Habib Siddiqui

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar has granted early release to seven soldiers jailed for the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys during a 2017 military crackdown in the western state of Rakhine, two prison officials, two former fellow inmates and one of the soldiers told Reuters. The soldiers were freed in November last year, the two inmates said, meaning they served less than one year of their 10-year prison terms for the killings at Inn Din village. They also served less jail time than two Reuters reporters who uncovered the killings. The journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, spent more than 16 months behind bars on charges of obtaining state secrets. The two were released in an amnesty on May 6. Win Naing, the chief warden at Rakhine’s Sittwe Prison, and a senior prison official in the capital, Naypyitaw, confirmed that the convicted soldiers had not been in prison for some months. “Their punishment was reduced by the military,” said the senior Naypyitaw official...

Jason Ditz Posted on May 27        Having managed a scant five seats in the April election, Yisrael Beiteinu, the party of Avigdor Lieberman, has emerged as kingmaker. or as seems increasingly likely, election-maker, as on Monday he ruled out joining the Netanyahu-led coalition . Israel’s parliament has 120 seats, meaning 61 are required to form a coalition. Netanyahu has a solid 60 seats, but Lieberman was really his only chance to get over the threshold, and that’s not going to happen. Under Israeli law the president is intended to keep nominating coalition leaders to try to form governments so long as it is plausible, but it seems Netanyahu may have been the first and last nominee, with parliament voting today on the preliminary ready to dissolve the Knesset and hold another election. Two more votes have to pass to actually hold the election, and those are likely to happen Wednesday, when Netanyahu’s mandate expires. Netanyahu continues to beg L...

By Gene Healy We’re told that the Trump administration’s brinksmanship on Iran stems from a power grab by President Donald Trump’s undeterrable national security advisor, John Bolton. And it’s true that Bolton has never met a “preventive” war he didn’t like  and that there’s every reason to suspect him of scheming to create an excuse for one. But lately it’s getting hard to distinguish President Trump from “President Bolton.” “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran,” Trump rage-tweeted Sunday . “Never threaten the United States again!” If the administration can’t be convinced to stand down, the House of Representatives should launch a preemptive strike of its own. They should credibly threaten to impeach the president if he goes to war without congressional authorization. Waging war without legal authority is an impeachable offense, if anything is. Impeachment was designed to thwart attempts to subvert the Constitution ; congressional control of the war ...

Click the link below to see the video. Video from a New York Times investigation

This is an old article, dated May 20, by Rana Ayyub which looks at why and how the opposition failed to unseat Hindu fascist BJP to winning the Indian election. ==== India's six-week-long multi-phase election has finally come to a close. According to exit polls released on Sunday, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party ( BJP ) has secured a legislative majority.  While the final make-up of the legislature will become clear on May 23, when final results are released, what is already clear is that the Indian opposition has failed to effectively counter the political appeal of the BJP and its nationalistic ideology. The main challenger to the BJP's second mandate in this election season was the Indian Congress Party led by Rahul Gandhi, a fourth-generation leader of the Nehru family. After his party was decimated in the 2014 general elections, Gandhi had to work hard to make its platform politically relevant once again and revamp his own image of an elitist and detached political ...

By Rana Ayyub In 2015, the first full year of Narendra Modi’s administration, a Muslim man named Mohammed Akhlaq and his son Danish were attacked by a mob of Hindu men in Dadri after being accused of storing beef in their refrigerator. Akhlaq died on the spot; Danish, who was preparing for the Indian administrative services, survived the lynching after two brain surgeries. In an interview published in 2018 , an exasperated Danish Akhlaq asked our leaders: “You want to make India a Hindu country? Would you kill all the Muslims or turn them out of the country? Please tell us to what extent you would go to finish Muslims?” He added: “I’m very uneasy. I have a feeling that if the BJP comes back then something big will happen. I cannot say what it is. I feel as if something will break in our country and we will not be able to fix it.” 1 Danish’s fear permeates life for all Muslims in India. In recent years, we have seen an explosion of ethnic and religious mob violence . This year’s...

By Rana Ayyub   When the results started trickling in on Thursday showing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist BJP government were set for a landslide victory after a divisive and polarizing campaign, I was not shocked. As a journalist, I have covered Modi’s career since his days as the Chief Minister of Gujarat and know his strategies all too well. Yet the defining image of the Indian election results was not of Modi’s speech in Delhi; it was of Pragya Singh Thakur, dressed in saffron robes, waving at a large crowd after a massive electoral victory. Thakur, a Hindu priestess from the northern Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, is best known for being charged under a terror law for conspiring and carrying out the 2008 bomb blasts in a Muslim-majority city of Maharashtra that left 10 people dead. She swears allegiance to a radical Hindu outfit called Abhinav Bharat that aims to establish a Hindu rashtra (state) and the supremacy of Hindus not just in Ind...