As Russia observes 25th anniversary of its constitution, many activists say there is not much to celebrate.by Rory Challandsan hour ago

Russia is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its post-Soviet era constitution.

However, critics say there is not much to celebrate as the constitution has been used to allow President Vladimir Putin to tighten his grip on power.

Ban on formal schooling, poor resources leave children of mostly Muslim minority without basic education, report warns.by Kate Mayberry7 hours ago

The Rohingya are facing a “lost generation” as children both in Myanmar and in the refugee camps of Bangladesh struggle to get an education, a new report has warned.

The Rohingya youth who remain in Myanmar’s Rakhine state have faced serious restrictions on access to schooling since the outbreak of violence there in 2012, with children often kept in separate facilities and unable to attend mainstream schools, the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) said on Thursday.

Older students are unable to attend university.

In Bangladesh, where more than 700,000 Rohingya now live in sprawling refugee camps after fleeing a brutal Myanmar army crackdown last year, authorities have banned formal education, and even the construction of any structure that might seem like a permanent school building.

As a result, most young people only have the option of attending informal learning centres run by civil society groups.

“Now more than ever, we need educated Rohingya who can act as leaders for the community, but as long as education remains severely restricted this will be impossible,” Tun Khin, president of BROUK, said in a statement.

“We are facing the prospect of a lost generation.”

‘Learning centres’

The mostly Muslim Rohingya are one of the world’s most persecuted minorities, attacked and driven out of Rakhine in what United Nations investigators have said remains an”ongoing genocide”.

An international law firm hired by the US State Department said earlier this month it had found evidence of genocide in the August 2017 military crackdown that drove the Rohingya into Bangladesh, and urged a criminal investigation into the atrocities.

“Right now, Rohingya are not getting any kind of formalised education in the camps,” John Quinley, a human rights specialist with Fortify Rights in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, where the refugee camps are located, told Al Jazeera. “This is a big concern for future generations of Rohingya. We are talking about lots of children who are unable to access education.”

Education in the 27 camps around Cox’s Bazar is provided by international and local NGOs as well as community-based organisations, and quality depends on who is running the centre.

The report, titled The Right to Education Denied for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh, noted that what classrooms existed were often overcrowded and poorly resourced. Many of the learning centres were located in refugees’ own shelters, it said.

Years of discrimination in Rakhine itself, “an apartheid state” according to Fortify Rights’ Quinley, had made the recruitment of teachers a serious challenge.

BROUK said of the teachers who arrived initially in August last year, only 21 percent had education beyond the secondary level while the segregation in Rakhine meant that Rohingya teachers were not allowed to travel and were therefore unable to access government-run teacher training programmes.

‘Inescapable’ challenges

UNICEF, which has been heavily involved in the provision of education in the camps, admitted in an August report that there were “inescapable” challenges in addressing the issue.

“Without an agreed and approved curriculum, children were taught with a variety of materials,” the UN agency for children said. “So enthusiastic were the children to learn that classrooms were often over-crowded.”

BROUK said that while aid groups had made “heroic efforts” to respond to the crisis there had been little long-term planning in relation to education, while prioritising primary over secondary education had created a shortage of opportunities for teenagers.

By July 2018, approximately 1,200 learning centres were operating while almost 140,000 Rohingya children had been enrolled in non-formal education of some kind, according to UNICEF.

BROUK noted that more than 150,000 children remained excluded from any kind of education, particularly those between the ages of 15 and 18.

UNICEF said it was developing a Learning Competency Framework and Approach (LCFA) to address some of the problems faced by school-age Rohingya.

The LCFA aims to double the amount of contact time for each child from the current two hours of teaching a day, expand classes for older children and teach in the languages used by the Rohingya including English, Burmese and local dialects.

Community involvement

According to BROUK, any solution required the involvement of the community who had been “largely absent” from any decision-making on education.

“It is essential to both the access and acceptability of education that communities have the freedom to establish their own schools – with the curriculum and language of their choosing,” the group’s report said. “While politically unpopular – such permissions should acknowledge the reality and potentially protracted nature of the situation.”

BROUK urged authorities in Bangladesh to remove all barriers on Rohingya refugees access to education and reiterated its call for the Myanmar government to address the hurdles facing the minority in their homeland.

“The only long-term and viable solution to the crisis lies inside Myanmar,” the report said. “The Myanmar authorities must immediately remove all restrictions on the human rights of Rohingya (including on access to education and freedom of movement), and grant Rohingya citizenship under national law.”

A November plan to start the repatriation of Rohingya to Myanmar fell apart after the refugees refused to leave.

The repatriation, agreed at the government level without the input of the Rohingya themselves, has been postponed indefinitely.

Aljazeera

Jack Dorsey encouraged his 4 million followers to visit Myanmar even though military is accused of ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Dorsey visited Myanmar for a 10-day meditation retreat and tourism

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been criticised for encouraging his 4.12 million followers to visit Myanmar, without mentioning the widespread allegations of ethnic cleansing of the country’s majority-Muslim Rohingya ethnic group.

In a lengthy thread on Twitter, Dorsey, 42, described in detail his experience on a silent meditation retreat in Pyin Oo Lwin, a town in northern Myanmar, before encouraging his followers to visit the South Asian country.

“Myanmar is an absolutely beautiful country. The people are full of joy and the food is amazing,” he said in the post on Saturday evening.

There was no mention of the plight of the Rohingya in the more than 700-word thread.

More than 730,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State in 2017, according to the United Nations, following a sweeping army crackdown in response to Rohingya attacks on security forces.

Rohingya refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh say Myanmar soldiers and Buddhist civilians killed families, burned many villages and carried out gang rape. UN-mandated investigators have accused Myanmar’s army of “genocidal intent”.

Myanmar has denied the allegations, saying its forces engaged in a counterinsurgency operation against “terrorists”.

Dorsey’s comments provoked a backlash with Twitter users accusing the Silicon Valley boss of being tone-deaf to the plight of the Rohingya and spawning the hashtag #JackIgnoresGenocide.

“I’m no expert on meditation, but is it supposed to make you so self-obsessed that you forget to mention you’re in a country where the military has committed mass killings and mass rape, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee in one of today’s biggest humanitarian disasters?” Andrew Stroehlein, the European media director of Human Rights Watch, responded on Twitter.

International lawyer Suchitra Vijayan also weighed in comparing the “silence” Dorsey sought from his meditation to his tight-lipped approach to the plight of the Rohingya.

Matthew Smith, CEO of Southeast Asia-based human rights NGO Fortify Rights, told Al Jazeera that Dorsey had “at best” miscalculated the reaction his post would provoke.

“It’s important that powerful people know and understand the landscape of abuse in Myanmar and speak openly and publicly about it. Genocide is everyone’s problem, and while we don’t expect everyone to speak about it publicly at every turn, atrocity crimes are the elephant in the room with regard to social media here,” Smith said.

“Mr Dorsey’s failure to mention the Rohingya or the Kachin, the Shan, and other [ethnic groups in Myanmar] was a political miscalculation at best. The pope made the same mistake. It’s not a good look”.

Social media in Myanmar

It was the second time Dorsey kicked up a social media storm within a month. In November, a picture of him with a placard saying “smash Brahminical patriarchy”, referring to the “highest” Hindu caste, went viral.

Twitter later apologised for the photo, which was taken during a trip to India and posted by a journalist Dorsey met during his visit.

Twitter CEO trolled for ‘smash Brahminical patriarchy’ placard

Dorsey has not responded publicly to the criticism over his visit to Myanmar, but an individual with knowledge of the trip stressed to Al Jazeera it was a holiday and Dorsey did not hold business meetings while in the country.

Social media companies have drawn criticism for allegedly allowing hate speech to spread at the peak of the military crackdown in Myanmar.

In August 2017, hundreds of new Twitter accounts sprang up in Myanmar, many of which appeared to be attempts to counter sympathetic portrayals of the Rohingya by the Western news media and human rights activists.

They portrayed the ethnic minority as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, or “Bengalis”. Rohingya regard themselves as native to Rakhine but the government has denied most of them citizenship.

In November, Facebook admitted it had not done enough to prevent the social network from being used to incite violence, following a report it commissioned on its presence in Myanmar.

Aljazeera

Beijing Apple has appealed against a Chinese court ruling that banned the sale and import of most iPhone models after granting Qualcomm an injunction against Apple, a stunning decision that comes amid the trade war between the US and China, CNBC reported.

Apple accused Qualcomm of playing dirty tricks, including asserting a patent that had already been invalidated by international courts, and other patents that it had never before used.

“Qualcomm’s effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world,” Apple said in a statement on Monday.

The ban does not cover the new iPhone XS, iPhone XS Plus or iPhone XR, which were not yet available when Qualcomm, an American microchip maker, filed its lawsuit, CNN reported.

The ruling was announced publicly on Monday but put into effect last week, but Apple said in a statement that all iPhone models remain available in China.

The phones covered by the ban make up about 10 per cent to 15 per cent of current iPhone sales in China, according to Daniel Ives, analyst at Wedbush Securities.

The court granted a pair of preliminary injunctions requested by Qualcomm.

Qualcomm claims that Apple violates two of its patents in the iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and iPhone X.

The patents allow people to edit and resize photos on a phone and to manage apps by using a touchscreen, according to Qualcomm.

The practical effect of the injunction is not yet clear.

“If Apple is violating the orders, Qualcomm will seek enforcement of the orders through enforcement tribunals that are part of the Chinese court system,” CNN quoted Don Rosenberg, general counsel for Qualcomm, as saying on Monday.

Qualcomm applauded the ruling, saying Apple owes it money for using its technology.

Apple and Qualcomm are suing one another in courts across the world. Billions of dollars are at stake, and each side has claimed some victories.

(IANS)

Pakistan would continue to lend full diplomatic, political and moral support to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, Prime Minister Imran Khan said Monday.

Khan’s remarks came in a message on the Human Rights Day which is observed every year on December 10.

This year, the Human Rights Day marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

He said this year is also significant for Pakistan as it has joined the UN Human Rights Council.

“Pakistan’s membership of the Council, for the fourth time, is a testimony to the confidence of the international community in Pakistan, as a consensus builder within the international human rights policy framework,” he said.

PTI

 Morocco’s navy coast guards have rescued 72 illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean, the Moroccan Army said.

The rescued included 53 sub-Saharan Africans and 19 Asians, Xinhua quoted the Moroccan Army as saying on Saturday.

The migrants, among them women and children, were brought safely to the port of Nador, the army said.

Morocco has witnessed a significant hike in illegal immigration attempts in 2018.

According to the Moroccan Interior Ministry, the authorities have foiled over 76,000 illegal immigration attempts between January and November 2018.

IANS

Toronto With its population of cricket-loving immigrants increasing rapidly, the Indian-dominated city of Brampton on the outskirts of Toronto will soon build the first world-class cricket stadium in Canada.

Announcing this while addressing members of the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce here on Friday, Brampton’s newly elected Mayor Patrick Brown said cricket is a passion in India as he has witnessed during his visits.

“That’s why we will build a world-class cricket stadium in Brampton during my term,” so that anyone coming from India to do business or live in his city doesn’t miss what they love, the Mayor told the Indo-Canadian gathering.

Known as a friend of India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Indo-Canadian community here, Brown, a former MP, has been to India 18 times during the past 11 years.

In fact, he started this year in India by doing a puja in Varanasi and offering prayers at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

The Indo-Canadian community accounts for a huge portion of the city’s population of over 600,000, with Punjabis alone making up over 20 per cent of its population.

To make the huge Indian community feel at home in his city, the Mayor said: “We will also have the first outdoor ‘garba’ this year out on the streets.”

He also mentioned that Brampton already allows the Indo-Canadian community to celebrate Diwali with fireworks.

The Mayor said that since creating jobs tops his agenda, he would take every step to make Brampton attractive for businesses and investors from anywhere, including India, by keeping the cost of doing business in his city low.

“There won’t be any tax increase during my term,” he said.

Describing Indian and other diaspora communities of his city as its biggest assets, the Mayor said he would use the huge Indian community to pitch his city to businesses in India.

“The Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce can open doors for Brampton in India. I have been India 18 times in 11 years and I will do now as Mayor to pitch Brampton to businesses in India,” he said.

Assuring the Indian-friendly Mayor of all support, Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce President Pramod Goyal said the chamber has been building business bridges between the two countries for over 40 years and creating jobs.

(IANS)

London To help news industry use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in more innovative ways, Google has announced a partnership with Polis, the international journalism think-tank at London School of Economics and Political Science, to create “Journalism AI”.

Part of the Google News Initiative (GNI), the “Journalism AI” project will focus on research and training for newsrooms on the intersection of AI and journalism.

“As part of ‘Journalism AI’, next year, we’ll publish a global survey about how the media is currently using — and could further benefit from — this technology,” Google said in a statement on Friday as it organised GNI Innovation Forum here.

“We’ll also collaborate with newsrooms and academic institutions to create a best practices handbook and produce free online training on how to use AI in the newsroom for journalists worldwide,” informed Matt Cooke, Head of Partnerships and Training, Google News Lab.

After testing with partners over the last two years, Google also introduced a new tool called Google Earth Studio which is an animation tool for Google Earth’s satellite and 3D imagery.

The tool empowers graphics specialists with new ways to leverage Google Earth imagery for storytelling.

“We’re inviting newsrooms around the world to start using the product for the first time,” said Google.

According to the company, it has provided free training to journalists on a range of tools reaching more than 140,000 people in-person.

“Our training on Google tools for journalists are now available in 16 languages — including Indonesian Bahasa, Thai and Turkish,” said Cooke.

Google News in November launched a new innovation challenge to help scribes and publishers in the Asia-Pacific region produce quality journalism in the digital age.

The Asia-Pacific Google News Initiative (GNI) Innovation Challenge will fund selected projects up to $300,000 and finance up to 70 per cent of the total project cost, that inject new ideas into the news industry.

According to Google, in Asia-Pacific, journalists and publishers are increasingly grappling with questions over how quality journalism can thrive in the digital age.

“From Yangon to Manila, Sydney to New Delhi, they are experimenting with fresh approaches to reporting and new business models,” said the company.

(IANS)

London Italian regulators have fined Facebook 10 million euros for selling users’ data without informing them.

The competition watchdog handed Facebook two fines totalling 10 million euros, “also for discouraging users from trying to limit how the company shares their data”, Italian portal The Local reported on Saturday.

Facebook “misleadingly gets people to sign up… without informing them in an immediate and adequate way of how the data they will provide will be harvested for commercial purposes”, read a statement from Italy’s AGCM consumer and market watchdog.

The authority has directed Facebook to publish an apology to users on its website and on its app.

Reacting to this, a Facebook spokesperson said they are reviewing the authority’s decision.

“We hope to work with them to resolve their concerns. This year we made our terms and policies clearer to help people understand how we use data and how our business works,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying.

“We also made our privacy settings easier to find and use, and we’re continuing to improve them. You own and control your personal information on Facebook,” the statement said.

Facebook Italy recently agreed to “make a payment of more than 100 million euros” to end a fiscal fraud dispute with Italian authorities.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), which is Facebook’s lead privacy regulator in Europe, in October opened a formal investigation into the fresh Facebook data breach which affected 50 million users, that could result in a fine of $1.63 billion.

“The investigation will examine Facebook’s compliance with its obligation under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security and safeguarding of the personal data it processes,” said DPC.

(IANS)