, who has clashed repeatedly with its fractious leadership. Although this lack of representation may be due to Britain's electoral system UKIP did receive 12.5 of votes in the 2015 election the party has long been a minor player on the political scene here, and is seen by many as a single-issue party whose views on British immigrants border on the unacceptable. The former investment banker, however, can and does claim to have played a part in the country's decision in the June referendum to leave the European Union. Having joined demands by Euroskeptics in the Conservative Party to have the vote in the first place, he campaigned tirelessly for "Brexit" and has styled himself as the driving force behind its success. Others may have a stronger claim to that especially Boris Johnson, the pro-Brexit former London mayor now acting as Britain's Foreign Secretary but it was Farage who accepted an invitation to stand alongside Trump in Mississippi this summer and use the example of Brexit to inspire Trump supporters to get out the vote. The meeting also raises questions about which other foreign politicians might be welcomed into the Trump White House ahead of their elected leaders. Trump's election was welcomed warmly by populist leaders across the Continent, including the French leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, who is seeking the country's presidency next year. It remains to be seen whether the grace and favor of the White House will bestow legitimacy on other Trump supporters and flatterers. |
World | British Lawmaker Dies After Being Shot and Stabbed in North of England | British lawmaker Jo Cox died after being shot and stabbed in her constituency in Birstall, West Yorkshire. Dee Collins, the chief constable of West Yorkshire police, said that the Labour Party member was pronounced dead by a paramedic crew attending to her. The 41-year-old Cox was attacked near Birstall's library where she holds advice surgeries, Sky News reports. According to the BBC, she has been taken by air ambulance to Leeds General Infirmary where armed police are outside the hospital. Her husband, Brendan Cox, tweeted this photograph of the MP by the barge where she stayed in London. , Speaking to Sky News, witness Hishem Ben Abdallah says a man pulled a gun out of his bag, which looked like a "First World War or a makeshift, handmade gun," before attacking Cox. He was fought off by a local man who may have been injured in the scuffle. The assailant is reported to have shouted Britain First' during the attack. Speaking to the BBC another eyewitness said "He shot this lady and then shot her again. He lent down. Someone was wrestling with him and he was wielding a knife and lunging at her. Three times she was shot. People were trying to help her. Then he ran off down a one-way street. Me and my mate drove round to try and find him.", A statement by the local West Yorkshire Police says that a 52-year-old man has been arrested in connection to the incident. The BBC tweeted an image of the arrest of a man nearby, , Cox wrote a pro-E.U. comment piece in the Yorkshire Post on June 10, saying a vote to leave the political bloc was not a "way to deal with concerns about immigration.", U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Sadiq Khan have tweeted their concern. , , The mother of two was elected to represent Batley Spen constituency in 2015. She is co-chair of the Friends of Syria All Party Parliamentary Group, and broke with her party in abstaining in a vote on military action in Syria. She has also expressed regret for nominating Jeremy Corbyn during last year's Labour leadership contest. The MP is married to former special advisor to Gordon Brown, Brendan Cox. Vote Leave and Vote Remain have suspended both their campaigns in light of the incident. |
World | Past Acts of Terrorism in Australia or Against Australians | Correction appended, Dec. 16 2014, As Sydney grapples with the Martin Place hostage situation, here's a recap of terror attacks and a couple of foiled plots that Australia and its citizens have been subjected to in the past, 1. Hilton Hotel Bombing, Sydney, February 1978 This incident, said to be the first terrorist attack on Australian soil, killed three people and injured nine others after a 6.5-kg bomb was detonated in a garbage bin. The blast's purported target was the Sydney Hilton Hotel, where Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and 11 other state leaders were staying the night before that year's Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. But the bombing remains shrouded in mystery over three decades later, according to the Herald Sun. It was initially attributed to Australian fringe religious group Anand Marga, but accused members of the group were subsequently acquitted after being jailed multiple times. Decades later, question marks still remain. 2. Assassination of the Turkish Consul General, Sydney, December 1980 A little under three years later, Turkish Consul General Sarik Ariyak was gunned down, along with a member of his security detail, by two men on motorcycles. Although a group called the Justice Commandos for the Armenian Genocide claimed responsibility for the attack, the perpetrators remained unidentified and no one was charged. 3. Turkish Consulate Bombing, Melbourne, November 1986 This attack was part of a wave of attacks on Turkish citizens and officials worldwide, but the only casualty was one of the bombers belonging to a group called the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. A Sydney resident named Levon Demirian, reportedly the dead man's accomplice, was jailed following the attack. 4. Israeli Consulate Bombing, Sydney, December 1982 Three people were injured in a blast that rocked the Israeli consulate in mid-December 1982, according to a contemporary New York Times report. A large part of the building was destroyed in what appeared to be part of a series of global attacks on Israeli diplomatic missions. Another Israeli institution, the Hakoah Club, was targeted by a car bomb later the same day. Those culprits were never caught, but Australian authorities reportedly reopened the case two years ago. 5. Bali Bombing, Indonesia, October 2002 Although this attack did not take place on Australian soil, 88 of the 202 victims of the blasts that ripped through two nightclubs in Bali's party district of Kuta were Australian citizens holidaying in their neighboring country. The Sydney Morning Herald described the attack as "stamping terrorism's bloody fingerprint on Australia's door." The second Bali bombing in 2005 also counted several Australian tourists among its victims. 6. Faheem Khalid Lodhi, Convicted October 2006 Lodhi, a Pakistani-Australian architect, was accused of planning to bomb Australia's electricity grid in 2003 and was sentenced to 20 years in prison three years later. He was reportedly found to have purchased two maps of the Australian electric-supply system under a false name and also had a handwritten Urdu-language "terror manual." He was the first person sentenced under Australia's antiterrorism laws established in 2004 and 2005. 7. Antiterrorism Raid, September 2014 A comprehensive antiterrorism raid was carried out in Australia in September this year, when over 800 members of the Australian Federal Police and the country's spy agency ASIO swept through 25 addresses across Sydney and Brisbane. The raid resulted in 15 arrests in response to an alleged plot to behead a random member of the Australian public. Correction The original photograph accompanying this article did not show the Australian flag as stated in the caption supplied by AFP/Getty Images. The image has been replaced. |
World | Ousted Ukraine Leader Vows to Keep Fighting | The deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich said Friday that protesters who succeeded in driving him out of the capital last week only represent the "absolute minority" of the country, that he is still the country's rightful leader, and that he'll keep fighting for Ukraine's future. Speaking from Russia in his first comments since leaving the country, Yanukovich, who has insisted he's still the country's legitimate leader, pushed back against the notion that he was ousted from office. "No one overthrew me," he said. "I was forced to flee.", And he blamed the "irresponsible actions of the West" for the protests that led to his downfall. His comments came as tensions between the new Ukrainian government and Russia escalated Friday, with Ukraine saying Russia had mounted a "military invasion" after masked men took control of airports in the country's Crimea region. Yanukovich said he hasn't met with Russian President Vladimir Putin since coming to Russia. "I will return to Ukraine once the conditions of my security and security of my family are secured," he said. |
World | Mexico Travel Warning Issued After Bodies Were Found in a Taxi a Hammock and Bags | The U.S. has issued a travel advisory for Mexico after authorities found eight bodies in Cancn this week. Travelers to Mexico are advised to "exercise increased caution," according to the State Department advisory, which notes that "violent crime, such as homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery, is widespread.", While initial reports suggested the travel advisory was issued because of the apparent murders in Cancn, a State Department spokesperson said Thursday that the advisory was updated in relation to a security alert by the U.S. Consulate in Ciudad Jurez. Quintana Roo, where Cancn is located, is under the Level 2 travel advisory that warns people in the area to travel with increased caution. The Associated Press reports that the eight bodies were found in the Cancn area on Tuesday. Two of the victims were found in an abandoned taxi, while two others were found dismembered in plastic bags at another location, according to the AP. A fifth man was discovered bound and fatally shot on Tuesday, while another was found dead in a hammock. The seventh victim was shot to death and discovered in a plastic bag. Officials did not immediately reveal details about the eighth body. The spree of apparent murders comes amid an uptick in homicides in the state Quintana Roo. According to the State Department, Quintana Roo is seeing an increase in homicide rates when compared to the same time period in 2016. "While most of these homicides appeared to be targeted, criminal organization assassinations, turf battles between criminal groups have resulted in violent crime in areas frequented by U.S. citizens," the State Department said in the advisory. Earlier this year, Mexican authorities found the bodies of five men stuffed into a car in Cancn. |
World | France Pulls Out of Event to Mark Rwanda Genocide | The French government has withdrawn from Monday's 20th-anniversary commemorations for the genocide in Rwanda, after the country's President accused France of participating in the 1994 mass killings. French Justice Minister Christiane Taubira canceled plans to attend the events in Kigali on Monday following Rwandan President Paul Kagame's denunciation of the "direct role of Belgium and France in the political preparation for the genocide," the BBC reports. President Kagame's remarks were made to the French-language weekly newsmagazine Jeune Afrique in an interview on March 27. The French Foreign Ministry said Kagame's remarks hurt the reconciliation process between France and Rwanda. More than 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda mostly ethnic Tutsi, but also moderate Hutus after the death of President Juvnal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu, on April 6, 1994. The violence only ended after Kagame's Tutsi-led group defeated government forces in July 1994. Kagame's faction, which has held the government since, has long blamed France for aiding the genocide. France was an ally of Habyarimana's government, and a Rwandan commission found France helped train ethnic Hutu militias, who prepared in the mass killings, and was aware of preparations for the genocide. France has acknowledged serious errors it made during the genocide, but has said its forces protected civilians during the violence. BBC |
World | France in State of Emergency as Terrorist Attacks in Paris Kill at Least 128 | In what appears to be the deadliest terror attacks in France in many decades, at least 128 people were feared killed in Paris on Friday night as a series of deadly attacks was staged across the capital city. Some reports say another 200 were injured, as many as 80 seriously. President Franois Hollande declared a state of emergency after an unknown number of gunmen opened fire in the crowded eastern part of the capital, stormed a Bataclan concert hall during a packed music performance, and set off explosives at the French national stadium the Stade de France, which was filled to capacity for a France-Germany soccer gameincluding with Hollande, who was among the spectators. A Paris prosecutor said more than 120 people are believed to have lost their lives. The head of Paris police said all attackers were believed to be dead. As of early Saturday morning local time French media was reporting as many as six separate incidents including, Shortly before midnight, Hollande went on television to appeal for calm and announce his government had shut French bordersa highly unusual move for European Union countries. "We have to be compassionate and we have to be united and keep a cool head. France needs to be strong and the state needs to be strong," he said. "What the terrorists want is for us to be scared. There are things to be scared about. But in the face of terror we have to be united and we will defeat these terrorists.", Around 12.30 a.m. local time police in riot gear stormed the Bataclan concert hall to break the hostage siege. The raid ended shortly after 100am, with two attackers dead, according to two police sources interviewed by France24. Multiple media reports suggested at least 100 people were killed inside the concert hall alone. Hollande went to the music venue shortly after the hostage crisis ended and sounded a fierce note as he thanked first responders for their bravery. "We will lead the fight. It will be merciless," he said. "When terrorists are capable of such atrocities, they must be certain that they will face a France united and determined.", Chems Akrouf, identified as a military intelligence expert on television channel France24 said "This is France's September 11th." There wasn't an individual target in these attacks, he said, like the police or journalists as before. "Here it's everyone we're sure that it was an act of terrorism where everyone is afraid and says to themselves, I could be hurt. If their objective was to transmit fear, they succeeded.", , Emergency medics at all hospitals across Paris were called into work shortly before midnight, as the wide scale of casualties became apparent. All police leave was canceled. As the news of the attacks whipped through the city, Parisian taxis switched off their meters on Friday night to ferry people home safely at no cost. Police appealed to people to keep off the streets, on a night when Parisians typically crowd into bars and restaurants to kick off the weekend. Since January, when jihadists claiming allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria ISIS and to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb launched a massacre at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine and laid siege to a kosher supermarket, the capital has been on high alert. Early details suggest that Friday night's attacks were far more sophisticatedand more deadlythan those back in January, which involved three gunmen, and killed 14 people. Parisians have remained highly jittery since the Charlie Hebdo attacks, continually reminded that terror threats remain. There are the bag searches at the doors of major department stores and public buildings, and uniformed soldiers with semi-automatic weapons patrol train stations and major intersections in the capital. All public buildings, including schools, have had red triangles posted on their front doors since January, denoting the highest state of alert in the country. And just last August, three Americans helped to thwart an armed attack on a packed high-speed train from Brussels to Paris, when they wrestled a gunmen to the ground in the passage of the train car. Worse still, the capital is just two weeks away from hosting its biggest event in many yearsthe international negotiations of climate change, which opens on Nov. 30 with a gathering of dozens of world leaders, including President Barack Obama. In the panic late Friday night, the details broke in spurts. The first details of Friday night's attacks broke at 9.45 p.m. when word came of a shootout at a restaurant in eastern Parisa neighborhood that is packed with diners at the weekends. Then came worse a series of explosions at the packed national stadium. Hundreds of people scrambled on to the field. One of the spectators, Richard M'Barki, told BFM Television by phone shortly after that he had heard three explosions. "There were not many policemen," he said on air. "People were badly informed.", In the aftermath of the attacks, Paris authorities announced all city facilities would remain shut on Saturday, from schools and universities to museums, gyms and libraries, , Hollande's residence said that a Defence Council meeting is convening Saturday morning, while the AP reports that the leader has cancelled his trip to the G-20 |
World | Pakistan Has Finally Admitted That Afghan Taliban Leaders Are Living There | In a significant departure from the Pakistani government's consistent, years-long denial of relations with the Taliban, one of its most senior foreign policy officials went on the record this week to say that the Islamic extremist group's leaders reside in Pakistan. The admission by Sartaj Aziz, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's top adviser on foreign affairs, came during a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. "We have some influence on them because their leadership is in Pakistan, and they get some medical facilities, their families are here," Aziz said, responding to a question about Pakistan's role in peace talks between the Taliban and Afghanistan government. "So we can use those levers to pressurize them to say come to the table,'" he said, "but we can't negotiate on behalf of the Afghan government because we can't offer them what the Afghan government can.", Although Pakistan's sheltering of the militant group is considered something of an open secret by experts familiar with the region, the official position has always been a denial of any linkages. "We do not make any comment on political leaders' statements," a spokesman for Pakistan's foreign office told the BBC. "He Aziz has said what he had to say.", The Pakistani Army and the Taliban leadership have not yet commented. A four-nation coordination group, comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, the U.S. and China, has held four meetings since December to establish a road map for further talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban, which Aziz hinted may take place later this month. |
World | No News Here Folks Chinas Premier Li Conducts Yearly Boring Press Briefing | It was the one question the Chinese public not to mention the Beijing press corps was awaiting. The scene was the annual press conference with China's Premier Li Keqiang at Beijing's Great Hall of the People. Actually, the words "press conference" make the session that closes the National People's Congress sound like a spontaneous event. Rest assured that the QA with the Chinese Premier is a meticulously scripted affair. The journalists chosen to ask questions on the morning of March 13 were contacted beforehand. There's negotiation at least from some foreign reporters about exactly how the queries will be phrased. But there are to be no surprises at the triumphal end of China's annual legislative session. This pre-screening ensures that the Premier somehow has all the right facts and figures available to respond in great detail. There are even ringers brought in who are instructed to raise their hands with great enthusiasm. As Li slogged through his answers, journalists took bets on how long it would take for the news-making moment to arrive. Li uttered disquisitions on the mystery surrounding Malaysia Airline Flight 370, which disappeared without a trace on March 8 with 153 Chinese passengers on board Li "families and friends of passengers are burning with anxiety" and "as long as there is a glimmer of hope," China will not halt its search for the missing airliner and the greatest challenge for China last year Li "increased downward pressure on China's economic growth". He vowed that "we need to loosen the straightjacket on businesses" and mentioned the hot term "rule of law" a couple times. Li acknowledged the severity of China's air pollution problem, guaranteeing "a war on our own inefficient and unsustainable model of growth and way of life" and noting that the first thing many Chinese do upon waking is to check pollution-index aps on their cellphones. But the question in question never came. For months now, a dragnet has appeared to tighten around Zhou Yongkang, who oversaw China's massive surveillance state until his retirement in late 2012. Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li, China has launched an anti-corruption crackdown that has netted hundreds of wayward officials. President Xi has promised to nab both lowly "flies" and high-ranking "tigers." If Zhou, he of the Mafioso slicked-back hair and steely gaze, is indeed probed, he would be the mightiest tiger to be felled in decades. After all, he was a member of China's elite ruling circle the then nine now seven men of the party's Standing Committee who determine the course of the People's Republic. Over the past year, a slew of officials high and low who worked under Zhou in three main spheres the state-owned oil industry, the populous province of Sichuan and the Public Security Ministry have been detained. His son and top aides have been implicated in nefarious financial dealings. Zhou himself may be under house arrest. All of which led some China-watchers to expect that Premier Li would use a pre-approved question at his press conference to at least indirectly refer to the state's possible case against Zhou. Li did not. In an annual press conference remarkably devoid of actual news, the Premier did take on a question about corruption it was the third one asked of him and was lobbed Li's way by a reporter from the online arm of People's Daily, the Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece. Li's voice took on a stern tone as he swore "zero tolerance" for corrupt cadres. He vowed that no matter "how senior his position is corrupt officials will be severely dealt with and punished to the full extent of the law." Li promised that "everyone is equal before the law." But, despite the People's Daily reporter asking specifically whether there was anything systemic that could be changed, Li declined to tout an easy tool to combat corruption among party ranks asset disclosure. Granted, releasing such financial information is a rather touchy subject in a political culture where profiting from power is almost expected. More importantly, no names certainly not Zhou's were named. Two years ago, at the final press conference by outgoing Premier Wen Jiabao, he launched a not-so-oblique attack on Bo Xilai, the former party chief of the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing and an aspirant to the Standing Committee. One day after Wen's press conference, the Bo purge began. It was a dramatic downfall that involved a poisoned British businessman, a murderous wife and a cache of absconded public funds. Bo's case turned into China's biggest political scandal in decades. Zhou was considered to have been Bo's political patron., As the minutes ticked by in Li's presser, expectations rose. After all, former Premier Wen had dispatched his tirade aimed at Bo toward the end of his press conference. Before answering his penultimate question, Li noted that it was time for lunch. Journalists must be hungry. A question followed on China's trading relations with Europe specifically to do with high-speed rails, nuclear power and solar panels. Then came the last question, the subject of which I've frankly forgotten. Suffice it to say it was not about Mr. Zhou. Reporters were dismissed for lunch. On Weibo, China's lively although occasionally censored microblogging service, people digested the press conference. One popular strain of commentary wondered why no mention had been made of Zhou. Wrote one Weibo user "I'm very puzzled, why did the journalists, especially the foreign journalists, not cherish their opportunity to ask questions? Don't they know Master Kang is the most delicious one?" Zhou's name is blocked on Weibo searches so Chinese online use creative nicknames like Master Kang to evade the state censors. Apparently the Weibo commenters were not aware of the scripted ritual. In fact, in a meeting with a senior Chinese official some weeks back, some of us in the foreign press community had already been warned that a question on Zhou was verboten. Meanwhile, the day before Li's press conference began, a bloodied man was found dead in the stairwell of a securities' firm off Beijing's Financial Street, one of the Chinese capital's business areas. Police said the man had ended his own life with a knife. His will was discovered. The dead man, according to Chinese media reports, is related to a former secretary to a senior leader currently under investigation. The Chinese press did not name the disgraced politician but he appears to be none other than Zhou Yongkang. with reporting by Gu Yongqiang/Beijing |
World | 43 Shiite Muslims Have Been Killed in a Sectarian Attack in Southern Pakistan | Gunmen attacked a bus carrying members of a religious minority in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi on Wednesday, killing 43 and injuring about a dozen. Provincial police chief Ghulam Haider Jamali said the bus was headed to a place of worship for Ismaili Shiite Muslims when the attackers boarded it and began firing, the Associated Press reported. About 60 people were reportedly on board the bus when the six gunmen climbed aboard. The assailants reportedly used 9-mm pistols to execute their victims. The Pakistani Taliban and other Sunni Muslim groups that have a presence in cities like Karachi have long targeted Shiites, believing that they are apostates, although no one has yet claimed responsibility for Wednesday's attack. "That's the probability, that some section of the Taliban or some other extremist sectarian organization carried out this attack," Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani political scientist and analyst, tells TIME. Rizvi added that the attack is most likely a message to the government and the Pakistan army, which has recently stepped up its crackdown on extremist groups. "It's a pre-emptive strike, it looks like an action to deter the army and Rangers a border security force from taking any firm actions against these militant groups," Rizvi says. "But they will not be deterred by this kind of action, I expect some major action in two or three days time by the military and paramilitary forces." |
World | Indonesias Elections Feature Plenty of Women but Respect in Short Supply | Indonesian elections wouldn't be complete without dangdut singers. Young women, usually attired in skimpy clothes, are a must at campaign rallies, warming up supporters with hip-shaking music and gyrating movements before party bigwigs deliver rousing political speeches. Yet, as Indonesians prepare vote in national legislature elections Wednesday, the participation of dangdut singers has gone beyond a mere stage act. To increase gender equality in politics, Indonesia has imposed a strict mandatory quota on women standing in this year's elections. Each political party has to field at least 30 female parliamentary candidates in to participate in an electoral district, or else it will be disqualified. It is essentially a good rule. But much to the derision of many voters and the consternation of women activists, political parties choose to pick women little experience in politics or public service wives, daughters or female relatives of established politicians, and famous celebrities dangdut singers, swimsuit models and actresses. On the latter, a phrase has even been coined caleg cantik, or beautiful legislative candidates., "Is it an election or a beauty pageant?" asks website LivingIndonesia, whose "Sexiest Legislative Candidates" post, comparing the celebrities' pre- and postcandidacy photos, has gone viral. Feminist activist Gadis Arivia slams that "political parties prefer legislative candidates with big breasts to those with big brain capacity.", Among the dozens of celebrity candidates is dangdut singer cum B-movie actress Angel Lelga. The 30-year-old, who is running for office for an Islamic party, became the butt of jokes after giving a bumbling interview on a TV talk show in January. Women with political pedigree are in high demand too. Late President Suharto's daughter Siti Hediati Hariyadi, popularly known as Titiek, is a leading MP candidate for Golkar Party, the strongman's once formidable political vehicle. Her former husband Prabowo Subianto is presidential candidate of his own Gerindra Party. Members of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's extended family are running on his Democratic Party's ticket. Tunggal Pawestri, a candidate for the Yogyakarta provincial legislature, blames the male-dominated parties for failing to attract and nurture female talent. "So the shortcut is to recruit celebrities," says Tunggal, who was among women's-rights activists who pushed for the quota system. "They have a function as purely vote getters.", Since Indonesia adopted the gender-quota law in 2003, and strengthened it five years later, the number of women elected to the 560-seat House of Representatives, or DPR, had increased, from 11 in 2004 to more than 18 in 2009. But celebrities and political dynasts comprise the majority of women MPs. A quarter of the women elected to parliament in 2009 were popular figures, while some 42 were related to established power-families. "It was disappointing," says Gadis, who founded the feminist Women's Journal. "And I expect the trend to continue.", Heavyweight politicians may prefer to recruit little-experienced celebrities and family members because they can be steered easily. But this was not always the case. Former President Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairwoman of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle PDI-P, was first wooed to join the prior incarnation of her party, despite lacking experience, because she's a daughter of Indonesia's first President, Sukarno. And there are strong women hailing from the entertainment industry. Rieke Diah Pitaloka, of PDI-P, and Nurul Arifin, of Golkar Party, are both comic actresses turned legislators who have earned high respect in their new careers. And to be fair, political parties also recruit male celebrities Lelga's former husband, dangdut star Rhoma Irama, is the presidential candidate for another Islamic party and there are also many politicians' sons, brother-in-laws and nephews appearing in nomination lists. But it is the young, attractive female newcomers who invite most scrutiny, and sometimes sexist comments. That is not fair, Tunggal says. "The ones who decide on the candidacy are political parties, and they are the ones who should be blamed.", One stumbling block to attracting female candidates is a relatively low employment rate of Indonesian women. According to the World Bank, only 51 of women are employed in the workforce, compared with 78 of men. Moreover, women who harbor big political ambitions could face opposition at home. Indonesian media recently reported a politician divorcing his legislative-candidate wife because, he said, she had little time for their family. Gadis acknowledges that while the gender-quota law "helps women, it is not enough." And they need to do more to push for real gender equality, she says. "We have male-dominated parties and patriarchal culture, and that closes access to many women. We need to shatter these if we want more capable women to participate in politics." |
World | China Sets Deadline to Stop Taking Organs From Executed Prisoners | China will no longer harvest transplant organs from executed prisoners from the start of 2015, a decision praised as ethical but which renews questions about where the world's most populous nation will find much needed organs. State-run newspaper China Daily says the Chinese government will end the globally criticized practice of taking organs from its condemned population by Jan. 1. China is the only country to as a rule take organs from executed people, a practice that has led to allegations that prisoners and their families are coerced into signing off on the donations and that demand for more organs could translate into more death sentences. China carefully guards the number of people it executes as a state secret, but U.S.-based human-rights group Dui Hua estimates that the Chinese state killed about 2,400 people last year, an enormous drop from around 12,000 people in 2002 and marking a continuous decline in executions over the past decade. Chinese supplies of transplant organs are far short of the nation's needs, partly because of traditional burial procedures, as well as to public suspicion that organ waiting lists are holding pens for those who cannot pay their way out of them, Huang Jiefu, China's Vice Minister of Health, was quoted in local press as saying. State officials said in 2011 that condemned prisoners provided about 64 of the nation's transplant-organ supplies. Huang told local media that about 300,000 patients are annually wait-listed in China for an organ donation that, ultimately, only about 10,000 of them receive. Just 1,500 organs have been donated so far this year, he said. The paucity of donated organs has fueled a black-market organ trade that has also raised considerable ethical questions. In the U.S. which has a population about a quarter of China, 9,512 people donated organs in the first half of this year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Some 120,000 people in the U.S. are still awaiting organs. |
World | Twitters Automatically Adding a Crescent Moon to Ramadan Tweets | Ramadan began Saturday, and it seems like everyone has since known to insert a crescent moon icon in their tweets about the holy month of fasting including Hassan Rouhani, the President of Iran, In reality, Twitter automatically adds the icon after the hashtag Ramadanand it adds a separate icon after the hashtag Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. It announced the new feature in a post to its blog last week. The icon only appears on Twitter web and its official apps. , The social media site has used a similar "hashflag" for the World Cup, , Twitter will also let you know when to start and end your fast if you tweet at @AlArabiya with the hashtags iftar or imsak and the name of your city after a hashtag. |
World | ISIS Digs Heels Into Tikrit as Iraq Offensive Slows | Correction appended, Although Iraqi forces have been waging war against ISIS in Tikrit for two weeks, the battle to drive the jihadists from the town has come to a stalemate. The militants remain stubbornly lodged there despite an assault from Iraqi security forces numbering in the thousands, along with 20,000 Shi'ite militiamen. Last week Iraqi officials and leaders from Popular Mobilization Forces, a coalition of the mostly Shi'ite militias, boasted they would have control of Tikrit within days, but now their offensive is on hold even though the numbers are on their side. "I'd be surprised if there was more than a thousand ISIS in there," says Christopher Harmer, a senior analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, who completed several tours with the U.S. Army in Iraq. "Based on the numbers alone, they should have done it a long time ago.", So why haven't they? ISIS, which has controlled the Tigris river hometown of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein since it took over swathes of Iraq last June, has used those months to prepare for this battle. The militants are embedded in the town's center, and the Iraqi-led fighters say they have used snipers and IEDsimprovised explosive devicesto create a dangerous fortress. While most civilians have fled, some still remain, making combat even more complicated. "It's street to street now," says Karim al-Nouri, a spokesman for the Popular Mobilization Forces. He says the operation has already retaken 8,000 square kilometers from ISIS near Tikrit, and has not been stopped but merely slowed in its tracks. "Now we need to be more careful so we can have victory with less casualties.", But neither the Iraqi national forces nor these Shi'ite militias are trained for this sort of offensive operation, says Harmer. The Shi'ite militiamen are capable and experienced fighters, many having fought the Americans during the Iraq war. But their role is usually to defend their own territory, not advance on other forces. "When you get right down to it, this is a super well-armed neighborhood watch group," says Harmer. ISIS, on the other hand, is "used to this kind of warfare," he says. "They are used to being outnumbered.", The Iraqi army has reclaimed territory elsewhere with the help of the U.S.-led coalition and its air strikes, but those have been conspicuously absent this time. That may be because of the involvement of the Iranians in what has become the biggest offensive yet against ISIS in Iraq. Images posted online claim to show American Abrams and Iranian Safir-74 tanks side by side moving against ISIS positions in the Saladin Governorate, while Major General Qasem Soleimani, who coordinates Iran's support for Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, has been photographed on the battlefield. Nouri, the Popular Mobilization Forces spokesperson, is coy about Iranian involvement, saying only that the Iranians have a planning and advisory role, and that there are no Iranian troops or weapons on the battlefield. "Of course if Iran wants to help us to fight ISIS they are welcome," he says. "Anyone who wants to help us fight terrorism is welcome.", Despite this entreaty, the U.S. said it had not been invited to provide air support when the offensive began. "Iraq is their country, it's their military, their fight against ISIS," Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren told reporters in Iraq earlier this month. "They didn't request support for it, and we didn't provide support for it.", But now that the advance on Tikrit has slowed, Baghdad has signaled American jets might be needed to help forces advance on Tikrit. But that will be hard for Washington, given Iran's role in the operation. "The U.S. cannot be in the position of actively supporting an Iran offensive," says Harmer. "For all practice purposes the Shi'ite militias are functioning as a subset of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, or Quds force.", Nouri says U.S. air strikes wouldn't help much in the battle for Tikrit's center. It would be technically difficult as the militants are embedded with civilians, and besides the U.S. has no one on the ground to call in the strikes. But what the U.S. could do is hit ISIS positions outside the town and convoys heading to Tikrit from places like Mosul, the largest city under control of ISIS and its base of operations. Without that, there's no telling how long the battle for Tikrit might continue. Nouri says it will be over within a week, but officials were saying that a week ago. What is clear is that the halting progress made so far will be giving some in Washington and Baghdad pause for thought. The Tikrit operation has been seen as a trial run for the eventual operation to retake Mosul, one that U.S. and Iraqi officials have suggested might happen as soon as the spring. But the longer this goes on, the less likely ISIS will be driven from its Iraqi stronghold any time soon. Correction The original version of this story incorrectly stated which group Christopher Harmer described as a "super well-armed neighborhood watch group." He was referring to the Shi'ite militiamen. , |
World | These 5 Facts Explain Obamas Foreign Policy Breakthroughsand Failures | Barack Obama's second term has seen a number of foreign policy breakthroughs, including the lifting of America's long-standing arms embargo against Vietnam just this week. These five facts explain why Obama's overtures have worked in some countries but not in others. 1. Vietnam, For years the U.S. maintained that lifting its arms embargo was contingent on Vietnam improving its human rights record. There's no compelling evidence that substantial progress has been made, but the shifting geopolitical balance in Asia has shifted Washington's thinking, and China's growing assertiveness in the South China Sea SCS has put neighboring countries on edge. The SCS's strategic importance cannot be overstated 1/3 of all global maritime trade travels through these waters, and there may well be vast amounts of oil and gas beneath its seabed. Officially, the US is calling for a "peaceful resolution" of boundary disputes in the SCS. The end of the US embargo signals to China that it won't stand by while Beijing throws its weight around Asia. There's more to this story. Obama's crowning foreign policy achievement will be the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, which, if approvedmost likely during the upcoming "lame duck" session of Congresswill lower barriers to trade and investment across 12 countries that make up 40 percent of the world's GDP. Vietnam stands to be the deal's single biggest beneficiary, boosting its economy 10 percent by 2030. And at a time when many people around the world are pushing back against trade deals, Vietnam is one of the few remaining unabashed cheerleaders of globalization. A 2014 Pew Research survey found that some 95 percent of Vietnamese citizens say trade is good, and 76 percent have favorable views of the US. This is a country that offers Washington real opportunities for security and commercial gains. Business Insider, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pew Research, 2. Cuba U.S. reengagement with Cuba is another story. Obama enjoys Pope Francis-level popularity ratings of nearly 80 percent on the island. In addition, 79 percent of Cubans say they're not satisfied with the country's economic system, and 55 percent of Cubans would leave the island if they could. A full 97 percent of Cubans say a better relationship with the US would benefit their country. Cuba's leaders can't maintain the status quo. For decades the island's Communist government has depended on friendly leftist governments to keep the country afloat. The Soviet Union was the principal benefactor until its collapse in 1991. In recent years, Cuba has sent doctors to Venezuela in exchange for 100,000 barrels of oil a day to help fuel the country's economy. It also received aid from Venezuela valued between 5 and 15 billion each year, equivalent to 15 percent of Cuba's GDP. That's no longer possible, given Venezuela's own economic problem. Obama saw an opportunity, and he grabbed itwith a little help from Pope Francis, who mediated early talks with Cuban leader Raul Castro. Washington Post a, Washington Post b, TIME, Read More These 5 Facts Explain Why Venezuela Could Be on the Brink of Collapse, 3. Iran For decades, Iran's theocratic regime has railed against the West, painting it as an existential threat to the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. It should have worried more about its stagnating economy. Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels of oil a day back before economic sanctions were tightened in 2012 by 2014, oil exports had fallen to just over a million barrels a day. For a country who relies on energy exports for nearly a quarter of its GDP, that represents a significant hit to its cash flow. It gets worseIran has long been considered the best-educated country in the Middle East, but an educated population becomes a problem when there aren't enough jobs to go around. Each year, 1.2 million young people enter the job market in a country with an unofficial youth unemployment rate estimated at more than 50. It's difficult to justify stifling your economy to pursue a nuclear program whose long-term security and economic benefits are murky at best. That gave Obama the opening he needed. A tightening of sanctions presented the US and its allies with an opportunity to draw Iran to the negotiating table and to continue to bargain until Iran offered an acceptable deal. There won't be a near-term thaw in US-Iranian relations, but the nuclear deal creates a long-awaited opening for genuine longer-term progress. Heritage Foundation, New York Times, Read More Read The Full Text of President Obama's Speech In Hiroshima, 4. North Korea Some regimes open up in hopes of maintaining political stability for North Korea, political stability depends on isolation. To that end, Kim Jong Un has spent the past five years consolidating his power without interference from outsiders. Of course, North Korea is only ably to do so because China provides food, fuel, and political cover. Beijing is responsible for 57 percent of North Korea's imports and is the final destination for 42 percent of the DPRK's exports. China accounts for a whopping 70 percent of North Korea's trade volume. It's been keeping North Korea afloat for decades. Kim Jong Un knows that better relations with the US depend on political and economic reforms that would surely destabilize his government. Washington shouldn't hold its breath. The Diplomat, Council on Foreign Relations, , 5. Russia Russia and the handling of the Ukraine crisis has been Obama's biggest foreign policy failure to date, in part because a confrontational approach has only given Putin greater incentive to demonize the West. Vladimir Putin has used conflict abroad to boost his popularity at home throughout his tenure, up to and including his land-grab of Crimea. In a Pew Global study conducted last summer, 88 percent of Russians had confidence in Putin to do "the right thing" regarding world affairs. Over 80 percent of Russians approved of Putin's handling of individual relations with the US, Ukraine and the EU. Of course, oil price volatility combined with ongoing sanctions have hit the Russian economy hardin 2015, Russia's GDP fell 3.7 percent while unemployment rose 7.4 percent. Yet Putin's approval ratings still top 80 percent. He used the last decade of high oil prices to build up a foreign reserves buffer of nearly 600 billion dollars. Russia has needed to dip into those savings, but it still has more than 375 billion in emergency funds at its disposal. Combine that with Putin's ongoing popularity, and it doesn't look like Russia will need better relations with Washington this year or next. Pew Research, International Business Times, Levada Center, Bloomberg *** We expect our presidential candidates to tell us exactly what they'll do once in office. The reality is that, especially for foreign policy, a commander-in-chief can usually do little more than seize opportunities as they ariseand try to sow the seeds that might one day create new ones. |
World | We Have to Respond Envoy Says China Did Not Want a Trade War | China's ambassador to the U.S. said Beijing has no choice but to respond to what he described as a trade war started by the U.S. "We never wanted a trade war, but if somebody started a trade war against us, we have to respond and defend our own interests," Ambassador Cui Tiankai said on "Fox News Sunday" in a rare U.S. television appearance. His comments come amid rising political and economic tensions between the world's two largest economies, and as international bodies and other countries warned that global growth will suffer if the dispute isn't resolved. Cui also dismissed as "groundless" a suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence that China has orchestrated an effort to meddle in U.S. domestic affairs. Pence ramped up the rhetoric in a speech Oct. 4, saying Beijing has created a "a whole-of-government approach" to sway American public opinion, including spies, tariffs, coercive measures and a propaganda campaign. His comments were some of the most critical about China by a high-ranking U.S. official in recent memory. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo got a lecture when he visited Beijing days later, about U.S. actions that were termed " completely out of line.", The tough words followed months of increases tit-for-tat tariffs imposed by Washington and Beijing that have ballooned to cover hundreds of billions of dollars in bilateral trade. Earlier this week, the International Monetary Fund cited the trade conflict when it downgraded its outlook for global growth to 3.7 percent this year and next, down from the 3.9 percent projected three months ago. U.S. growth for 2019 was forecast to 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent this year. "There are clouds on the horizon," IMF Chief Economist Maurice Obstfeld told reporters on Oct. 9 at the organization's annual meetings in Bali, Indonesia. "Growth has proven to be less balanced than we had hoped.", At the close of those meetings, finance officials from several countries, including Japan and Brazil, called on the feuding nations to come to a comprehensive agreement on trade issues. "Our message was very clear de-escalate the tensions," IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde told Bloomberg Television in an interview. The trade disputes are creating "choppy" waters for the global economy, she said. At the same meetings, Chinese officials received an unusual gesture of support when Mexico's former president Ernesto Zedillo counseled them to follow the example set by Mexico and Canada during their recent re-negotiations with the U.S. on the North American Free Trade Agreement. "Mexico and Canada made clear that they'd rather not have Nafta than having the deal that the U.S. wanted," Zedillo said. "So I hope China doesn't blink.", Read more Global finance chiefs urge trade war solution, In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Cui said the U.S. has "not sufficiently" dealt in good faith with the Chinese on trade matters, saying "the U.S. position keeps changing all the time so we don't know exactly what the U.S. would want as priorities.", The escalating trade row was seen as a contributing factor to last week's global market rout that sent the SP 500 and other major U.S. indexes to their worst performances in months. Larry Kudlow, the White House economic director, said on "Fox News Sunday" that President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will "probably meet" at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires in late November. "There's plans and discussions and agendas" being discussed, he said. Cui said he was present at two previous meetings of Xi and Trump, and that top-level communication "played a key role, an irreplaceable role, in guiding the relationship forward." Despite current tensions the two have a "good working relationship," he said. So far, talks with China on trade have been "unsatisfactory," Kudlow said. "We've made our asks" on allegations of intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers, he added. "We have to have reciprocity." |
World | Germanys AntiImmigrant Party Makes Gains in State Elections | Germany's anti-immigration party made significant gains in three state elections Sunday, dealing a blow to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's open door policy to refugees. The nationalist party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, entered all three legislatures in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt after campaigning against Merkel's liberal migrant policy, according to the Associated Press. "We are seeing above all in these elections that voters are turning away in large numbers from the big established parties and voting for our party," AfD leader Frauke Petry said, according to the AP. Read More Why Angela Merkel Is TIME's Person of the Year 2015, The AfD won more than 14 of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg, nearly 11 in Rhineland-Palatinate and nearly 23 in Saxony-Anhalt, according to the AP. Its success could mean added pressure on Merkel to close Germany's doors to migrants, The Guardian reports. "We have a very clear position in refugee policy We don't want to take in any refugees," AfD deputy chairman Alexander Gauland told the newspaper. "All who voted for us stand behind this policy.", AP |
World | Watch Parisians Vow To Stand Strong Against Terror Threat | Mourners in Paris have taken to the streets to express their sympathy and vow resilience in the wake of the deadly terrorist attack that took place against satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo Wednesday. "They don't have the last word. They don't win. At the end, we have to win," one man said. The suspects behind the attack on Charlie Hebdo were cornered in a factory northeast of Paris with at least one hostage on Friday, and another gunman linked to them took captives in a kosher grocery store. |
World | Thai Junta Defends Itself From US Criticism Over Its Decision to Give Police Powers to Soldiers | A spokesman for Thailand's junta has hit back at criticism from Washington, insisting that military officers in the country should have powers usually reserved for the police. The generals who seized power in a coup almost two years ago have drafted a new constitution and say they plan finally to hold elections. But the draft charter, issued on March 29, would allow the military to retain a degree of control over future elected governments, and also included a controversial measure to give soldiers ranked sublieutenant and higher the power to summon, arrest and detain people suspected of anything from crimes against public peace to gambling. Army officers will also be allowed to seize assets and search some properties without warrants. Junta spokesman Major General Sansern Kaewkamnerd told the Bangkok Post that the measure was needed to support police in cracking down on "mafia" and "influential crime figures.", Human-rights groups say the powers would lead to more restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and association in the country, where the military government has already been stamping out dissent. U.S. State Department spokeswoman for East Asia, Katina Adams, on Monday called on Thailand's generals to "limit the role of the military in internal policing and allow civilian authorities to carry out their duties," the Associated Press reported. Sansern rejected the U.S. getting involved in domestic affairs, and said Washington was being misled by "public-relations companies" hired by unnamed parties to denigrate the Thai government, the Bangkok Post said. Bangkok Post, AP |
World | Turkey Is Not Convinced By Erdogans Bid to Transform the Constitution | President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is leaving nothing to chance. Launching his campaign on Feb. 17 to expand the power of his office via a constitutional referendum, the President came out with rhetorical guns blazing. He likened the opponents of the proposed amendments to those who plotted the bloody July 2016 coup attempt that failed to dislodge him from power. He compared potential "no" voters to "terrorists.", The president's public bombast belies the fact that with less than two months to go before the April 16 vote, public support for the proposed constitutional revision is lukewarm at best. Even in a country where the pro-government faction dominates the media and authorities jail some political opponents, Erdogan's victory in the referendum does not look assured. A poll released on Feb. 14 showed the "no" votes beating the yes votes 47.5 to 43.9 percent, with 10 percent still undecided. The extent of opposition sets up a campaign with the highest of stakes. If the constitutional amendments pass, Erdogan stands to fortify his grasp on power. If the proposal loses, it would deal an embarrassing defeat to Erdogan, opening a new chapter of political uncertainty for the country. There's little question the constitutional overhaul would, if approved, hand enormous new responsibilities to Erdogan. The changes would eliminate the office of prime minister, grant the president the authority to appoint and sack ministers, limit parliament's ability to challenge the executive, and permit the president to formally lead a political party. Erdogan and his faction argue the changes would bring much-needed political stability to shore up the state in the face of terrorist attacks and swirling regional volatility. Opponents say the changes would fatally undermine Turkey's already beleaguered democracy, opening an era of autocracy. Perhaps most worrying for Erdogan and his supporters, the president's own Justice and Development Party known by the Turkish acronym AKP appears to be increasingly divided over the reforms. In one public opinion poll, 35 percent of AKP members said they would not vote yes. Even Turkey's former prime minister under Erdogan, Ahmet Davutoglu, said publicly in January that he had "concerns" about the planned constitutional overhaul. Some are confused why the changes are needed, when Erdogan already enjoys sweeping power. In the wake of the failed and deadly coup attempt in July 2016, Erdogan's government suspended or detained tens of thousands of civil servants and military officials. Dozens of news organizations were closed. At least 12 opposition members of parliament have been detained. With these kinds of powers already in his possession, why transform the constitution?, "They have failed to explain to their own people what it actually means to change the constitution and go for a presidential system. Not everyone understands what Erdogan is trying to do," says Burak Kadercan, an expert on Turkish politics at the U.S. Naval War College. But privately, some members are expressing concerns about the potential for a massive centralization of power in the hands of the executive. "Obviously it is not a democratic move, and so there is this kind of uneasiness on the part of the AKP people," Etyen Mahcupyan, a prominent journalist and former advisor to Davutoglu, tells TIME. "It's like the pot boiling.", The opposition within the ruling party remains a silent movement. Aside from Davutoglu's gentle statement of misgivings, no major AKP figures have come forward to oppose the president. The former prime minister himself felt compelled to resign in May 2016, in a move that analysts said was prompted in part by his failure to lend full-throated support for Erdogan's proposed constitutional changes. "No one is in a position to come forward and challenge Tayyip Erdogan. So that's the situation there is discontent. There is this energy of a kind of opposition, but it is not said out loud very much," adds Mahcupyan, in a phone interview. That's not a big surprise given how Erdogan has sidelined his rivals. The "no" campaign has been demonized and most of the media fear reprisals if they challenge the president. In addition, the left-wing, pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party HDP is reeling following the arrest of dozens of its top leaders, including members of parliament. The clampdown on the party could depress turnout among minority Kurdish voters, a majority of whom are believed to oppose the constitutional changes. "It's going to be tough. We are not well organized now because of all this pressure, but we know that there is a deep dissatisfaction against Erdogan, particularly as the economic crisis is deepening. There is definitely a chance. So, it is not a done deal for President Erdogan," says Hisyar Ozsoy, a lawmaker affiliated with the opposition HDP. In the weeks leading up to the referendum, Erdogan is expected to campaign heavily for a "yes" vote, traveling the country in a campaign stressing the themes of security and stability. The president remains a popular, if polarizing figure, and he could yet translate his charisma into a win in the referendum. Increasingly, the vote seems less about changes to the constitution, and more on the president himself. "He has a lot of stake in this," says Kadercan. "He personalized this by putting himself back into the field, and putting his name behind yes." |
World | Pentagon Confirms AlShabab Leader Killed in US Airstrike | White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that the Pentagon has confirmed al-Shabab leader Ahmed Godane was killed in a U.S. airstrike earlier this week. Al-Shabaab is an African al-Qaeda offshoot primarily operating in Somalia which claimed responsibility for a deadly attack at a Nairobi, Kenya mall last September. "Godane's removal is a major symbolic and operational loss to the largest al-Qaeda affiliate in Africa and reflects years of painstaking work by our intelligence, military and law enforcement professionals," said Earnest in a statement. "Even as this is an important step forward in the fight against al-Shabab, the United States will continue to use the tools at our disposal financial, diplomatic, intelligence and military to address the threat that al-Shabab and other terrorist groups pose to the United States and the American people.", The American airstrikes targeting al-Shabab in Somalia were previously reported, but it was unclear until now if Godane was killed as a result of them. See the full list of attacks Godane has claimed to be responsible for in Earnest's recounting below |
World | India Strikes Down Controversial Law Banning Offensive Online Content | In a landmark ruling, India's apex court struck down a law that allowed the government to jail citizens for up to three years for posting "offensive" content on the Internet. The contentious law, known as section 66A under the 2009 amendment to India's Information Technology Act, was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on Tuesday. "Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 is struck down in its entirety being violative of Article 19 1 a and not saved under Article 19 2," the court said in its judgment, referring to the portion of the Indian constitution that guarantees every citizen the right to free speech and expression. The court's decision, in response to a 2012 petition from law student Shreya Singhal, caps a three-year long legal battle and was met with jubilation among proponents of free speech. , , , , "The Internet is so far-reaching and so many people use it that it is very important for us to protect this right today, now," Singhal told AFP on Tuesday after describing the ruling as a "big victory.", Successive governments in India have grappled with issues of online censorship and free speech, and Singhal's petition came after a slew of arrests related to 66A in 2012 including two young women who criticized the shutdown of India's financial capital Mumbai over the death of a local politician. Earlier, the New York Times had reported that then telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal had asked websites like Facebook, Google and Yahoo to screen objectionable content and prevent it from being published. The new government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has had its fair share of censorship battles, including a recent ban on a controversial British documentary about the infamous 2012 New Delhi rape case. The government also justified section 66A in February, calling greater Internet regulation necessary even after admitting the law was "draconian.", However, the Supreme Court judges said that "assurances of the government that it will not be misused" was not enough to justify the law, which uses terms like "grossly offensive" and "causing annoyance, inconvenience enmity, hatred or ill will," that they deemed too vague and easy to be misconstrued. The court upheld section 69A of the act, however, which allows the government to block online content, and section 793 which makes intermediaries such as YouTube or Facebook liable for not complying with government demands for censorship of content. |
World | Chinas Hanghzou Clears Out Pestsand Peopleas It Prepares to Host the G20 Summit | If the massive propaganda blitz enveloping China is to be believed, the chance to host a G20 summit is a mandate from the heavens, a seal of international approval that confirms China's status as global economic savior. "Experts are confident," proclaimed the state-run China Daily, "that the G20 Hangzhou summit will deliver a desirable cure for the still anemic global economy." State media have described Hangzhou, the city in eastern China where leaders of the world's 20 largest economies will convene on Sept. 4-5, as a "dream town" and no less than a "paradise on earth.", That is superlative praise, and I wondered how the last city to have hosted the G20 was transformed by its brush with global greatness. So on Sept. 2 in Hangzhou, I asked 30 passersbythe kind of iPhone-swiping, Costa Coffee-swigging business types who might be interested in the fate of the global economywhat they thought of the 2015 G20 summit host. It turned out that only one person plus two G20 volunteers knew that the last G20 confab had taken place in Turkey. No one knew that the city in question was Antalya, the resort town on the Mediterranean. Read More Tsang Yok-Sing Wants to Heal the Rift Between Hong Kong and China, The results of my surveyalbeit an unscientific samplingraises a question Why does the Chinese government care so much about hosting these kinds of events when they doesn't necessarily translate to global glory? In the official Chinese narrative, 2008 Beijing Olympics, 2010 Shanghai Expo, 2014 Beijing APEC and 2016 Hangzhou G20 mark the metronomic emergence of a nation that is once again claiming its rightful place as Zhongguothe "middle country" or, to be more poetic, "the center of the world," as China is known in Chinese. "In my view, Hangzhou is hosting the G20 because the rest of the world's economy is broken," says Wu Rulin, a software engineer in Hangzhou. "It makes sense to have the G20 in the place with the best economy.", It's true that China now claims the world's second-largest economy and served as an oasis of stability in 2008 when, as the inaugural G20 meeting was held in Washington, much of the rest of the world was caught in financial crisis. Today, Hangzhou is home to one of the world's largest tech companies, China's Alibaba, which boasted the largest IPO in history in 2014, as well as Geely, China's first private carmaker and Volvo parent, and Wahaha, China's largest beverage maker. Economic growth may be slowing in China, idling factories and miring state-owned firms in even more debt. But the European Union is pulling apart amid a refugee crisis and the U.S. is trapped in a toxic political cycle. You can't blame Chinese President Xi Jinping for saying that, with the G20 Hangzhou summit, "China will work with all other parties to pull in one direction in the spirit of win-win partnership.", Read More China's Morality Censors Take Aim at the Country's Film Industry, China's undeniable power, its global gravitas, makes it all the more puzzling that its government feels the need to constantly prove its greatness to the world. On the eve of the G20 summit, do state media really need to quote "foreign experts" from Kazakhstan and Chad to show that China will save the day with its eager consumers and innovative entrepreneurs? Did I know, one of an estimated 760,000 G20 volunteers asked me in excellent English, that Hangzhou had already hosted the World Leisure Expo and the China International Cartoon and Animation Festival? I did not. "This shows," she told me, "that Hangzhou is a very unique city.", Hangzhou is, indeed, pleasant. Back in the 13th century, Marco Polo called the onetime imperial capital the world's most magnificent metropolis. Hangzhou has been remade since then, particularly in the months leading up to the G20. All manholes have been locked down, lest security surprises spring from underground. Hangzhou officials have exhorted locals to drive mosquitoes, rodents, flies and cockroachesthe "four pests"out of town. Those words bring bad memoriesbeginning in the 1950s, a nationwide campaign against the "four pests," led to the ecologically devastating extermination of sparrows, and the birds have since been replaced by cockroaches in a new accounting of pestilent creatures., Read More Lost In Transition The Shifting Landscape of Western China, People, it seems, are also a bit of a nuisance for a city that wants to clear its streets and airfor the likes of Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel and Narendra Modi. Residents have been given a weeklong holiday around the G20 period, and Hangzhou train stations heaved with humanity eager to leave, if only they could stand the hour-long security lines. With factories shuttered, the city's normally smoggy skies have turned what's been dubbed "G20 blue.", But for international visitors who want to visit the city's most vaunted tourist attraction, the West Lake, with its pagodas and gardens, G20 is an inopportune time. Only people with special passes can now strolls its perimeter. Some of the tourists supposedly wandering around West Lake, another G20 volunteer explained, aren't holiday-makers at all but security forces dressed in civilian clothes to "make normal people feel more comfortable." Even a dream town needs a bit of make believe to turn itself into a paradise on earth. |
World | Narendra Modi Wins Readers Poll for TIME Person of the Year | Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won the online reader's poll for TIME Person of the Year, beating out other world leaders, artists and politicians as the most influential figure in 2016 among people who voted. The magazine's editors decide the final Person of the Year, but poll results provide a look at how the world sees these figures. Modi won with 18 of the vote when the poll closed Sunday at midnight. He placed well ahead of his closest contenders, including Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Julian Assange, who all received 7 of the "yes" vote. Modi also placed far ahead of other prominent figures of this year, like Mark Zuckerberg 2 and Hillary Clinton 4. In recent months, Modi saw high approval ratings from Indians, according to a September Pew poll, and ratified the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Modi has come under scrutiny recently for getting rid of 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, impacting cash-based businesses and threatening India's economy. Current poll results, analyzed by poll host Apester, found that preferences differ across the world and the United States. Modi performed particularly well among Indian voters as well as those in California and New Jersey. Every year, TIME selects the most influential person of the year, noting, for better or for worse, the person or group of people who have had the largest global impact over the past 12 months. In partnership with Opentopic and IBM's Watson this year, TIME editors were also able to see how candidates were influential on the Internet. Update Last-minute votes tallied on Monday after the close of the poll, by poll host Apester, brought Modi's lead up to 19. TIME'S Person of the Year will be revealed on Dec. 7. |
World | Thailand Defends Its Decision to Forcibly Return Uighur Migrants to China | Thailand's junta government has defended the forcible return of more than 100 Uighur migrants to China despite their fears of persecution. "Thailand has worked with China and Turkey to solve the Uighur Muslim problem," Colonel Weerachon Sukhondhapatipak, deputy spokesman for the Thai government, told reporters Thursday. "We have sent them back to China after verifying their nationality.", The move has been condemned by the U.N. Washington and human-rights groups, and led to violent scenes in Turkey when pro-Uighur protesters attacked the Thai consulate in Istanbul with clubs and rocks. Uighurs are a Muslim minority in China's far-western region of Xinjiang, but they are ethnically, culturally and geographically closer to the Turkic peoples of Central Asia than to the Han China's dominant ethnic group. Thousands have fled the escalating violence and perceived abuses in Xinjiang in recent years. Despite hosting hundreds of thousands of displaced people, mainly from Burma, within its borders, Thailand has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and still does not have functioning asylum procedures. The 109 Uighurs returned Wednesday "self-identified as Turks, expressed fear of being sent to China and expressed the strong desire to go to Turkey," Vivian Tan, Bangkok-based spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency, tells TIME. Their forced return "violates international law," she adds, notably prohibitions on "sending people back to a place where their lives and freedoms could be in danger.", Washington echoed U.N. concerns about the deportations. "We strongly urge the government of Thailand, and other governments in countries where Uighurs have taken refuge, not to carry out further forced deportations of ethnic Uighurs," U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. The reaction in Turkey was particularly fierce. Late last month, Thailand won approval in Turkey but a stern rebuke from Beijing by sending a group of 170 Uighurs there. Bangkok's decision to send the present batch of Uighurs to Beijing is seen as kowtowing to the Chinese leadership, which is extremely sensitive to the Uighur issue. "The international community needs to take a firm stand to guarantee the rights of Uighur refugees," said Alim Seytoff, president of the Uyghur American Association, in a statement. "Governments and multilateral agencies must not permit China to disregard international human rights norms.", Xinjiang is rich in natural resources, boasting China's largest deposits of oil, natural gas and coal. It is also comparatively underdeveloped and sparsely populated, with its wide open spaces a tempting prospect to settlers from the rest of densely populated China. An influx of Han Chinese has raised overall living standards, says Beijing, though Uighurs claim of marginalization and the erosion of their traditional culture. During the current Islamic holy month of Ramadan, for example, all students and state employees, among them many Muslim Uighurs, were forbidden from fasting. Such grievances have spurred an insurgency, often targeting Chinese civilians as was the case in March 2014, when 29 were killed during a bloody knife attack at Kunming's train station in western China's Yunnan province. Many Turks see themselves as having a cultural and spiritual bond with the Uighurs, and the unrest has strained relations with Beijing. The attack on the Thai consulate was preceded by fierce protests outside the Chinese consulate and badgering of Chinese tourists in Istanbul. Thailand's junta chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha warned Thursday that "we might temporarily have to close the embassy in Turkey" should the situation deteriorate. As Thailand currently holds another 50 Uighur migrants while "their nationalities are verified," this fear is very real. Thai authorities must weigh Beijing's ire, their international responsibilities and another backlash from Turkey. However, owing to close socioeconomic ties China is Thailand's second biggest trading partner Beijing no doubt remains favorites in this ethnic tug of war. |
World | China Tumbles in Annual Corruption Index | China fell 20 spots in this year's corruption rankings, despite President Xi Jinping's massive campaign to weed out graft that has disciplined more than 60,000 government officials. Transparency International's annual study, released late Tuesday, scored 175 countries and territories based on how corrupt experts perceive them to be. The lowest rankings indicate the highest amounts of corruption. China, the world's second largest economy, placed 100 on the Index, down from 80 in 2013. "Fast-growing economies whose governments refuse to be transparent and tolerate corruption, create a culture of impunity in which corruption thrives," Jos Ugaz, the chair of Transparency International, said in a statement released with the report. Brazil, Russia and India, the other members of the so-called BRIC developing nations, all placed in the lower two-thirds of the rankings. Denmark held onto first place as the country seen as least corrupt, while recent and current conflict zones represented some of the poorest-faring countries, including Syria 159, Libya 166 and Somalia, which tied North Korea for last place. Iraq, where the government said on Monday that an internal review had found some 50,000 soldiers were on the payroll but not showing up for duty, placed 170. |
World | Reports and Images From the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 Crash Scene | It wasn't long after news broke that Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 had crashed in eastern Ukraine that traditional and social media were both flooded with descriptions of the crash scene, along with photos and videos apparently taken at the spot where the plane came down. Taken together, they paint a grisly picture of the scene on the ground in the Donetsk region. Early reports say that all 295 aboard reportedly 280 passengers and 15 crew members were killed. Below are some of the stills and videos members of the public and journalists have posted on social media sites. It is not possible to verify the authenticity of the images, MORE Protecting Airliners From Missile Attacks |
World | As Indonesia Reels from the Earthquake and Tsunami Experts Warn of More Deadly Disasters to Come | Correction appended Oct. 11, 2112 ET, Indonesia is facing a long and painful recovery from the devastating earthquake and tsunami of two weeks ago, but scientists say that this latest calamity could simply be a warning of more deadly and destructive disasters ahead. Palu, in Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, was ravaged on Sept. 28 by a 7.5-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that lashed the coastal city with waves up to 20 ft. tall. The twin disasters claimed nearly 2,000 lives, according to the U.N. with thousands more injured and missing. Survivors will feel the consequences for years some 74,000 people lost their homes, and will live in refugee camp-like settlements for the foreseeable future. It's been a year of natural disasters. Hurricane Florence dumped record rainfall on the Carolinas, Typhoon Mangkhut triggered landslides and killed dozens in the Philippines, and turbulent wildfires tore across California. Another earthquake on Indonesia's Lombok Island in July killed over 500 people. The devastating toll of such disasters could be contributing a false sense of their frequency, experts told TIME. While climate change is increasing the severity of some natural disasters, like hurricanes, typhoons and wildfires, the number of annual earthquake and tsunami events is fairly stable. According to data compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey U.S.G.S., the number of severe earthquakes has remained static since 1900. Read more New UN Report Warns of Looming Climate Change Crisis, But the damage those quakes cause, and the threat they pose to human life, is increasing. A report last year from the Belgium-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters CRED documented slightly fewer natural disasters in 2017 than the previous decade, but a 49 increase in the economic losses those events inflicted. The reasons are clear more humans are moving into more densely populated cities, and surrounding themselves with infrastructure roads, bridges, and buildings that become deadly hazards during a disaster, and expensive to repair when it subsides. People, infrastructure, and wealth are being "concentrated into increasingly exposed urban centers in the most hazardous parts of the planet," says Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at University College London. "Disaster preparedness is not keeping up.", Earthquakes and tsunamis have proven particularly deadly, claiming nearly 750,000 lives over the past 20 years, more than other extreme weather events, according to a forthcoming report from the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. Much of that mortality came in 2004 after a 9.1-magnitude earthquake in the southern Indian Ocean generated a devastating tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people in 12 countries, the majority in Indonesia. In some cases, the very factors that make coastal cities appealing also amplify their danger. Many are built in the path of tropical storms or alongside tectonic faults that mirror coastlines. Palu is no different it sits at the end of a long bay, which protects its residents from sea storms, McGuire notes. But that bay also helped concentrate the tsunami's destruction, raising water levels and guiding it directly towards Palu's inhabitants. Read more Indonesia Quake Survivors Worry About Future, Erosion along the Palu-Kora fault that formed the bay around Palu also facilitated liquefaction, a phenomenon where the soil churns like ocean waves during an earthquake. The liquefaction was a horror but it should not have been a surprise a 2012 Indonesian government survey found that outlying tracts of Palu like Petobo and Balaroa were at high risk of liquefaction, the Associated Press reported Monday. Now, those neighborhoods are gone and thousands of former residents are still missing. Palu's worst hit areas won't be rebuilt, according to a government disaster agency spokesperson, which could prevent a future tragedy. But reconstructing the rest of Palu to withstand future earthquakes will be costly. "There is no simple answer to this problem," McGuire wrote to TIME in an email. "Cities are simply located in the wrong place.", Read more Indonesia How Liquefaction Made Mud Flow Like Waves', There is some improvement in recent years our ability to recognize and prepare for earthquakes and tsunamis has grown by bounds, with seismic stations, tidal gauges, and seafloor sensors that measure minute tremors and changes in ocean depth. "Indonesia has significant and continuously improved its tsunami early warning system and preparedness" since the 2004 tsunami said Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center ITIC in Hawaii. But early detection doesn't confer immunity localized tsunamis like Palu's "can hit in minutes," Kong added. In Sulawesi, the government came under fire for preemptively canceling tsunami warning sirens and text message alerts. But just fifteen minutes separated the earthquake and tsunami, according to a timeline compiled by the New York Times. Electricity lines and cell phone towers were downed in minutes, making it unclear how much longer the alert could have gone out for. With the unpredictability of earthquakes and tsunamis, education and awareness can be far more effective than high-tech equipment, numerous experts told TIME. "People need to know that if they live in earthquake country the ground shaking is their natural warning," geophysicist Jason Patton wrote to TIME, adding that civilians should know to evacuate even if warning equipment fails. "A natural disaster only becomes a catastrophe if lots of people are harmed.", Correction The original version of this story misstated the type of phenomenon that hit Indonesia on Sept. 28. It was a tsunami, not a tidal wave. |
World | Prince William to Make Plea on Chinese TV to End Illegal Wildlife Trade | As part of his ongoing campaign against the illegal wildlife trade, Prince William plans to make a direct television appeal to Chinese consumers. William believes the speech, which will be shown on China's top-rated TV channel after being taped in London in mid-October, is a chance to widen the appeal of his fight for endangered wildlife. The Duke of Cambridge, 33, wants "to explain how people around the world must work together to save some of the planet's most critically endangered species before they are lost forever," a palace spokesman said in a statement Monday. "He considers this issue an important test for his generation's ability to solve the much more complex global challenges it will face in the decades to come.", William set up United for Wildlife in 2013, and has also taken part in talks with the Chinese president Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama on the issue. And when he visited China in March, he made a hard-hitting appeal for wildlife protection. "He was pleased to raise this issue with the president of China when they met in Beijing earlier this year and has been encouraged by China's willingness to play its part in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade," the spokesman said. The upcoming broadcast of the speech, which will be in English in a show called Let's Talk, will air around the same time as a state visit to London by the Chinese president and his wife, Peng Liyuan. The visit is part of a series of engagements William and wife Kate have plannedfor the fall. Prince Harry is also set to return to royal duties next week when he gets back from a three-month tour aiding conservation in southern Africa. |
World | China Urges Calm as North Korea Prepares For National Celebration | BEIJING/PYONGYANG Military force cannot resolve tension over North Korea, China said on Thursday, while an influential Chinese newspaper urged the North to halt its nuclear program in exchange for Chinese protection. With a U.S. aircraft carrier group steaming to the area and tension rising, South Korea said it believed the United States would consult it before any pre-emptive strike against the North. Fears have been growing that the reclusive North could soon conduct its sixth nuclear test or more missile launches in defiance of U.N. sanctions and stark warnings from the United States that a policy of patience was over. China, North Korea's sole major ally and benefactor, which nevertheless opposes its weapons program, has called for talks leading to a peaceful resolution and the denuclearization of the peninsula. "Military force cannot resolve the issue," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told reporters in Beijing. "Amid challenge there is opportunity. Amid tensions we will also find a kind of opportunity to return to talks.", While U.S. President Donald Trump has put North Korea on notice that he would not tolerate any provocation, U.S. officials have said his administration was focusing its strategy on tougher economic sanctions. Trump has diverted the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier group towards the Korean peninsula, which could take more than a week to arrive, in a show of force aimed at deterring North Korea from conducting another nuclear test or launching more missiles to coincide with important events and anniversaries. The possibility of U.S. military action gained traction after the U.S. Navy fired 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian airfield last week in response to a deadly gas attack. Wang warned that history would hold any instigator to account. "Whoever provokes the situation, whoever continues to make trouble in this place, they will have to assume historical responsibility," Wang said. South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se told parliament in Seoul he believed Washington would consult Seoul if it was considering a pre-emptive strike. The United States has about 28,500 troops in South Korea. A Washington-based think-tank that monitors North Korea, 38 North, said satellite images on Wednesday showed activity around the North's Punggye-ri nuclear test site on the east coast that indicated it was ready for a new test. South Korean officials said there were no new signs to indicate a test was more likely, although they also said the North appeared ready to conduct a test at any time. An influential state-backed Chinese newspaper said the best option for North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, was to give up its nuclear programme, and China would protect it if it did. "As soon as North Korea complies with China's declared advice and suspends nuclear activities China will actively work to protect the security of a denuclearised North Korean nation and regime," said an editorial in the Global Times, which is published by the Communist party's People's Daily. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe underscored fears about threats from North Korea, telling parliament in Tokyo that Pyongyang could have the capacity to deliver missiles equipped with sarin nerve gas. A senior Japanese diplomat said the United States was putting "maximum pressure" on North Korea to resolve issues peacefully while putting responsibility on China to sway its old ally. "We will watch what action China takes," the diplomat said. While Japan did not see a high risk of military action, it expected to be consulted by the United States if it decided to attack. North Korea has about 350 missiles that can hit Japan. About 200 foreign journalists gathered in Pyongyang for North Korea's biggest national day, the "Day of the Sun", were taken to what officials billed as a "big and important event" early on Thursday. It turned out to be the opening of a new street in the centre of the capital, attended by leader Kim. North Korea marks the 105th anniversary of the birth of state founder Kim Il Sung on Saturday. In 2012, it tried but failed to launch a long-range rocket carrying a satellite to mark the date and tested a newly developed intermediate-range missile last year. North Korea's official KCNA news agency said early on Thursday that Kim Jong Un had guided training of the army's special operation forces jumping from aircraft. On Tuesday, North Korea warned of a nuclear attack on the United States at any sign of American aggression. The North is technically at war with the United States and South Korea after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce and not a peace treaty. The North regularly threatens to destroy both countries. U.S. officials said Trump was considering sanctions that could include an oil embargo, banning North Korea's airline, intercepting cargo ships, and punishing Chinese banks doing business with it. "There's a whole host of things that are possible, all the way up to what's essentially a trade quarantine on North Korea," one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters in Washington. Customs data in Beijing on Thursday showed that China's coal imports from North Korea had plunged 51.6 percent in the first three months in 2017 from a year ago. China suspended issue of permits for coal imports from North Korea on Feb. 18 as part of its effort to implement U.N. sanctions. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke by telephone on Wednesday, just days after they met in the United States for the first time, underscoring the sense of urgency about North Korea. Trump said on Twitter his call with Xi was a "very good" discussion of the "menace of North Korea". He said later on Wednesday the United States was prepared to tackle the crisis without China, if necessary. |
World | 82 Percent of the Wealth Generated Last Year Went to the Richest 1 Percent of the Global Population | LONDON Four out of every five dollars of wealth generated in 2017 ended up in the pockets of the richest one percent, while the poorest half of humanity got nothing, a report published by Oxfam found on Monday. As global political and business leaders gather for this week's World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the charity's report highlights a global system that rewards the super-rich and neglects the poor. It found that 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth in 2017, while 82 percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population. "It reveals how our economies are rewarding wealth rather than the hard work of millions of people," Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam's executive director, told Reuters Television. "The few at the top get richer and richer and the millions at the bottom are trapped in poverty wages.", Byanyima blamed "tax dodging" as a major cause of global inequality and urged leaders to clamp down on tax havens and plough money into education, healthcare and jobs for young people. In particular, Byanyima criticised U.S. President Donald Trump, who is attending the World Economic Forum, for creating "a cabinet of billionaires" and implementing tax legislation that she said rewarded the super-rich, not ordinary Americans. The annual report by Oxfam found that the number of billionaires rose at a rate of one every two days between March 2016 and March 2017, while in the United States the three richest people own the same wealth as the poorest half of the population. Oxfam said that women workers were worst hit by global inequality as they consistently earn less than men and usually have lower paid and more insecure forms of work. The World Economic Forum has previously estimated that it would take 217 years before women earn as much as men and have equal representation in the workplace. According to the 2017 Forbes rich list, the five richest people on the planet are all men from Microsoft's Bill Gates, to veteran investor Warren Buffett, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Inditex founder Amancio Ortega and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "The economic model is not working at all," Oxfam report co-author, Iigo Macas Aymar, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "The way this wealth is being distributed we are really worried, it's being concentrated in fewer hands.", Oxfam called for all workers to receive a minimum living wage, the elimination of the gender pay gap and tougher rules to crackdown on tax avoidance. |
World | Thousands of Icelanders Have Volunteered to Take Syrian Refugees Into Their Homes | More than 11,000 Icelanders have offered to take Syrian refugees into their homes, after their government said it would accept only 50 people this year. A Facebook event created Sunday by Icelandic author and professor Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir encouraged members of the public to call on the government to increase its intake of refugees, reports Agence France-Presse. Messages on the event page offered food, housing, clothes and schooling. "I'm a single mother with a 6-year-old son," wrote Hekla Stefansdottir. "We can take a child in need. I'm a teacher and would teach the child to speak, read and write Icelandic and adjust to Icelandic society. We have clothes, a bed, toys and everything a child needs. I would of course pay for the airplane ticket.", The overwhelming response has led the country's Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson to appoint a committee of ministers to discuss the possibility of allowing more refugees into the country, which has a population of about 330,000 residents, reports the Icelandic Review Online. "It has been our goal in international politics to be of help in as many areas as possible and this is one of the areas where the need is most right now," he told Icelandic news site RUV. More than 4 million Syrians have fled the conflict in their home country and a further 7.6 million are displaced inside Syria, according to the U.N. The number of refugees pouring into Europe after fleeing war and persecution in Africa and the Middle East is the highest it's been since the end of World War II. Download TIME's mobile app for iOS to have your world explained wherever you go |
World | Canadian Woman Caught Trying to Smuggle AsylumSeekers Across the Border | A Canadian woman faces charges of human smuggling after police intercepted nine asylum seekers near the U.S.-Canada border on Friday. Police arrested Michelle Omoruyi, 43, who was driving a vehicle that contained the nine people. She has been charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling. Omoruyi's arrest was part of a four-month investigation into human smuggling in the Saskatchewan, the CBC reports. Several asylum seekers have crossed the U.S. border into Canada amid President Trump's crackdown on immigration. All nine asylum seekers were taken into custody by theReuters. They have since been released after applying for refugee status in Canada. |
World | ProDemocracy Students Gather in Hong Kong Demand to See Chief Executive | The red, green, blue and yellow tents spread out across the lawn gave the first indication that Tuesday wasn't just another day at Hong Kong's Tamar Park. Several hundred students had gathered in the Chinese Special Administrative Region to press their demand for true democracy. These are some of the thousands of students across Hong Kong who are boycotting classes this week, the latest manifestation of a democracy movement that eyes unfettered elections for the territory's Chief Executive by 2017. In August, the Chinese government ruled that candidates for the city's top post must be selected by a nominating committee perceived to serve the Chinese Communist Party. On Tuesday, banners representing groups from various universities mingled on the lawn, as the emphatic voice of local activist Au Loong-yu blared over a loudspeaker, giving one of several public lectures planned for the week. Organizers estimated that over a thousand people were in attendance by 1 p.m. although this seemed overly optimistic. "It is still very early, and I believe there will be more people coming," said Yvonne Leung, a spokesperson for the Hong Kong Federation of Students, which is leading the strike. The student groups are demanding an audience with Hong Kong's current Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. "We have issued an ultimatum to the Chief Executive that if he does not show up to Tamar Park within 48 hours then we will have upgraded actions," Yvonne Leung said. Sure enough, there were scuffles later in the day outside the offices of the Chief Executive as students called on him to "honor his election promise.", For many of those clustered together in the sweltering late-morning heat some under the colored tents, some under trees, others carrying their own umbrellas the impetus was a show of solidarity for the future democratization of the city, rather than any immediate impact. "If we join this campaign for a week it may not affect anything, but it may affect democracy in the future so it's important for us to come out and show support," said 21-year-old Lin Ka-kit, who is studying dental surgery at Hong Kong University. A rally at the Chinese University of Hong Kong on Monday drew over 13,000 people, according to organizer estimates cited by the New York Times. By comparison, Tuesday's showing was markedly more subdued. But the student movement is a prelude to a bigger protest planned on Oct. 1 by the larger Occupy Central movement. Protesters have vowed to paralyze the financial heart of the city, although support appears to be dwindling as Beijing has showed no sign of compromising. "I don't think we can change the mind of Beijing," admitted Jacky Cheung, a journalism student at Chu Hai College of Higher Education, "but it's important to raise awareness and get more people to join the protest." |
World | There Is a Country to Build Afghanistans President Ashraf Ghani Gives an Exclusive Interview to TIME | The war in Afghanistan is now America's longest and going from bad to worse. As of February, only about 60 of Afghanistan's 407 districts were reported to be under government control, with the authorities in Kabul still struggling to counter a dangerous Taliban insurgency that began after the extremist group's fall from power almost 16 years ago. The insurgency is expanding, and Afghanistan also faces threats from ISIS and other terror outfits. Some 13,000 NATO troops among them about 8,400 U.S. soldiers remain in the country. That number could rise, amid reports that an additional 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops may be heading to Afghanistan as the Trump administration weighs military proposals. Against this backdrop, on May 11 TIME's South Asia bureau chief Nikhil Kumar sat down with Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani in the presidential palace in Kabul to talk about the deteriorating security situation, the possible troop increase, Ghani's conversations with Donald Trump, the threat from ISIS and the prospects for a political settlement with the Taliban. Excerpts have been edited for clarity, On Ghani's impression of Donald Trump, following two phone calls with the U.S. President, Trump began with Afghanistan's advantages, which was very impressive. The natural mineral wealth of the country was the first issue that we discussed. We were able to talk to each other very easily. We had a free-floating conversation. All the fundamental questions were asked by him. But the style is different, so you don't prepare half-an-hour briefings for President Trump. You need to be very sharp. It's a business model. Can you do the elevator pitch? Can you get your point across? And because of that I think we've built an excellent relationship. On Trump bringing up Afghanistan's mineral wealth first, before the deteriorating security situation, It's the perception. The visual perspective is important he saw a potentially wealthy country. Others immediately see chaos. We got to security almost immediately. But beginning there with Afghanistan's mineral wealth, why is that important? Because he could see self-reliance When we say we want sovereignty, can we provide the fiscal basis of it? And that fiscal base is our natural wealth. That is a fundamental issue. Our challenge is simultaneity. You cannot make the economy wait for security. You have to be able to do it What is important about our people they take a certain degree of insecurity as contextual, because of the last 40 years of conflict. If the conflict were new, like Iraq, it would be a completely different reaction, or Syria. Here, they take a certain degree of conflict they hate it but they understand it. But if they don't see you working on dams and livelihood and connectivity and others, they think you're not coming out of the vicious circle. When we completed the first dam and it was with very generous help from India in Herat province it was the first dam that was completed in 40 years. There were spontaneous celebrations across the whole country. Something was being realized. The thirst for standing on our own two feet is really very high. On his message to U.S. taxpayers, and why they should continue paying for the war in Afghanistan almost 16 years after the fall of the Taliban, The most important thing, from their perspective their security depends on us. If I am correct in saying that this is a war over Afghanistan, I would like the American taxpayer to imagine, given what Osama bin Laden alone could do what if a third, a half, God forbid, or all of Afghanistan, is a center of global terrorism incorporated? The threats, given the way threats operate now, will become much more pronounced. Our cooperation on terrorism is based on mutual interest and that interest needs to be conveyed to the American public. They are not safe, but if this menace is not contained, none of us is going to be safe. On the costs of the war in Afghanistan, The number of troops is one-tenth of what they were. The costs are one-tenth. They've been reduced by 90. And the most significant thing except in the counterterrorism arena, American soldiers are not fighting. We are fighting. Over 2,300 Americans lost their lives between 2001 and the end of 2014. Since then, it's under 50. Fifty is still too many. But this is where the dynamic has changed. On recent reports about the possible deployment of an additional 3,0005,000 U.S. troops, and whether the numbers proposed would be enough to improve the security situation in the country, Yes, because the core reason is that we need advice at the level of the division. At the corps command level we have advice, but it is at the division level where Afghan forces need additional support. On whether security can be restored without a more significant increase in costs and international troops, Security can be restored, yes. First of all, my relationship with both President Obama and President Trump is not to ask for things. President Obama called me on his last day in office and said the only person who never asked him for anything was me. And I do not get into the executive decision-making process of my partner countries. I don't go to the press I don't make requests. Because it has to be interest-based, it has to be a factual and demonstrable set of propositions. The security transition with the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014 and the departure of most foreign troops is a done thing. There is no global appetite, there is no Afghan appetite, for a resumption of that scale of presence. We need to put this to rest because if there are questions regarding this, the consensus will break. Second, what we need is precisely the way that the Resolute Support Mission as the current NATO deployment is known is defined and also it's in our bilateral security agreement advise, train and assist. In these functions, the numbers that have been proposed are the right numbers. In 2001, we didn't have an army we had remnants of a dissolved army that had no hope. Our generals had literally become busboys. Restoring this has been really important. But of course there are significant issues. For example there is corruption in the police. In the Ministry of Defense, I have retired over 150 generals in the last two years. They had done their service, they had served their country. But they were being extended beyond the law. So I have put a stop to this. Reorganizing our forces is critical to sustainability. We cannot shift the burden again. On the growing threat from the Taliban and whether Afghan forces can hold back the insurgents without a significant surge in international troops, We can hold them back, because, again, we need to see, 2015 the year after the end of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan was a battle for survival. We did everything the Taliban, Pakistan and others were saying we brought a massive reduction of security forces. But instead of coming to consensus over a political solution in Afghanistan, they accelerated the fight. So the Taliban and their backers have had two goals one, to overthrow the government second, to create two political geographies. They were able to take Kunduz momentarily. But except for that they have not been able to take a single major provincial capital. TIME But the Taliban are at the gates again, They are at the gates. We are not saying we are not in conflict that would be illusionary. What I am saying is we are not about to collapse. We have been able both years 2015 and 2016 to contain immense onslaughts in a time when, because of Congressional sanctions against Russia, we had no airpower with Western sanctions on Moscow preventing Afghanistan from securing spare parts for its aging Russian aircraft. Our fleet? The only assistance that they could secure after knocking on the doors of over 50 countries was from India. Four helicopters that really were lifesavers. Now we expect should the plan be approved by President Trump, a major overhaul of the Afghan air force, a doubling of our special forces, a reorganization to the level of the company and the division, that enables us to get going. So what we have been doing in 2015 and 2016 that is an extremely rare phenomenon fighting and reforming at the same time. And the jury is out. But it has not been not for lack of effort. On how much input his government has had in the Trump administration's review of America's Afghan policy, Input has been two-fold. We prepared a four year plan. It was completely driven by me, and by my colleagues, our national security council has agreed on it. Then we shared it We have been very lucky. It's probably very rare in history to have so many top security officials be the friends of Afghanistan. TIME In the US?, In the U.S. General Votel commander of U.S. Central Command, General Scapparatti NATO's top military commander, General Dunford, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Thomas Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, and of course General McMaster as U.S. National Security Adviser, and Secretary Mattis, the former General Mattis, among the first people to have landed in Kandahar. So we know people who know us intimately. The conversation has been enormously productive. On the dropping of the so-called Mother of All Bombs on ISIS fighters in eastern Afghanistan in April, a mission that Trump called "very successful" but which Ghani's envoy to Pakistan, Omar Zakhilwal, condemned as "reprehensible and counterproductive", Our ambassador changed his mind, of course, because he had not been briefed properly. He's an honorable man, he submitted his resignation, I refused it. We have an attachment to every inch of this soil and when the land hurts, we really hurt. But the judgment came from the people. I had a very large gathering of the people in the six districts that were most affected. And their words really need to be taken into account. They said, "They call this the mother of the bombs we want the father." Daesh the Arabic term for ISIS is truly a heinous phenomenon. On what the bomb achieved, It destroyed a very significant group of Daesh leaders They were attempting to use caves that had been dug up during the Soviet period, and then their attempt was on Tora Bora the cave complex in eastern Afghanistan and former Taliban stronghold where Bin Laden fled in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2001. Tora Bora was a symbolic thing. All of this has been put to an end. On whether there had been any civilian casualties, No. Whenever there have been civilian casualties, the local people have come absolutely forward I had all the leaders visit, about 400 people, not a single person raised the question of civilian casualties. On the threat from ISIS in Afghanistan, If al-Qaeda was version 2.0, Daesh is version 4.0. Daesh is not face-to-face. It is face to Facebook. This is a significant difference, because it combines old things, and now the lone wolf phenomenon is produced by ideology, the communication part of Daesh. I've put forward these three notions the ecology, morphology and pathology of terror. Pathology by Daesh is distinctively to swallow its opponents, to frighten the population. In that regard, the threat is very real. The attempted recruitment is of a different standard, and the nature of the conflict that they propose is of a different order, so it needs to be taken seriously. And, if you look at Dabiq, their publication, they are asking all their followers not to go to Iraq and Syria and to go to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And the movement is made possible by the same networks that make possible the flow of drugs, antiquities and bring oil and other things. Going after the financing and after the criminal economy now, I think, has become imperative. On the numbers of ISIS fighters in the country, It would be guessing. I would say hundreds, not thousands. But hundreds that are lethal. On whether Al-Qaeda is still active in Afghanistan, Yes. We've eliminated a number of key places and we've captured a lot of information. But it's not finished by any means. On the controversial peace deal between the Afghan government and the former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose forces bombarded Kabul ruthlessly during the country's civil war in the 1990s. Critics say the pact, which paved the way for Hekmatyar's return to Kabul in early May, highlighted a culture of impunity in Afghanistan, with former warlords being allowed to escape accountability for their actions, Did the deal in Northern Ireland underline the culture of impunity? What are the two standards? How many Nazis were prosecuted after World War II, how many Vichy? Let us not impose two standards. If we are seeking peace, we need to have forgetfulness regarding the past. TIME In his speech when he arrived in Kabul, Hekmatyar referred to the Taliban as brothers and said he would act as a mediator. Is that a position you endorse?, The casualties that we suffer do not allow for luxury. Peace is not a luxury. Peace is a necessity I'm spending 4-6 hours a day on security. This is an unnecessary imposition. They key issue is can we change bullets to ballots? Bullets will flow and will kill. Can we shift the conflicts among us to the political arena? Our failure in the past has been a failure of politics. TIME So is a political settlement possible with the Taliban?, It depends on them. TIME What are your red lines, when you say it depends on them?, The red line is our constitution. The process we've followed with Mr Hekmatyar is enormously productive. Namely, it's done within the constitution, it's done through intra-Afghan dialogue, it's done in Kabul. It's done openly. There are no secret annexes, there are no secret understandings, it's a totally open phenomenon. Now, of course, when a person of his significance comes back, the political geometry changes. People adjust and readjust. But the criteria of the strength of the state is can it absorb it? Can it provide the ground for dialogue?, On his government's contacts with the Taliban, We have open lines of communication with a lot of Taliban. They reach us. This in Afghan society, it's a connected society. But the discussions need to be principled and open. On reports late last year of secret talks between his government and the Taliban in Qatar, Between buzz and discussions you need to differentiate. People reach out. There are a lot of honest brokers, or attempted honest brokers, that want to bring peace. We are not closing the door. But when we get to formal open discussions, that's when we have the breakthrough. And that's our insistence. It's not going to be under the table. It's going to be through the Afghan Peace Council a government panel tasked with negotiating an end to the conflict and through a properly constituted delegation, along the lines that we did it in Murree the Pakistani hill resort where an earlier round of peace talks were held. On the suggestion by General Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, that Russia was supplying arms to Taliban insurgents, The first issue is we need Russia to be part of the consensus for a stable Afghanistan. Second, our request to the Russians is that we do not become part of a global chess game, a tit-for-tat for other situations. Russia would lose and harm its own interests if it armed the Taliban or other groups. TIME But do you think it is? Have you seen any evidence?, I do not want to comment on this. We need engagement and we are going to be convening a regional meeting. A regional consensus is important for us. There was a spontaneous regional consensus in 2002, and there must be an active regional consensus now. We have made a lot of progress towards this. We have work to do with Russia and I hope that it will be productive. On reports of Chinese troops operating in Afghan territory, There are no Chinese troops on Afghan soil. On his message to President Trump about Pakistan, a country that Ghani has accused of waging an "undeclared war" on Afghanistan, A stable Pakistan is in our interests. A stable Afghanistan is in Pakistan's interests. We hope that the U.S. that has sacrificed so much in blood and treasure with us can help Pakistan normalize itself. TIME And how do they do that?, By showing that continuing to sponsor destabilizing forces harms their own interests. Look, Pakistan amended its constitution, amended its Army Act, prepared a national action plan against terrorism. All this goes against the distinction between good and bad terrorists. There can be no such thing. This is a snake that will bite you. On his remarks to the BBC last year that he had "no sympathy" for Afghan migrants fleeing the war-torn country, I've lived in exile for 24 years. I was never discriminated against. I went to the best schools, I taught at the best schools, I worked at the World Bank. I was given all my jobs on the phone. But I was very unhappy. I'm happy now. I have the hardest job in the world. I get a billion curses a day. But I'm happy. I was not talking about lack of sympathy. I was talking about love. I came back because my textbooks, my elementary school textbooks, compelled me to come. That was my message. It got distorted. Afghans are a networked society. When I go to Afghan villages, I ask two questions how many of you have been abroad? How many of you have relatives abroad? Sixty percent of hands go up. In 1978, the answer to these two questions would probably have been zero point zero something. It needs to be looked at as an organized process. Who is underwriting this? People are spending 30,000 to 50,000 to migrate and lose their lives in the Mediterranean. That's the part I've no sympathy for the smugglers. And it's also an appeal. When they go, when highly educated people go, and become manual laborers it breaks my heart. There is a country to build here. On the challenge of absorbing the recent surge in returning refugees from Pakistan, Iran and Europe. Last year, more than 600,00 returned from Pakistan alone, amid a breakdown in relations between the two countries, If we have half a loaf of bread, we will divide it with the returnees. But this will make Afghanistan whole. As long as we have refugees, we are not whole. Those that have gone to Australia, to North America, to Europe their second and third generation, we hope, will do what the Irish and the Indians and the Chinese have done But the refugees that are in Iran and Pakistan, and some in Greece and others, have difficult conditions. And we need to be able to prepare. Again, it forces us to speed up certain parts of the economy. |
World | See the Early Ice Melt in Greenland in One Amazing GIF | The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet started early and fast this year, checkering the white ice sheet with blue streams and lakes much earlier in the season than normal. According to NASA, this happens every summer, but this year the melting began early and has accelerated faster than average years. The record melt year was 2012. "This year we had some really early season melt events that kick-started things," said Allen Pope, a scientist at the National Snow Ice Data Center. Check out the GIF above to see the melting difference between June 2014 and June 2015. |
World | Moscow Nanny Admits to Decapitating 4YearOld Child | A nanny in Russia admitted in court Wednesday that she beheaded a 4-year-old girl in her care. Officials said Gulchekhra Bobokulova, 38, had suffered from mental health problems, according to the BBC. Bobokulova was arrested Monday when she was found carrying the child's severed head outside of a Moscow train station. When asked in court on Wednesday if she was guilty, she said, "yes.", Bobokulova, the child's nanny, is believed to have waited for the girl's parents to leave the home before killing her and setting the apartment on fire, according to BBC. Surveillance footage captured Bobokulova walking near a metro station with the head in her hands. BBC |
World | The UN Isnt Ruling Out Elements of Genocide in Myanmar Heres What That Means | The U.N. has issued its strongest rebuke yet of Myanmar's persecution of the Rohingya, a mostly stateless Muslim minority, with the body's top human rights official suggesting that recent military operations in Myanmar's western Rakhine State could include "elements of genocide.", Addressing a special session of the Human Rights Council on Dec. 5, High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein described "widespread, systematic and shockingly brutal attacks against the Rohingya community" that "deliberately and massively targeted civilians," and enumerated actions "warranting the attention of the International Criminal Court" that have been perpetrated against the Rohingya by Myanmar's security forces and local militia. The U.N.'s 47-member Human Rights Council also adopted a rare resolution, albeit with slightly weaker language, saying Myanmar's military campaign "very likely" included crimes against humanity, the Associated Press reports. China, the Philippines and Burundi voted against the resolution, while nine countries abstained. Here's what it means, More than 626,000 Rohingya have been displaced from Myanmar's Rakhine State into Bangladesh since late August, according to U.N. estimates, the majority of them women and children. The Rohingya, a persecuted minority, fled a campaign of violence by Myanmar's military, which was launched in response to a series of deadly attacks on security posts by a Muslim armed group on Aug. 25. While Myanmar claims that its "clearance" operations are intended to root out terrorists, displaced Rohingya say that the military is indiscriminately targeting civilians, including children, with human rights groups documenting accounts of extrajudicial killings, arson, and sexual violence. International bodies, including the U.N. and U.S. increasingly agree Zeid said the operations "appear to have deliberately and massively targeted civilians.", Read more Myanmar's Crisis, Bangladesh's Burden Among the Rohingya Refugees Waiting for a Miracle, Zeid's latest statement is the strongest language yet from the U.N. on the crisis in Myanmar, suggesting that a total lack of access to the conflict zone raises serious questions about what transpired. The High Commissioner recounted a list of recent allegations against Myanmar security forces, including "killing by random firing of bullets serious bodily or mental harm inflicted various forms of torture or ill-treatment," and widespread sexual violence. "Given all of this, can anyone rule out that elements of genocide may be present?" he asked. Last month, experts at the the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and human rights watchdog Fortify Rights warned of "mounting evidence" that genocide is being committed against the Rohingya. Read more Myanmar's Attempt to Destroy Rohingya Muslims, The U.N. defines genocide as an international crime committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." But individuals are infrequently charged with genocide, and component crimes, including murder, forced deportation, torture, and sexual violence, can also be classified as ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, which have not been specifically defined under international law and therefore aren't prosecutable. In September, Zeid called the crisis "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing." Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued a stern condemnation last month after traveling to Myanmar, saying that the campaign "constitutes ethnic cleansing" and those who perpetrated atrocities "must be held accountable.", , Rights groups widely hailed the resolution. Human Rights Watch said the Council sent a "strong message" that the global community will not "avert its gaze" from the plight of the Rohingya. "The U.N. resolution makes clear that the international community retains a watchful eye over the plight of the Rohingya and demands action. But it needs to ensure that its rhetoric is matched by its will to prevent further mistreatment, forced returns, and assaults to the human rights and dignity of the Rohingya," Laila Matar, HRW's senior U.N. advocate said in a statement. Myanmar and Bangladesh reached a tentative agreement in late November to begin repatriating Rohingya within two months, but experts and rights groups have raised concerns that Rohingya could suffer further violence in Rakhine or face apartheid in camps like those that have existed in the central part of the state since riots in 2012. Zeid also rejected a repatriation scheme, which he called "hasty window-dressing of these shocking atrocities," without "sustained human rights monitoring on the ground." Rights groups and independent media have been barred from northern Rakhine since violence in October 2016, except for a few government-staged press tours. But with no clear diplomatic or humanitarian solution, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya are waiting in overcrowded displacement camps, where supplies are stretched thin. Zeid also called for "a new impartial and independent mechanism" to facilitate criminal prosecutions, which he acknowledged are "extremely rare" in Myanmar. In March 2017, the U.N. set up a fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of rights abuses, but its members have not been granted visas to the country. The commission interviewed Rohingya in Bangladesh instead in October, where they heard many accounts that "point to a consistent, methodical pattern of actions resulting in gross human rights violations," according to a statement. |
World | Kashmir Car Bombing Becomes Regions Deadliest Attack as Toll Rises to 41 | SRINAGAR, India The death toll from a car bombing on a paramilitary convoy in Indian-controlled Kashmir has climbed to 41, becoming the single deadliest attack in the divided region's volatile history, security officials said Friday. A local Kashmiri militant rammed an explosive-laden van into the convoy along a key highway Thursday. In addition to the dead, the attack wounded nearly two dozen other soldiers, India's paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force spokesman Sanjay Sharma said. The attack is ratcheting up already hostile tensions between India and Pakistan, who both administer parts of the disputed territory but each claim it entirely. India has blamed Pakistan for supporting the bombing, while Islamabad cautioned India not to link it to the attack. India's Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced Friday that New Delhi was withdrawing the most favored nation trade status given to Pakistan and would take all possible diplomatic steps "to ensure the complete isolation from international community of Pakistan of which incontrovertible evidence is available of having a direct hand in this gruesome terrorist incident.", He said Home Minister Rajnath Singh would visit Kashmir later Friday and review security situation there, and warned that they will ensure "those who have committed this heinous act of terrorism and those who have supported it actively are made to pay a heavy cost.", Rebels have been fighting Indian control since 1989, but the Muslim-majority region has experienced renewed attacks and repeated public protests in recent years as a new generation of Kashmiri rebels, especially in the southern parts of the region, has challenged New Delhi's rule with a mixture of violence and social media. Officials said the militant in Thursday's attack drove into a bus traveling in the convoy as it reached Lethpora, a town outside Srinagar. Police said the bus was destroyed and at least five other vehicles were damaged. "The blast was so powerful that one cannot recognize whether the vehicle was a bus or a truck. Just pieces of mangled steel remain," Sharma said. Videos circulated by local news groups showed ambulances rushing to the site and people running as smoke billowed from the damaged vehicles. Debris and body parts littered the road. The Greater Kashmir newspaper reported that militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed responsibility. A pre-recorded video circulated on social media sites showed the purported attacker in combat clothes and surrounded by guns and grenades. Indian Prime Minister Modi condemned the attack in a speech at a government function Friday saying India would give "a crushing response.", "Our neighboring country thinks such terror attacks can weaken us, but their plans will not materialize," he said. He said government forces have been "given total freedom" to tackle militants. Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said the country condemns acts of violence anywhere in the world, and denied any involvement. "We strongly reject any insinuation by elements in the Indian media and government that seek to link the attack to Pakistan without investigations," it said in a statement. The U.S. however, specifically singled out Pakistan in its statement condemning the attack. "The United States calls on Pakistan to end immediately the support and safe haven provided to all terrorist groups operating on its soil, whose only goal is to sow chaos, violence, and terror in the region," the statement from the White House press secretary's office said. It said the attack strengthened U.S. resolve to bolster counterterrorism cooperation with India. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947 and regularly exchange fire along their highly militarized border in Kashmir. Kashmir experienced many car bombings from 2000 through 2005 that inflicted high casualties on Indian troops. The attacks prompted Indian authorities to procure bombproof armored vehicles for soldiers operating in the region. Indian soldiers are ubiquitous in Kashmir and local residents make little secret of their fury toward their presence in the Himalayan region. Most Kashmiris support the rebels' demand that the territory be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country, while also participating in civilian street protests against Indian control. Since 1989, about 70,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing Indian crackdown. Last year's death toll was the highest since 2009, with at least 260 militants, 160 civilians and 150 government forces killed. |
World | Pregnant Women Advised Not to Travel to 11 Southeast Asian Countries Over Zika Risk | U.S. health officials on Thursday advised pregnant women to avoid nonessential travel to Southeast Asia and the Maldives because of the potential risk of Zika infection, which can cause severe birth defects. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC singled out 11 countries in its latest advisory Brunei, Burma Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste East Timor and Vietnam. Thursday's advisory about potential risks in Southeast Asia so far only recommend postponing nonessential travel. The CDC said travelers have been infected with the virus in parts of Southeast Asia, where Zika is endemic and has been present for many years. Many local residents are believed to be immune, though travelers most likely are not. Read More Why You Should Care About Zika, "Pregnant women traveling to Southeast Asia could become infected with Zika virus," the CDC said. "The level of this risk is unknown and likely lower than in areas where Zika virus is newly introduced and spreading widely.", Zika is a primarily a mosquito-borne disease, but it can also be sexually transmitted. It was identified in Brazil last year and has since spread globally. Infection is not always symptomatic, but can cause a fever similar to dengue. Zika infection during pregnancy can cause serious brain abnormalities such as microcephaly and other birth defects. Read More See All the Places Where the Zika Virus Has Spread, The CDC has advised pregnant women to avoid almost 60 countries or regions worldwide because of Zika's rapid spread. |
World | ISIS Revenge Killings Reportedly Target Sunni Tribe in Iraq | Fighters from the militant group that has taken over vast swaths of Iraq are summarily executing members of a Sunni tribe that resisted their advance, according to a new report. The New York Times, citing tribal leaders and local officials, reports that the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria ISIS is exacting harsh revenge on the Albu Nimr tribe, killing more than 200 after the tribe fought for months to keep the jihadists out of their region near the town of Hit, 90 miles west of Baghdad. "We put the responsibility on the government because they didn't respond," one tribal member. "We were fighting ISIS with rifles, and it was fighting us with heavy machine guns.", Read more at the Times |
World | Watch a Fireball Streak Across Scotlands Sky | Residents were startled on Monday night when a bright glowing flash, believed to be a meteor, streaked across the sky in northeast Scotland. Bill Addison shared footage taken from his car's dashboard camera, which shows a bright fireball shooting through the atmosphere. functiond, s, id var js, fjs d.getElementsByTagNames0 if d.getElementByIdid return js d.createElements js.id id js.src 'https//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.jsxfbml1versionv2.11' fjs.parentNode.insertBeforejs, fjsdocument, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk', Social media users took to Twitter and reported that the suspected meteor made a loud boom as it exploded. , , Robert Massey, deputy executive director for the Royal Astronomical Society, told CNN that he believes the object could have been a low-altitude meteor,' which burned into a fireball. "If people did see it and it was something like an incoming low-altitude meteor, they can consider themselves lucky," he told CNN. CNN |
World | The Mutineer How Antonio Trillanes Came to Lead the Fight Against Rodrigo Duterte | The Philippine Senate can lack a sense of political theater. Beyond the cockerel chained up outside, the lackadaisical weapons pat-down at the gate, and the "deposit your firearm here" plaque at the sign-in counter, the place has a bland institutional feel. Fluorescent lights glimmer weakly on its wooden floors, a bellhop pushes its service elevator's buttons, and bureaucrats sip coffee in its cafeteria. Since Rodrigo Duterte became President in June 2016, however, this squat brutalist building in the heart of the Philippine capital has become an arena of unceasing spectacle. In its session hall, masked relatives of murdered slum residents have testified against police, a self-confessed hitman claimed to have fed people to crocodiles at the president's behest, a former cop corroborated that hitman's story after a "spiritual awakening," and the Philippine environmental secretary sang R. Kelly's 1996 hit, I Believe I Can Fly. Local journalists describe the scenes here as the local telenovela, a Spanish loanword meaning soap opera. Says a Senate reporter "Welcome to the circus.", The latest performance came during a probe to determine how a 6.4-billion peso 125 million shipment of methamphetamine slipped through the Philippine Bureau of Customs. During a hearing on the issue last month, a retired naval officer turned senator called Antonio Trillanes IV alleged that Paulo Duterte, 42, the Vice Mayor of Davao City and the President's son was complicit in bringing this and other drug shipments before it into the Philippines. A dragon-like tattoo on the younger Duterte's back, Trillanes told a packed Senate, proved his membership of a drug-smuggling Chinese triad. Sacred digits traced into the tattoo could be decoded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, he said, if only Paulo would show it. Paulo refused. Trillanes has also long alleged that Duterte Sr. amassed billions of pesos in ill-gotten funds, challenging him to open his bank accounts to scrutiny. , "Duterte's war on drugs is a sham. It's a misdirection. This is what he does to deflect suspicion," Trillanes tells TIME from his office in the Senate. "Duterte himself was part of the illegal drug trade in Davao City when he was mayor. They were using Davao City Port as a trans-shipment point for illegal drugs." , Like his son, Duterte maintains that his wealth is the product of inheritance and legitimate investments, and Paulo has denied involvement in the 125-million shipment. For a senator to accuse a president of profiting from narcotics would be shocking in most countries. But it has a black irony in the Philippines, where Duterte has said he would be "happy to slaughter" three million drug users and promised that he would not hesitate to order the killing of his own children if they were involved in drugs. Since his drug war began last July police have shot dead at least 4,000 drug suspects in nightly raids. Thousands more have been killed by vigilantes, whom some investigations have linked to police. Read more A Bloody Drug War and an ISIS-Linked City Siege Mark Duterte's First Year in Office, Trillanes' allegations are compelling enough that the Philippine Ombudsman is now investigating Duterte and his family's finances. The President, in turn, says he will file impeachment cases against both the Ombudsman and the head of the country's Supreme Court. At 46, Trillanes is now Duterte's principal adversary, since Senator Leila De Lima was jailed in February. De Lima and Duterte's enmity stretches back to 2009 when De Lima, as head of the government's commission on human rights, launched a probe into the then Davao City mayor's alleged use of death squads. After she began investigating extrajudicial killings anew last August, Duterte promised De Lima would "rot in jail" for her alleged involvement in the illegal drug trade, a charge that she has denied. About a dozen convicted felons some with pending applications for pardon or clemency said they had funneled drug money to the Senator and police arrested her soon after. At a recent news conference, Duterte, 72, pulled back his jacket to show reporters a firearm he carries tucked in his waistband for his new first foe. "I'm bringing a gun, not for my enemy because that has already been taken care of by my security, but in case we face each other in a duel" he said in Filipino, referring to Trillanes. On another occasion, the President declared "I destroy him or he will destroy me.", On a recent Wednesday in a Senate committee room, Trillanes, in a snug navy suit and navy tie, clicked through a series of slides that showed fake news posts that had been disseminated through the Philippines. In one instance, the country's Justice Secretary had falsely claimed opposition senators such as Trillanes had helped orchestrate the ISIS-inspired siege of Marawi City in the south to destabilize the government. The senator made his recommendations on stymieing the spread of fake news, marched from the committee room, took the elevator up to the fifth floor, and with a flurry of assistants in tow swept past the office of Senator De Lima. Although the number 223 was tacked to De Lima's door, indicating the number of days she had been in jail, her office was not empty. Inside her aides were hustling to ready her daily briefing pouch of news, messages of support, memes, and senatorial comings-and-goings. To date, De Lima has hand-written 175 dispatches and filed 37 bills from her cell in the police headquarters. Read more The Fighter How Leila de Lima Ended Up Leading the Opposition to Rodrigo Duterte's Drug War, In his sparsely furnished office a few doors down, Trillanes tells TIME that Duterte and his allies had been determined to silence both him and De Lima "De Lima legally, by incarcerating her, and myself through political assassination," he says. About a week later, he would travel to the U.S. to meet Senator Marco Rubio, who along with two other U.S. Senators has expressed grave concern over "extrajudicial killings and human rights violations" in the Philippines. At the time of writing, the Philippine Department of Justice was considering filing treason charges against Trillanes, according to a presidential spokesman. Military through and through, Trillanes graduated cum laude from the Philippine Military Academy and then, like his father before him, joined the Navy. The patrician IV that follows his family name, it turns out, has nothing to do with lineage and everything to do with differentiating him from his siblings. There's Antonio Jr. Juan Antonio, Antonio III also an Antonia and a Dominic. He grew up middle class, he says, and friends call him Sonny. According to Trillanes' Senate profile, his naval unit apprehended dozens of human smugglers and rescued 32 passengers from a ferry that sunk during a super typhoon. But he says that corruption and mismanagement by the armed forces' top brass jarred with such idealized portrayals of duty. After he got hold of a classified document that appeared to indicate the state was killing its own people, Trillanes confronted then President Gloria Arroyo. He received only a dressing down for insubordination. At breaking point, he and more than 300 other disillusioned junior officers and troopers barricaded themselves inside Manila's luxury Oakwood Hotel in 2003. They wore armbands bearing nationalistic symbols and demanded Arroyo's resignation. "Fatherly" talks from senior officers ended the attempted coup d'etat before a shot was fired and "an overheated news conference was the mutineers' main action," the New York Times reported at the time. Still, Trillanes was jailed for more than seven years. Six hundred miles south, then Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was deep into his anti-criminality campaign. That June, men on motorcycles shot dead a radio host named Jun Pala who often introduced himself on air as "the voice of democracy in Duterte's reign of terror." Although Duterte denied involvement in the killing, he said that he knew who was behind it. Pala was killed, the President said, because "he was a rotten son of a bitch," adding that being a journalist does not exempt you from assassination. A decade after Oakwood, the Army called the mutiny "wrong" but also said it was "a necessary event" and an "an eye-opener" that led to several reforms, such as better accountability for military spending and a grievance system that allows soldiers to complain about their superiors. The mutiny also thrust Trillanes into the spotlight. In prison, he became the spokesman and de facto leader of the mutineers, who coalesced into a nationalistic party called the Magdalos. To this day, Trillanes has a security staffed by former soldiers he says would take a bullet for him. There is little of the showman about Trillanes off the Senate floor. In person he is restrained and somewhat austere. His office is empty of trinkets or decoration and beyond a few clues his rigid posture, his wedding band it's difficult to get a handle on the man outside politics. , Retired University of the Philippines professor Mila Reforma taught Trillanes during his masters in Public Administration the year before the Oakwood mutiny. She remembers him as an excellent but solemn student who preferred to work solo and had a keen sense of integrity. His term papers were all on corruption in the Navy, a subject his peers wanted to avoid. , "When he told me that he was going to run for senator, I was very much against it," she tells TIME. For one thing, she did not think he had the money for another, there was a rigidity about him that did not seem suited to politics "He was serious. Too serious for comfort." The late Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago once remarked that though young and handsome, Trillanes would "look even better if he attempted to smile once in a while.", Not everyone is charmed by Trillanes. In September, Senate chair Richard Gordon whom Trillanes accused of "lawyering" for Paulo Duterte filed an ethics complaint against the mutineer who he said engaged in "unparliamentary acts and uttered unparliamentary language and exhibited disorderly behavior." Gordon, 72, tells TIME that such conduct shows the "recidivism" of a man "totally dedicated to havoc." Besides the coup attempts, he notes that Trillanes shut off the microphone of a pro-Duterte Senator during an investigation into the Davao Death Squad last year and in 2011 humiliated a former Defense Secretary who was accused of embezzling more than 1 million in state funds. Days after Trillanes told Angelo Reyes that he "had no reputation to protect," the general shot himself through the heart in front of his mother's grave. "He gets away with it because he bullies his way out," says Gordon. "I'm not going to let this pipsqueak senator who doesn't follow his own code of conduct in the Academy, his own code of conduct as an officer, or the code of conduct in the Senate, get away with it." Trillanes faces suspension or expulsion by his colleagues if found guilty of unparliamentary conduct., Is the mutineer a true patriot and soldier as his Magdalos insist, an attack dog with no regard for propriety as Gordon claims, or a pragmatist with an axe to grind against Duterte? Though at loggerheads the two share some traits they are both outsiders with a penchant for drama and prepared to take on the establishment. Trillanes even asked Duterte to back his Vice Presidential bid in 2016. When asked why recently, the senator claimed that at the time he did not know the president-to-be was a murderer. In the end, Duterte picked another running mate both he and Trillanes lost to Liberal Party candidate Leni Robredo. Many Filipinos have expected Robredo to lead the fight against Duterte. In the Philippine political system, presidents and vice-presidents are elected separately and can be from opposing parties. Besides a few notable exceptions, however, the popular but politically inexperienced Robredo has demurred from clashes with Duterte. That, and the jailing of De Lima cleared the space into which the combative Trillanes has stepped. Is it possible to determine whether someone is a member of a triad group on the basis of a code number traced into a tattoo as Trillanes claims? A spokeswoman at the U.S. Department of Justice tells TIME that some agents may have specialized experiences that would enable them to identify organized crime affiliation from a tattoo or other markings, but the Drug Enforcement Administration does not maintain a database of such markings. Paulo Duterte, who did not respond to TIME's requests for comment, accuses Trillanes of making a desperate bid to drag down his father. Many in the Philippines' rapacious social media community joined him in poking fun at Trillanes' insistence he show his tattoo. "Is he gay?" Paulo Duterte's lawyer quipped. As for the President, his main response to Trillanes' corruption charge was to level the same allegation at the senator. Duterte was later forced to admit he had "invented" the number of a bank account Trillanes supposedly held in Singapore. Soon after the President read out the spurious number in an interview Trillanes flew to the country to prove it did not exist. For Richard Heydarian, an author and political analyst at Manila's De La Salle University, Paulo Duterte's evasiveness and apparent contempt for the Senator did not play well. "This is the court of public opinion and Trillanes has scored points. He is threatening the shield of moral rectitude the President has put forward.", That threat comes amid a marked decline in Duterte's once lofty high approval rating. Philippine research group Social Weather Stations' most recent quarterly survey, published Oct. 8, logged an 18-point fall in Filipinos' net satisfaction with their President, from 66 to 48. Separate surveys found that three of five Filipinos now believe only the poor are killed in the anti-illegal drug campaign, only around one in five believe police claims that those killed violently resisted arrest, and two-thirds worry that they or someone they know will be a victim of extrajudicial killings. However, another recently released poll by Pulse Asia found that nine out of 10 Filipinos support the drug war even though three quarters believe extrajudicial killings are taking place. In a concession to "bleeding hearts and media," Duterte suspended the Philippine National Police's involvement in anti-drug operations on Oct 12. He had done the same in January when local news site Rappler pegged the death toll around 7,000 as outcry peaked over the police ransom and murder of a South Korean businessman. This time around, the outrage followed a spate of egregious killings of teenagers in and around Caloocan City, the northern Manila subdivision where Trillanes was born. On Aug. 16 Caloocan police dragged 17-year-old Kian Delos Santos into an alleyway, shot him in the head, and dumped his body next to a pigsty. Days later police murdered Carl Angelo Arnaiz, 19 he was killed "execution style" with indications he had been tortured, forensics said. Arnaiz' friend Reynaldo De Guzman, 14, was found about two weeks later floating in a creek with dozens of stab wounds and his head wrapped in packaging tape. According to investigators, De Guzman would have been a vital witness to what happened to Arnaiz. , "It's not even a covert operation," says Trillanes. "It's a public policy to kill Filipinos.", Read more In Manila, death comes by night, Whether Trillanes is motivated by disgust at the state killing its own citizens like he says he was for Oakwood or by ego and ambition as his critics claim, the mutineer still prowls the Senate, baiting Duterte like a ringmaster. In a rare public statement last month the President's common-law wife Honeylet Avancea articulated the predicament neatly that the senator is still alive, she said, proves her husband is not a murderer. , As long as he is alive, though, Trillanes is at pains to prove the contrary. |
World | Experts MH17 Victims Could Have Remained Conscious During Fall | In the aftermath of the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet, it has been widely assumed that deathor at least unconsciousnesscame quickly for the 298 people aboard when the Boeing 777 came apart in the oxygen-thin, cold air at 33,000 feet. But some medical and aviation experts who spoke to TIME are questioning this assumption. As photos from the MH17 debris field near Gravobo, Ukraine, have shown, many of the victims' bodies appeared completely intact after falling from a great altitude. TIME asked experts to review photographs from the scene and found a minority view some victims may have survived the aircraft's disintegration and even experienced consciousness during the fall to Earth. The images were taken by French photographer Jerome Sessini, who was among the first at the crash site, and they focused on plane debris and victims' bodies. Some of Sessini's work was recently published by TIME, but the photos reviewed by the experts also included images of human remains considered inappropriate for publication., The intact bodies are not out of the ordinary, according to Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City and chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police. Baden has investigated high-profile plane disasters like the TWA 800 crash in 1996 and the 2010 crash of a Polish government jet near Smolensk, Russia, that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski. As Baden explained, objects falling through the air reach what is called terminal velocity, an upper limit on speed dictated by such variables as air density and the falling object's surface areabut not the height from which it is dropped. For a human body, terminal velocity is about 120 mph 193 k/h. Impact at that speed inflicts devastating internal injuries, but the skin tends to remain intact. Baden says that many of the victims did exhibit minor burns and shrapnel wounds, most of which appeared non-lethal. He says this suggests that some of the passengers could have been alive and even conscious during their descent. "The cause of death in the great majority of these people would have been impact with the ground," he said. Unless they were affected by the initial explosions or shrapnel, and absent some pre-existing condition like lung or heart disease, they would have remained alive and even been conscious at some point during the approximately 3-to-4-minute fall. "Even if there's no oxygen, you'd catch your breath in four minutes," he said. "You might have some brain damage, but you'd be alive, and you could be conscious," he said. Autopsies, at least when there is such extensive damage to the head and brain, cannot allow doctors to pinpoint when exactly consciousness was lost, so it might never be possible to know for sure if Baden is right. The deceleration that occurred as a result of the attackwhich could have been the equivalent of driving into a wall at 500 mphmight have been less sudden than has been assumed. The Russian-made SA-11 suspected to have been used in the attack is designed not to strike the aircraft directly, but to explode before impact, instead releasing a cloud of shrapnel. "The deceleration itself wouldn't be rapid, it would almost be like someone pulling back on the throttles perhaps," says Robert Benzon, a former Air Force pilot and veteran accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, now retired. Benzon speculated based on the nature of the missile that the decompression may have been somewhat gradual, and could have been survivable in the short term. "In my estimation what you'd have is a lot of small holes in the airplane," he says, "so the decompression itself would be pretty slow.", Several bodies were found still strapped into their seats. Robert Goyer, who is editor-in-chief of Flying magazine, said that airliner seats are designed to withstand tremendous G-forces, sometimes more than a human body can sustain. Even when the seat itself is torn from the surrounding structure of the plane, people are likely to remain belted in. He cited Juliane Koepcke, who in 1971 survived a two-mile fall into the Amazon rainforest, strapped to her seat all the while. Photographs indicate that those who did stay in their seats tended to retain all of their clothing, but other passengers were found in states of undress. While Goyer said that it was common to see bodies stripped of clothes after falling a long distance through the air, Baden suspected other causes. "You can lose a shirt or a headband or maybe even a jacket, but not pants and underwear and shoes and socks. It would seem to me, given the situation, that looters came," he said. As further evidence, he noted indications in the photos that some of the bodies appeared to have been moved around, based on lividitythe dark discoloration of the skin that occurs in the lowest parts of the body, as blood settles due to gravity. When this discolored skin is seen facing up, it suggests that a part of the body previously low to the ground was shifted from that position. Baden also observed that none of the bodies pictured appeared to be wearing watches or jewelry. The investigation into the tragedy was initially hindered by strife in the region, with some reports suggesting that rebels have threatened investigators, tampered with the plane debris, and moved bodies around. The Dutch government has since succeeded in negotiating the release of some of the passengers' remains, which were kept on refrigerated train cars and eventually flown back to the Netherlands for a more thorough forensic examination. |
World | Burma Votes in Historic Elections | In the shadow of a pagoda and a mosque, not long after dawn had broken in downtown Rangoon, a line of citizens shuffled forward to cast their votes in Burma's most consequential election in a generation. Some in Burma's commercial capital dressed in their best sarongs, others in embroidered veils and Muslim prayer caps. Still others chose the uniform of the tropics worldwide shorts and t-shirts inscribed with a collection of random English words. War War Nandar Min, 20, chose a t-shirt speckled with red hearts. "I'm not supposed to say who I voted for," she said. But she quickly pointed to the red on her shirt. "Red is my favorite color.", Red is also the color of opposition in Burma, which is officially now known as Myanmar. The hue belongs to the National League for Democracy NLD, the party of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. During the campaign period in Rangoon, NLD red flags, adorned with a fighting peacock and star, were draped from decrepit balconies and decorated sides of cars. In 1990, the NLD won a landslide victory in nationwide polls but the military regime ignored the result. Suu Kyi spent most of two decades under house arrest, only emerging in late 2010, shortly after a rigged election boycotted by the NLD installed the Union Solidarity and Development Party USDP, a military proxy, in power. It is easy to list the ways in which the Nov. 8 elections are flawed. The generals who governed Burma for nearly half a century, ruining a land graced with natural bounty, stage-managed a transition to what they called "discipline-flourishing democracy." Even if the NLD scores another landslide today, the 2008 constitution precludes Suu Kyi from the presidency and reserves one-quarter of parliament for the military. While many political prisoners have been released, others have been thrown back in jail. A much-expected investment boom has failed to materialize, and cronies have snapped up the country's choicest contracts. Corruption gnaws at society. Ethnic minorities, who make up at least one-third of Burma's complex cultural patchwork, complain of no end to the discrimination that led some to pick up arms decades ago. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a Muslim ethnicity living in Burma's far west, have been disenfranchised and sequestered in camps the vote was also canceled in eastern ethnic zones where the Burmese army has attacked ethnic militias, despite a much-vaunted ceasefire. A virulent nationalist movement that claims Buddhist credentials is trying to rend Burma's multicultural fabric. And while Rangoon has bustled with the trappings of democratic process raucous campaign rallies, international election observers, first-time voters showing off their ink-stained pinkies the NLD and other opposition parties complained of voter-list irregularities and suspicious numbers of advanced voters. On Saturday evening in Rangoon's Kyauktada township, a polling station in a Buddhist hall welcomed advance voters. "Everything is going just fine," said Kyaw Kyaw Lwin, a township electoral commission official. Yet no one had bothered to secure the five ballot boxes with yellow plastic locks, per regulation. But all these complaints, all these caveats, cannot take away from voters cherishing their belated chance to choose. For hours on Sunday morning, Burmese citizens queued at polling stations, some amid rice paddies, others on streets stained with splashes of betel nut. "I have seen enough violence in my country," said Su Yin Mon Zin, who came back to Burma last year after eight years studying in Australia. "I don't want that anymore.", Our minds are made for adaptation, constantly acclimatizing to new realities. Today, on the streets of Rangoon, known officially as Yangon, people, just like anywhere in the world, walk with their heads bowed over cellphones. In the cities, everyone seems to be on Facebook. Signboards advertise icons of global commerce Coca-Cola, Land Rover and fancy Toto toilets. Newsstands sell stacks of papers, most bearing the smiling visage of Suu Kyi. Yet just five years ago, to flaunt of a picture of Mother Suu, as she has been affectionately dubbed, could garner a jail sentence. SIM cards cost thousands of dollars, far more than what an average Burmese city-dweller made in a year. International sanctions placed on the regime for its record of forced labor, rape and unfair imprisonment, among other crimes left Burma to molder. Rangoon's fleet of taxis included geriatric specimens so rusted that you could watch the potholed roads through the floor. Suu Kyi bristles when people point out all those new cars snarling Rangoon traffic, what she calls "a veneer of change." Poverty, she notes, is still rife, and an expanding middle class only makes the poor feel poorer. "I often ask foreign delegations who go on about the amazing reforms that are taking place, so I have asked them, what do you think exactly has changed?'" says Suu Kyi. "I was told by one delegation that they see more Toyota cars on the streets. I said that may be very well for the Toyota company but that doesn't mean our country is doing better.'", But the millions of Burmese taking part in today's polls do believe that their voices matter, that their participation in a fundamental social contract counts. There are many questions of concern for the coming days. Will the vote be free and fair enough to past international muster? If the NLD prevails, will it be allowed to form a government and even if it can form a government what can the party accomplish in a system so stacked in the military's favor? How will a party so dependent on a single 70-year-old icon manage in an expanded role? Will the army really stay in the barracks? After all, in 2007, just meters from the polling station near the Sule pagoda and Bengali Sunni Jameh mosque, soldiers sprayed bullets on monks, students and ordinary Burmese who had gathered in peaceful protest. Dozens are believed to have died in the junta's massacre. That was only eight years ago. On Sunday morning, a middle-aged female civil servant walked out of the Sule polling station and flashed her purpled little finger. She said that she had been forced a few days before to attend a rally for the ruling USDP, as were many of her fellow government-workers. "But, you know, I voted for the NLD," she said. "All my friends will vote for the NLD, too.", Still, an element of fear a conditioning from decades of government repression and brutality lingered. It was safer, the civil servant said, not to give her name, just in case something goes very wrong after the vote. Then she waggled her little finger and headed home to celebrate Burma's historic elections. "My vote," she said, as she walked away, "is my treasure." |
World | Rob Ford Returns to Office After Rehab | Toronto Mayor Rob Ford returned to office Monday following a two-month stay in rehab for substance abuse, CBC reports. Ford's return comes after a year of scandalous behavior including public drunkenness, using obscene language and smoking crack cocaine. He agreed to attend rehab at the end of April, releasing a statement that said he had "a problem with alcohol" for which he was seeking help. Toronto's city council stripped him of most of his powers and budget following news of his drug-taking, rendering him mayor in name only. Nevertheless, Ford has refused to quit, saying voters will decide his fate in the municipal elections on October 27. The mayor is due to speak to the media at 330pm ET, though what he'll say remains a mystery. Ford's main electoral opponents, John Tory and Olivia Chow, have scheduled media addresses directly after Ford's, at 4pm and 430pm respectively. Councillor Doug Ford, brother of the embattled mayor, has been playing his cards close to his chest. He said Sunday his brother was "looking forward to coming back, that's for sure.", The councillor added "He looks the same, but a little lighter. He'll be hungry and looking forward to meeting the people.", CBC, |
World | QampA with UN Secretary General Candidate Christiana Figueres | The United Nations is selecting a new Secretary General this fall. TIME foreign affairs columnist Ian Bremmer spoke with Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, about how she would change the UN, , What is the single most important thing that a UN Secretary General can do to make the United Nations a more effective institution?, Deepen the trust among Member States, and between Member States and the UN as an institution. The UN is tasked with many responsibilities, including engaging in active preventive diplomacy, running outstanding field operations, creating the context for ambitious multilateral achievements, and delivering on programs across the many focus areas that have been mandated by governments. None of these can be delivered without trust. In the lead up to the Paris Agreement, we used to say that our three priorities were trust, trust and trust. This is because as deeper trust was established and carefully built, new types of conversations became possible and the elusive common ground began to emerge and grow. My vision is of a United Nations that Member States and citizens everywhere fully trust to help the international community avoid war, to excel at seeding and keeping peace where it is needed, and to foster breakthrough agreements and partnerships that improve people's lives today and give them greater hope for the future. , What aspect of the UN's work do you believe is in greatest need of reform?, Last year, the UN supported Member States to reach three breakthrough multilateral agreements that, taken together, lead us towards a more secure and prosperous future for all. These have become known as "Agenda 2030". As a consequence of its own success, the UN as an institution now needs to reorganize around the inspiring goals that these agreements established, and ensure that it has the resources and capacity to ensure they are delivered. Many suggestions have been made about the specific reforms that might be needed for example, the appointment of a Deputy Secretary General who is exclusively focused on Sustainable Development, or the establishment of a Sustainable Development Board to oversee the UN's 27 development programs, funds and specialized agencies ensuring that they all pull in the same direction. An early task for the next Secretary General will be to consider the merits of these suggestions and come to a view about what's needed. But what's clear is that, with the negotiating phase now behind us, the UN must step confidently forward into this new era, pull together much more closely and gear up for the on-the-ground delivery of Agenda 2030. , You've written of the need for greater UN investment in "early-warning" of potential conflicts. What are the most important tell-tale signs of impending violence, and how can the UN use these to prevent conflict?, There are many factors that are linked to the likelihood of conflict demographic shifts, exposure to fluctuating global commodity prices, economic performance and levels of inequality, a State's human rights record, security of access to vital resources, and communities' vulnerability to natural shocks like drought to name but a few. The ongoing build up of adverse factors to use the analogy of fire is like the build up of large stocks of biomass. While lightning will not necessarily strike this year or next, still the build up of that biomass creates an ever-present risk just one spark can, at any moment, tip the whole situation into conflict. Early warning systems are there to monitor the overall build up of that biomass it does not help us to track some tell-tale signs, but not others. Rather, the UN system, working very closely with regional organisations, must continually scan and analyze the full range of data available always on the look-out for the build up of risk. There are several ways in which the UN can use this information to prevent conflict. In the short term, the UN can engage in preventative diplomacy supporting States to alleviate and de-escalate key risk factors, where it notes that these are building up. For example, where particular communities are facing increasing water insecurity, the UN might support the host country and its neighbors to reach a trans-boundary water sharing agreements that ensures people's immediate needs are met. In the longer term, there is much that the UN can do to prevent conflict too for example, accompanying countries in their implementation of the 2030 Agenda to ensure that societies everywhere are more prosperous, resource secure and resilient to shocks. , What is the most important obstacle to the effectiveness of the Security Council, and what you do to overcome this obstacle?, The Security Council is at its most effective when its 15 Members share a common perspective on an emerging situation and can rapidly agree on what they see as the necessary course of action. But as we all know, it is rarely that simple. Given the complexity of many of the threats to peace and security that we see playing out today, and the different worldviews that come together on the Council is it any wonder that a consensus position often takes time to emerge? This is not to excuse inaction we are all shamed by the suffering we see in our world today and must do more to ensure people everywhere are safe and that their human rights are being honored. It is easy to say that there is no simple, quick solution to improving the effectiveness of the Security Council but there are things that the Secretary-General can do. I would work tirelessly to ensure that many issues never need come before the Security Council raising emerging threats early and lending my good offices to resolve a dispute before it becomes a conflict. Should this fail, I would not hesitate to bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in my opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security. While the Security Council deliberated on the matter and what must be done, I would act as a trusted, impartial go-between for the various members, listening to their perspectives and giving 100 to building bridges between them in service of a swift and effective response. , No institution can be all things to all people. What things do you believe the UN should avoid trying to do? , I believe the UN needs to act as a locus for agreement and as a catalyst for action creating a favourable context for agreement among Member States, and mobilising a wide range of actors to deliver those agreements. While the UN system can and must align itself to help them deliver, it should not bear the full weight of delivery alone. The private sector, investors, civil society and many other stakeholders are very able to play their part often having better access to capital flows and delivery infrastructure, including supply chains, than the UN. This approach is what I refer to as the new "collaborative diplomacy" inviting the contribution of others and blending the best of governmental and non-government recognizing that more can be achieved through the collaboration of all. , What specifically would you do as Secretary-General to help women and girls around the world to achieve their human potential?, Women's rights would be a key focus of my work as SG, and I would make this an overarching issue for all UN bodies to give special attention to. There have been some areas of improvement in women's rights globally in recent years, but overall progress has been limited, and significant inequalities and injustices based on gender persist globally. This is both unforgivable and a loss for all of us not just women, as we all miss out when over 50 of the human population is not supported to achieve its full potential. Evidence shows, for example, that improving gender equality in all sectors can contribute to greater global peace and prosperity. There are many things that I would seek to do on this issue as SG. Firstly, I would strengthen the foundations upon which women's potential can flourish by promoting wider and stronger adherence to the UN Declaration on Human Rights and by implementing the 2030 Agenda many aspects of which are relevant to women in particular. And secondly, I would make a concerted push on particular issues, including providing greater aid to displaced women across the world the vast majority of refugees and displaced people are women and putting additional safeguards in place to prevent them from being abused, and involving women in political negotiations and peacekeeping efforts. |