World

A 57-year-old bureaucrat replaced Raul Castro as the president of Cuba on Thursday, launching a new political era as a government led by a single family for six decades tries to ensure the long-term survival of one of the world’s last communist states.

The National Assembly announced that Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez had been approved as the sole candidate for president.

The 86-year-old Castro will remain head of the Communist Party, which is designated by the constitution as “the superior guiding force of society and the state.” As a result, he will still be the most powerful person in Cuba for the time being.

His departure from the presidency is nonetheless a symbolically charged moment for a country that has been under the absolute rule of one family since the revolution — first by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and, for the last decade, his younger brother.

Facing biological reality but still active and apparently healthy, Raul Castro is stepping down as president in an effort to guarantee that new leaders can maintain the government’s grip on power in the face of economic stagnation, an aging population and increasing disenchantment among younger generations.

“I like sticking with the ideas of President Fidel Castro because he did a lot for the people of Cuba, but we need rejuvenation, above all in the economy,” said Melissa Mederos, a 21-year-old schoolteacher. “Diaz-Canel needs to work hard on the economy, because people need to live a little better.”

Most Cubans know their first vice-president as an uncharismatic figure who until recently maintained a public profile so low it was virtually nonexistent. That image changed slightly this year as state media placed an increasing spotlight on Diaz-Canel’s public appearances, including remarks to the press last month that included his promise to make Cuba’s government more responsive to its people.

“We’re building a relationship between the government and the people here,” he said then after casting a ballot for members of the National Assembly. “The lives of those who will be elected have to be focused on relating to the people, listening to the people, investigating their problems and encouraging debate.”

Diaz-Canel gained prominence in central Villa Clara province as the top Communist Party official, a post equivalent to governor. People there describe him as a hard-working, modest-living technocrat dedicated to improving public services. He became higher education minister in 2009 before moving into the vice presidency.

In a video of a Communist Party meeting that inexplicably leaked to the public last year, Diaz-Canel expressed a series of orthodox positions that included somberly pledging to shutter some independent media and labeling some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.

But he has also defended academics and bloggers who became targets of hardliners, leading some to describe him a potential advocate for greater openness in a system intolerant of virtually any criticism or dissent. International observers and Cubans alike will be scrutinizing every move he makes after he officially takes office on Thursday.

Two years after taking over from his ailing brother in 2006, Castro launched a series of reforms that expanded Cuba’s private sector to nearly 600,000 people and allowed citizens greater freedom to travel and access to information. He has failed to fix the generally unproductive and highly subsidized state-run businesses that, along with a Soviet-model bureaucracy, employ three of every four Cubans. State salaries average $30 a month, leaving workers struggling to feed their families, and often dependent on corruption or remittances from relatives overseas.

Castro’s moves to open the economy have largely been frozen or reversed as soon as they began to generate conspicuous shows of wealth by the new entrepreneurial class in a country officially dedicated to equality among its citizens.

“I don’t want to see a capitalist system, hopefully that doesn’t come here, but we have to fix the economy,” said Roberto Sanchez, a 41-year-old construction worker. “I’d like to have more opportunity, to buy a car, and have a few possessions.”

As in Cuba’s legislative elections, all of the leaders selected Wednesday were picked by a government-appointed commission. Ballots offer only the option of approval or disapproval and candidates generally receive more than 95 per cent of the votes in their favour.

The Candidacy Commission also nominated another six vice-presidents of the Council of State, Cuba’s highest government body. Only one, 85-year-old Ramiro Valdez, was among the revolutionaries who fought with the Castros in the late 1950s in the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.

State media went into overdrive Wednesday with a single message: Cuba’s system is continuing in the face of change. Commentators on state television and online offered lengthy explanations of why Cuba’s single-party politics and socialist economy are superior to multi-party democracy and free markets, and assured Cubans that no fundamental changes were occurring, despite some new faces at the top.

“It falls on our generation to give continuity to the revolutionary process,” said assembly member Jorge Luis Torres, a municipal councilman from central Artemisa province who appeared to be in his 40s. “We’re a generation born after the revolution, whose responsibility is driving the destiny of the nation.”

Source : AP

Thousands of Indians have taken to the streets to join nationwide protests against continuing sexual assaults of women and girls, including that of an eight-year-old girl who was gang-raped and brutally murdered inside a temple in Jammu area of Indian-administered Kashmir.

"Punish the guilty" was the rallying cry on Sunday in New Delhi, Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, Bangalore and other cities, according to India's NDTV.

"Small little girls are being raped every day and the way this time it has happened, that people actually came and supported these rapists, this is (new) heights and this is the time that we should take it as an alarm," Ved Amrita, a protester in New Delhi, told Associated Press news agency.

Asifa Bano, from the Bakerwal Muslim community, was gang-raped and murdered in Kathua district near Jammu, her case causing public outrage after lawyers tried to prevent state police from filing a charge sheet last week.

The girl was heavily sedated, kept in a Hindu temple, and gang-raped by at least three men over the course of four days in mid-January, the police said in the charge sheet made public on Tuesday.

She was later strangled, and her body was found in the forest near the temple. One of the three suspected rapists was a policeman.

Leaders from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including two ministers from the Jammu and Kashmir government, organised rallies in defence of the accused. The ministers were forced to resign on Saturday amid widespread public anger.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised justice for both rape victims, but critics said it was "too little, too late". Modi's BJP party controls the government both in Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh.

The body of another girl who had been raped was found in Surat, Gujarat state, on April 9. Police said on Sunday that they had not yet been able to establish the identity of the young girl, whose body with "86 injury marks" was found in the city's suburbs.

Many protesters expressed particular anger at India's ruling Hindu nationalist party for initially siding with the accused in the Kashmir case. The young victim was Muslim while the accused are Hindu.

Source : Al Jazeera

Iran is expected to block the popular messaging app Telegram, following similar measures taken by Russia, after the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced he was leaving the service to safeguard the national interest.

Telegram has proved a massive success in Iran, dwarfing the number of people using its global rival WhatsApp, and surpassing Facebook and Twitter, which have both been blocked for a long time in the country.

About 40 million Iranians – almost half of the country’s population – are estimated to be on Telegram, which has also appealed to older generations previously unfamiliar with the use of such social media platforms. In addition to one-to-one or group messaging, it allows users to broadcast posts to large audiences with its channel function.

Khamenei’s office announced on Wednesday that it was shutting down the ayatollah’s Telegram channel in order to safeguard national interests and end what it said was Telegram’s monopoly on the country’s social media.

The announcement also signalled that a nationwide ban on the app was imminent. “This move comes ahead of plans by the authorities to block Telegram and is aimed at supporting domestic social media apps,” read the brief message.

Iran’s vice-president, Eshaq Jahangiri, also announced that he was quitting Telegram. Officials also sent a directive to all civil servants and government departments telling them to stop using Telegram.

Iran has been mulling a ban on Telegram ever since protests over economic grievances at the end of last year took on a political dimension before spreading to up to 80 cities in January. Officials blamed Telegram for providing a platform for protesters to organise rallies.

The country’s technology minister personally reached out to Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, at the time, asking him to block channels that he alleged were spreading violence, prompting one such channel – that had been spreading misinformation – to be blocked.

Iranians have shown huge resilience when it comes to the state blocking their access to online services, sites and social platforms. They have mastered anti-filtering software to bypass state restrictions and often migrate in their millions to a new platform when one is blocked. The success of Telegram is partly thanks to Iranians rapidly switching to the messaging service when Viber was blocked.

The news in Iran comes after Russia’s internet watchdog blocked an estimated 16m IP addresses in a massive operation against the banned Telegram messaging app four days after a court ordered the service to be blocked over alleged terrorism concerns.

Source : The Guardian

Myanmar says it has repatriated the first family of Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh, despite a UN warning that it is not safe to return.

Some 700,000 Rohingya have fled across the border to escape a brutal military campaign that began last August.

The UN has accused Myanmar of "ethnic cleansing" - a charge it denies.

Myanmar says five members of a family arrived at a "repatriation camp" on Saturday, and were provided with supplies and ID cards.

If confirmed, this would be the first group of Rohingya repatriated to Myanmar since the crisis began.

The Myanmar government says it has been engaged in a justified campaign against Rohingya militants in Rakhine state.

Earlier this month, it sentenced seven soldiers to prison terms for involvement in the killing of 10 Rohingya men.

Refugees fleeing the country into neighbouring Bangladesh, however, said that such acts were widespread - describing indiscriminate killings, rape, and the burning of villages.

Source : BBC

Turkey will hold snap presidential and parliamentary elections on 24 June, brought forward by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from November 2019.

He has run Turkey since 2002 and will seek five more years with beefed up powers approved in a referendum last year.

The idea of an early poll was initially proposed by nationalist allies.

Erdogan said in a televised speech the country needed the new election to rid it of "the diseases of the old system".

"Developments in Syria and elsewhere have made it urgent to switch to the new executive system in order to take steps for our country's future in a stronger way," the president said in a live broadcast.

Erdogan said he had made the decision after speaking to the head of the nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bahceli, who is expected to form an alliance with Erdogan's ruling AK Party in the parliamentary polls.

Source : BBC

Russia on Saturday called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council as Moscow said it would consider supplying S-300 missile systems to Syria following U.S.-led strikes.

"Russia convenes an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss aggressive actions of the U.S. and its allies," President Vladimir Putin said in a statement published on the Kremlin website.

"The current escalation of the situation around Syria has a devastating impact on the whole system of international relations," he added.

U.S., British and French forces pounded Syria with more than 100 missiles early on Saturday in response to a poison gas attack that killed dozens of people last week, in the biggest intervention by Western powers against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Putin said the U.S. actions in Syria made the humanitarian catastrophe worse and caused pain for civilians.

"Russia in the most serious way condemns the attack on Syria where Russian military servicemen help the legitimate government to fight terrorism," Putin said.

Missiles for Syria

Moscow may consider supplying S-300 surface to-air missile systems to Syria and "other countries", Colonel-General Sergei Rudskoi told a televised briefing on Saturday.

Russia had "refused" supplying those missiles to Syria a few years ago, he added, "taking into account the pressing request of some of our Western partners".

Following the U.S.-led strikes, however, "we consider it possible to return to examination of this issue not only in regard to Syria but to other countries as well," Rudskoi said.

Syria's air defense system, which mostly consists of systems made in the Soviet Union, has intercepted 71 of the missiles fired on Saturday by the U.S., British and French forces, he added.

"In the past year and a half Russia has fully restored Syria's air defense system and continues to further upgrade it," Rudskoi said.

Source : CNBC

The former US first lady Barbara Bush has died at the age of 92, a family spokesman has said.Bush had been in failing health in recent days – she reportedly had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure. A family spokesman, Jim McGrath, said in a 15 April statement: “Following a recent series of hospitalizations, and after consulting her family and doctors, Mrs Bush has decided not to seek additional medical treatment and will instead focus on comfort care.”

Born in New York in 1925, Barbara Pierce married George HW Bush on 6 January 1945. They had six children including the former president George W Bush and the former Florida governor Jeb Bush. She is also survived by her sons Neil and Marvin and her daughter Doro Bush Koch. Her daughter Robin died at the age of three in 1953.

 As first lady from 1989 to 1993, Bush was an advocate for literacy and started the Barbara Bush Foundation to promote this goal. She drew attention while at the White House for seeking to eschew politics, particularly controversial issues such as abortion.

A storm has damaged two minarets located at different entry gates of the iconic Taj Mahal in the northern Indian city of Agra.

Officials said that winds blowing at 130kmh (80mph) caused the 12ft (4m) pillars to collapse.

The four longer minarets that surround the main structure remain intact.

The 17th Century mausoleum attracts about 12,000 visitors a day and is one of the world's most popular tourist attractions. One of the destroyed minarets was located at the royal gate where tourists often get their first glimpse of the monument.

The other was located at the southern gate. Authorities said that work had begun to restore the damaged structures.

The Maldives rejected a demand by a U.N. human rights watchdog on Monday that former president Mohamed Nasheed be allowed to stand for office, including in a presidential election later this year.

 The U.N. Human Rights Committee, a panel of independent experts overseeing states’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, said Nasheed’s conviction on terrorism charges was based on vague laws, contained serious flaws and violated his right to a fair trial.

“Political rights can be suspended or restricted only in exceptional circumstances and under certain conditions. And judicial proceedings that violate the right to fair trial can render the resulting restriction of political rights arbitrary,” committee member Sarah Cleveland said in a statement.

Nasheed was sentenced to 13 years in jail but went into exile during a medical trip to Britain. He was disqualified from running in presidential elections for 16 years.

The committee said it wanted information from the Maldives within 180 days about measures taken to take its views into account, and said those measures should be disseminated broadly in the official languages of the Maldives.

But the government swiftly rejected the Committee’s report.

“The Government of the Maldives... wholeheartedly refutes that any of these rights have been violated in the case of the former President Nasheed. The Government accepts the conviction of Nasheed as lawful and final,” it said in a statement.

It described Nasheed as a fugitive and said the U.N. committee had not given enough consideration to information submitted by the government.

“Having attempted to subvert the course of justice and dismantle the judicial branch of the State, both while in Office and since leaving it, former President Nasheed was charged for having ordered the abduction of a sitting judge,” it said.

The Maldives, home to 400,000 people and best known as a tropical paradise for tourists, has experienced political unrest since Nasheed, the island’s first democratically-elected leader, was forced to quit amid a mutiny by police in 2012.

The current president Abdulla Yameen imposed a state of emergency in February to annul a Supreme Court ruling that quashed the convictions of nine opposition leaders, including Nasheed.

During the 45-day emergency, Yameen’s administration arrested former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the chief justice, another Supreme Court judge and a Supreme Court administrator on charges of trying to overthrow the government.

All four have been charged under terrorism laws. They have all rejected the charges.

The Supreme court, now reduced to three bench judges after the arrests, went on to reverse its decision to quash the convictions of the opposition leaders.

Source : Reuters

Pakistan’s Supreme Court dashed former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s hopes of returning to power on Friday, ruling that the disqualification handed to him last year in the Panama Papers Case was for life.

A report said the disqualification under Article 62 (1)(f) of Pakistan’s constitution is for life. Article 62(1)(f), which sets the precondition for a member of Pakistan’s parliament to be ‘sadiq’ and ‘ameen’ (honest and righteous), was the one under which Sharif was disqualified as PM last year.

Sharif, a three-time prime minister, was ousted by the judiciary in July 2017 over corruption charges which he is currently facing in Pakistani courts.

Friday's ruling addressed an ambiguity over Sharif's disqualification and whether he was barred from office for life or a specific period.

Sharif has denied any wrongdoing and has blamed "hidden hands" for his dismissal.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf leader Jahangir Tareen was among the other lawmakers also disqualified under the article.

A prominent US lawyer has died after setting himself on fire in a New York park in a protest against climate change.

The remains of David Buckel, 60, were found in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

In a suicide note found nearby, Mr Buckel wrote that he had immolated himself using fossil fuel to symbolise what he said was the damage human beings were doing to the Earth.

He said most people now breathed bad air and many died prematurely.

Buckel was well known for his legal work on behalf of gay, lesbian and transgender people and later worked with several environmental groups.

Source : BBC

Russia’s ambassador to Lebanon said any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted, a step that could trigger a major escalation in the Syrian war.

Russian ambassador to Lebanon Alexander Zasypkin (L) stands with the head of Lebanon's Higher Relief Council (HRC) Ibrahim Bashir upon the arrival of a Russian aeroplane carrying humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Lebanon, at Beirut international airport April 3, 2013. REUTERS/Sharif Karim.

Russian Ambassador Alexander Zasypkin, in comments broadcast on Tuesday evening, said he was referring to a statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian armed forces chief of staff.

The Russian military said on March 13 that it would respond to any U.S. strike on Syria, targeting any missiles and launchers involved in such an attack. Russia is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally.

The United States and its allies are considering whether to hit Syria over a suspected poison gas attack that medical relief organizations say killed dozens of people in the rebel-held town of Douma near Damascus on Saturday.

“If there is a strike by the Americans, then...the missiles will be downed and even the sources from which the missiles were fired,” Zasypkin told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV, speaking in Arabic. He also said a clash “should be ruled out and therefore we are ready to hold negotiations”.

Russia and the United States blocked attempts by each other in the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to set up international investigations into chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday canceled a planned trip to Latin America later this week to focus instead on responding to the Syria incident, the White House said. Trump had on Monday warned of a quick, forceful response once responsibility for the Syria attack was established.

(Reuters)