Pakistan-origin Muslim family of 4 killed in ‘premeditated’ attack in Canada
Ontario: A man driving a pickup truck rammed into and killed four members of a Muslim family in the south of Canada’s Ontario province, in what police said was a “premeditated” attack.
A 20-year-old suspect wearing a vest “like body armour” fled the scene after the attack on Sunday evening, and was arrested at a mall seven kilometres from the intersection in London, Ontario where it happened, said Detective Superintendent Paul Waight.
“There is evidence that this was a planned, premeditated act, motivated by hate. It is believed that these victims were targeted because they were Muslim,” he told a news conference.
The names of the victims were not released, but they include a 74-year-old woman, a 46-year-old man, a 44-year-old woman and a 15-year-old girl — together representing three generations of the same family, according to London Mayor Ed Holder. A nine-year-old boy was also hospitalised following the attack and is recovering.
“Let me be clear, this was an act of mass murder perpetrated against Muslims, against Londoners, rooted in unspeakable hatred,” said Holder.
Holder said flags would be lowered for three days in London, which he said has 30,000 to 40,000 Muslims among its more than 400,000 residents.
Identified as Nathaniel Veltman, the suspect has been charged with four counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder. Police said Veltman, a resident of London, did not know the victims.
Waight said local authorities are also liaising with federal police and the attorney general about adding “possible terrorism charges”.
He offered few details of the investigation, but noted that the suspect’s social media postings were reviewed by police.
Waight said police did not know at this point if the suspect was a member of any specific hate group and declined to detail evidence pointing to a possible hate crime, but said the attack was planned.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that he was “horrified” by the attack.
“To the loved ones of those who were terrorised by yesterday’s act of hatred, we are here for you,” he said, singling out the nine-year-old in hospital.
“To the Muslim community in London and to Muslims across the country, know that we stand with you. Islamophobia has no place in any of our communities. This hate is insidious and despicable — and it must stop,” he added.
Calling it a “condemnable act of terrorism”, Prime Minister Imran Khan said the incident revealed growing Islamophobia in Western countries. “Islamophobia needs to be countered holistically by the international community,” he said.
Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said three generations of Pakistani-Canadians were killed in a “brutal act of mass murder for their Muslim faith”.
“This is an act of terror rooted in unspeakable hatred and Islamophobia. Extend our deepest sympathy to the family members and pray for recovery of the only survivor; a little boy,” he said. AFP
India’s low-income front-line workers burned by rising fuel prices
New Delhi: Rizwan-ud-din, a 37-year-old who delivers food in the southern Indian city of Chennai, struggles to pay his rent and loan instalments every month as he has been hit by higher fuel prices and fewer food orders.
Millions of weekly wage-earners like Rizwan, who make their living ferrying goods or people throughout India, have been hit hard by record-high fuel prices which are among the highest in Asia, having risen by a third in the 15 months since the coronavirus first struck the country.
The average cost of a litre of petrol in Mumbai has risen above 100 rupees ($1.4) this month, 50 to 70 percent more than in Bangkok, Hanoi and Manila.
State and federal taxes, which have doubled since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, account for more than 60 percent of India’s retail fuel price.
With the federal government facing ballooning healthcare costs tied to its ongoing battle against COVID-19 and commitments to vast farm and other subsidies, a finance ministry official said there was little scope for a meaningful tax cut that might ease the pain on low earners.
“I used to spend 1,500 rupees ($20.6) a week on petrol before the pandemic, now I spend 2,000 rupees ($27.4). I am already earning less due to fewer orders due to lockdowns,” Rizwan lamented, saying a third of his earnings were spent on fuel.
For an Indian earning the average national wage, a litre of petrol would take up a quarter of their daily income, according to Reuters news agency calculations. Reuters
Myanmar junta hits Suu Kyi with graft charges
Yangon: The Myanmar junta has hit deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi with corruption charges over claims she accepted illegal payments of gold and more than half a million dollars in cash, state media reported Thursday.
The country has been in turmoil since the generals ousted Suu Kyi on February 1, with nearly 850 civilians killed in a brutal crackdown by security forces on near-daily protests against the coup.
The 75-year-old Nobel laureate, who has been in custody since the coup, is facing a raft of wide-ranging criminal charges, including sedition and breaching a colonial-era secrecy law.
The latest charges relate to allegations by the former Yangon region chief minister that Suu Kyi illegally accepted $600,000 in cash from him along with around 11 kilograms of gold.
The Anti-Corruption Commission found evidence that Suu Kyi had committed “corruption using her rank”, according to the Global New Light of Myanmar, a state-run newspaper. “So she was charged under Anti-Corruption Law section 55.”
She is also accused of abusing her authority when renting two areas of land for her charitable foundation.
After weeks of legal wrangling, two of Suu Kyi’s trials are due to start in earnest next week, hearing evidence from witnesses.
In Naypyidaw, the remote capital purpose built by the previous military regime, her trial will start on Monday on charges of violating restrictions during last year’s election campaign and possessing unlicensed walkie-talkies.
A separate case is scheduled to start on June 15, where she is charged with sedition alongside ousted president Win Myint and another senior member of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
Her lawyer, Khin Maung Zaw, dismissed the corruption charges as “absurd”.
“There is an undeniable political background to keep her out of the scene of the country and to smear her prestige,” he told AFP, saying she could face long prison terms on the secrecy and corruption charges.
“That’s one of the reasons to charge her — to keep her out of the scene.”
Suu Kyi spent more than 15 years under house arrest during the previous military rule before her 2010 release.
Her international stature diminished following a wave of military violence targeting Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s marginalised Muslim Rohingya community that displaced more than a million people, but the coup has returned Suu Kyi to the role of cloistered democracy icon.
The junta has previously said it would hold fresh elections within two years but has also threatened to dissolve the NLD.
“That election — I cannot say if it will materialise or not, and maybe NLD will not be able to compete,” Suu Kyi’s lawyer Khin Maung Zaw told AFP.
“But for Aung San Suu Kyi, if she is convicted under these charges she will not be allowed to compete.”
Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing has justified his power grab by citing alleged electoral fraud in the November poll, which Suu Kyi’s NLD won in a landslide. AFP
Iran regains UN vote after US allows use of frozen funds
New York: Iran regained its vote in the UN General Assembly after the United States enabled Tehran to use funds frozen in South Korea to pay some $16 million it owed to the world body.
Iran lost its vote in the 193-member General Assembly in January because it was more than two years in arrears. It owed more than $65 million, but paid the minimum amount needed to regain its vote.
“Iran has paid the minimum amount due,” UN spokesman Farhan Haq said on Friday, confirming Iran could vote again. Iran says $20 billion of its oil revenue has been frozen in countries like South Korea, Iraq and China since 2018 under sanctions imposed by then-US president Donald Trump.
“Illegal US sanctions have not just deprived our people of medicine; they have also prevented Iran from paying our dues in arrears to the UN,” Iran’s UN Ambassador Majid Takht Ravanchi posted on Twitter.
“After more than 6 months of working on it, the UN today announced it has received the funds.”
Iran was able to vote in the General Assembly on Friday to elect five new members of the UN Security Council.
The foreign ministry said that it had proposed to the United Nations that it could use funds frozen in South Korea to pay its dues. It said the world body followed up with the US Treasury Department to get the appropriate approvals.
“The permit was recently issued and the process of withdrawing the membership fee from Iran’s account in the Korean banks and transferring it to the U.N. account in Seoul has been paved, and this payment will be made soon,” Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said last week. AFP
Russian human rights lawyer named 2021 Oak Human Rights Fellow
Moscow: The Oak Institute for Human Rights has named Olga Sadovskaya, a Russian human rights lawyer, as its 2021 Human Rights Fellow. Sadovskaya, vice chair of the Committee Against Torture, the largest and most notable anti-torture organization in Russia, has worked on issues surrounding torture for more than 18 years. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Sadovskaya, who hails from the city of Nizhny Novgorod in western Russia, will join the Colby community in August and will engage with students, faculty, staff, and the greater community throughout the fall semester.
Olga Sadovskaya, the 2021 Oak Human Rights Fellow, will join the Colby community for the Fall 2021 semester and raise awareness on issues of torture and incarceration in Russia and around the world.
“The consistent violation of human rights in the carceral system is not only a major global problem but it is an urgent issue in the United States. There is a pressing need to confront and find better solutions to our current prison system,” said Valérie Dionne, director of the Oak Institute for Human Rights and associate professor of French. “We are lucky to have Olga Sadovskaya coming to campus to share her experience combating torture and to explore potential solutions with us that could replace the current carceral system.”
The Committee Against Torture (CAT), established in 2000 by Sadovskaya and three other activists, created accountability for torture previously missing in Russia. Torture was scarcely discussed, and victims were often scared, ashamed to speak out, or believed justice was unattainable. Even with CAT’s work, however, the practice of torture prevails, and investigations into torture are still inadequate. This problem is amplified in the Chechen Republic, where CAT is the sole organization working on cases of torture and abductions.
Sadovskaya and her dedicated team have won many international awards: the PACE Prize of the Council of Europe, the Martin Ennals Award, the Frontline Defenders Human Rights Award, and the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. Sadovskaya herself has received the Andrei Sakharov Freedom Award.
During her early years at the organization, Sadovskaya’s role as an investigator included collecting evidence of torture in prisons, penal colonies, police stations, and psychiatric institutions. Over time, she transitioned to analysis and international defense work with the European Court of Human Rights and various UN bodies. Sadovskaya also trains lawyers on how to work with the European Court of Human Rights.
Drawing upon years of experience with torture cases, Sadovskaya and her team wrote and published a methodology for public investigations, widely used by human rights organizations in Russia. Sadovskaya has personally represented more than 300 victims of torture before the European Court of Justice. Two of the cases were included in the list of the 20 most important cases that changed Russia (Case-Law of the European Court of Human Rights, Special issue, 5, 2018).
While working against state-sanctioned torture, Sadovskaya has faced personal threats, including threats of murder, particularly for her work in Chechnya. The committee’s office has been burned down several times, and members’ cars have been destroyed. Sadovskaya is also periodically monitored and constantly at risk of being accused of baseless crimes.
The Oak Human Rights Fellowship will give Sadovskaya a much-needed respite to return to Russia with renewed energy. As the 2021 Oak Fellow, she will connect with Colby students and raise awareness on issues of torture and incarceration in Russia and around the world.
Established in 1997 by a generous grant from the Oak Foundation, the Oak Institute for Human Rights hosts an Oak Human Rights Fellow each year. The fellowship offers an opportunity to spend a semester in residence at Colby. Fellows teach, conduct research, and educate the community on important global human rights issues. Colby.edu
Nuclear arms decline stalls as nations modernise arsenals
Stockholm: As nuclear nations commit to renewing and sometimes expanding their arsenals, a decline seen since the early 1990s seems to have stalled, with some signs of a numerical increase, researchers said Monday
“The reduction of nuclear arsenals that we have gotten used to since the end of the Cold War appears to be levelling out,” Hans Kristensen, associate senior fellow at SIPRI’s Nuclear Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme, told AFP.
The number of nukes among the nine nuclear-armed states — the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea — totalled 13,080 at the start of 2021, a slight decrease from 13,400 a year earlier, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) estimated.
However, this includes retired warheads waiting to be dismantled, and without them, the combined military stockpile of nuclear arms rose from 9,380 to 9,620.
Meanwhile, the number of nuclear weapons deployed with operational forces increased from 3,720 to 3,825, the report said.
Of these, some 2,000 were kept in a “kept in state of high operational alert,” meaning for launch in a matter of minutes.
“We’re seeing very significant nuclear modernisation programmes all around the world and in all the nuclear weapons states,” Kristensen said.
He added that nuclear states also seem to be raising “the importance they attribute to the nuclear weapons in their military strategies.”
This change can be observed in both Russia and the United States, which together possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, Kristensen said, stressing it was too early to say if the new US administration under President Joe Biden would deviate from the strategy under his predecessor Donald Trump.
“I think that the Biden administration is signalling quite clearly that it is going to continue the overwhelming main thrust of the nuclear modernisation programme that was underway during the Trump years,” the researcher said, noting the programme was started under Barack Obama.
The US and Russia continued to dismantle retired warheads, but both had about 50 more in “operational deployment” at the start of 2021 than a year earlier.
At the same time, the “New START” nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia was extended for another five years in early 2021, albeit at the last minute.
The extension was important to “create stability” and “it was doubly important” as other treaties — such as the INF treaty, banning intermediate and shorter range land based missiles — have expired.
The report authors said “all the other seven nuclear-armed states are also either developing or deploying new weapon systems or have announced their intention to do so.”
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) this month reported that nuclear nations increased spending on their arsenals by $1.4 billion (1.2 billon euros) to $72 billion in 2020, even as the pandemic raged.
In August, the parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — or most countries in the world — are set to meet in New York for a review held every five years.
Under the treaty nuclear powers commit to “pursue negotiations in good faith” both on the “cessation of the nuclear arms race” and “nuclear disarmament”, but as many are renewing their arsenals, other parties may question their commitment.
“The member states of that treaty will rightly be able to ask: ‘Are you truly in ‘compliance with this treaty?’,” Kristensen said.
“‘If you’re not, why should we continue to be members to the treaty’.”
While we might see a reversal of the trend since the end of the Cold War, Kristensen cautioned there were a lot of uncertainties about where future developments might lead.
“Is it just that the reduction phase is over, or are we even going to see an increase because countries might want more weapons,” he said, adding that China’s growing stockpile may also affect US and Russian readiness to disarm. The situation during the Cold War was much more “intense,” added Kristensen.
The number of nuclear weapons peaked at over an estimated 70,000 in 1986. AFP
Outgoing UN aid chief slams G7 for failing on vaccine plan
United Nations: Outgoing UN aid chief Mark Lowcock slammed the Group of Seven wealthy nations for failing to come up with a plan to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, describing the G7 pledge to provide 1 billion doses over the next year as a “small step.”
“These sporadic, small-scale, charitable handouts from rich countries to poor countries is not a serious plan and it will not bring the pandemic to an end,” Lowcock, who steps down on Friday, told Reuters. “The G7, essentially, completely failed to show the necessary urgency.”
The leaders of the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada met in Cornwall, England over the weekend and also agreed to work with the private sector, the Group of 20 industrialized nations and other countries to increase the vaccine contribution over months to come.
“They took a small step – at that very, very nice resort in Cornwall – but they shouldn’t kid themselves it’s more than a small step and they have still have a lot to do,” Lowcock said.
“What the world needed from the G7 was a plan to vaccinate the world. And what we got was a plan to vaccinate about 10% of the population of low and middle income countries, maybe by a year from now or the second half of next year,” he said.
In May, the International Monetary Fund unveiled a $50 billion proposal to end the COVID-19 pandemic by vaccinating at least 40% of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 and at least 60% by the first half of 2022.
“That is the deal of the century,” said Lowcock, adding that the G7 could also have done a lot more to provide vital supplies – such as oxygen ventilators, testing kits and protective equipment – to countries who are going to have to wait longer for vaccines.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday urged world leaders to act with more urgency, warning that if developing countries were not vaccinated quickly, the virus would continue to mutate and could become immune to inoculation. AFP
