Ko Ni, legal adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, was shot as he got into a taxi by an unknown assassin.

There were no reports on possible motives behind the murder of Ko Ni [EPA]

by Al Jazeera

A legal adviser for Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party has been shot dead outside Yangon’s international airport, in what appeared to be a rare outbreak of political violence in the commercial capital.

Police arrested a lone gunman, but a motive was unknown in the killing of 65-year-old Ko Ni on Sunday, a prominent member of Myanmar’s Muslim minority.

A taxi driver who tried to stop the gunman was also killed, according to Zaw Htay, spokesman for President Htin Kyaw.

“We have detained and are questioning the gunman to find out why he killed him, and who is behind it or paid him to do it,” Zaw Htay told Reuters.

A police official told Reuters the suspect was a 53-year-old Myanmar citizen from the central city of Mandalay.

Mourners gathered in front of the home of Ko Ni on Monday.

“This is a crime and I request you find justice,” senior party member Tin Oo told media, saying Ko Ni’s death was a loss for the whole country.

The apparent assassination comes amid heightened tensions in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where leader Aung San Aung San Suu Kyi is under pressure over a heavy-handed security operation in an area of the country’s northwest that is populated mostly by Muslims.

‘Talking to his grandson’

Ko Ni had just embraced his young grandson as he stepped out of the airport terminal on his return from Jakarta, said the lawyer’s daughter Yin Nwe Khine.

“My father was talking to his grandson. Then, I heard a gunshot. At first, I thought it was a car tyre blowing out, then I saw my father lying on the ground,” she said.

Ko Ni, an expert in constitutional law, had spoken out about the powerful role the military retains in governing Myanmar, despite handing over power to Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian administration in April.

“My father was often threatened and we were warned to be careful, but my father didn’t accept that easily. He always did what he thought was right,” said Yin Nwe Khine.

“A lot of people hate us because we have different religious beliefs, so I think that might be why it happened to him, but I don’t know the reason.”

Ko Ni had joined Minister for Information Pe Myint on the visit to Muslim-majority Indonesia, billed as an opportunity to share experiences of national reconciliation.

The delegation included several Myanmar Muslim leaders, some belonging to the mostly stateless Rohingya minority.

Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur for Myanmar, voiced her outrage over Ko Ni’s killing, saying she had met him on her last trip to the country earlier this month, which included a visit to Rakhine.

“My deepest and most sincere condolences to the family of U Ko Ni the most prominent and respected Muslim lawyer of Myanmar,” she tweeted, calling on Aung San Suu Kyi’s government to “get to the bottom” of his death.

Comments by Donald Trump on nuclear weapons and climate change have made the world less safe, atomic scientists say.

The atomic scientists say the world had edged closer to doomsday [EPA]

Atomic scientists say the world is inching closer to an apocalypse, partly due to the words and actions of US President Donald Trump.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group of nuclear scientists who have been assessing global security for 70 years, said they were moving their symbolic Doomsday Clock 30 seconds closer to midnight for a number of reasons, but cited Trump’s campaign rhetoric on nuclear proliferation and denial of climate change in particular.

“Even though he has just now taken office, the president’s intemperate statements, lack of openness to expert advice and questionable cabinet nominations have already made a bad international security situation worse,” the scientists said.

Trump, who assumed office on January 20, has made contradictory statements about climate change, at times calling it a hoax and other times saying he would keep an open mind about it.

US-Russia relations

Beyond the election of Trump, the scientists listed a number of other reasons for their assessment, including strains in relations between the US and Russia, which together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, and North Korea’s underground nuclear tests.

“The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than it has ever been in the lifetime of almost everyone in this room,” Lawrence Krauss, the chairman of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors, told reporters on Thursday.

“The last time it was closer was 63 years ago in 1953 after the then Soviet Union exploded its first hydrogen bomb, creating the modern arms race,” he added.

Alluding to Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said: “This is the first time that the words and stated policies of one or two people placed in high positions have so impacted on our perception of the existential threats we believe the world faces.”

In a lengthy 18-page explanation of its decision, the scientists said that the international community failed to “come effectively to grips” with both nuclear weapons and climate change last year.

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by a group of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, the American-led clandestine effort to build the world’s first nuclear weapons.

Over the decades the scientists have recognised climate change as an additional threat, and in their report said “it could change life on Earth as we know it”.

Last year, the bulletin opted not to change the clock’s time from three minutes to midnight.

US president also reiterates he will build Mexico wall as he moves to fulfill some of his most controversial pledges.

During his campaign Trump had vowed a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” [EPA]

by Al Jazeera

The US president, Donald Trump, will sign executive orders restricting visas and immigration, as well as the entry of refugees, making good on his signature campaign pledges, according to several media reports.

Trump is due to speak on Wednesday to employees at the Department of Homeland Security – which handles immigration – and sign orders on refugees and national security, the reports said.

“Big day planned on NATIONAL SECURITY tomorrow. Among many other things, we will build the wall!” Trump tweeted late on Tuesday.

One of the orders would restrict immigration and access to the US for refugees and visa holders from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, according to the Washington Post, which noted that citizens from many of these countries already faced major obstacles in obtaining US visas.

Immigration experts told the newspaper that the orders would stop all admissions of refugees for 120 days, including those fleeing Syria’s civil war, and a 30-day halt to issuing immigrant and non-immigrant visas to people from some countries with Muslim majorities.

But there is likely to be an exception for those fleeing religious persecution if their religion is a minority in their country. That exception could cover Christians fleeing Muslim-majority nations, according to The Associated Press news agency.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Nihad Awad, a Muslim American community leader, called the order a “blind policy” that “does not make and will not make America safer”.

“It will make America and our society more fearful and less welcoming. And that’s not the American way of being great as a nation,” said Awad, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations.

During the fiscal year 2016, the US government had admitted 10,000 Syrian refugees, the majority of whom were families and their children.

‘Total and complete shutdown of Muslims’

Trump launched his presidential campaign with a promise to restrict the entry of refugees and build a wall along the southern US border with Mexico.

He also called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the US until authorities can better screen those who come into the country.

What remains unclear is how the orders would be implemented by John Kelly, homeland security secretary, who told his confirmation hearing that the border wall might not “be built anytime soon.”

On Thursday, Trump is also expected to sign executive orders on the so-called sanctuary cities, where local officials refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities on such things as handing over undocumented immigrants for deportation.

Trump has also vowed to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, which his predecessor Barack Obama introduced in 2012.

The programme allows more than 750,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the country as young children to live and work in the US without fear of deportation.

But whether, and how, Trump addresses the programme remains unclear.

“Many options are being worked through on DACA,” the Post quoted a White House official as saying.

In addition to the border wall, Trump also wants to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada, warning last week that he would abandon the pact unless the US gets “a fair deal”.

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto vowed on Monday that there would be “neither confrontation nor submission” in the negotiations, which will include trade, immigration and other issues.

East African survivors from latest disaster off Libyan coast recount harrowing details from Saturday’s sinking.

2017 shows no sign of departures slowing with 2,300 migrants registered in Italy since January 1 [Yannis Behrakis/Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

Four people are dead and nearly 180 are missing, presumed dead, after a ship capsized in the Mediterranean on Saturday, officials said after interviewing a handful of survivors.

Humanitarian workers from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) recounted harrowing details of the latest major tragedy in waters off Libya after talking to four rescued passengers – two Eritreans and two Ethiopians – who arrived on Monday evening in the Sicilian port of Trapani.

The survivors, three men and one woman, were described as “traumatised and exhausted”. They said their two-tier, wooden boat had left Libya on Friday with more 180 people packed on board, all of them originally from East Africa.

After five hours at sea, the engine cut out and the boat started to take on water. As it slowly sank, more and more of the people on board were submerged.

One of the survivors described a desperate effort to find his wife, who had taken a spot in the centre of the ship.

After hours in the water, the survivors were rescued on Saturday, 30 nautical miles from the Libyan coast, by a French boat operating as part of the European borders agency’s Operation Triton before being transferred to another agency ship, the Siem Pilot.

Siem Pilot, provided by the Norwegian coastguard, arrived in Trapani on Monday evening with the four survivors, four recovered bodies and 34 people rescued from another stricken boat.

The latest deaths and rescues follow a record year for the number of people trying to reach Europe on the western Mediterranean route from North Africa to Italy.

Some 181,000 people were registered at Italian ports in 2016 while the UNHCR recorded more than 5,000 deaths and presumed deaths on all migration routes across the Mediterranean.

Despite the mid-winter weather making crossings particularly perilous, the start of 2017 has brought no sign of departures slowing, with some 2,300 people already registered in Italy since January 1.

Trade and financial sanctions to end after Sudanese government makes efforts to improve regional security.

The lift in economic sanctions is anticipated to improve US-Sudan relations [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

The United States has announced the end of a 20-year economic embargo on Sudan, lifting trade and financial sanctions in an effort to foster ties with the Sudanese government.

The announcement made by outgoing President Barack Obama’s administration on Friday comes after an executive order to permanently repeal a range of sanctions as a result of Sudan’s efforts to improve security in the region.

For the first time in two decades, Sudan will be able to receive imported goods and services from the US, as authorised by the US Department of the Treasury.

The lift will also release frozen Sudanese property and assets held in the US, and permits the trade with the oil and gas industry in Sudan.

Following talks to improve cooperative relations, the move is expected to tackle concerns including enhanced accessibility for aid groups, and efforts to end the Darfur conflict.

“Sudan has long expressed a desire to get out from under sanctions, as well as other restrictions that the United States has imposed on Sudan going back 20 years,” a senior US administration official told reporters.

“Over the past two years, we have looked for a way to engage with Sudan in a way we could overcome some of the lack of trust of the past,” he said.

While it is still unclear what US President-elect Donald Trump’s stance is on the embargo lift, Sudan welcomed the decision.

Gharib Allah Khidir, spokesperson for the Sudanese foreign ministry, said: “this step represents a positive and important development for the course of bilateral relations between the United States of America and Sudan, and is the natural result of joint efforts and long and frank discussions”.

However, some US sanctions tied to Sudan’s “state sponsor of terrorism” title remain in place, including a ban on weapons sales and restrictions on Darfur-related sanctions remain in effect.

Darfur has been engulfed in a deadly conflict since 2003, when ethnic minority tribes took up arms against the government, accusing it of marginalising the region.

Washington’s outreach will still be limited, as the US is unlikely to engage directly with Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir.

Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which he denies.

European Court of Human Rights upholds fines on Swiss Muslim parents who refused mixed swimming lessons for daughters.

The ECHR said the Swiss court was right to protect foreign pupils from social exclusion [Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA]

by Al Jazeera

The European Court of Human Rights upheld a decision of a Swiss court backing fines on Muslim parents who refused to allow their daughters to take part in mixed swimming lessons on the basis of their religion.

The parents, both Turkish-Swiss dual nationals, appealed to the court over a fine handed down by education authorities after they declined to send two of their daughters to mixed swimming lessons.

They said that the requirement, imposed by the school up until the age of puberty as part of its physical education curriculum, violated their right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion enshrined in article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

While the court acknowledged that the requirement was an interference with the freedom of religion, it ruled that the interference represented a “legitimate aim” to protect foreign pupils from social exclusion.

It said that schools played an important role in encouraging social integration, especially regarding children of foreign origin.

It also noted that the authorities in Basel, Switzerland, had tried to reach a compromise with the parents, including allowing the girls to wear burkinis for the lessons.

The court also ruled that the fine imposed on the parents, of 350 Swiss francs ($345) each per child, totalling 1,400 francs, was proportionate to the aim.

The European Court of Human Rights was established to oversee the European Convention on Human Rights, adopted by the 47-member Council of Europe.

The court is not a European Union institution.