Month: July 2020

Austria’s chancellor called for new elections following the dramatic collapse of his coalition government amid corruption allegations yesterday.

“Enough is enough”, Sebastian Kurz said in a televised address, following the resignation of his far-Right vice chancellor.

Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), was forced to step down after a video emerged in which he promised government contracts to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch.

In a brief televised statement, Mr Kurz said he was not prepared to continue in coalition with the Freedom Party, and had asked the Austrian president for early elections.

As he spoke, thousands of people gathered outside the chancellery in Vienna chanting: “Kurz must go!”

Mr Strache was the first far-Right leader to ride the populist wave to power in a major European capital, and his resignation will come as a body blow to populists across the continent.

As right-wing populists held a rally in Italy ahead of European elections, he had to face the cameras back home.

Mr Strache’s dramatic fall from grace began late on Friday when two German publications released details of a video filmed secretly at a villa in Ibiza in 2017, months before the election that propelled the Freedom Party to power.

 

In the video, Mr Strache and another FPÖ politician, Johann Gudenus, are seen talking with a woman posing as a Russian oligarch who claims she wants to invest €250 million (£219 million) in the Austrian economy.

Mr Strache is seen encouraging her to buy a controlling stake in Krone Zeitung, Austria’s highest-selling newspaper, and reposition it to support his party in the forthcoming elections.

He suggests that once he is in power, lucrative government contracts will be awarded to the Russian woman’s business instead of to Austrian companies.

Extracts from the video were published by Germany’s Spiegel magazine and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. It is unclear who made the video.

In a statement announcing his resignation, Mr Strache claimed he had been a victim of “political dirty tricks” – but admitted his filmed comments were “catastrophic and embarrassing”.

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Mr Strache maintained he had not done anything illegal – in the video he tells the Russian woman they must not break the law. “The only criminal offence here is the intelligence service-style honey trap,” he said.

He said he was resigning to allow the coalition government between the Freedom Party and Mr Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party to remain in power.

But Mr Kurz made it clear he was not prepared to continue with the coalition.

By taking his party into coalition with the Freedom Party, it was argued Mr Kurz had found a way to keep the populist far-Right under control. But the Freedom Party has dragged has government into a series of scandals.

Mr Strache’s resignation threatened to overshadow a rally of European populists convened by Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, in Milan yesterday ahead of the European elections.

The rally brought together Mr Salvini and Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally, as well as populists from the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Belgium.

Joko Widodo, the incumbent Indonesian President, won last month’s election by a comfortable ten percent margin over his rival, retired General Prabowo Subianto, the country’s election commission announced early on Tuesday.

The official result of 55.5% for Mr Widodo, 57, and 44.5% for his challenger confirmed unofficial counts by pollsters of the April 17 election, but it could trigger a legal complaint and civil unrest after accusations by Mr Prabowo, 67, of widespread corruption and incompetence. 

The official vote count was announced a day earlier than expected and in the small hours of the morning amid heightened tensions in the capital, Jakarta, following plans by Islamist groups to hold mass rallies to protest the results.

It also follows a US embassy security alert to avoid demonstrations and police warnings that Islamic extremists were plotting to launch attacks to disrupt the election announcement. 

Over the past month, police have arrested 29 suspects linked to Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) – the largest Islamic State-linked group in the country, and at least five homemade bombs have been confiscated in various locations across Java and North Sulawesi. 

The police and military have been ordered to prevent people from travelling en masse to Jakarta to join protests and water cannons and armoured vehicles are on standby. 

The election commission itself is being protected by heavily armed security officials and barbed wire. 

Mr Widodo, a moderate Muslim and popular reformist leader who focused during his first term on infrastructure development and slashing red tape, won the poll with over 85 million votes out of 154 million cast in the world’s third-largest democracy. 

His victory was boosted by a high turnout of almost 80 percent of the 192 million eligible voters who cast their ballot in some 800,000 voting stations spanning the 17,000 islands of the Southeast Asian archipelago. 

The election campaign between the two rivals – who also went head to head in the 2014 poll – was bitter and divisive. 

It is not yet clear if Mr Prabowo will mount a legal challenge to the official result, which he previously did, and lost, in 2014. 

An election supervisory agency earlier on Monday dismissed claims of systematic cheating because of a lack of evidence and independent observers and analysts have said the poll was free and fair. 

But a witness for Prabowo’s campaign team and the leading opposition party refused to sign and validate the official results, reported Reuters.  

“We won’t give up in the face of this injustice, cheating, lies, and these actions against democracy,” said Azis Subekti. 

Neither candidate has so far publicly commented on the election commission declaration. 

Earlier this week, the government and police urged the protestors to remain peaceful, and the Prabowo camp has sought to distance itself from planned demonstrations, reported the local media. 

According to the Jakarta Globe, more than 1,200 Prabowo supporters were stopped by police from travelling to Jakarta during a three-day operation that began on Saturday. 

CNN Indonesia reported that four Molotov cocktails were allegedly found hidden inside a minibus used by four would-be protestors en route to the capital. Police in all provinces have been tightening security.    

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Scott Morrison, Australia’s newly re-elected prime minister, took time in his victory speech to thank the people of Queensland for propelling him to an unlikely victory for his centre-Right Liberal Party.

But as the final results rolled in this week, eventually handing Mr Morison an unexpected majority and increased mandate, the northeastern state has faced mischievous calls for a "Quexit".

In a move that would see Queensland banished from the rest of Australia, disillusioned Labor voters turned on the region for dumping the Left in favour of Mr Morrison’s government – thus killing off ambitious green policies.

"We demand ‘Quexit’.  Cut them loose!" was a regular cry online, where outrage has been fuelled by the view that Queenslanders selfishly chose coal mining jobs over bolder action on climate change promised by the Labor opposition.

“Queensland you are the most affected state from climate change, the Great Barrier Reef, drought riddled farmland, cyclones, floods, yet you decided to vote Liberal? WHAT WAS GOING THROUGH YOUR MINDS,”  wrote one Labor supporter.

The Quexit mockery also served to highlight the deep divide between progressive urbanites concerned with climate change, and the rural and suburban classes thinking more about jobs and the economy.

Writing in The Brisbane Times, the award-winning broadcaster and author, Madonna King, hit back at the patronising critics of Queensland.  “The rest of Australia laughs at us…telling us why we are wrong. So south of the border they can call it Quexit, and label us morons, freaks and un-Australian,” she thundered.

Queensland is seven times the size of Great Britain, and is often derided as the ‘deep north’ for its perceived conservatism.

But it has elected Labor state governments for most of the past 30 years, and has far-reaching centre-left traditions.

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Underneath the Quexit jokes, however, Queensland does harbour some genuine breakaway tendencies.

Robbie Katter, a state MP for Katter’s Australian Party, represents the seat of Traeger, which covers about a third of Queensland and is almost the size of France.

“We have called for a separate state in north Queensland. It is a terrific idea,” he told the Sunday Telegraph.

“We are still clumsily grasping these (state) lines that were drawn on a map 150 years ago and expecting it all to work. People often refer to the north of Queensland splitting away but you often find other western areas of the state saying please don’t leave us behind.”

The main grounds for a divorce would be economic independence and the freedom to exploit north Queensland’s natural resources, including coal, without outside meddling from southerners or environmental restrictions.

“We’ve got economic decline, population decline, our suicide and crime statistics are getting worse.  And we hear from the government that the big challenge of our time is climate change and the Great Barrier Reef,” Mr Katter explained.

“It is not that people don’t care about (climate change) but there are other more pressing concerns.”

Labor still holds the state government in Queensland. But fearing a wipeout in regional elections next year, this week they accelerated a decision to develop a coal field bigger than the UK.

A Canadian filmmaker has vowed never to return to Everest after describing the “carnage” at the top of the mountain this year, which included having to step over a dead body.

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Elia Saikaly climbed Everest for the third time this month as he filmed a documentary about four Arab women making the ascent but was shocked by the scenes at the summit.

More than 800 people have reached the peak this year, with at least 10 fatalities. A photograph of the queue to reach the summit went viral last week.

"Death. Carnage. Chaos,” was how Mr Saikaly, an experienced mountain climber, summed up what he saw after setting off to summit Everest on May 22.

In an interview with The Ottowan Citizen, the newspaper…

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Canada was complicit in a "genocide" against thousands of indigenous women and girls over the last 30 years, a government inquiry has claimed. 

The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls was established two and a half years ago to investigate the murders and disappearances of thousands of indigenous women over the past three decades.

In a summary report it concluded that through "state actions and inactions rooted in colonialism and colonial ideologies" indigenous women and girls have faced a disproportionately high level of violence.

As many as 4,000 Indigenous women have been murdered over the past few decades, but the report suggested the real figure may never be known.

It linked the deaths to endemic poverty, racism, sexism and addiction social to failed attempts by early colonisers to force indigenous people to integrate.

The 1,200-page report was unveiled on Monday at a ceremony at the Canadian Museum of History attended by Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, and victims’ families. 

Entitled "Reclaiming Power and Place," the report makes more than 230 recommendations for the government, including giving Indigenous languages official status on par with English and French.

Mr Trudeau made Canada’s reconciliation for its colonial past a major part of his 2015 election campaign, and he has apologised for some of the country’s historical wrongs since taking office.

Last month, he posthumously exonerated a Cree chief unjustly imprisoned for treason more than 130 years ago. Promising a national action plan to address the violence yesterday, Mr Trudeau said: "To the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls of Canada, to their families, and to survivors – we have failed you. But we will fail you no longer." 

He added: "To the survivors and families here today, and to those watching or listening at home, I want you to know that this report is not the end."

The inquiry acknowledged that there are disagreements over what constitutes genocide, saying it is still preparing a supplementary report to summarise its finding "according to the legal definition of genocide".

"Genocide is the sum of the social practices, assumptions, and actions detailed within this report," it said.

"The national inquiry’s findings support characterizing these acts, including violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people, as genocide."

2SLGBTQQIA is an abbreviation for different sexualities and gender identities.  

At another point, the report stated: "The fact that First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples are still here and that the population is growing should not discount the charge of genocide."

The Assembly of First Nations said the final report "reaffirms what First Nations and families have been saying for many years  – we need immediate, sustained and coordinated action to address the long-standing and systemic causes of violence against Indigenous women and girls and those at risk”. 

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In a statement, the National Chief Perry Bellegarde said the treatment of the Indigenous population was "consistent with the definition of genocide based on the many assaults on First Nations people and culture".

Mr Bellegarde cited the implementation of residential schools, forced sterilisation and Canada’s child welfare system’s mass apprehensions of Indigenous children as evidence for the claim. 

A Russian investigative journalist facing drugs charges in a case supporters have denounced as a frame-up was taken to hospital Saturday after complaining of being beaten in police custody.

Ivan Golunov, a Moscow-based reporter for Meduza independent news site has been charged with attempted dealing in designer drug mephedrone and cocaine.

Supporters and his defence team said he had received death threats and suggested the drugs were planted to punish him over his reporting. Rights groups Amnesty said there was evidence that the authorities were fabricating drugs charges to shut up their critics.

After his detention on Thursday, Mr Golunov told a representative of Russia’s presidential rights council, which advises Vladimir Putin, that police had punched him and stood on his chest,

His lawyer Pavel Chikov said that paramedics suspected he had broken ribs and concussion. A paramedic who examined him told Interfax news agency that he had numerous grazes to his chest, injuries to his ribs and a suspected head injury while police have denied he was beaten.

The journalist was due to attend court Saturday for a ruling on whether to hold him in custody but police said that they called an ambulance after he complained of feeling unwell and he was taken to a hospital for examination.

Mr Golunov’s detention has prompted widespread outrage and supporters and journalists have held protests outside the police headquarters and the court where his case was due to be held.

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Meduza posted photographs of people holding placards in support of Mr Golunov in cities in Russia and abroad.

The 36-year-old has investigated high-level corruption among Moscow officials and Meduza said it believed he was being persecuted for his journalistic work.

Meduza general director Galina Timchenko told journalists outside court that Mr Golunov had received death threats over his reporting.

"Ivan received threats. Two months ago they became almost daily," she said. She had failed to persuade Mr Golunov to contact police, she added.

"They said ‘we’ll bury you forever’," she said.

Mr Golunov has investigated everything from Russia’s shady funeral industry to corruption in Moscow city hall.

"We have reasons to believe that Golunov is being persecuted for his journalistic work," Meduza said in an earlier statement.

The respected site is based in EU member Latvia to avoid Russian censorship, but some journalists, including Mr Golunov live in Russia.

One of his lawyers, Dmitry Dzhulai, told AFP it appeared the drugs had been planted on Golunov.

Moscow police admitted that they published on their website photographs of drugs paraphernalia that they captioned as showing the crime scene but were not taken at Golunov’s flat.

"Everything indicates that the authorities are planting drugs on their targets to shut them up with a jail sentence," said Natalia Zvyagina, director of Amnesty International’s branch in Russia.

A presidential rights council member who visited Mr Golunov in detention on Friday, Yeva Merkacheva, said in a statement that he had shown her scratches on his back that he said were from police dragging him.

He also told her he was twice punched in the head and that the police also stood on his chest and that "he hadn’t slept for 24 hours and so he feels bad. He also hasn’t eaten", she said.

Russian journalists and rights groups see the case as an example of the persecution of independent reporters, with many saying Mr Golunov was not known to take drugs.

Outside the Moscow court where he was due to appear Saturday, several journalists held up placards with slogans including "I am the journalist Ivan Golunov. Arrest me too."

Police detained three people, an AFP video journalist saw.

On Friday, dozens of journalists protested against Mr Golunov’s detention outside Moscow police headquarters and were themselves briefly detained.

Reporters Without Borders warned his arrest could mark "a significant escalation in the persecution" of independent journalists in Russia.

While journalists at Russia’s dwindling number of independent media resources frequently face criminal probes, physical attacks and official pressure, drugs accusations are not common.

A tribal militia killed as many as 150 men, women and children in a village in central Mali on Monday, heightening fears that an Islamist insurgency in the area is mutating into an ethnic war.

Firing indiscriminately, gunmen from the semi-nomadic Fulani ethnic group raided Sobane-Kou, a village inhabited by the Dogon, a rival tribe aligned to Mali’s government. 

Many residents were burnt alive as they cowered in their houses, according to Ali Dolo, the mayor of a nearby town, who said that 95 charred corpses had been found in the ruins of the village.

At least 65 people remain unaccounted for. The raid appeared to be a reprisal for an attack carried out by a pro-government Dogon militia elsewhere in the Mopti region in March that killed 157 Fulani villagers.

Mali has been at the centre of an Islamist insurgency that is spreading rapidly through the West African fringes of the Sahara, a region known as the Sahel. 

Some 10,000 civilians were killed in the Sahel last year, more than in Iraq and Syria combined, as the region establishes itself as arguably the new frontline in the war on Islamist terror.

UK's pivot to the Sahel

The conflict has taken on an ethnic dimension as Islamist groups exploit tensions between rival groups that have long competed over land and grazing. Local Islamist groups have recruited heavily from the Fulani, who are mostly cattle-herders.

Struggling to cope against the emerging Islamist threat — despite the growing presence of Western forces in the region — local governments armed militias from tribes hostile to the Fulani, like the Dogon.

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Across West Africa, from Nigeria to Burkina Faso, violence between the Fulani and tribal militias, often armed by their respective governments, has led to a dramatic escalation of violence between groups that have long competed with each other for grazing and land.

Civilians have mostly borne the brunt of the violence. Demonstrating the cross-border nature of the violence, at least 19 people were killed in a raid on a village in Burkina Faso, across the border from Mali, on Monday.

Relatively peaceful until recently, Burkina Faso has been dangerously destabilised as militias pledging allegiance to both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State gain a foothold in the country.

A politician in northwestern Pakistan was given paws for thought after his press conference was streamed live on Facebook with the “cat filter” turned on, giving him on-screen whiskers and ears.

The online stream of regional minister Shaukat Yousafzai speaking with journalists went viral on Friday after a member of his social media team accidentally activated the filter on the social network.

Comments started pouring in as Facebook users noticed pink cat-like ears and whiskers had appeared on the heads of the minister and two accompanying officials.

There’s “a cat in the cabinet” one said. Others were more literal: “Shaukat Yousafzai looks like a cat – Meow meow meow,”.

The video – seen by an AFP reporter – was deleted minutes after the press conference from the official Facebook page of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, which is in power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Images from the press conference were still available on social media.

Yousafzai confirmed the incident and told AFP it happened by accident.

“The cat filter was turned on by mistake” Yousafzai said, adding “let’s not take everything so seriously”.

“I wasn’t the only one – two officials sitting along me were also hit by the cat filter,” he joked.

The live stream continued with the whiskers and ears in place, even after the error was pointed out by users.

A press statement, issued by the PTI social media team said the incident happened because of “human error”.

“All necessary actions have been taken to avoid such incidents in future,” it said.

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Angry Hong Kong protesters vowed on Tuesday to step up their campaign against a controversial extradition law after the city’s chief executive Carrie Lam refused to answer their calls to withdraw it and resign.

In her first public appearance since a record-breaking march against the bill on Sunday, Ms Lam offered a “sincere apology” and admitted she shouldered personal responsibility for the way it had led to “controversies, disputes and anxieties” within Hong Kong society.

She suggested that the bill would effectively be shelved by allowing it to “lapse” before the end of the legislative term in 2020, adding that the government had accepted that reality. 

But she refused to explicitly retract the legislation, which would allow some suspects to face trial in mainland China.

Her remarks did nothing to ease the standoff with protest groups who denounced her apology as insincere and accused her of arrogance for failing to address any of their main demands.

Joshua Wong, one of Hong Kong’s most high-profile pro-democracy activists, pledged more acts of “civil disobedience” would specifically be carried out ahead of next week’s G20 summit in Japan, which will be attended by Xi Jinping, the Chinese president.

“No matter how President Xi Jinping or Carrie Lam try to ignore the requests of the people or silence the voice of Hong Kong citizens, more and more rallies and protests and action will happen soon,” he said.

“No matter what happens, Hong Kong people will continue our fight,” he added.

“The only way forward is for Carrie Lam to step down. It’s time for her to enjoy her retired life and end her political career.”

The Civil Human Rights Front, one of the main groups behind the mass rallies that have choked central Hong Kong in recent weeks declared it was “disappointed” by the chief executive’s latest response, and said it would meet with pro-democracy legislators on Wednesday to agree the way forward.

Ms Lam’s refusal to completely scrap the extradition bill may be a face-saving measure but it has also raised suspicions among protesters that it could only be a delaying tactic until the situation calms down.

Hong Kong protests | Read more

Her initial labelling of protests last week as “organised riots” and reluctance to address demonstrators’ charges of excessive force by riot police has led to a total a breakdown of trust between protest groups and the career civil servant.

Heavy-handed police action last Wednesday, when officers in riot gear fired rubber bullets and tear gas cannisters on a demonstration sparked public outrage, with many at Sunday’s rally carrying banners that read “Stop Killing Us” and posting “Stop Shooting” posters on walls and bridges.

The police have since scaled down their presence at protest events, which have remained peaceful, and Stephen Lo, the police chief, clarified on Monday that he did not seek to classify the whole protest as a riot.

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But indignation at the police response was reignited on Tuesday by a viral video that showed how demonstrators narrowly avoided being crushed after tear gas had caused a stampede towards a building whose doors were locked.

Activists have included dropping all remaining charges against protesters as one of their five main demands.

While this goal may be easier to obtain than Ms Lam’s resignation, observers say that her poor handling of Hong Kong’s biggest political crisis in decades will torpedo any long-term political ambitions that she may have harboured.

Mr Wong admitted that protesters were aware that her resignation would only lead to the installation of another “puppet” by Beijing. “This fight for free elections is what we ask for in the long run,” he said.

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has detected another methane "spike" on Mars, in what could be a sign of alien life on the red planet.

According to the New York Times, which obtained an email about the discovery written by senior scientists at Nasa, the rover detected "startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air."

The detection of methane hints at an even greater discovery – life on Mars – as the gas is often generated by microbes underground known as methanogens,which can survive without oxygen.

"Given this surprising result, we’ve reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment, " wrote scientist Ashwin R. Vasavada  in the email published by the New York Times.

The most recent discovery of Methane is 21 parts per billion, three times higher than the "spike" in 2013. 

While increased methane levels measured by @MarsCuriosity are exciting, as possible indicators for life, it’s important to remember this is an early science result. To maintain scientific integrity, the #science team will continue to analyze the data before confirming results. pic.twitter.com/zSrONQHuc5

— Thomas Zurbuchen (@Dr_ThomasZ) June 22, 2019

Scientists are also not ruling out the possibility that the methane was not recent, having been trapped underground for millions of years, and only now is gradually emerging through cracks in the surface. 

Thomas Zurbuchen, from Nasa’s science mission directorate, advised people not to jump to any conclusions about the methane detection in a message on Twitter. 

"While increased methane levels measured by Mars Curiosity are exciting, as possible indicators for life, it’s important to remember this is an early science result," he wrote. 

"To maintain scientific integrity, the science team will continue to analyse the data before confirming results."

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