Mogadishu truck bomb: 500 casualties in Somalia’s worst terrorist attack

 Destroyed vehicles in the centre of Mogadishu. Officials fear the death toll will continue to rise. Photograph: Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images

Jason BurkeAfrica correspondent-Sunday 15 October 2017 19.21 BST

At least 239 people killed and hundreds seriously injured in attack blamed on militant group al-Shabaab

At least 500 people are believed to have been killed or seriously injured in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in one of the most lethal terrorist acts anywhere in the world for many years.

The death toll from Saturday’s attack, which involved a truck packed with several hundred kilograms of military-grade and homemade explosives, stood at 239 on Sunday but is expected to rise as more bodies are dug from the rubble spread over an area hundreds of metres wide in the centre of the city. At least 300 people were injured, according to local reports.

Rescue workers on the ground said it would be difficult to establish a definitive death toll because the intense heat generated by the blast meant the remains of many people would never be found.

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The devastating bombing will focus attention on the decade-long battle against al-Shabaab, an Islamist group, in Somalia. It provoked a chorus of international condemnation. Michael Keating, the UN special envoy to Somalia, called it “revolting”.

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The US mission to Somalia said: “Such cowardly attacks reinvigorate the commitment of the United States to assist our Somali and African Union partners to combat the scourge of terrorism.”

Al-Shabab earlier this year vowed to eascalate attacks after both the Trump administration and Somalia’s recently elected president announced new military efforts against the group.

Doctors struggled to treat the huge numbers of seriously wounded victims on Sunday, while thousands of people queued to give blood in Mogadishu.

Rescue workers were still digging out injured survivors late on Sunday night. Hundreds of people took the streets to protest against the attack.

The city has been hit by multiple bombings in recent years. None have been as deadly as this attack, however.

The bomb, which is thought to have targeted Somalia’s foreign ministry, was concealed in a truck and exploded near a hotel on a busy street, demolishing the building and several others.

Sources close to the Somali government said the truck had been stopped at a checkpoint and was about to be searched when the driver suddenly accelerated. It crashed through a barrier, then exploded. This ignited a fuel tanker which was stationary nearby, creating a massive fireball.

Ambulance sirens echoed across the city on Sunday afternoon as bewildered families wandered among the rubble and wrecked vehicles, looking for missing relatives. Bodies were carried from the scene in makeshift stretchers made of blankets, as people tried to dig through the debris with their bare hands.

“In our 10 year experience as the first responder in #Mogadishu, we haven’t seen anything like this,” the Aamin ambulance service tweeted.

“There’s nothing I can say. We have lost everything,” said Zainab Sharif, a mother of four who lost her husband in the attack. She sat outside a hospital where he was pronounced dead after hours of efforts by doctors to save him from an arterial injury.

Muna Haj, 36, said his son had been killed. “Today, I lost my son who was dear to me. The oppressors have taken his life away from him. I hate them. May Allah give patience to all families who lost their loved ones in that tragic blast … And I pray that one day Allah will bring his justice to the perpetrators of that evil act,” he said.

Alinur Abdi, a local businessman, said: “There is nothing resilient about this. How can you say ‘we are resilient’ when people are being killed in their hundreds? We need to get our act together and find a solution for this madness.”

The Somali president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, declared three days of national mourning and joined thousands of people who responded to a plea by hospitals to donate blood for the wounded. “I am appealing to all Somali people to come forward and donate,” he said.

Mohamed, who took power in February, had vowed to rid the country of al-Shabaab. He has faced huge challenges, with the insurgency proving resilient to a ramped-up offensive aided by the US, and a famine.

Dr Mohamed Yusuf, the director of the Mogadishu’s Medina hospital, said his staff had been “overwhelmed by both dead and wounded”.

He added: “This is really horrendous, unlike any other time in the past.”

Al-Shabaab, which has been affiliated to al-Qaida since 2011, has not yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

However the organisation has a history of launching bomb attacks against civilian targets in Mogadishu, and is known to avoid claiming responsibility for operations which it believes may significantly damage its public image among ordinary Somalis.


The scene of the explosion in Mogadishu. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters

Somalian officials said al-Shabaab did not “care about the lives of Somali people, mothers, fathers and children”.

The prime minister, Hassan Ali Khaire, said: “They have targeted the most populated area in Mogadishu, killing only civilians.”

The information minister, Abdirahman Omar Osman, said the blast was the largest the city had seen. “It’s a sad day. This is how merciless and brutal they are, and we have to unite against them,” he said.

One western expert working with the Somali government said the bomb was aimed at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that it was likely al-Shabaab had not anticipated the destruction it would cause.
“That it exploded next to a fuel tanker was just very, very bad luck,” the expert said.

Investigators will seek to establish the source of the military-grade explosives used in the bomb. One source suggested they had been stolen from Amisom, the much-criticised African Union peacekeeping mission, which has about 20,000 troops in the country.

In recent months, Al-Shabaab has stepped up its attacks as it tries to destabilise the new government of Mohamed.

Though largely confined to the countryside since withdrawing from Mogadishu six years ago, al-Shabaab has repeatedly taken over small towns, as well as inflicting significant losses on Amisom and Somali troops.

The US military has stepped up drone strikes and other efforts this year against al-Shabaab, and a US special forces operative was killed in a skirmish with the group earlier this year, the first American combat casualty in Africa since the Black Hawk Down episode in Mogadishu in 1993.

There is a small faction of extremists linked to Islamic State in the semiautonomous state of Puntland, in northern Somalia but it is not thought to have the capability to launch this kind of attack.

Saturday’s blast occurred two days after the head of the US Africa command was in Mogadishu to meet Somalia’s president, and two days after the country’s defence minister and army chief resigned for undisclosed reasons.

The British foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said the UK “condemns in the strongest terms the cowardly attacks in Mogadishu, which have claimed so many innocent lives”.

Additional reporting by Abdullahi Mire in Mogadishu

'Final phase' of battle for Raqqa as civilians flee under deal

Raqqa was the first big Syrian city to fall to Islamic State as it declared a 'caliphate' and rampaged through Syria and Iraq in 2014

A Syrian woman flashes the victory sign as civilians gather on the western front after fleeing the centre of Raqqa on 12 October (AFP)

Sunday 15 October 2017 

US-backed forces announced on Sunday the "final phase" of the battle to retake Syria's Raqqa, after the city was evacuated except for foreign Islamic State group fighters and their families.

More than 3,000 civilians fled Raqqa on Saturday night under an evacuation deal that left just a few hundred foreign IS fighters and some of their relatives in the handful of positions they still hold in their one-time Syrian stronghold.

Commanders said the way was now clear for a final assault by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-Arab militia alliance that broke into Raqqa in June and has since captured 90 percent of the city. 

SDF spokesman Talal Sello said the 3,000 civilians had evacuated to areas controlled by the SDF under a deal negotiated between local officials from the Raqqa Civil Council and Syrian IS fighters.

"Raqqa is now empty of civilians who had been taken as human shields," he said.

"Only 250 to 300 foreign terrorists who refused the deal and decided to stay and fight until the end remain in the city, and relatives of some members are with them," he said, without specifying the number of civilians.

Sello said a total of 275 Syrian IS fighters and family members had also left militant-held parts of the city and were with SDF fighters.

He declined to specify where those militants and their families would go.

With the deal's implementation, the SDF announced what it said was the last phase of the fight to capture the city.

"We are now in the final phase of the battle for Raqqa," Jihan Sheikh Ahmed, spokeswoman for the SDF's Raqqa campaign, told AFP.

In a statement, the SDF said that the last phase of the fighting would "end the presence of the terrorist mercenaries inside the city".

"The battle ... will continue until the entire city is cleared of terrorists who refuse to surrender, including foreign terrorists."

'Surrender or fight' 

There had been speculation for days about a deal to allow the SDF to capture the last parts of the city while preventing further civilian casualties.

But there had been contradictory reports about whether the deal would allow foreign IS fighters to leave, something that has been strongly opposed by the US-led coalition supporting the SDF.

The Raqqa Civil Council issued a statement Sunday afternoon denying that foreign IS fighters had been allowed to leave the city, after one of its members said "a portion of the foreigners have left".

The RCC said "for clarification and accuracy, the foreign Daesh [IS] are not at all the concern of the Raqqa Civil Council and the tribal leaders, and they cannot be pardoned."

"Those who have surrendered are only Syrians, and they number a total of 275 including their families."

The US-led coalition had on Saturday announced a convoy would leave the city, specifying that it would not include foreign IS fighters.

"We're very adamant about not allowing foreign fighters to leave the city," coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon told AFP on Sunday.

"Our stance was they either stay and fight or they surrender unconditionally."

"The last thing we want is foreign fighters to go free so they can return to their countries of origin and cause more terror and more havoc," he added.

But Dillon said local officials had not been asked for guarantees.

"This is a local solution," he said.

"While we may not fully agree with our partners sometimes, we have to respect their own solutions to their issues."

IS captured Raqqa in 2014, and under its rule the city become synonymous with the militant group's worst abuses and was transformed into a planning centre for attacks abroad.

The loss of Raqqa would be only the latest blow for IS, which has suffered a string of setbacks in recent months.

It was driven from its largest Iraqi stronghold Mosul in July and now holds only a sliver of territory in the country.

In Syria, its presence is largely confined to the eastern province of Deir Ezzor, where it is under attack by both the SDF and a Russia-backed Syrian government campaign.

On Saturday, Syria's army seized the former IS stronghold of Mayadeen in Deir Ezzor.

Russia’s Neighbors Respond to Putin’s ‘Hybrid War’

Baltic and Nordic countries turn to education as much as military hardware to counter Moscow’s hybrid threats.

RIGA, Latvia — On Aug. 30, the western Latvian region of Kurzeme suddenly lost cellular service for seven hours, an unusual event in the tech-savvy Baltic nation.

BY REID STANDISH-OCTOBER 12, 2017

Though the Latvian government has yet to say just what caused the disruption, the country’s intelligence services announced last week that they are investigating if the unusual loss of service resulted from a Russian electronic attack; a Russian ship equipped for electronic warfare was reportedly just offshore at the time.

They’re not alone: Norwegian intelligence services declared last week that their country suffered an electronic attack in September that they say came from Russia, with GPS signals on flights in northern Norway being jammed just as Moscow was carrying out its massive “Zapad” military exercise in the neighborhood.

Latvia’s concern is a reflection of the growing array of hybrid war capabilities in Russia’s arsenal — from the use of disinformation and propaganda to sow internal discord within a country, to crippling cyberattacks, to old-fashioned military power. Those capabilities have been honed in recent years in the Russian campaigns in Ukraine and Syria. But the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and their Nordic neighbors, have increasingly become a testing ground.

Lithuania has said that it has faced a constant stream of cyberattacks against its government departments since 2014, while Russian jets routinely violate national airspace in the Baltic. Estonia said that Russia abducted one of its intelligence officers in September 2014 in a high-profile incident involving smoke grenades at a customs post near the border; he was later released in a prisoner swap. Finland has also weathered a flood of false information about the war in Ukraine, fake stories about the abuse of ethnic Russians in Finland, and real threats from Russian President Vladimir Putin that Moscow will be forced to take countermeasures if the country joins NATO.

The traditional response has been to field tanks and train troops; earlier this year, NATO deployed four battalion-sized battle groups to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to deter the Russian military. But amid the heightened tensions, officials across the region say that they are moving fast to counter and adapt to Russia’s new generation of war capabilities in an emerging defense doctrine that increasingly relies on investing in brainpower as much as it does firepower.
“What we need to change is our attitude and see that this isn’t just about Russia. It’s about us,” Janis Garisons, the state secretary at Latvia’s Ministry of Defense, told Foreign Policy in an interview. “Russia is exploiting our weaknesses.”

Those weaknesses include the usual suspects, from pregnable electricity grids to porous cyber defenses. But they also include society’s vulnerability to information warfare. Russian-directed misinformation uses fake stories, doctored photos, and propaganda to confuse and distract everyday citizens and policymakers alike. In Latvia, these stories have centered around undermining the country’s membership in the European Union and NATO, but they also increasingly look to create and amplify divisions in society, whether on wedge issues like LGBT rights or discrimination toward Latvia’s ethnic Russian population.

“Sun Tzu said that the best victory is a victory won without weapons,” Garisons said, referring to the ancient Chinese military strategist, “and that is what’s been happening.” Now, the government is looking to education to fortify everyday Latvians against this multifaceted barrage.

“Our aim is now to build societies that are resilient to these kinds of threats,” Garisons said.

Currently, Latvia’s ministries of defense and education are working out how to beef up the country’s school curriculum to emphasize media literacy and critical-thinking skills at the lowest levels to inoculate future citizens against misinformation. Later, that will be complemented by elements of military training as the students get older. The goal, Garisons said, is to raise awareness of the whole spectrum of threats facing Latvia across the entire population.

“This is the new normal, and we need to adjust ourselves,” Garisons said.

In the meantime, Latvia still has to fend off more immediate threats — especially cyber and electronic attacks that are increasingly hard to attribute and require years of planning and investment to defend against.

In the case of the mysterious cellphone outage in August, Latvia’s intelligence services are still investigating whether it was the result of a deliberate Russian attack. But Latvia may not even have been the main target. Officials suspect Latvia’s western region may have been collateral damage in a broader disruption aimed at Sweden’s Oland Island, a strategic spot commanding the central Baltic and the entry to the Gulf of Bothnia. Sweden — a non-NATO member — was hosting large military exercises with the alliance in September. (A spokesperson from Sweden’s Armed Forces told FP that they had no information to offer about such an incident.)
 
Across the Baltic Sea, Finland has also been moving quickly to fortify itself against both old threats and new ones. Helsinki is spending heavily on defense, maintains a large conscript army of 280,000 soldiers, and has a growing array of civil defense initiatives. But Helsinki is also beefing up resources outside the barracks, launching a public diplomacy program to train government employees about what disinformation is and how fake news goes viral. The Nordic country has also looked to boost its already close ties with NATO, opening an EU and NATO-linked center in Helsinki in early October dedicated to researching how governments can push back against information warfare.

A shooting war is probably unlikely — “it would mean World War III,” Finnish President Sauli Niinisto told journalists last week — but a quiet one is already underway. In addition to a flood of fake news, including stories designed to inflame ethnic tensions, pro-Russian activists have targeted and harassed a Finnish journalist who was investigating the activities of troll farms in Finland. (Russian internet trolls routinely spread disinformation and amplify societal divides, in Europe as in the United States.)

So far, Finland has proven more resistant than most to the information onslaught. Finnish officials point to the prominent role that their investment in education and limiting income inequality have played in curbing the scope for outsiders to exploit divides. Foreign Ministry officials note that media literacy in the school system helped Finns turn away from fake news or propaganda sites, such as the Russian state outlet Sputnik, whose Finnish-language bureau closed in March 2016 due to low readership.

Training well-informed citizens is becoming as important as training a large conscript army that can hopefully deter invaders, Finnish officials say.

“These ideas sound robust, but it’s also about deterrence,” Mikko Kinnunen, director for security policy and crisis management at Finland’s foreign ministry, told FP. By investing in education and awareness about new types of risks, Helsinki hopes it can take away the incentive for a future cyber or large-scale disinformation attack.

“We need to have these in our toolbox in case we need to use them,” Kinnunen said.

Photo credit: Anders Wiklund/AFP/Getty Images

Correction Oct. 13: A former version of this article identified the state secretary at Latvia’s Ministry of Defense as Janis Bergmanis. His name is Janis Garisons.

North Korea not ready to meet with South Korea in Russia: agencies

FILE PHOTO: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches the launch of a Hwasong-12 missile in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on September 16, 2017. KCNA via REUTERS/File Photo

OCTOBER 15, 2017 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Politicians from North and South Korea will not hold direct talks in Russia on Monday about Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programme despite attending the same event and being urged to do so by Moscow, Russian news agencies said on Sunday. 

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, is due to discuss the missile crisis in separate talks with a deputy head of North Korea’s legislature and the head of South Korea’s parliament on the sidelines of a congress of parliamentarians in St Petersburg on Monday.

Moscow has called on the two countries to use the opportunity to have their own direct talks to try to narrow their differences.

But the RIA news agency on Sunday cited Piotr Tolstoi, the deputy speaker of the Russian lower house of parliament, and an unnamed member of North Korea’s delegation as saying there would not be any direct talks.

The unnamed North Korean delegate was quoted as saying that U.S. pressure on Pyongyang and U.S. and South Korean military exercises meant preconditions for such talks had not been met.

Konstantin Kosachyov, head of the upper house of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said Moscow would try again on Monday to encourage the two delegations to hold face-to-face talks despite the lack of progress.

Russian news agencies quoted him as saying that the North Korean delegation had so far declined to hold such talks, while the South Korean delegation had said it was ready for such a meeting.

“We will definitely not try to coerce or talk somebody into anything,” the Interfax news agency cited Kosachyov as saying.

“(But) it will be pity, both on the human and political level, if another opportunity to de-escalate tensions in relations between North Korea and South Korea is missed.”

North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile launches have stirred global tensions and prompted several rounds of international sanctions at the U.N. Security Council.

A de-escalation plan, backed by Russia and China, would see North Korea suspend its ballistic missile programme and the United States and South Korea simultaneously call a moratorium on large-scale missile exercises, both moves aimed at paving the way for multilateral talks.

Nepal at the edge of political uncertainty again

From left: K.P. Oli, Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda and SherBahadurDeuba

Saturday, 14 October 2017

With Parliamentary elections due on 26November, and the present Parliament ceasing to exist on 22October, Nepal is again standing on the edge of political uncertainty if not a political crisis.
While a change of Government due to an election is only to be expected in a democracy, Nepal has not had stability since monarchy ended in 2006. It has had 10 governments in 11 years.

Early this month, the Maoist Center (MC) led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ quit the alliance with the  Nepali Congress (NC) led by Prime Minister SherBahadurDeuba, and teamed up with the opposition Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) led by P.K.Oli and the Naya Shakti Party (NSP) founded last year by former Prime Minister BaburamBhattarai.

This unexpected move jolted Deuba and the entire Nepalese polity. The Government lost its majority. It now has only 246 out of the 593 Members of Parliament. But MC Leader Dahal has assured that his party will continue in the Government till the end of the current Parliament.

However, Dahal has also indicated that he is ready to leave the Government “if asked to”. Media reports say that the MC has been having issues with the NC as the two parties are wedded to two different ideologies. Their compatibility has always been in question. While the NC is Centre-Left, MC is Maoist/Marxist-Leninist. The MC’s natural ally is actually CPN (UML), as both are communist and pro-China to boot, while the NC is seen as pro-India.

Reports also speak of moves to secure a Caretaker Government led by a neutral person till January 2018 by when a new Parliament will have been elected.
But to defeat this move and stay on in power during the elections, Prime Minister Deuba is said to be planning to postpone the Parliamentary elections till mid-2018.

The excuse that he is sad to be trotting out is the difficulty of holding elections in the hill areas of the country under the extremely cold weather prevailing between 26 November and 7December.

But the Election Commission has been warning the Government not to take any steps that will hinder the elections. The Chief Election Commissioner, Dr. Ayodhi Prasad Yadav, has said in release that he requests the Government not to take any “unpleasant” decisions on the eve of the elections and not to let any “obnoxious” events or incidents take place in the run up to the polls.

The other option mooted is the formation of a national unity government.

“Consultations are on among parties to form such a government and it is hoped that there will be consensus on maintaining political order before elections,” the Nepalese media quoted Deep Kumar Upadhyay, former Ambassador of Nepal to India, as saying. Upadhyay had resigned recently to contest the coming elections as an NC candidate.

NC’s political future at stake

However, the more pressing problem for Deuba is to find a suitable substitute for the MC. He has to find another influential “democratic” partner to take on the consolidated leftist forces comprising the MC, CPN (UML) and the NSP. To match the “leftist and nationalist” front, he has to put together a “democratic” front.

One of the options is to strike a deal with the ‘Madesi’ parties of the Terai or plains region. The Madesis are people of Indian origin who have, for long, been having grievances against the indigenous Nepali political elite of the country.

The Maoist Centre of Dahal has some influence among the Madesis though this might be neutralized by its new ally, the CPN(UML), which has been earning the displeasure of the Madesis by its opposition to their demands in regard to amendments to the September 2015 constitution and the electoral system.

But in an interview in Kathmandu Post recently, IshworPokharel, the General Secretary  of the CPN (UML), said that the gap between his party and the Madesis is not unbridgeable as the party’s stand on issues like amending the constitution are “reasonable” and not communal.

The Madesis want the Constitutional provision saying that the “Nepali language written in Devnagari script shall be the language of official business in Nepal” to be amended. But Pokhrel points out that there is another provision which allows provinces to select national languages that are spoken by large numbers of people in that province as languages of official business. Therefore, in Terai, Hindi could be used for official purposes at the provincial level.

“Our Constitution does not promote one language over others, so the argument used by the Madhes-centric parties that it promotes Nepali language and discriminates against others is flawed,” the CPN (UML) asserted.

The second issue the Madhes-centric parties have is about Nepali citizenship.

“But our constitution proposes that foreign women married to Nepali men can obtain naturalised citizenship after initiating the process to renounce their foreign citizenship,” Pokhrel pointed out.
On the Madhesi complaint that the 22 districts in the Tarai region have only 47.27% of the total Parliamentary constituencies while the Madesis are 51% of the Terai population, the CPN (UML) leader said that constituencies are not always formed on the basis of  population but also on geographical conditions.

International perspective

From the international perspective, the worrying aspect is Nepal’s relations with India if the NC-CPN (MUL) comes to power.

While NC is known to be pro-India, the CPN (UML) is dubbed pro-China, while the NC’s stand is nebulous. However, there is no hard and fast line for these parties. They could be pro-India at one juncture and pro-China at another, depending upon their political need and the extent of pressure from the competing Big Brothers across the borders at any given point of time.

On the new alliances policy on India and China, Pokhrel said: “As Nepalis, we lack faith in ourselves. We believe that international powers have a greater say in actions that occur within our country. We have to maintain cordial relations with our two immediate neighbours, India and China.

We cannot take sides and must maintain our independence.”

“However, we also have to realise that we rely on India and China for a number of things, and as such, we need to treat our relationship with both countries with respect.It seems that the international community regards these new alliances with optimism; they wish that these parties would work together and resolve their differences.”

America’s insane gun-culture

US Constitution’s Second Amendment must be repealed

 

October 14, 2017, 6:06 pm 

Small circles show broken windows, pyramid is Hotel Luxor, across the busy road from Luxor is the concert venue. Source: New York Times

About 75% of Americans support the country’s insane gun-culture
Source BBC-Gallup

by Kumar David

"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed".

Second Amendment of the US Constitution

Gunman Stephen Paddock, acting alone so far as is known, fired an automatic weapon from the 32-nd floor of the Mandalay Hotel, Las Vegas, at 10 pm on Sunday (1 Oct) over the hotel grounds and a busy road into an open plaza, venue of a concert, killing 58 people and injuring 500. I was in the next hotel (Luxor) on Tuesday morning and walked out to see the broken windows through which he shot and the plaza across the street. Several guns were found in his hotel room and dozens in his home in a quiet retirement neighbourhood. The city was in shock and as expected many said "This is fishy there must be more to it than meets the eye". The Las Vegas Police declared "What we know is Stephen Paddock is a man who spent decades acquiring weapons and ammo and living a secret life". And that’s where today’s morality play starts.

The first ten amendments to the US Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, are not in the conventional sense amendments. They were enacted at the time and in the process of enacting the Constitution but placed in an annexe because of complex processes between Congress and States. The well-known First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and faith and effectively makes the US a secular state; splendid provisions. (Backward Lankans demand religious bigotry and racial bias in the constitution). The Tenth Amendment stipulates that all powers not explicitly allocated to the Centre belong to the States – the opposite of Lanka. If the First and Tenth clauses in the Bill of Rights are exemplary, the Second is palpably asinine. Where in the world, except bandit enclaves and remote regions like Pakistan’s inaccessible North West Frontier, is one allowed to store an arsenal at home or cart it along when visiting the mother-in-law? If a weirdo, or for that matter anybody, can legally procure, store and employ a jaw-dropping armoury, isn’t the legal system god-awful weirder?

But seriously, the US has the worst statistics in many ways. With 113 guns per 100 people it has more guns in private hands than mortal souls on terra firma! Except Central America’s de facto failed states Columbia, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela and a few others, the US has the world’s highest firearm related homicide rate. As against 3.6 per 100,000 people per years in US, the statistic in other rich countries is Hong Kong (0.00), Singapore (0.02), UK (0.06), Germany (0.07), Australia (0.16), France (0.21 and Canada (0.38). Not just lower, but one or two orders of magnitude smaller! There is no denying, though numb-skulls swear against the proposition: Unchecked availability of guns is responsible for a very high homicide, gun related suicide and accidental death rate in America.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), a big time right-wing political outfit masquerading as a sporting association, pours money into the election coffers of reactionary Congressional, Senatorial and Presidential candidates. It opposes curbs on sales, control, ownership, licencing, and background checks of prospective buyers. It is more insidious than the Ku Klux Klan because the latter is written off as a bunch of neo-Nazi loonies, and more pernicious than Lankan monks with a politico-religious agenda. The dreadful problem in America is that the public supports the unquestioned sale, retention and use of guns. The country is a slave to gun culture. A 2016 Gallup-BBC showed that while 35% of Americans supported hand-gun ownership in the 1960s it has risen to over 75% by 2015.

If you declare Lankans stupid on religion and race you will have to award the same ranking to Americans on guns. The Second Amendment (2A) must be repealed but the public won’t support this. Sensible things are often not possible because of people’s stupidity. I admire the US in many respects; its top universities are the best, its technology and scientific achievements, broadly, still unsurpassed and it is an open and plural society. Tens of thousands of people of all races and faiths frequently protest racial and religious injustice. But with a few exceptions Sinhalese Buddhists and Catholics/Christians did not lift a finger to halt the carnage of 1958, 1977 and 1983 – the leaders of the day actually egged it on. To my knowledge few Tamils took a stand against LTTE terrorism against civilians. Nevertheless though thousands of whites join civil rights campaigns and oppose anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim bias, this is soured by public foolishness on the gun issue in the US.

Merchants of fake news

Con artist Donald Trump popularised the term ‘fake news’ but it his cohorts who are expert at the black art. A proliferation of false propaganda led to Silicon Valley corporations facing scrutiny over their role in allowing false news to reach millions on their platforms. YouTube aired conspiracy theory videos claiming the shooting was a hoax, outraging survivors and victims’ families. Thereafter tech companies made little effort to prevent the spread of false and offensive propaganda. YouTube, Facebook and Google spread false reports within hours and promoted right-wing conspiracy theories misidentifying the killer as a Democrat opposed to Donald Trump, member a Muslim terror group and a person on a FBI watch list.

Media personalities Alan Jones and Wayne Allyn Root who claim millions of listeners made incendiary remarks such as "Ladies and gentlemen, the October Revolution is here, the shooting is orchestrated by shadowy global forces fomenting war in America" and "Las Vegas is in the throes of a coordinated Muslim terror attack". Leading ABC commentator Jimmy Kimmel was moved to respond "No breathing human on this planet produces more fake news than Donald Trump".

Progressive Democrats such as Nancy Polanski do not mention repeal of 2A, though it is undeniably clear to any creature with a brain that this is what should be done. Reflect on the misery of our wiser constitution drafters who know that the provisions on Buddhism/Religion are relics that should be jettisoned but they are bound hand and foot by intolerant public narrow-mindedness. Our drafters are constrained to juggle with "unitary", aekiya", "united and indivisible" and such bosh instead of a bold declaration of devolution of power away from the centre. So too Polanski, Bernie Sanders and the US Democrats are struggling to do only what is possible: Get some sort of bipartisan gun-control legislation pushed through instead of full-blooded repeal of 2A.

In Rakhine State, Burma soldiers use murder, rape and fire to drive hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes. (References to jihadist terrorism and Wahabism are to pull the wool over the eyes of public opinion). Burma is in transition from military rule to democracy with power still split between the two. But civilian politicians, including Aung San Suu Kyi have not lifted a finger in defence of the Muslim Rohingya. True, Suu Kyi is no Gandhi or Mandela in moral stature and her elected cohorts are not free of prejudice, but anti-Muslim bigotry is as pervasive in Burma as it is in Lanka. In this context standing for the rights of the Muslim minority there is more dangerous than making concessions to Tamils in Sri Lanka. Burman Buddhists will not hesitate to support a military coup and a return to dictatorship if the government attempts to protect Muslims.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub say in the New York Times of 5 October:

Quote: "It goes to show that even a partial transition to democracy imperil the ideals it is meant to protect. But how valuable is democracy if it leads to harsh, majoritarian populism, forcing the weak to pay a high price for that democratic option? At what point does an elected government lose moral authority? Today’s nascent democracies are held to a much higher moral standard than older ones were in their early days? The United States relied on slave labour and waged brutal ethnic cleansing against Native Americans. Europeans used slavery, torture and oppression to control their colonies. The atrocities are abhorrent and shameful, but it is easy for us to see it from the comfortable vantage of today’s wealth and stability. Much of what we have today is derived from the oppression of others. We need to take a cold, hard look at the difficulties of establishing democracy". End quote.

We in Sri Lanka too need to take a cold hard look at these issues of fractured democracy in the context of an ever receding prospect of an even half-decent constitution – anodyne fixes aside.

Am I too harsh on Suu Kyi and the yahapalanaya government? The former terminated outright military dictatorship, the latter saw off the repressive and corrupt Rajapaksa regime; both valuable feats not to be belittled. So the purpose of my harsh criticism is to halt backsliding, and if need be, to move forward another step to a better alternative.

America to Rethink of its Role in Global Affairs

Lacking the visionary leadership, President Obama lost precious time and opportunities to deliver “Yes, We Can.” Now, President Trump is making headlines with inherent stagnation of inner look on the current global affairs.

by Mahboob A Khawaja- Oct 15, 2017

( October 15, 2017, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) America under President Trump continues to foster an agenda of extreme perplexity, triviality and confusion in dealing with urgent global affairs. If the administration were to learn from the history, it must be candid, focused and redirect its strengths and weaknesses from the past and usher a new strategic direction of change and adaptability to the present and futuristic challenges of collaborative understanding with all the global powers. This should include the conflict in Syria, Iran nuclear deal, agreement on climate change and pursuing a balanced approach to Israel-Palestine issues.

How to Comprehend the Contradictions of the US Policy Behavior?

Lacking the visionary leadership, President Obama lost precious time and opportunities to deliver “Yes, We Can.” Now, President Trump is making headlines with inherent stagnation of inner look on the current global affairs. Every day is becoming a strange new media theater of absurdity, not distinguishing between the problems and solutions. American politics endured wide range of human, intellectual, political and material losses because of the wrong thinking, wrong actions and dubious performance of the former Obama and Bush administrations. The war agenda destroyed America’s capacity and credibility as an influential global power. The perpetrators of prolonged war agenda floating above the normal mindset must be abnormal – insane – irresponsible, utterly individualistic paranoid to make such move on behalf of the people who elected them for change and peacemaking.

World affairs are a complex discipline and often require serious and impartial mindset to see the issues objectively, rationally and dispassionately. The US Trump administration is uncertain and lacks imagination and repeating the blunders of the Bush era – acting like immature kids who get mad while playing with toys – behaving like the sadistic Razor King we read in European history who broiled his enemies and enjoyed witnessing the live killings. Strangely, Obama lied about prospective change and opening up a dialogue with the Muslim world. This was a fiction, not a fact of policy shift to get elected. Often change bring hopes and optimism for something different – an escape from the cruel obsession of the few to something more conducive to the human nature. But you can only expect this from rational beings having fullest sense of moral, intellectual and professional accountability to the society that bestows legitimacy to their role and official standing, certainly not from those who appear to have lost all basic norms of morality and civilization. Julia Dalton (“Is Obama the Trojan Horse, A Psychopath, A Bad Boyfriend or all Three?” OpenEdNews: 1/07/2012), a strong former supporter of Obama notes that President Obama was more of a psychopath and a Trojan horse than being an author of Audacity of Hope, and imaginative manipulator of “Yes We Can” to win the elections.

Leaders or War Criminals to be Held Accountable

After the atrocities of the 2nd World War, the allied forces captured and tried many Nazis for crimes against humanity. Now, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tony Blair and many others have been identified by the Kualalumpur International Commission on Crimes against Humanity as involved in the crimes against humanity for the killing of millions of innocent civilians men, women and children in Iraq. On June 28, 2005 at the Berlin Strategic Seminar (“America’s Indispensable Role in Securing the Future of Civilization” Executive Intelligence Review: 7/8/2005), American intellectual Lyndon LaRouche offered the following observations about President Bush and Cheney’s insanity to make them unfit for the policy making and leadership office:

“Now, the United States Constitution provides for impeachment. The intrinsic basis for impeachment, is not conviction for some crime. That is not sufficient basis for impeachment, because the question of the Presidency of the United States is the question of an institution, not of a person. But, if the person who occupies that institution is clinically insane, or is otherwise incompetent to serve, that is sufficient grounds for a charge of impeachment and for his removal from office. On the other hand, we have a Vice President, who is not necessarily a psychopath, but is a sociopath. The man must be removed from office. What we have now, as a result of the actions and continuing actions in the Senate, we have a bloc, being exerted by the U.S. Senate, against the dangers intrinsic in the incumbency of these two creatures, and the people who control them. And therefore, if the world is to be saved, these two creatures must be kept under control and removed from office—not four years or three years from now, but in the immediate future.”

Why did Obama not take action to bring all these culprits to justice? Did Obama have similar characteristics and features of insanity like Bush, Blair and Cheney? If so, should the Norwegian Nobel Committee have revoked the Peace Prize given to Obama without performance and accountability? Julia Dalton finds it a fact of life that Obama is a wrong guy to occupy the post of president of the US:

“I know it’s hard to admit you made a mistake. I get it. You really believed this guy was “the one” and he is the one for the 1%: Wall Street, the too big to fail banks, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, big oil, big pharma, i.e. the corporate fascist state he’s so gingerly locking into place…………And, therefore, I feel it’s my duty to do an intervention. For those of you still deluding yourselves, who still can’t face reality I suggest therapy or better yet maybe pick up a copy of “He’s just Not That into You.”

Nothing is going to last unto eternity- for sure; Obama faced many limitations and overburden too, the pinch of self-exalted individualistic opportunitism, so common amongst all the political contenders of public goodness, civility and humanity. They all pretend like the puppets do, politicians are no different a specie but the same kind. Julia Dalton thinks so:

“The Obama brand is collapsing just as the Bush brand before him became so craven even the most deluded had to recognize the fraud that had been perpetrated upon the American people”

Could America Make a Navigational Change for a Peaceful Future?

Paul Craig Roberts (“the Next War on Washington’s Agenda.” OpenEdnews: 01/12/2012), spells out the ingrained political cynicism governing the Washington’s based military-industrial complex of which Mr. Obama was the latest willing participatory leader.

You wonder, what is this all fuss about? President Trump as of October 14, 2017 is revisiting the traditional belligerent strategy against Iran by refusal to testify the Iranian compliance on the international nuclear agreement. It opens up new suspicious weakness in US policy behavior- who could trust the American behavior even in situation of solid global agreement? Paul Craig Roberts (“the Next War on Washington’s Agenda.”), noted three major reasons for the US policy pursuit against Iran:

“One is the neoconservative ideology, adopted by the US government that calls for the US to use its superior military and economic position to achieve world hegemony. This goal appeals to American hubris and to the power and profit that it serves….A second factor is Israel’s desire to eliminate all support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel’s goal is to seize all of Palestine and the water resources of southern Lebanon. Eliminating Iran removes all obstacles to Israel’s expansion…..

It is unthinkable and irrational stance that if Iran develops the nuclear know-how and capacity and that it could threaten anyone in the region or beyond. We live in an age of actions-reactions and nuclear reprisals – no one would like to be candidate for the first strike to ensure self-destruction, and those who possess the nuclear capability know it well, understand its disastrous consequences to use the nuclear weapons. The North Korean nuclear crisis is a current example in global affairs. American leadership knows it well too. Imagine, if the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the absolute king of Iran was alive and buying the weapons from the US, would America move to strangle Iran? No, certainly NO. Isn’t this another myth of the continued bogus War on Terrorism raged on the false pretext of the WMD in Iraq?

Mankind looks for Hope for peace and co-existence amongst the divergent cultures and nations of the world. Global politics is not a system of moral principles or intellectual and political values but often a game – a cruel drama – a puppet show often staged to appease the few draculas – a psychopath puzzle of few insane people who had nothing useful to contribute to the mankind except drudgery, deceit, lies and inborn deceptions – the previous net outcome of this thinking was the continuing bogus War on Terrorism. Wars are planned, conspired and are the outcome of few cruel monsters – egomaniac mindsets, not of the electoral consensus of the rational beings dreaming of life as a gift from God, progressive in civility and nobility of thoughts and behaviors and being accountable to the rest of the humanity. The Europeans have come to realize these harsh facts after centuries of wide ranging insanity and Two World Wars and killing of millions and millions of fellow Europeans just to maintain racial superiority, national borders, rule of the few obsessed with individualistic power. Should the Americans not learn from the annals of the darkest chapters of the modern European history? Paul Craig Roberts attempts to reflect on this much needed historical Essence of Learning and the Urgent need for a Navigational Change:

“We, as Americans, need to ask ourselves what all this is about? Why is our government so provocative toward Islam, Russia, China, Iran? What purpose, whose purpose is being served? Certainly not ours…………Where do we go from here? If not to nuclear destruction, Americans must wake up. Football games, porn, and shopping malls are one thing. Survival of human life is another. Washington, that is, “representative government,” consists only of a few powerful vested interests. These private interests, not the American people, control the US government. That is why nothing that the US government does benefits the American people.”

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in global security, peace and conflict resolution-international affairs with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including Global Peace and Conflict Management: Man and Humanity in Search of New Thinking. Germany, May 2012. His forthcoming publications are entitled: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution; and Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution: Approaches to Understand the Current Issues and Future-Making, Germany, 2017).

Here’s what ride-hailing app Grab thinks about rival Uber’s alleged spying

Grab says companies should be held accountable for their corporate behavior after allegations of spying emerged against rival Uber. Source: fivestarsandamoon.

By A. Azim Idris -13th October 2017

RIDE-HAILING company Grab believes action should be taken against Uber if the spying allegations against its global competitor were true.

In a statement to Asian Correspondent on Thursday, Grab said it had full confidence in the capabilities of law enforcement agencies to investigate the recent claim, which was revealed in a Bloomberg report.

The statement, issued by Grab’s communications team, said Uber’s alleged practices had not impacted Grab’s “leadership in ride-hailing” and the company remained focused on growing its business and cementing its “unassailable market leadership”.

“We uphold ourselves to strict quality management standards and internal governance, and work closely with regulators and governments in all the countries that we operate in for nation-building efforts,” the statement read.

“We believe in being responsible corporate citizens and believe companies should be held accountable by the government and public for their corporate behaviour.”

SEE ALSO: Uber under investigation over allegations of bribery in Asia 

According to the Bloomberg report on Tuesday, Uber’s staff allegedly deployed a special software, called Surfcam, to scrape data from its competitors to find out how many drivers were in their systems in real-time and their locations.

Uber also reportedly used the tool on Grab, its biggest rival in Southeast Asia since a breakthrough on the software came in 2015 from Uber’s office in Sydney.

FRANK BULLITT‏ @FrankBullitt39

USE UBER BEST READ THEIR CONDITIONS ON SPYING ON ALL THE DATA THAT GOES THROUGH YOUR PHONE #bigbrother IS WATCHING YOUR EVERY MOVE

4:52 am - 7 Oct 2017

While much has not been reported about Surfcam, the software was named after webcams popularly used in Australia and other countries which were used to help surfers read swells and determine the best times to ride them.

A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that the software was a cause for concern with at least one member of Uber’s legal team as it may run afoul of Grab’s terms or Singapore’s strict computer-crime laws.

Uber has yet to respond to the allegation.

On the legality of Surfcam, Choo Zheng Xi, a litigation lawyer and director at Singapore-based law firm Peter Low & Choo, told Tech in Asia that the “practice may potentially get problematic is if data scraping turns into something more targeted and invasive.”

SEE ALSO: Malaysian government body denies links to Uber bribery allegations

Choo said Uber would likely be held liable under Singapore’s Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act (CMCA) if it had scraped data owned by Grab.

“It’s less controversial if Uber was merely trying to obtain insights into customer behaviour by data scraping public interactions on the Grab web page,” Choo was quoted as saying.

“Apart from whether or not Uber’s broken any laws, if Grab lawyers up, they’d probably be advised to start looking into questions of whether Grab can characterize Uber’s behaviour, together with its software developers, as a conspiracy to cause it economic loss by illegal means. Again, the jury’s out on that.”

However, Wayne Ong, another Singapore-based lawyer said that data scraping per se is illegal, but rather, the manner by which the data is obtained is what should be asked.

“The CMCA protects against hacking. If the data used is publicly available, there may not be any hacking involved.”