Month: November 2024

DHAKA: Hundreds marched in Bangladesh’s capital on Saturday to demand protections for Hindus and other minorities who say they have suffered violence and threats since the ouster of autocratic premier Sheikh Hasina.

Hasina’s toppling in an August student-led uprising saw a spate of reprisals on Hindus, who were seen as disproportionate supporters of her regime.

The caretaker government that replaced her, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, has acknowledged and condemned attacks on Hindus but said in many cases they were motivated by politics rather than religion.

Regular protests in the months since claim that attacks are continuing and have demanded action from Yunus’ administration, an “advisory council” tasked with implementing democratic reforms and staging fresh elections.

“It’s deeply regrettable that the council of advisers do not acknowledge the sufferings minorities have endured,” Hindu civic leader Charu Chandra Das Brahmachari said. “I have witnessed the atrocities against them — their temples, businesses, and homes.” Protest organisers have urged the interim government to introduce a law to protect minorities and mandate a minimum share of minority representation in government, among other demands.

Tensions have been inflamed by the filing of sedition charges this week against 19 people who participated in an earlier minority rights rally in the port city of Chittagong. The group was accused of disrespecting the Bangladeshi national flag by hoisting a saffron flag — the emblematic colour of the Hindu faith — to fly above it.

Vesna Turkulov — the director of the clinical centre of Vojvodina — told reporters that three people who had been pulled from the rubble were in a serious condition, two of whom were undergoing operations. “The injuries are very severe,” the doctor added.

Earlier the interior minister said rescuers were working to free multiple people trapped beneath the wreckage of the roof. Cranes and excavators worked alongside emergency responders digging through the rubble to search for the survivors, according to a photographer at the scene.

“The operation is still ongoing and extremely challenging. Over 80 rescuers are involved, with the assistance of heavy machinery,” Dacic said.

The Serbian government said an official day of mourning would be held on Saturday, according to a statement published by the country’s state broadcaster. The Blood Trans­fusion Institute in Novi Sad also called on residents to donate blood following the accident.

Borrell and his Japanese counterpart Takeshi Iwaya unveiled the pact to develop cooperation on joint military drills, exchange of information related to the defence industry, and space security among other matters.

“I am extremely pleased to be here with Minister Iwaya to announce the conclusion of this security and defence partnership between the European Union and Japan,” Borrell said.

He called it the “the first agreement of this nature” the EU has made with an Asia-Pacific country, describing it as “historical and very timely”.

“We live in a very dangerous world” and “given the situation in both of our regions, this political framework deepens our ability to tackle emerging threats together,” Borrell told reporters.

He did not mention China, but Japan has previously called its neighbour its greatest security challenge.

After the Tokyo talks, Borrell heads to South Korea, where concerns about North Korea will top the agenda.

The United States has said thousands of North Korean troops are in Russia readying to fight in Ukraine.

Pyongyang test-fired one of its newest and most powerful missiles on Thursday, demonstrating its threat to the US days ahead of elections.

Defence industries

The text of the EU-Japan Security and Defence Partnership said they would promote “concrete naval cooperation”, including through activities such as joint exercises and port calls, which could also include “mutually designated third countries”.

It also said the EU and Japan would discuss “the development of respective defence initiatives, including exchange of information on defence industry-related matters”.

Japan, which for decades has relied on the United States for military hardware, is also developing a new fighter jet with EU member Italy and Britain set to be airborne by 2035.

The agreement on industrial cooperation could “turbo-charge collaboration, such as joint defence projects between Japanese and European firms funded through EU mechanisms may be on the cards”, analyst Yee Kuang Heng of the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Public Policy said.

Japan is ramping up defence spending to the NATO standard of two percent of GDP by 2027, partly to counter China.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who could head a minority government after a disastrous general election last week, has said that “today’s Ukraine could be tomorrow’s East Asia”.

Ishiba has also called for the creation of a NATO-like regional alliance with its tenet of collective security, although he has conceded this will “not happen overnight”.

The winner will replace Rishi Sunak as the leader of the opposition, after he led the party to a crushing election defeat in July, losing almost two thirds of its MPs.

His successor faces the daunting task of rebuilding the Tory party after years of division, scandal and economic turbulence, which saw Labour eject them from power by a landslide.

 

Voting by tens of thousands of party members, who need to have joined at least 90 days ago, closed on Thursday. Both candidates have claimed the result will be close.

The Conservatives do not disclose how many members the party has, but the figure was about 172,000 in 2022, and research suggests they are disproportionately affluent, older white men.

Both candidates are seen as on the party’s right wing. Kemi Badenoch, 44, is the former trade secretary, who was born in London to middle-class Nigerian parents but spent most of her childhood in Lagos.

After moving back to the UK aged 16, she stayed with a family friend while taking her A-levels, and has spoken of her time working at McDonald’s as a teenager.

Having studied computer science at Sussex University, she then worked as a software engineer before entering London politics and becoming MP for Saffron Walden in Essex in 2017.

Ms Badenoch prides herself on being outspoken and has said the Conservatives lost because they “talked right and governed left”. But her critics paint her as abrasive and prone to misspeaking.

At the Conservative Party conference, a crucial staging post in the contest, she began her speech which followed three other male candidates by saying: “Nice speeches, boys, but I think you all know I’m the one everyone’s been waiting for.”

Her rival Robert Jenrick, 42, has been on a political journey. Elected as a Cameroon Conservative in 2014, he was one of the rising star ministers who swung behind Boris Johnson as prime minister and was later a vocal supporter of Rishi Sunak.

But he resigned as immigration minister in December 2023, claiming Sunak’s government was breaking its promises to cut immigration.

 

The MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire says he had a “working-class” upbringing in Wolverhampton. He read history at Cambridge University and worked at Christie’s auctioneers before winning a by-election.

After a long ministerial career where he was seen as mild-mannered, he is said to have been “radicalised” by his time at the Home Office and has focused his campaign on a promise to slash immigration and leave the European Convention on Human Rights to “stand for our nation and our culture, our identity and our way of life”.

He has put forward more policies than his rival, but attracted criticism for some of his claims – including that Britain’s former colonies owe the Empire a “debt of gratitude”.

A survey of party members by the website Conservative Home last week put Kemi Badenoch in the lead by 55 points to Mr Jenrick’s 31 with polls still open.

James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary and seen as a more centrist candidate was knocked out of the race last month. One of his supporters, the Conservative peer and former Scotland leader Ruth Davidson, has predicted neither Mr Jenrick nor Ms Badenoch will stay as leader until the next general election.

I’ve now voted for Robert Jenrick, who I don’t think will win. I struggle to believe that the person that’s the next leader of the Tory party is going to take us into the next election in five years’ time and I struggle to believe that they’re going to leave the leadership at a time of their own choosing.”

Henry Hill, deputy editor of ConHome, said the contest which Tory officials decided would take almost three months, has not led to enough scrutiny – because the MP rounds of voting took so long.

“We know much less [about them] than I think we should”, he said. “The problem with this contest is the party decided to go really long, but at the same time, they confined the membership vote – with just the final two – to just three weeks, and ballots dropped halfway through that process.

“We had months and months with loads of candidates in the race, but also that was the MP rounds and you’d think the MPs will have a chance to get to know these people already. For the actual choice the members are going to be making, there has been barely any time to scrutinise that.

He added: “I think the party remembers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak taking weeks to take lumps out of each other in 2022 and wanted to avoid that. But it means the two campaigns haven’t really been attacking each other and that tends to be how you expose people’s weaknesses.”

After 14 years in government under five prime ministers, it is not since David Cameron in 2005 that the party has elected a leader to go into opposition – with a long road until the next general election.

Veteran ex-MP Graham Brady, who served as chair of the backbench 1922 committee, told Sky News that the position was more hopeful than after the 1997 landslide.

He said: “The biggest challenge for a leader of the opposition in these circumstances is just to be heard, to be noticed. I came into the House of Commons in 1997 at the time of that huge Blair landslide.

“We worked very, very hard in opposition during that parliament, and at the next general election [in 2001], we made a net gain of one seat.

“Now, there is a huge difference between now and 1997. The Blair government remained very popular and Tony Blair personally remained very popular through that whole parliament and beyond. And in 100 days or so, Keir Starmer has already fallen way behind.

“So I think we’ve got a great opportunity. I don’t think we’re up against an insuperable challenge, but it’s a big challenge.”

Kate Fall, now Baroness Fall, worked with Lord Cameron in opposition and later in Downing Street when he was prime minister in the coalition government. She said the next leader needed to keep the party “united and disciplined”.

“The first thing is to think about why we lost. The second thing is what do we have to say? Then they need to be agile, they need to be reactive, but pick their fight, not fight over everything. They also need to get out and about,” she said.

Lord Cameron travelled around the country holding question and answer sessions called Cameron Direct. “When you’re prime minister, you can’t do that as much as you like. But as leader of the opposition you can get out, talk to people, we thought it was very trendy to have a podcast and so on.”

She says this week’s budget gives the next leader “an ideological divide” to get into, but warns that the next leader must not risk alienating former Tories who switched to Labour and the Lib Dems.

Seven people were killed — five schoolchildren, one police personnel, and a passer-by — in a blast reportedly targeting a police mobile near the Girls High School at the Civil Hospital Chowk in Mastung, Balochistan, police told Geo News on Friday.

Initially, there were five dead. Later, two additional casualties were reported among the injured who succumbed to their wounds during treatment at the hospital, said DHQ Medical Superintendent Nisar Ahmad Baloch, which increased the death toll to seven.

Baloch added that 30 injured people were undergoing treatment at DHQ and Nawab Hospital in Mastung, among which most were schoolchildren.

Sub-Divisional Police Officer (SDPO) Miandad Umrani said that a remote-controlled explosive device was planted in a motorcycle.

The ages of the deceased schoolchildren, which include girls and boys, are between 10 to 13 years old, while four policemen are among the injured.

Emergency has been declared in both hospitals, said Mastung Deputy Commissioner Mir Baaz Khan Marri.

Earlier the police reported at least 15 people injured in the attack, which completely destroyed the police vehicle.

Several other vehicles, including rickshaws, present near the blast site were also damaged, they added.

Police earlier also said that all injured were shifted to the District Headquarters Hospital (DHQ) nearby.

Soon after the blast, an emergency was declared across all Quetta hospitals including the Civil Hospital, BMC Hospital and Trauma Centre, said the provincial health department spokesperson, adding that all doctors, pharmacists, staff nurses and other medical staff have been summoned.

The spokesperson said that nine people injured in the blast, among which the condition of three is critical, were shifted to the Trauma Center in Quetta. The injured were being treated at the hospital.

The state of law and order in Pakistan, particularly in restive provinces Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has remained impacted by terrorist activities with several innocent lives of civilians and security personnel including police and military soldiers, lost to the menace.

Today’s blast in the country’s southwestern province comes days after five people were killed and two were injured after unknown gunmen opened fire on locals at the site of a dam in Panjgur.

Balochistan remains vulnerable to terror activities alongside KP, especially in the past recent months with both provinces accounting for 97% of the total 722 fatalities in the first three quarters of the ongoing year, as per a report issued by the Centre for Research and Security Studies (CRSS).

Meanwhile, Balochistan Chief Minister Sarfaraz Bugti condemned the blast expressing grief over the loss of lives. He extended condolences to the relatives of the martyred policeman and schoolchildren.

“Terrorists have now targeted innocent children along with labourers,” said Bugti, resolving to avenge the blood of innocent citizens including children.

He added that locals among the civilian population also have to keep an eye on the terrorists. “The monster of terrorism can only be fought together.”

Acting President and Senate Chairman Yousuf Raza Gillani also condemned the incident and expressed deep grief over the loss of innocent lives.

“Terrorist elements are an enemy to humanity. The nation stands strong beside the security forces and law enforcement agencies against terrorism,” he said.

In his condemnation statement, National Assembly Speaker Sardar Ayaz expressed solidarity with the families of the victims.

“The perpetrators who target innocent citizens and children are enemies of humanity and peace,” said the speaker.

He condemned the targeting of innocent children and civilians by terrorists for their nefarious purposes.

Sadiq praised the enduring sacrifices made by security forces and police officers in the fight against terrorism, emphasising that such shameful acts by malicious elements cannot shake the nation’s resolve in the war against terror.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi also condemned the explosion and said: “No words are enough to condemn the incident of targeting innocent children.”

He described the attack as an “act of brutality”, adding that “targeting children is a heinous crime that no one should tolerate”.

Naqvi asserted that those responsible for such horrific acts should face no leniency. “The beasts who play with the lives of innocent children do not deserve any compassion,” he stated.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to boost bilateral ties with Qatar as he met the Gulf country’s top leadership during his two-day official visit.

PM Shehbaz held delegation-level talks with the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, followed by a one-on-one meeting to discuss a wide array of bilateral interests in Doha on Thursday, according to Radio Pakistan.  

The two leaders reaffirmed their commitment to deepening strategic ties, underscoring the importance of shared economic goals and regional stability.

They also reviewed the entire spectrum of Pakistan-Qatar relations, exploring potential avenues for enhanced cooperation in trade, potential areas of investment, energy and culture.

PM Shehbaz commended Qatar’s stance on the Palestinian issue expressed by its emir during the 79th UNGA held on the 24th of last month.

He appreciated mediation efforts by Qatar for an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded supply of humanitarian aid, Radio Pakistan reported.

The premier also invited the Qatari emir to visit Pakistan.

PM Shehbaz also held an extensive and productive meeting with his Qatari counterpart Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani during his visit.

The two leaders discussed avenues to further strengthen bilateral relations, particularly focusing on enhancing cooperation in areas such as trade, investment, energy, and cultural exchange.

PM Shehbaz acknowledged Qatar’s contributions to Pakistan’s economic growth and expressed his gratitude for Doha’s continued support in various sectors.

He reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to deepening economic ties and emphasised the potential for expanded collaboration.

He also thanked his Qatari counterpart for hosting a large number of Pakistani diaspora who act as a human bridge between the two brotherly countries.

The leaders discussed global and regional issues, underscoring the need for peaceful solutions and mutual cooperation to address challenges.

The Qatari premier highlighted Pakistan’s strategic importance in the region and expressed his enthusiasm for strengthening ties with Islamabad in line with Doha’s vision for economic growth and regional stability.

Both leaders agreed on the importance of continuing high-level exchanges to promote understanding, foster cooperation, and identify new areas for growth.

The Qatari PM showed his resolve to work with Pakistan for peace in the region including Afghanistan.

Additionally, PM Shehbaz extended an invitation to Qatari investors to explore Pakistan’s diverse economic sectors, including agriculture, information technology, and tourism.

He outlined the Pakistani government’s commitment to providing a conducive environment for foreign investors and discussed potential incentives to facilitate their entry into the Pakistani market.

The premier expressed his deep appreciation to the Qatari emir and prime minister for the warm hospitality extended to him and his delegation.

He emphasised that this visit would further solidify the strong bonds of friendship, mutual respect, and cooperation between Pakistan and Qatar, bringing mutual benefit to both nations.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said on Thursday that Riyadh could potentially move “quite quickly” on some bilateral agreements with Washington even if a mega-deal involving recognising Israel remains out of reach.

Since last year Saudi Arabia has been bargaining hard for a defence pact with the United States as well as assistance with a civilian nuclear programme.

As part of that deal the Gulf kingdom, home to the holiest shrines in Islam, would recognise Israel for the first time.

De facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last month ruled out recognising Israel without the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan reiterated on Thursday that normalisation was “off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood”.

But during a session at the Future Investment Initiative forum in Riyadh, he also said deals in other areas could advance soon.

“The bilateral agreements we are working on with the US are actually multiple agreements,” Prince Faisal said.

“Some of them we can progress probably quite quickly, and some of them we are working on — especially those related to trade, AI, et cetera — which are not tied to any other third parties.”

Officials in US President Joe Biden’s administration have described the ongoing bilateral talks as building towards the proposed mega-deal, dismissing the possibility of separating the different components.

Prince Faisal seemed to acknowledge on Thursday that the defence-related elements were bound up with normalisation.

“Some of the more significant defence cooperation agreements are much more complicated,” he said.

“We would certainly welcome an opportunity to finish them before the current administration’s term, but that’s reliant on other factors outside of our control.”

Prince Faisal also said Riyadh had no preference on the winner of next week’s presidential election in the US.

“Obviously, we’ve worked with President (Donald) Trump before, so we know him, and we can find a way to work with him very well,” he said.

“But we also know, obviously, the team that is currently working with the Biden administration. Vice President (Kamala) Harris is part of that team, and we’ve been able to build a very strong working relationship. So we absolutely have no preference.”

He added: “They will certainly be different, whether one or the other would be better, this is not up to me to say.”