Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe won the ruling Liberal Democratic Partys (LDP) leadership election on Thursday, securing a historic third term that will effectively extend his time in power by another three years.

Abe comfortably beat his only contender, former Defence Minister Shigeru Ishiba, by securing 553 out of a total 807 votes, reports The Japan Times.

He won 329 out of the 402 valid ballots cast by LDP MPs and 224 out of the remaining 405 votes allocated to party branches in each prefecture based on the number of members age 18 or older who have paid party fees.

His extended term in office signals the possibility that Abe, who has already been at the helm of the world’s third-largest economy for nearly six years in his second stint as Prime Minister, may become the longest-serving premier in Japanese history.

With his renewed leadership, Abe is likely to reshuffle his Cabinet in the coming weeks, reportedly as soon as early October.

Abe has credited himself with “restoring a decent economy” under his Abenomics policy and taking the Japan-US alliance to a stronger level.

He also repeated that it’s the “responsibility of the LDP” to revise the war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution to formalise the ambiguous status of the Self-Defense Forces – the nation’s de facto military – which he said “protects the peace and independence of Japan”.

(IANS)

In a huge relief to former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Muhammad Safdar, the Islamabad High Court on Wednesday suspended their prison sentences in a corruption case and ordered their release.

A two-judge bench comprising Justice Athar Minallah and Justice Miangul Hassan Aurangzeb gave the judgment on petitions filed by three challenging the July verdict against them in the Avenfield case, Geo News reported.

The reference pertained to the Sharifs’ purchase of four upmarket flats in Avenfield House, London. The three were convicted by an anti-corruption court in Pakistan of not being able to prove the source of assets used to purchase the properties.

Sharif, Maryam and Safdar had been sentenced to 11 years, eight years and one year respectively.

“We accept the petitioners’ pleas seeking a suspension in their sentences,” Justice Minallah said, adding that the National Accountability Bureau, Pakistan’s anti-corruption watchdog, was unable to prove a financial link between Sharif and the apartments in question.

Ordering their release, the judges directed the three to submit bail bonds worth Rs 0.5 million each.

The sentences will remain suspended till the final adjudication of the appeals filed by the petitioners, according to the report.

A large number of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders, including its President Shehbaz Sharif, leaders Pervaiz Rashid and Khurram Dastgir, were present in the courtroom and cheered as the judgment was announced.

Following the judgment, Senator Chaudhary Tanvir submitted bail bonds for the three at the deputy registrar’s office.

According to jail officials, they can be released on Thursday, provided the order was received prior to the expiration of lock-up time.

(IANS)

At its best, speeches at the recently concluded World Hindu Congress echoed the soaring spiritual ideals evoked by Swami Vivekananda in Chicago 125 years ago.

Even Mohan Bhagwat, Sarsangchanalak of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), focused essentially on the need for unity and patience among Hindus while fighting obstacles, of which, he said, there would be many. The burden of excavating implied accusations in Bhagwat’s speech fell to his critics.

At the plenary session, the moderator requested speakers to address issues of conflict without naming the speakers or their organisations in the interest of harmony. Other speakers sought to unite the followers of all the great religions that took birth in India — Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism.

Some of the speakers from Bhagwat to Swami Swaroopananda of the Chinmaya Mission, framed the issues before Hinduism in a moral paradigm. Ashwin Adhin, the Vice President of the Republic of Suriname, began his speech in chaste Hindi, later quoting cognitive scientist George Lakoff: “Facts matter immensely. But to be meaningful they have to be framed in terms of their moral importance.”

The dissonances, between the spiritual and the mundane, were to emerge later on the fringes of the seminars which were part of the Congress. Many of the delegates appropriated to themselves the mantle of a culture besieged by proselytising faiths. There were speakers who urged Hindus to have more children to combat their ‘dwindling population’. Posters warned Hindus of the dangers from ‘love jihad’ (Muslim men ‘enticing’ Hindu women).

In one of the sessions on the media, filmmaker Amit Khanna noted that religion had always played a prominent part in Indian cinema, starting with the earliest mythologicals. “Raja Harishchandra”, the first silent film, he said, was made by Dadasaheb Phalke in 1913. He sought to reassure the audience on the future of Hinduism. “Over 80 percent of Indians are Hindus,” he said adding: “Hinduism has survived many upheavals for thousands of years. Hinduism has never been endangered.”

Other speakers, lacking spiritual and academic pedigrees, drew on an arsenal of simulated anguish and simmering indignation.

The nuances of history pass lightly over the ferociously devout and it took little effort to pander to an aggravated sense of historical aggrievement.

At one of the debates, the mere mention of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, elicited sniggers and boos. The speaker hinted at ‘Nehruvian socialism’ which had made the Indian economy a non-starter. He concluded with a coup de grace, to a standing ovation: “Nehru did not like anything Indian.”

The poet Rabindranath Tagore, who composed the Indian national anthem, had spoken of his vision of a country where the “clear stream of reason had not lost its way”. At some of the discussions, even the most indulgent observer would have been hard put to discern the stream of reason.

The image of a once great civilisation suppressed by a century of British rule and repeated plunder by invaders captured the imagination of many in the audience. Hanging above it all, like a disembodied spirit, was the so-called malfeasance of Nehru, the leader who had won the trust of Hindus only to betray them in the vilest manner.

These tortured souls would have been well advised to adopt a more holistic approach to Hinduism, and history, looking no further than Swami Vivekananda, who once said: “The singleness of attachment (Nishtha) to a loved object, without which no genuine love can grow, is very often also the cause of denunciation of everything else.”

Historians have informed us that Nehru preferred his father’s intellect over his mother’s tradition but he was never contemptuous of religion. While he undoubtedly felt that organised religion had its flaws, he opined that it supplied a deeply felt inner need of human nature while also giving a set of values to human life.

In private conversations some delegates spoke of how their America-born children had helped persuade them to drop their pathological aversion to gays and lesbians. Despite their acute wariness of perceived cultural subjugation, the irony was obviously lost on them that Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code,(which criminalises gay sex) recently overturned by the Indian Supreme Court, is a hangover from the Victorian British era-embodied in the Buggery Act of 1533.

In the face of the upcoming elections in the US, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi’s decision to speak at the conference was a political risk. With a newly energised political Left, even the perception of being linked with “fascist” or sectarian forces could be political suicide in the critical November elections. Despite vociferous appeals to disassociate himself from the Congress, Krishnamoorthi chose to attend.

“I decided I had to be here because I wanted to reaffirm the highest and only form of Hinduism that I have ever known and been taught — namely one that welcomes all people, embraces all people, and accepts all people, regardless of their faith. I reject all other forms. In short, I reaffirm the teaching of Swami Vivekananda,” Krishnamoorthi said.

Given the almost pervasive abhorrence of anything remotely Nehruvian among a section of the delegates, it was a revelation to hear the opinion of Dattatrey Hosable, the joint general secretary and second-in-command in the RSS hierarchy. Speaking on the promise of a newly-resurgent India, Hosable said in an interview to Mayank Chhaya, a local journalist-author-filmmaker: “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new — when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

The quote is from Nehru’s famous Tryst with Destiny speech delivered to the Indian Constituent Assembly on the midnight of August 14, 1947 — proof, if any is needed, that the force of Nehru’s ideas can transcend one’s disdain of him.

A Dubai court has ordered for the extradition of British national and alleged middleman Christian Michel in the Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland VVIP choppers deal case, official sources said late on Tuesday.

They said the court pronounced the judgement on Tuesday after India had officially made the request to the Gulf nation sometime back, based on the criminal investigations conducted in this case by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

The full contents of the order against Christian Michel James (54) are expected to be known by Wednesday as the legal pronouncement is in Arabic and is being translated in English at the behest of Indian authorities, they said.

The order is being seen as a major shot in the arm to the agencies– Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and ED — probing the case.

The ED, in its charge sheet filed against Michel in June 2016, had alleged that he received EUR 30 million (about Rs 225 crore) from AgustaWestland. The money was nothing but “kickbacks” paid by the firm to execute the 12 helicopter deal in favour of the firm in “guise of” of genuine transactions for performing multiple work contracts in the country, it had said.

Michel is one of the three middlemen being probed in the case, besides Guido Haschke and Carlo Gerosa, by the ED and the CBI. Both the agencies have notified an Interpol red corner notice (RCN) against him after the court issued a non-bailable warrant against him.

Michel has been extensively interviewed by the Indian media in Dubai in the past and both the agencies want him to join the probe to take the case forward.

The ED had also brought on record, in the chargesheet, that the three middlemen “managed to” make inroads into the Indian Air Force (IAF) to influence the stand of the officials into reducing the service ceiling of the helicopters from 6,000 metres to 4,500 metres in 2005. AgustaWestland became eligible to supply a dozen helicopters for VVIP flying duties after this change.

The ED investigation found that remittances made by Michel through his Dubai-based firm Global Services to a media firm he floated in Delhi, along with two Indians, were made from the funds which he got from AgustaWestland through “criminal activity” and corruption being done in the chopper deal that led to the subsequent generation of proceeds of crime.

On January 1, 2014, India scrapped the contract with Finmeccanica’s British subsidiary AgustaWestland for supplying 12 AW-101 VVIP choppers to the IAF over the alleged breach of contractual obligations and charges of paying kickbacks to the tune of Rs 423 crore by it for securing the deal.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan Tuesday sought the National Assembly’s advice for granting citizenship to Pakistan-born children of Afghan and Bangladeshi migrants.

Addressing a session of the country’s lower house, the prime minister said that he wants to take this decision on humanitarian grounds as refugees after living in the country for so many years they should be issued identity cards.

Khan said that granting citizenship to Pakistan-born refugees will also bring down the crime rate as the refugees, who mostly work as laborers as they are not allowed to apply for jobs in government sector, currently get much lower wages than local laborers and get inclined to criminal activities.

Supporting his argument, the prime minister said that the country’s Citizenship Act, 1951, states that every person born in Pakistan has the right to get its nationality.

Citing example of Bangladeshi refuges, Khan said that even their grandchildren were born in Pakistan, but they have not been granted citizenship yet.

Earlier, addressing a fund raising ceremony for dams, the prime minister vowed to give national identity cards and passports to Afghan and Bengali migrants.

Opposition and allies of the government raised concerns of the remarks.

However, the prime minister also said no decision has yet been taken and he invites lawmakers to hold debate and
float suggestions about giving nationality to those who born in Pakistan as the country’s law allows citizenship to those who born here.

(IANS)

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit has discovered that a self-deleting messaging app called Tiger Text has been adopted by at least one US police department, which may have used it to share sensitive and potentially incriminating information that they wouldn’t want disclosed to a court.

Current and former officers from the Long Beach Police Department in Southern California have told Al Jazeera that their police-issued phones had Tiger Text installed on them.

The Tiger Text app is designed to erase text messages after a set time period. Once the messages have been deleted, they cannot be retrieved – even through forensic analysis of the phone.

The police officers who spoke with Al Jazeera said the confidential messaging system was used to share details of police operations and sensitive personnel issues.

Two of the officers claimed that they were also instructed by their superiors to use the app to “have conversations with other officers that wouldn’t be discoverable”.

They said they understood this to include exculpatory evidence that could be potentially helpful to attorneys in both civil and criminal proceedings against the department.

It’s a claim that the Long Beach Police Department denies.

But the officers say they were not surprised by the instructions, claiming that the discovery process within the police department was never on the “up and up”.

“I find it odd that we have a communication system that circumvents everything that we are supposed to be doing,” said one officer who is still with the department.

But “nothing surprises me working there”.

‘Institutional cover-up’
According to the research group Mapping Police Violence, the Long Beach Police Department ranked fifth in the nation for officer-involved shootings per capita in 2015.

Civil rights lawsuits have resulted in the city of Long Beach paying out tens of millions of dollars to the families of those shot.

One former police officer said he suspects this is what motivated the department to adopt the application.

“There have been a number of officer-involved shooting cases that have hurt the department,” he said.

“This is a way for them to conceal and get away with some of the negative things that affect their liability with these cases.”

Mohammed Tajsar, a lawyer with the ACLU, told Al Jazeera that he was shocked by the officers’ claims.

“If the department brass instructed members of the force to use Tiger Text to shield from the public the disclosure of sensitive messages about investigations into police killings, then this is an institutional cover-up of the highest order, designed to protect a department that is notorious for killing people,” Tajsar said.

Al Jazeera obtained financial records from the Long Beach Police Department that indicate that the Tiger Text system has been in place since at least 2014, with over 100 police personnel using the app.

More than 100 police personnel at the Long Beach Police Department have been using Tiger Text since 2014 [Al Jazeera]
One document from the City of Long Beach Purchasing Division describes the app as “a secure messaging platform for criminal investigations and confidential communications.”

All the officers Al Jazeera spoke to asked that their identity be kept confidential for fear of reprisals from the police department.

They say that the Tiger Text app was set to delete messages after a few days and that it was distributed to officers in specialised details and to all senior officers above the rank of lieutenant.

The ACLU believe that by using the app, the Long Beach Police Department could be breaking laws that require the preservation of records and the rules that require their disclosure during legal cases, potentially putting thousands of court verdicts at risk.

Al Jazeera’s investigation into the use of Tiger Text found that the Georgia Department of Corrections also began using the application in 2013.

But lawyers for the department quickly decided that its use would likely violate Georgia law, possibly breaching the state’s records retention legislation and most likely leading to court discovery violations.

Insufficient evidence
One Long Beach police officer told Al Jazeera that while he was working within the Department, he witnessed Tiger Text being used during an investigation into the police shooting of Jason Conoscenti in the Alamitos Beach neighbourhood in 2014.

The officers involved in the shooting were cleared of any wrongdoing after prosecutors found insufficient evidence to bring charges.

Al Jazeera spoke to several lawyers who have litigated against Long Beach. None were aware of the police department’s use of the Tiger Text app.

Nikhil Ramnaney, a deputy public defender with the Law Offices of the Los Angeles County Public Defender said his office might now be forced to review all Long Beach cases since 2014, adding: “I don’t know what information is in those Tiger Texts, it could be exculpatory, it could lend to practices that are unconstitutional or even illegal.”

In response to AJ Jazeera’s investigation, Long Beach Police Department said it “complies with all laws related to discovery, and any information relevant to a specific investigation would be documented and provided according to legal requirements”.

The department said it uses the Tiger Text application “to communicate confidential crime scene information, victim information, and personnel matters between department management personnel, as well as employees in specialised details”.

Joanna Schwartz, an expert on police litigation at the UCLA School of Law believes it is difficult to predict the legal problems that the use of a self-deleting app will bring for the Long Beach Police Department.

“The use of Tiger Text by the police makes it more difficult to bring winning civil cases against them and effectively to defend criminal cases. The immediate question is; is this the kind of police department that the City of Long Beach wants to have?”

Aljazeera

The death toll in the Philippines due to super typhoon Mangkhut increased to 74 on Tuesday as rescue teams continued to search for dozens of people buried in an abandoned mine due to landslides.

According to the latest figures provided by the National Police, 55 people were missing and 74 injured due to the strongest typhoon of the season, which lashed parts of Luzon island on the northernmost tip of the Philippines on Saturday, reports Efe news.

The highest number of casualties was reported from the mining town of Itogon in Benguet province, where massive floods and landslides buried a gold mine and four barracks where some miners and their families had been living illegally.

President Rodrigo Duterte visited the families of the victims in Itogon on Monday and handed over a cheque for 45,000 pesos ($832) to each of them, apart from providing material for basic necessities and aid for the last rites of the victims.

Three days after the passage of the devastating Mangkhut, more than 20,000 people remained displaced from their homes while an estimated 590,000 people have been affected by the storm.

Currently the four worst-hit provinces Abra, Benguet, Cagayan and Ilocos Norte have been declared to be in a state of calamity due to the scale of the damage caused by the typhoon.

A Russian military aircraft with 14 people on board has disappeared from the radar after flying over Syria, Moscow’s Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.

“Connection has been lost with the crew of the Ilyushin Il-20 aircraft over the Mediterranean Sea,” the Ministry said.

Contact was lost at about 11 p.m. on Monday, reports the BBC.

The incident reportedly occurred about 35 km from the Syrian coast as the aircraft was returning to the Hmeimim airbase near the north-western city of Latakia.

According to state-run TASS news agency, trace of the Il-20 on flight control radars disappeared during an attack by four Israeli F-16 jets on Syrian facilities in Latakia.

“At the same time Russian air control radar systems detected rocket launches from the French frigate Auvergne, which was located in that region,” it added.

A search-and-rescue operation is underway, the BBC said.

Russia began military strikes in Syria in 2015 after a request from President Bashar al-Assad, who has stayed in power despite seven years of civil war.

(IANS)

Prime Minister Imran Khan has pledged to implement existing Pakistani laws that would grant citizenship to all Afghan and Bangladeshi refugees who were born on Pakistani soil, a major departure from previous policy.

Pakistan is home to more than 1.39 million registered Afghan refugees, according to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), many of whom have been resident in the country for more than 30 years.

There are also more than 200,000 ethnic Bangladeshis in Pakistan, most of whom live in the southern city of Karachi. Many of them were stranded in the city after the war in 1971 when Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, gained independence.

Are Afghan refugees in Pakistan a security threat?
Afghan refugees, meanwhile, have poured into Pakistan from its western neighbour for decades, first fleeing the Soviet invasion in the 1970s, and then the civil war that ensued.

Since 2001, a fresh influx of refugees followed the US invasion of Afghanistan, and the subsequent Taliban war to take back the country.

“These poor migrants from Bangladesh, they have been here for more than 40 years, their children are grown now … we will give them passports and ID cards, as well as those Afghans whose children have been raised here, who were born here, we will also give them [citizenship],” said Khan in Karachi on Sunday.

“This happens in every country in the world, why is it that here we are inflicting such an injustice on these people?”

The announcement is a marked departure from the policy followed by previous governments, and could see the prime minister face confrontation with the country’s powerful military, which has often blamed Afghan refugees for violence in Pakistan.

Pakistani law allows citizenship for all those born in the country, with the exception of children of foreign diplomats, “enemy aliens” and those who migrated away from territories that became Pakistan after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

The legal status of Afghan refugees resident in Pakistan expires on September 30, although it is widely expected to be extended by the government, as has been done numerous times in the past.

Repatriation of refugees

The UNHCR welcomed the development, but said it was awaiting specifics on how Khan’s government intended to move forward.

“UNHCR welcomes the statement on Afghan children born in Pakistan,” spokesperson Dan McNorton told Al Jazeera. “We look forward to working closely with the government of Pakistan on this issue in the coming weeks.”

WATCH: Pakistan PM: Afghan refugees ‘will not be forced to return’
The Afghan government did not immediately comment.

Since 2014, Pakistan has been actively encouraging the repatriation of Afghan refugees, with the numbers of refugees returning spiking during that year.

Rights groups say Pakistani authorities have carried out a sustained campaign of intimidation and harassment of refugees since a 2014 attack on a Peshawar school killed more than 140 people, an attack that Pakistan blames groups based in Afghanistan for.

The rate of repatriation dropped last year, as violence spiked and the Afghan Taliban stepped up their attacks on civilian targets across the country.

This year, at least 9,821 Afghan refugees have repatriated to their homeland, according to UNHCR data. Birth rates among the refugee community, however, are high, and at least 14,682 Afghan refugee births were also recorded during the same period, the data shows.

Tense relations
Relations between the two neighbours have remained tense for years, with Afghanistan blaming Pakistan for hosting the Afghan Taliban leadership and its allies, a claim that Pakistan denies.

Pakistan claims Afghanistan has not acted against the Pakistan Taliban, which it claims is based in eastern Afghanistan.

On Saturday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi led a high-level delegation on a visit to Kabul, with both sides pledging their commitment to a new comprehensive dialogue framework.

Aljazeera

Rohingya refugees’ return to Myanmar’s Rakhine state should be safe, speedy and sustainable, Indian High Commissioner to Bangladesh Harsh Vardhan Shringla said on Monday.

In his first visit to Bangladesh’s Kutupalong refugee camp, inhabited mostly by Rohingya Muslims, Shringla said India was focussing on three “Ss” to address the Rohingya crisis, bdnews24.com reported.

Bangladesh is currently providing shelter to over 1 million Rohingyas who fled “ethnic cleansing” in the Rakhine state.

The High Commissioner handed over relief materials to Disaster Management and Relief Minister Mofazzel Hussain Chowdhury Maya for Rohingyas refugees living in Bangladesh.

Over 1.1 million litres of super kerosene oil and 20,000 kerosene multi wick stoves were handed over in the third phase of humanitarian assistance from the Indian government to Bangladesh, reports say.

The Bangladeshi Minister thanked India for its fuel support and said the latest round of Indian aid will help over 20,000 families for five months.

“Fuel is a big problem and it’s a complex issue. We sought support from India and they responded very positively. We thank them for this support,” said Maya.

The Rohingya exodus from Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh began in August 2017 after a crackdown by the Myanmarese military that the UN likened to “ethnic cleansing with signs of genocide through killings, rapes and the razing of houses that year”.

But the Myanmar government says it was fighting militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and was not targeting civilians.

In September 2017, the Indian government under “Operation Insaniyat” extended the first phase of humanitarian assistance comprising of 981 tonnes of relief supplies.

The relief material consisted of family packs of rice, pulses, sugar, salt, cooking oil, tea, ready-to-eat noodles, biscuits and mosquito nets.

In May 2018, 373 tonnes of relief materials, including 104 tonnes of milk powder, 102 tonnes of dried fish, 61 tonnes of baby food, 50,000 raincoats and 50,000 pairs of gum boots for the rainy season were handed over in Chattogram.

Earlier, the Myanmar government agreed to a deal with Bangladesh to repatriate refugees, but few have returned. The Rohingya leaders say they would not go back unless they were guaranteed safety.

Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi has faced international outrage for not condemning the Army’s actions in Rakhine state.

A predominantly Buddhist country, Myanmar denies Rohingyas citizenship. The government even excluded them from the 2014 census and refused to recognize them as a people.

(IANS)