World

Kim Jong Un has declared "a new history begins now" after shaking hands with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the start of a landmark peace summit.

Kim became the first North Korean leader to step into South Korean territory since 1953 on Friday morning, crossing the line that separates the two Koreas at the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in a highly choreographed moment that was beamed live to the world.

He was greeted by President Moon before walking along a red carpet to the Peace House for the first meeting between the leaders of the divided Koreas since 2007.

The two leaders appeared at ease, smiling and talking, and on entering the Peace House Kim signed a guest book, where he wrote "a new history begins now" and "an age of peace, at the starting point of history."

Kim and Moon have a full day of talks that are expected to focus on three subjects with worldwide implications -- the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a peace settlement and the improvement of bilateral relations.

Source : CNN

A 57-year-old bureaucrat replaced Raul Castro as the president of Cuba on Thursday, launching a new political era as a government led by a single family for six decades tries to ensure the long-term survival of one of the world’s last communist states.

The National Assembly announced that Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez had been approved as the sole candidate for president.

The 86-year-old Castro will remain head of the Communist Party, which is designated by the constitution as “the superior guiding force of society and the state.” As a result, he will still be the most powerful person in Cuba for the time being.

His departure from the presidency is nonetheless a symbolically charged moment for a country that has been under the absolute rule of one family since the revolution — first by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and, for the last decade, his younger brother.

Facing biological reality but still active and apparently healthy, Raul Castro is stepping down as president in an effort to guarantee that new leaders can maintain the government’s grip on power in the face of economic stagnation, an aging population and increasing disenchantment among younger generations.

“I like sticking with the ideas of President Fidel Castro because he did a lot for the people of Cuba, but we need rejuvenation, above all in the economy,” said Melissa Mederos, a 21-year-old schoolteacher. “Diaz-Canel needs to work hard on the economy, because people need to live a little better.”

Most Cubans know their first vice-president as an uncharismatic figure who until recently maintained a public profile so low it was virtually nonexistent. That image changed slightly this year as state media placed an increasing spotlight on Diaz-Canel’s public appearances, including remarks to the press last month that included his promise to make Cuba’s government more responsive to its people.

“We’re building a relationship between the government and the people here,” he said then after casting a ballot for members of the National Assembly. “The lives of those who will be elected have to be focused on relating to the people, listening to the people, investigating their problems and encouraging debate.”

Diaz-Canel gained prominence in central Villa Clara province as the top Communist Party official, a post equivalent to governor. People there describe him as a hard-working, modest-living technocrat dedicated to improving public services. He became higher education minister in 2009 before moving into the vice presidency.

In a video of a Communist Party meeting that inexplicably leaked to the public last year, Diaz-Canel expressed a series of orthodox positions that included somberly pledging to shutter some independent media and labeling some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.

But he has also defended academics and bloggers who became targets of hardliners, leading some to describe him a potential advocate for greater openness in a system intolerant of virtually any criticism or dissent. International observers and Cubans alike will be scrutinizing every move he makes after he officially takes office on Thursday.

Two years after taking over from his ailing brother in 2006, Castro launched a series of reforms that expanded Cuba’s private sector to nearly 600,000 people and allowed citizens greater freedom to travel and access to information. He has failed to fix the generally unproductive and highly subsidized state-run businesses that, along with a Soviet-model bureaucracy, employ three of every four Cubans. State salaries average $30 a month, leaving workers struggling to feed their families, and often dependent on corruption or remittances from relatives overseas.

Castro’s moves to open the economy have largely been frozen or reversed as soon as they began to generate conspicuous shows of wealth by the new entrepreneurial class in a country officially dedicated to equality among its citizens.

“I don’t want to see a capitalist system, hopefully that doesn’t come here, but we have to fix the economy,” said Roberto Sanchez, a 41-year-old construction worker. “I’d like to have more opportunity, to buy a car, and have a few possessions.”

As in Cuba’s legislative elections, all of the leaders selected Wednesday were picked by a government-appointed commission. Ballots offer only the option of approval or disapproval and candidates generally receive more than 95 per cent of the votes in their favour.

The Candidacy Commission also nominated another six vice-presidents of the Council of State, Cuba’s highest government body. Only one, 85-year-old Ramiro Valdez, was among the revolutionaries who fought with the Castros in the late 1950s in the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.

State media went into overdrive Wednesday with a single message: Cuba’s system is continuing in the face of change. Commentators on state television and online offered lengthy explanations of why Cuba’s single-party politics and socialist economy are superior to multi-party democracy and free markets, and assured Cubans that no fundamental changes were occurring, despite some new faces at the top.

“It falls on our generation to give continuity to the revolutionary process,” said assembly member Jorge Luis Torres, a municipal councilman from central Artemisa province who appeared to be in his 40s. “We’re a generation born after the revolution, whose responsibility is driving the destiny of the nation.”

Source : AP

Thirteen children have died after their school bus collided with a train in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Indian police said today.

The bus had been travelling across an unmanned railway crossing when the accident took place. The incident comes weeks after 24 children died when their bus fell into a gorge in Himachal Pradesh state.

Road accidents are common in India, often due to poor driving or badly maintained roads and vehicles. The latest incident took place in the Kushinagar region of Uttar Pradesh state. It is not yet known how many children were travelling in the bus. 

The state government has ordered an investigation into the incident and announced compensation to the families of those killed in the accident. 

(BBC)

Iran is expected to block the popular messaging app Telegram, following similar measures taken by Russia, after the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, announced he was leaving the service to safeguard the national interest.

Telegram has proved a massive success in Iran, dwarfing the number of people using its global rival WhatsApp, and surpassing Facebook and Twitter, which have both been blocked for a long time in the country.

About 40 million Iranians – almost half of the country’s population – are estimated to be on Telegram, which has also appealed to older generations previously unfamiliar with the use of such social media platforms. In addition to one-to-one or group messaging, it allows users to broadcast posts to large audiences with its channel function.

Khamenei’s office announced on Wednesday that it was shutting down the ayatollah’s Telegram channel in order to safeguard national interests and end what it said was Telegram’s monopoly on the country’s social media.

The announcement also signalled that a nationwide ban on the app was imminent. “This move comes ahead of plans by the authorities to block Telegram and is aimed at supporting domestic social media apps,” read the brief message.

Iran’s vice-president, Eshaq Jahangiri, also announced that he was quitting Telegram. Officials also sent a directive to all civil servants and government departments telling them to stop using Telegram.

Iran has been mulling a ban on Telegram ever since protests over economic grievances at the end of last year took on a political dimension before spreading to up to 80 cities in January. Officials blamed Telegram for providing a platform for protesters to organise rallies.

The country’s technology minister personally reached out to Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, at the time, asking him to block channels that he alleged were spreading violence, prompting one such channel – that had been spreading misinformation – to be blocked.

Iranians have shown huge resilience when it comes to the state blocking their access to online services, sites and social platforms. They have mastered anti-filtering software to bypass state restrictions and often migrate in their millions to a new platform when one is blocked. The success of Telegram is partly thanks to Iranians rapidly switching to the messaging service when Viber was blocked.

The news in Iran comes after Russia’s internet watchdog blocked an estimated 16m IP addresses in a massive operation against the banned Telegram messaging app four days after a court ordered the service to be blocked over alleged terrorism concerns.

Source : The Guardian

WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook Inc. is raising its minimum age from 13 to 16 in Europe to help it comply with new data privacy rules coming into force next month.WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook Inc. is raising its minimum age from 13 to 16 in Europe to help it comply with new data privacy rules coming into force next month.

WhatsApp will ask European users to confirm they are at least 16 years old when they are prompted to agree new terms of service and a privacy policy provided by a new WhatsApp Ireland Ltd entity in the next few weeks.

It is not clear how or if the age limit will be checked given the limited data requested and held by the service.

Facebook, which has a separate data policy, is taking a different approach to teens aged between 13 and 15 in order to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law.

It is asking them to nominate a parent or guardian to give permission for them to share information on the platform, otherwise they will not see a fully personalized version of the social media platform.

But WhatsApp, which had more than 1.5 billion users in January according to Facebook, said in a blog post it was not asking for any new rights to collect personal information in the agreement it has created for the European Union.

“Our goal is simply to explain how we use and protect the limited information we have about you,” it said.

WhatsApp, founded in 2009, has come under pressure from some European governments in recent years because of its end-to-end encrypted messaging system and its plan to share more data with its parent, Facebook.

Facebook itself is under scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers around the world since disclosing last month that the personal information of millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, setting off wider concerns about how it handles user data.

WhatsApp’s minimum age of use will remain 13 years in the rest of the world, in line with its parent.

Source : Reuters

Turkey will hold snap presidential and parliamentary elections on 24 June, brought forward by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from November 2019.

He has run Turkey since 2002 and will seek five more years with beefed up powers approved in a referendum last year.

The idea of an early poll was initially proposed by nationalist allies.

Erdogan said in a televised speech the country needed the new election to rid it of "the diseases of the old system".

"Developments in Syria and elsewhere have made it urgent to switch to the new executive system in order to take steps for our country's future in a stronger way," the president said in a live broadcast.

Erdogan said he had made the decision after speaking to the head of the nationalist MHP party, Devlet Bahceli, who is expected to form an alliance with Erdogan's ruling AK Party in the parliamentary polls.

Source : BBC

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has questioned the legitimacy of efforts by the US and its European allies to change a nuclear deal with his country.Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has questioned the legitimacy of efforts by the US and its European allies to change a nuclear deal with his country.

The US and French leaders announced on Tuesday that they were working on a "new deal" that would expand and extend the terms of the 2015 accord.

But Rouhani said they had no "right" to renegotiate a seven-party agreement.

He also dismissed US President Donald Trump as a "tradesman" not qualified to comment on global treaties.

"You don't have any background in politics," he said. "You don't have any background in law. You don't have any background on international treaties."

The former US first lady Barbara Bush has died at the age of 92, a family spokesman has said.Bush had been in failing health in recent days – she reportedly had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and congestive heart failure. A family spokesman, Jim McGrath, said in a 15 April statement: “Following a recent series of hospitalizations, and after consulting her family and doctors, Mrs Bush has decided not to seek additional medical treatment and will instead focus on comfort care.”

Born in New York in 1925, Barbara Pierce married George HW Bush on 6 January 1945. They had six children including the former president George W Bush and the former Florida governor Jeb Bush. She is also survived by her sons Neil and Marvin and her daughter Doro Bush Koch. Her daughter Robin died at the age of three in 1953.

 As first lady from 1989 to 1993, Bush was an advocate for literacy and started the Barbara Bush Foundation to promote this goal. She drew attention while at the White House for seeking to eschew politics, particularly controversial issues such as abortion.

Mario Abdo Benitez, the candidate from Paraguay's ruling Colorado Party, won the presidential election on Sunday, data released by the country's election tribunal showed.Mario Abdo Benitez, the candidate from Paraguay's ruling Colorado Party, won the presidential election on Sunday, data released by the country's election tribunal showed.

According to results released by the Superior Court of Electoral Justice (TSJE) of Paraguay, Abdo Benitez garnered 46.44 percent of the votes, while his main rival Efrain Alegre from the opposition Ganar Alliance pocketed 42.74 percent after 99.67 percent of ballots were counted.

Jaime Bestard, the TSJE president, announced in a press conference that this result is "irreversible."

The margin of victory is much tighter than that indicated by pre-election opinion polls.

Abdo Benitez pledged to "unite the country" in front of thousands of supporters on Sunday night at the headquarters of the Colorado Party in the capital Asuncion after the TSJE declared his victory. "The people voted for the unity of Paraguay and not for the division of Paraguay, and today I am committed to being a unifying factor in the future of Paraguay," Abdo said.

Abdo Benitez, 46, will take office and begin a five-year term in August when he succeeds outgoing President Horacio Cartes. 

Source : Xinhua

The Maldives rejected a demand by a U.N. human rights watchdog on Monday that former president Mohamed Nasheed be allowed to stand for office, including in a presidential election later this year.

 The U.N. Human Rights Committee, a panel of independent experts overseeing states’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, said Nasheed’s conviction on terrorism charges was based on vague laws, contained serious flaws and violated his right to a fair trial.

“Political rights can be suspended or restricted only in exceptional circumstances and under certain conditions. And judicial proceedings that violate the right to fair trial can render the resulting restriction of political rights arbitrary,” committee member Sarah Cleveland said in a statement.

Nasheed was sentenced to 13 years in jail but went into exile during a medical trip to Britain. He was disqualified from running in presidential elections for 16 years.

The committee said it wanted information from the Maldives within 180 days about measures taken to take its views into account, and said those measures should be disseminated broadly in the official languages of the Maldives.

But the government swiftly rejected the Committee’s report.

“The Government of the Maldives... wholeheartedly refutes that any of these rights have been violated in the case of the former President Nasheed. The Government accepts the conviction of Nasheed as lawful and final,” it said in a statement.

It described Nasheed as a fugitive and said the U.N. committee had not given enough consideration to information submitted by the government.

“Having attempted to subvert the course of justice and dismantle the judicial branch of the State, both while in Office and since leaving it, former President Nasheed was charged for having ordered the abduction of a sitting judge,” it said.

The Maldives, home to 400,000 people and best known as a tropical paradise for tourists, has experienced political unrest since Nasheed, the island’s first democratically-elected leader, was forced to quit amid a mutiny by police in 2012.

The current president Abdulla Yameen imposed a state of emergency in February to annul a Supreme Court ruling that quashed the convictions of nine opposition leaders, including Nasheed.

During the 45-day emergency, Yameen’s administration arrested former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the chief justice, another Supreme Court judge and a Supreme Court administrator on charges of trying to overthrow the government.

All four have been charged under terrorism laws. They have all rejected the charges.

The Supreme court, now reduced to three bench judges after the arrests, went on to reverse its decision to quash the convictions of the opposition leaders.

Source : Reuters

King Mswati III of Swaziland announced on Wednesday that he was renaming the country "the Kingdom of eSwatini".

The monarch announced the official change in a stadium during celebrations for the 50th anniversary of Swazi independence.

The celebrations also marked the king's 50th birthday. The new name, eSwatini, means "land of the Swazis". The change was unexpected, but King Mswati has been referring to Swaziland for years as eSwatini.

It was the name the king used when he addressed the UN general assembly in 2017 and at the state opening of the country's parliament in 2014.

He explained that the name had caused some confusion, saying: "Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland."

Source : BBC

A prominent US lawyer has died after setting himself on fire in a New York park in a protest against climate change.

The remains of David Buckel, 60, were found in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

In a suicide note found nearby, Mr Buckel wrote that he had immolated himself using fossil fuel to symbolise what he said was the damage human beings were doing to the Earth.

He said most people now breathed bad air and many died prematurely.

Buckel was well known for his legal work on behalf of gay, lesbian and transgender people and later worked with several environmental groups.

Source : BBC