Habib Siddiqui

GENEVA (Reuters) - The Turkish Cypriot delegation to U.N.-sponsored talks proposed a two-state solution for Cyprus on Wednesday to end the conflict with Greek Cypriots and put the island's two communities on an equal footing, but it was swiftly rejected by the Greek Cypriot side. The Mediterranean island was split in 1974 between a Greek Cypriot south and a Turkish Cypriot north. Only Turkey recognises the breakaway state in Northern Cyprus. Recommended Videos Powered by AnyClip 'Be creative': U.N. chief says as Cyprus talks open 333 Play Video NOW PLAYING'Be creative': U.N. chief says as Cyprus talks open Low expectations as UN tries to kickstart Cyprus peace talks European Parliament ratifies EU-UK trade deal marking beginning of post-Brexit world Prince Harry meets with family for clear-the-air talks Texas police to demand Tesla crash data The proposal was presented at informal talks with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in Geneva, who had urged both s...

Sri Lanka cabinet approves ban on Muslim face veils Sri Lanka's cabinet on Tuesday approved a proposed ban on wearing full-face veils including Muslim niqabs in public, citing national security grounds, despite a UN expert's comment that it would violate international law. The cabinet approved the proposal by Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekera at its weekly meeting, Weerasekara said on his Facebook page. The proposal will now be sent to the Attorney General's Department and must be approved by parliament to become law. The government holds a majority in parliament and the proposal could easily be passed. Weerasekara has characterized veils which cover the body and face worn by some Muslim women as a sign of religious extremism and said a ban would improve national security. Wearing of niqabs and burqas was temporarily banned in 2019 after the Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks killed more than 260 people. Two local Islamist extremist groups that had pledged a...

By Aseel Jundi in Jerusalem East Jerusalem’s towering, turreted Damascus Gate, one of the main entrances to the Old City, was the scene of tension and violence between Palestinians and Israelis over the past few weeks, as it has been many times before. Palestinians have been protesting since the beginning of Ramadan, on 13 April, against an Israeli ban limiting their access to the full Damascus Gate plaza after Ramadan's night prayer, known as tarawih, ends. Israeli military police detained four Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem on Sunday evening for chanting national slogans and waving Palestinian flags in celebration after tossing aside barricades blocking them from sitting on the plaza, a popular gathering spot for Palestinians during the Muslim holy month. Many Palestinians see Israel’s increasing restrictions and heavy security presence at Damascus Gate and elsewhere in the city, as well as recent bouts of settler aggression, as part of ongoing attempts to erase Pale...

Jewish settlers Wednesday overnight set three Palestinian-owned vehicles on fire near the village of Beit Iksa, northwest of Jerusalem, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA. Local sources said that a group of Jewish settlers torched the vehicles, which were parked nearby the illegal Israeli settlement of Ramot, spray-painted racist graffiti, and smashed the window shields of other vehicles parked in the area. In March, Jewish settlers set two Palestinian vehicles on fire and scrawled hate graffiti in the village. “Price tag” refers to an underground anti-Palestinian Israeli group that routinely attacks Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel. The Israeli government still refuses to label it as a terrorist organization and considers it only a group of vandals. Settler violence against Palestinians and their property is routine in the West Bank and is rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities. Settler violence includes property and mosque arsons, stone-...

Ram Puniyani Currently (April 2021) India is passing through its worst period as Covid19 Phase II is at its peak, with high rate of infectivity and mortality. The shortage of beds, Oxygen, test facilities and medicines is the cause of concern all over. The victims and their families are feeling the massive tragedy as the nation watches the gross mismanagement and lack of foresight in planning. As the criticism of the rulers is coming up a new word ‘system’ has been thrown up. Now it is not Mr. Modi who is to be blamed for the shortcomings and worsening plight but the system is to be blamed. On one hand the lack of scientific temper of the rulers made them make statements like we will conquer the Pandemic in 21 days. Some leaders exhorted the devotees to come for mass congregations of Kumbh. The other set of them held massive election rallies without wearing masks and without following the norms of physical distancing. Two high Courts have held election Commission responsible for ...

The grimness grinds on for the world’s 80 million forcibly displaced persons, 34 million of them children. Covid-19 is proving to be hard to beat, putting severe, months-long restrictions on activist support for refugees in transit and host nations alike. Ali (not his real name), who spoke to us from Ritsona camp in Greece, has been contributing to camp life as a volunteer educator. The psychological and educational toll of living as a refugee child is a blight on young lives. With education services often overstretched even in refugee camps where agencies have easy access, teaching the young is vital activist work for many asylum seekers who despite their own tough circumstances, seek to better those of others, particularly the young. Ali is a well-educated Afghani who has negotiated a perilous path to Europe alongside his wife. In this first interview, he spoke to Ahmad Soheil Ahmadi about the terrible conditions of his journey. ASA: Mr Ali, you spent time in Iran and studied at o...

Israel’s status as an apartheid state is likely to be cemented further with a new report by Human Rights Watch concluding that the occupation state has crossed the threshold to be classified as such. The report, titled “A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution”, is expected to be released tomorrow. It has been authored by Omar Shakir, the Jerusalem-based director of HRW who was expelled by Israel two years ago. Although precise details are as yet unknown, pro-Israel groups have already started a campaign against HRW in what appears to be an attempt at damage limitation by trying to discredit the organization. Controversial pro-Israel lobby group NGO Monitor argued that the report is merely part of a much wider assault on Israel and its self-declared identity as a Jewish state. “HRW’s text is part of a renewed NGO push over the past 18 months, attaching the term ‘apartheid’ to discourse on Israel… The NGO network seeks to reinforce politica...

Last year saw an increase in global military spending despite the damage the coronavirus lockdowns did to the world’s economy. A new study from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found total global military expenditures rose to $1.98 trillion in 2020, representing a 2.6 percent increase from 2019. The 2.6 percent increase came as the global gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 4.4 percent. Military spending accounted for 2.4 percent of the global GDP, a figure known as the military burden. The military burden for the 2019 global GDP was 2.2 percent. The increase in military burden from 2019 to 2020 represents the most significant year-on-year rise since the 2009 financial crisis. As always is the case, the US was by far the biggest spender. The SIPRI study estimated that the US spent $778 billion on its military, accounting for 39 percent of the global total. US military spending saw a 4.4 percent increase from 2019. The study said 2020 marked the third co...

JERUSALEM (AP) — One of the world’s best-known human rights groups said Tuesday that Israel is guilty of the international crimes of apartheid and persecution because of discriminatory policies toward Palestinians within its own borders and in the occupied territories. In a sweeping, 213-page report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch joins a growing number of commentators and rights groups who view the conflict not primarily as a land dispute but as a single regime in which Palestinians — who make up roughly half the population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza — are systematically denied basic rights granted to Jews. Israel adamantly rejects that characterization, saying its Arab minority enjoys full civil rights. It views Gaza, from which it withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005, as a hostile entity ruled by the Islamic militant group Hamas, and it considers the West Bank to be disputed territory subject to peace negotiations — which collapsed more than a decade ago. Human Ri...

Note: my latest book: Bangladesh: A Polarized and Divided Nation? - deals with Maratha invasion on Bengal and its impact on the people. Here below is an article shared from sabrangindia.in that shows how the Hindutvadis are exploiting religion in the 2021 election in India. - Habib Siddiqui ===== sabrangindia.in The whole thrust of the RSS-BJP election campaign for 2021 state assembly elections in Bengal has been to save Bengal from the rule of Mamata Bannerjee who is not a ‘Hindu’. PM of India, Narendra Bhai Modi, a self-proclaimed Hindutva nationalist, as usual set the polarising agenda. While addressing the first election rally, he called upon the electorate to overthrow the ‘nirmam’ (cruel) rule of Mamata by showing a ‘Ram Card’. He did not name Hindus directly but there was no confusion about the religious identity of the electorate Indian PM was addressing to. [1] Amit Shah, the RSS-BJP Chanakya or the main strategist for Bengal polls minced no words in exposing the anti-...

We’re approaching the 20th anniversary of the Global War on Terror when the George W. Bush administration made the decision to ruin the 21st century. Trillions of dollars spent, a permanent and expanding war bureaucracy on our shores, upwards of a million civilians dead, tens of millions more displaced, entire regions of the globe destabilized, and the American people no safer than they were on September 10. When the immensity of the nefariousness is laid bare, a normal man is tempted, in the words of satirical cynic H.L. Mencken, “to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” That is the conclusion when one finishes Scott Horton’s Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, which stands as the most irrefutably argued and damning indictment of modern U.S. foreign policy yet written. Published on the anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, its release date is a distressing reminder that, with a brief respite from 2011 to 2014, the United States has bee...

JERUSALEM (AP) — Hours after Israeli soldiers shot and killed Osama Mansour at a temporary checkpoint in the occupied West Bank, the military announced that it had thwarted a car-ramming attack — but the facts didn’t seem to add up. By all accounts, Mansour had initially stopped his car when ordered to do so. His wife, the mother of his five children, was sitting in the passenger seat. And after the soldiers sprayed the vehicle with gunfire, killing him and wounding her, they declined to arrest her as an accomplice. Witnesses say the soldiers killed Mansour for no apparent reason, part of what rights groups say is a pattern of fatal shootings of Palestinians by Israeli forces under questionable circumstances. The debate over the soldiers’ conduct echoes that over the high-profile police killings of Black Americans in the United States. The conviction this week of former Minneapolis, Minn., police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd, who police initially said had die...

Over 100 Palestinians were injured and 50 others were detained in nightly violent clashes with Israeli police and Jewish settlers amid simmering tensions surrounding the holy month of Ramadan in the occupied city of East Jerusalem. Violent clashes broke out between extremist Jewish settlers and Palestinians after some 300 extremist Jewish settlers marched towards Damascus Gate outside the Old City of Jerusalem, shouting “Death to the Arabs” and “Arabs get out” late on Thursday. The settler march was organized and led by Lehava, a Jewish supremacist anti-miscegenation group whose members physically assault Palestinians suspected of dating Jewish women and whose leader, Bentzi Gopstein, also expressed support for burning down churches. Policemen fired stun grenades, tear gas and water cannons against Palestinians who attempted to confront the settler march, and some of whom threw stones and bottles, injuring over 100 and detaining some 50 others. The Palestinian Red Crescent sources s...

From the launch of the U.S. war against Iraq to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic there were over four million ‘excess deaths’ in the U.S., deaths over and above the rates experienced in other rich nations. Given the class distribution of longevity— the rich live a full decade longer than the poor on average, these excess deaths were overwhelmingly concentrated amongst those cast aside by neoliberal economic policies. Should this read as old news, the Lancet provides updated data suggesting that as of early 2021, none of the underlying causal factors have been resolved. Interpretation is that as devastating as the Covid-19 pandemic has been, to date it has been but a bit worse than business as usual in the U.S. of A. This will no doubt read as a surprise, implausible even, to the managerial class, the PMC, who have benefitted from government policies that have favored them, and the financial economy in general. But consider: excess deaths as measured here (explained below) are relati...

NEW DELHI — An unknown hacker planted more than 30 documents that investigators deemed incriminating on a laptop belonging to an Indian activist accused of terrorism, a new forensic analysis finds, indicating a more extensive use of malicious software than previously revealed. The report will heighten concerns about the controversial prosecution of a group of government critics under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Arsenal Consulting, a Massachusetts-based digital forensics firm, examined an electronic copy of the laptop at the request of defense lawyers. The Washington Post reviewed a copy of the report. A previous analysis by Arsenal, which The Washington Post reported in February, found that 10 letters had been deposited on the laptop, including one that discussed an alleged plot to assassinate Modi. The latest report by Arsenal finds that 22 additional documents were also delivered to the computer by the same attacker. The documents — now totaling 32 — have been cited by law enfor...

Brian McGlinchey This fiscal year alone, the U.S. government will redistribute over $3.8 billion in American wealth to the government of Israel—violating federal law every step of the way. While having amassed upwards of 200 nuclear warheads, Israel is not a member of the the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)—unlike every other state on Earth other than North Korea, India, Pakistan and South Sudan. That makes U.S. aid to Israel illegal under the Symington Amendment of 1976, which bars economic and military assistance to countries that acquire nuclear reprocessing technology without submitting to international safeguards and inspections. The law was reinforced by the Glenn Amendment of 1977. Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal: A Not-So-Secret Secret Where its arsenal is concerned, Israel is said to pursue a policy of “nuclear ambiguity”—neither confirming nor denying its existence. For nearly 50 years, the U.S. government has played along. However, in the face of over...

COVID-19 cases in Palestine, especially in Gaza, have reached record highs, largely due to the arrival of a greatly contagious coronavirus variant which was first identified in Britain. Gaza has always been vulnerable to the deadly pandemic. Under a hermetic Israeli blockade since 2006, the densely populated Gaza Strip lacks basic services like clean water, electricity, or minimally-equipped hospitals. Therefore, long before COVID-19 ravaged many parts of the world, Palestinians in Gaza were dying as a result of easily treatable diseases such as diarrhea, salmonella and typhoid fever. Needless to say, Gaza’s cancer patients have little fighting chance, as the besieged Strip is left without many life-saving medications. Many Palestinian cancer patients continue to cling to the hope that Israel’s military authorities will allow them access to the better equipped Palestinian West Bank hospitals. Alas, quite often, death arrives before the long-awaited Israeli permit does. The tragedy i...

On 20 April, Dr Maung Zarni joined the 2-hour expert-discussion on Myanmar’s troubling situation since the February 1, 2021 coup against the democratically elected government of National League for Democracy. Better known as a human rights activist, Maung Zarni’s research has focused on his country’s military affairs over the last 30 years. His presentation at the Democracy Forum – broadcast live on YouTube – focused on the institutional history with Fascist DNA and its short-lived attempts at professionalisation of the military by the martyred founder General Aung San and his successor General Smith Dunn, an ethnic Karen trained at the British Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, Surrey. He pointed out that the institutional character of the Tatmadaw as government military, and the mindset of the officer corp were single-handedly moulded by the late general Ne Win, the dictator who was trained in Tokyo’s Kempeitai Training Academy, which was dismantled in 1945, following Japan’s uncon...

While this writer never felt that the inauguration of Joe Biden as president would usher in a period of Utopia for the United States, he at least felt that he had climbed out of the rabbit hole into which Alice, in the form of the Electoral College, had shoved him four years earlier. But, in true Orwellian form, black is white and white is black under this new administration. And nowhere is this bizarre view more pronounced than in the context of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Let us set a baseline of understanding. After years of negotiations, the U.S., under President Barack Obama (don’t get this writer started on him), Iran and several other nations signed an agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear development program, in exchange for the lifting of many sanctions issued against that nation. This was good news all around: many nations had a major new market for their goods, Iran was able to export its own products and services, and the world, bizarrely, breathed a ...