(Bloomberg) — Boris Johnson executed a brutal clear-out of more than half of his predecessor’s top team, installing supporters in key roles as the new prime minister signaled his intent to deliver Brexit in 98 days.Eighteen of the 29 ministers who sat…
July 24, 2019Read More
In his Washington visit, Prime Minister Imran Khan secured a legitimate role for Pakistan in shaping Afghanistan’s future, writes Shamila N. Chaudhary, a former National Security Council director.
July 24, 2019Read More
Authorities in India’s northern Uttrakhand state are investigating whether sex-selective abortions were carried out in 132 villages in one of its 13 districts, where not a single girl was born since April. The investigations follow official revelations that among 216 births over the past three months in Uttarkashi district, 250 miles northeast of New Delhi, all were boys. The district administration has marked these villages as a ‘red zone’, and instituted a team of 25 officials to investigate abortions of female foetuses, a practice that was banned in 1994 but continues unabated. “We have identified areas where the number of girl childbirth is zero or in single-digit numbers” said Uttarkashi district magistrate Ashish Chauhan, adding that the authorities were monitoring these areas to examine what was affecting the ratio. Kalpana Thakur, a women’s rights activist and social worker however, claimed that the statistics in these villages clearly indicated the prevalence of female foeticide. “It cannot be just a coincidence” she said, “ as it clearly indicates female foeticide is taking place in the district and the administration is not doing anything to prevent it”. India has a long history of female infanticide: of baby girls poisoned, suffocated, drowned, starved or simply abandoned and left to die. India’s last population census in 2011 revealed a skewed sex ratio of 943 girls for every 1,000 boys, which studies show has since dropped to 896 girls. A United Nations report in 2014 said the dwindling number of girls in India had reached ‘emergency proportions’ and was primary cause for the exponential rise in the number of rapes and other sexual crimes against women in the country. Traditionally girls are considered a liability, as expensive dowries have to be paid at their weddings, while boys are seen as assets for carrying the family name and being allowed to perform important Hindu rites. Activists said many families want only boys, and keep aborting unborn daughters until they get a son. “It’s a primeval instinct which legislation cannot change” said Seema Mustafa of the Centre for Policy Analysis in New Delhi. Meanwhile, a ‘bride crisis’ is afflicting the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, where thousands of young men are failing to find brides following decades due to a shortage of women. Some families have started importing brides from poorer states in the hope that they will produce male offspring.
July 24, 2019Read More
Britain’s new Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab is a karate-loving hardcore eurosceptic who has rapidly chopped his way to the top of British politics. Raab had a rocky three months as Britain’s Brexit minister last year, quitting in November saying Ther…
July 24, 2019Read More
Six people were killed and the mayor of Mogadishu wounded in a bombing at the mayoral offices in the Somali capital, the government said on Wednesday, in an attack claimed by Al-Shabaab jihadists. United Nations special envoy James Swan had met the ma…
July 24, 2019Read More
Italian premier Giuseppe Conte on Wednesday tried to answer parliament’s questions about an alleged bid by Matteo Salvini’s League party to broker covert Russian funding after the far-right minister refused. Interior Minister Salvini, an admirer of Ru…
July 24, 2019Read More
Anadolu Agency/GettyDARSALAH, West Bank—The bulldozers came early to Wadi Hummus, the whimsically named hamlet in Sur Baher, a neighborhood in southeastern Jerusalem. They rumbled in slowly Monday at 6:00 in the morning, and immediately their maws began to carve huge chunks out of buildings, most of them partially built. The din of the de-construction was heard far and wide, and activists embedded on-site to protest the demolition activity said that two hours earlier they’d seen soldiers place explosive charges in the vicinity of a multi-story building, so a big bang was anticipated as journalists assembled.In point of fact, Gal Berger, a veteran Palestinian affairs correspondent for the Kan News broadcaster, chided his Israeli colleagues for suddenly paying so much attention to something that “happens every week.” But this operation is set against the backdrop of an ugly election campaign as right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu struggles not only to keep his office but to avoid criminal indictments. A hard line against Palestinians will be seen as a plus by some in his base. After the Netanyahu Fail, What Is Trump’s Israel-Palestine Solution? Let Others Pick Up the PiecesAnd with these demolitions, Israel was destroying structures located in the West Bank’s Area A, which is defined under the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords as exclusively administered by the Palestinian Authority. In a statement, Israel’s Civil Administration, which is in fact the Israeli army department responsible for civilian life in the West Bank—which has been under Israeli military occupation since the war of 1967—said the demolition of 12 “illegally constructed” buildings and two foundations fell in an area “under an injunction prohibiting building signed by the Central Command on the outskirts of Sur Baher in close proximity to the security fence.”The reference is to a 2011 military order prohibiting construction within about 300 yards of Israel’s security barrier, which went up after a succession of terror attacks in 2002. Israel claims the buildings in question were erected after 2014. The demolitions followed an Israeli Supreme Court ruling accepting the army’s contention that the buildings, including those in Palestinian-administered territory, constituted “a security danger to the area of the security fence.”On Monday, there was no access to the actual site of the Wadi Hummus demolition, an Israeli army operation supported by military police, and, beyond the official statement, no information was available from Israeli authorities. In turn, spokespeople for the Israel Defense Forces, the police, the military police and the civilian administration claimed not to be responsible for the task. Official sources varied in the number of buildings affected by the demolition order, but most of the structures were uninhabited. Only two families were physically displaced.As Iran-U.S. Tensions Rise, Hezbollah Readies for War With IsraelThe entire undertaking could be seen and heard from a few hundred feet away, across the “security fence,” which U.S. President Trump has extolled as a wall, but which, in the segment that slices through Wadi Hummus, is in fact merely a dusty road flanked by fairly loose barbed wire fencing along each side. At about 8:00 a.m., Khaled Abu Mahmid, a middle-aged attorney clad in a plain black suit, stood on a neighbor’s balcony and surveyed the ruins of the home he’d built just on the Palestinian side of the road-acting-as-fence, in the small town of Darsalah.Until Monday morning, he resided in the four-story dwelling with his wife and four children, one of whom is a married son who lived in the multi-family unit with his own wife and three young children. Abu Mahmid, a West Bank Palestinian, held to a lawyerly argument. “The Israeli high court’s decision to destroy the home, is not a legal decision. It is political, because the home was built in 2008, before the security road was built.”His home was in Area B, which, following Oslo, is under Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control. Area C, 61 percent of the West Bank, is fully under Israeli control. Nobody—not Abu Mahmid, not the Israeli representatives—mentioned the fact that the Palestinian Authority, the undisputed sovereign of Area A, and the civilian authority in Area B, had no role in Israel’s internal debate about the right of the buildings to stand.Whenever Abu Mahmid’s home was built, no one disputes one thing: the buildings demolished on Monday are interspersed among other preexisting buildings unquestionably built prior to 2011, at equal distance from the security road, and their continued presence does not, apparently, constitute a substantial threat.Accompanying Abu Mahmid was Khaled el-Khatib, the mayor of Darsalah, a town located in Bethlehem’s administrative district, who said “we gave them the approval to build, through the Palestinian local government.” It is almost impossible for Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem to receive building authorizations from Jerusalem city hall. Speaking to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher for the left-wing Ir Amim advocacy group, said “residents who didn’t want to build without a permit sought a creative solution and were granted construction permits from the Palestinian Authority to build in areas A and B, where Israel has no authority concerning construction plans.”Israel’s “insistence to prevent this solution is a very cruel act,” he added. Asked where he would sleep that night, Abu Mahmid glanced at the rubble and turned away, for once overcome.For Jamal Darawy, chairman of the Bethlehem district’s eastern sector, “The main reason for demolishing is to weaken the Palestinian Authority, to show the world that we are not good enough to have a state.”He scoffed at the contention the Sur Baher homes posed a threat to Israeli security as “a fake reason,” pointing out that Arabs live on both sides of the security road, and Israelis, in any event, remain free to “continue guarding with their cameras and their border police units.” “Actually,” he said, “these homes are no danger to any Jews or Israelis or any human being.” No terror attacks have originated in Wadi Hummus. Asked why the homes in the neighborhood were judged a security threat, military police spokesman Baruch Honig said “the state of Israel does not wait for a terror attack to take place before acting.”At about 7:00 p.m., Nizar Amer, the acting spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry, tweeted that “Israel has the full right to demolish the illegal buildings adjacent to the security fence in Sur Baher. This was carried out following a High Court of Justice ruling that these constructions constitute a security danger to Israeli civilians. This is a deliberate provocation by the Palestinian Authority. Those who knowingly built illegal houses took the law into their own hands.”About an hour later, a video started making the rounds of Israeli and Palestinian WhatsApp groups, showing an Israeli Border Police officer embracing a soldier, turning around for a smiling selfie and exulting “mazal tov!” as, behind them, an unfinished multi-story building in Wadi Hummus was detonated, neatly crumpling floor by floor. The video was taken at 7:30 p.m., police spokesman Honig said, and was “congratulatory at the conclusion of a 17-hour operation in intense heat.” Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.
July 24, 2019Read More
KABUL/WASHINGTON, July 24 (Reuters) – The United States believes a proposed European initiative to bolster maritime security in the Gulf would complement ongoing U.S. efforts there instead of being a “stand-alone” operation, the top U.S. general said o…
July 24, 2019Read More
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