Tag Archives: WorldNews

U.S. Intelligence Agencies Prepare to Pull Back Officers From Africa

Trump – leave and let Russian and China take over… An expected withdrawal of military forces would lead the C.I.A. and other agencies to reduce their presence, leaving some officials and experts fearful of a gap in stopping terrorist threats.

India’s founding values are threatened by sinister new forms of oppression | Madhav Khosla

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By employing drones and facial recognition against the opposition, Narendra Modi seems heedless of civil liberties and justice

The anger is extraordinary for its depth and ferocity. In protests that have spread across the world’s largest democracy, Indians of all stripes have taken to the streets. Two weeks ago, the government amended the citizenship law to speed up applications for refugees from surrounding countries who are Hindu, Christian, Parsi, Jain or Buddhist – but not Muslim. The law coincides with an attempt to create a new list of India’s citizens, a task whose precise mechanism has evolved in recent days. Regardless of the details, it will be a Kafkaesque exercise during which poor people with few official documents will have to prove their citizenship. If they happen to be Muslim, the citizenship law means the consequences they face will be different. Detention centres mushrooming across India reveal what those might be.

The pan-Indian nature of the outcry is striking. India has long been home to disobedience, but the scale and reach of the present discontent is rare. Though the protests have been painted as a conspiracy limited to Muslim and elite forces, elements that have come together to suppress the real India, there seems to be genuine and diverse opposition to the plainly exclusionary citizenship law. As the drama and horror have unfolded, both the protesters and the state have acted in familiar ways. We have seen student agitations, silent marches, legal orders, police brutality and recriminations. Yet there is something special about this episode, something new on each side.

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Government exposes addresses of new year honours recipients

Thank Tory non-competent leadership-management

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Cabinet Office apologises after details of more than 1,000 people posted online in error

More than 1,000 celebrities, government employees and politicians who received honours in the new year list have had their home and work addresses posted on a government website, the Guardian can reveal.

The accidental disclosure of a tranche of personal details of those being celebrated for their service to British society is likely to be considered a major security breach, particularly as senior police and Ministry of Defence staff were among those whose details were made public.

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Johnson visit to Lebedev party after victory odd move for ‘people’s PM’

traitor British style

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PM mingled with Russian elite amid claims of Moscow interference in UK politics

It was the equivalent of a V-sign cheerfully flashed at his critics. The day after his landslide election victory, Boris Johnson and his girlfriend Carrie Symonds dropped into a caviar-fuelled Christmas party in London hosted by former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny.

During the campaign Johnson had stubbornly refused to publish the Russia report, written by the last parliament’s intelligence and security committee.

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The BJP wants to silence us. But our voices will only grow louder | Amit Chaudhuri

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The backlash against the Citizenship Amendment Act shows that Indians will not accept the party’s distorted vision for their country

Huge nationwide protests, involving people of various religions, professions, castes and classes, such as haven’t been seen since the freedom struggle, took place in India last week. To understand this outpouring of rage and euphoria connected specifically to the recent Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), and more broadly to what it means to be an Indian, we must look to the re-election of the rightwing Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in May with an overwhelming majority.

Absolute power became for the BJP a licence to initiate one draconian change after another, all of them in some way to do with the status of Muslims in India, and, umbilically connected to this, with the status of democracy. Among these was the implementation of a national register of citizens (NRC) in the state of Assam, ostensibly to uncover illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. The real motive seemed to be to identify Muslim migrants. The government made a promise: once this was complete, it would happen in the rest of India.

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