#Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman

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Violent clashes have broken out in Pakistan between security forces and supporters of former prime minister Imran Khan after he was arrested on Tuesday.

Protests are erupting nationwide, and at least one person has been killed in the city of Quetta.

The United States and UK have called for adherence to the "rule of law".

Mr Khan was arrested by security forces at the High Court in the capital, Islamabad.

Dramatic footage showed dozens of officers arriving and detaining the 70-year-old, who was bundled into a vehicle and driven away.

He was appearing in court on charges of corruption, which he says are politically motivated.

Mobile data services in the country were suspended on the instructions of the interior ministry on Friday as protests grew, many of them taking place in front of army compounds.

Pakistan's army plays a prominent role in politics, sometimes seizing power in military coups, and, on other occasions, pulling levers behind the scenes.

Many analysts believe Mr Khan's election win in 2018 happened with the help of the military. Now in opposition, he is one of its most vocal critics, and analysts say the army's popularity has fallen.

Footage from Lahore posted on Twitter appeared to show a crowd breaking into the military corps commander's house destroying furniture and belongings inside.

Speaking from Washington, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he wanted to make sure that "whatever happens in Pakistan is consistent with the rule of law, with the constitution".

UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, speaking alongside Blinken, noted that Britain enjoyed "a longstanding and close relationship" with Commonwealth member Pakistan, and wanted to "see the rule of law adhered to".

On Tuesday evening, supporters of Imran Khan gathered outside the Pakistan High Commission in London to protest against his arrest.

'Chaos and anarchy'

Mr Khan was ousted as PM in April last year and has been campaigning for early elections since then.

General elections are due to be held later this year.

Speaking to the BBC's Newshour, Mr Khan's spokesman, Raoof Hasan, said he expected "the worst" and that the arrest could plunge the country "into chaos and anarchy".

"We're facing multiple crises. There is an economic crisis, there is a political crisis, there is a cost of livelihood crisis and consequently this occasion will be a catharsis for them to step out and I fear a fair amount of violence is going to be back," he said.

A member of Mr Khan's legal team, Raja Mateen, said undue force had been used against him at the court.

"Mr Khan went into the biometric office for the biometrics. The rangers went there, they broke the windows, they hit Mr Khan on the head with a baton," said Mr Mateen.

Mr Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party called on its supporters to protest. In the hours after he was detained, violence was reported from cities including Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar.

On the streets of Islamabad, hundreds of protesters blocked one of the main highways in and out of the capital.

People pulled down street signs and parts of overpasses, lit fires and threw stones. During the hour or so that the BBC was there, no police or authorities were visible.

Protesters said they were angry about Imran Khan's arrest.

"This is absolutely the last straw," said Farida Roedad.

"Let there be anarchy, let there be chaos. If there is no Imran, there's nothing left in Pakistan. No one is there to take over."

Writing on social media, police in Islamabad said five police officers had been injured and 43 protesters arrested.

It said at least 10 people, including six police officers, had been injured in the south-western city of Quetta in clashes between Mr Khan's supporters and security forces - with one protester killed.

A statement from the inspector general of Punjab police said the arrest of Mr Khan had been ordered because he was accused of "corruption and corrupt practices".

The case involves allegations over the allotment of land in the so-called Al-Qadir Trust, which is owned by Mr Khan and his wife, Dawn newspaper reported.

Mr Khan, who is being held at an undisclosed location, denies breaking any law.

In a video message filmed as he travelled to Islamabad - and released by the PTI before his arrest - Mr Khan said he was ready for what lay ahead.

"Come to me with warrants, my lawyers will be there," he said. "If you want to send me to jail, I am prepared for it."

Security was tight in the centre of the capital for the former PM's court appearance.

Dozens of cases have been brought against Mr Khan since he was ousted from power.

The security forces have tried to detain him on a number of previous occasions at his Lahore residence, but were blocked by his supporters, resulting in fierce clashes.

On Tuesday, police had blocked roads into Islamabad, so the number of supporters with Imran Khan was not as high as on previous occasions, making it easier to arrest him.

He was elected prime minister in 2018, but fell out with Pakistan's powerful army. After a series of defections, he lost his majority in parliament. He was ousted after he lost a confidence vote in April 2022, four years into his tenure.

Since then, he has been a vocal critic of the government and the country's army.

In October, he was disqualified from holding public office, accused of incorrectly declaring details of presents from foreign dignitaries and proceeds from their alleged sale.

The next month, he survived a gun attack on his convoy while holding a protest march.

On Monday, the military warned him against making "baseless allegations" after he again accused a senior officer of plotting to kill him.

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[ad_1] CNN  —  The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for a deadly blast in a mosque in Peshawar on Monday, the latest attack on the city in northwest Pakistan. A powerful explosion killed at least 48 people and left about 157 injured, according to Peshawar Police Chief Mohammad Aijaz Khan. Rescue operations are now underway in the mosque, which is situated inside a police compound and is mostly attended by law enforcement officials. Sarbakaf Mohmand and Omar Mukaram Khurasani – two officials from the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) – put out statements saying the blast was “revenge” for the death of TTP militant Khalid Khorasani last year. The TTP is a US-designated foreign terrorist organization operating in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. CNN cannot independently verify the group’s claims. In a statement to CNN, Khan, the Peshawar police chief, earlier said the incident inside the Police Lines Mosque was “probably a suicide attack,” echoing Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. “The brutal killing of Muslims prostrating before Allah is against the teachings of the Quran,” Sharif said in a statement, adding that “targeting the House of Allah is proof that the attackers have nothing to do with Islam.” “Terrorists want to create fear by targeting those who perform the duty of defending Pakistan,” the prime minister continued. “Those who fight against Pakistan will be erased from the page.” Sharif added that “the entire nation and institutions are united to end terrorism” and that there’s a “comprehensive strategy” in the works in order to restore law and order in the northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where Peshawar is located. The prime minister went to Peshawar following the deadly blast and visited Lady Reading Hospital to meet those injured, his office said. “Just returned from Peshawar. The sheer scale of the human tragedy is unimaginable. This is no less than an attack on Pakistan. The nation is overwhelmed by a deep sense of grief. I have no doubt terrorism is our foremost national security challenge,” Sharif posted on Twitter. “My message to the perpetrators of today’s despicable incident is that you can’t underestimate the resolve of our people,” he added. Pakistan’s former leader Imran Khan, whose party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf holds the provincial government of Khyber Pakhtunkwa, also condemned the blast saying in a tweet that “it is imperative we improve our intelligence gathering & properly equip our police forces to combat the growing threat of terrorism.” The city of Peshawar – which is located at the edge of Pakistan’s tribal districts that border Afghanistan – has frequently been the site of attacks by the TTP and other militant groups. The Islamic State (ISIS) said they were responsible for an attack on a Shia mosque in Peshawar in March 2022. That blast killed at least 61 people and injured another 196. TTP’s central spokesman Muhammad Khurasani is yet to comment on Monday’s attack. [ad_2] Source link

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Pakistan is kneeling in front of India's diplomacy, Now PM Imran Khan came forward to talk

Pakistan is kneeling in front of India’s diplomacy, Now PM Imran Khan came forward to talk

Imran Khan,Prime Minister Of Pakistan Pakistan, which has been using terrorism against India on its own behalf, is now seen kneeling succumb Indian diplomacy. Now he is talking about peace and brotherhood. After the statement by Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa to resolve peace and amicable issue of Kashmir issue two days ago, now the Prime Minister of Pakistan has offered something…

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Afghanistan’s ‘Misinformation Surge’

An avalanche of misinformation has followed the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Some of it is sloppiness: people sharing information and not knowing it’s wrong. But intentional efforts appear to be at play, seeking to shape the images of the Taliban, the resistance, U.S. officials, and the Pakistani military. The identities and motivations of those sharing this misinformation are often not clear, but they could be part of organized propaganda campaigns.

Misinformation about Afghanistan has been posted in many languages, including Urdu, Hindi, English, and Korean. The Poynter Institute, the Associated Press, and Agence France-Presse have compiled many examples, including a Twitter thread from AFP fact-checker Uzair Rizvi.

U.S. actions in Afghanistan have so far been a frequent target of misinformation. Some social media posts include photoshopped images of Afghan evacuees bearing heavy weaponry, suggesting Washington has helped terrorists leave Afghanistan; these were posted by Russian media outlets. Others falsely accuse U.S. President Joe Biden of gifting $80 billion in arms to the Taliban and abandoning U.S. military dogs.

Additionally, much of the misinformation spreading in Afghanistan relates to Taliban brutalities and is easily debunked. An image of the Taliban purportedly auctioning off women actually depicts a protest against the Islamic State in London in 2016, and a photo of a man leading women in chains is digitally edited from an image taken in Iraq in 2003, for example. Other posts mention a nonexistent Al Jazeera investigation on women abducted by the Taliban and their nonexistent plans to execute Christian missionaries.

The battles between the Taliban and resistance fighters in Panjshir—the only province not seized by the group last month—have become a bonanza for fake news. The lack of credible on-the-ground reporting in the province has led to an information shortage that could be easily exploited. Photos of supposed Taliban fighters in Panjshir actually depicted French soldiers. Several Indian TV channels broadcast video purporting to show Pakistani aircraft attacking Panjshir. (In reality, the video was depicting American jets flying in Wales.)

What explains this surge in misinformation? The sudden attention rush of a major news story, the power of social media, and information shortages all play a role. Moreover, actors with axes to grind use misinformation as ammunition. Fake news about Biden’s policies in Afghanistan has been propagated by his rivals, from the U.S. Republican Party to Russian state media. Nationalist Indian outlets seek to paint Pakistan as an aggressor.

The information vacuum is critical. In recent years, Afghan and U.S. officials stopped providing information about military casualties and the amount of territory under Taliban control. As the security situation worsened in the last few years, media coverage outside of Kabul became more difficult. It’s now hard to know what’s happening in far-flung areas. In Panjshir, for example, the lack of on-the-ground reporting results in competing narratives, fueling rumors and propaganda wars.

The spread of misinformation in Afghanistan has troubling implications. For one, fake stories about the Taliban could change the group’s image among those outside of Afghanistan. While its brutality is apparent from its actions in Kabul, where citizen journalists recently filmed the Taliban beating female protesters, it’s harder to see this elsewhere. Without independent reporting, accounts of beatings, arrests, and intimidation outside the capital can’t be confirmed—giving the group space to project itself as softer and more moderate.

Furthermore, with so much fake news, true accounts run the risk of being dismissed as false. Social media posts have already suggested the images of U.S. aircraft taking off with Afghans clinging on that began circulating on Aug. 16 are fake. And with foreign bureaus evacuating their Afghan employees and local journalists facing Taliban threats, information shortages are only likely to worsen.

Unfortunately, the spread of misinformation all works to the Taliban’s advantage. It could prompt the militants to ramp up repressive activities in areas with little media presence, knowing that many of them will go unreported or unconfirmed.

Misinformation About the End of the War in Afghanistan, Debunked

These claims were among the recurring themes of misinformation that we fact-checked as the two-decade war came to a chaotic close.

— By: Samantha Putterman

— September 7, 2021 | Poynter.Org

President Joe Biden speaks about the end of the war in Afghanistan from the State Dining Room of the White House, Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

As President Joe Biden stuck to a deadline for pulling U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, he was criticized for leaving some Americans and thousands of Afghan allies behind and for not responding fast enough to the Taliban’s takeover.

Biden was also lashed over several things he didn’t do or that just didn’t happen.

Influential GOP senators and Fox News promoted false and misleading claims about the scale of U.S. weaponry now in the Taliban’s hands, the abandonment of military K-9s, and Biden’s treatment of the families of 13 U.S. soldiers who died in the Aug. 26 Kabul airport attack, which killed more than 200 people.

These claims were among the recurring themes of misinformation that we fact-checked as the two-decade war came to a chaotic close.

Claim: The Biden administration gifted the Taliban with an $80 billion “arsenal.”

Claims about the U.S. giving Taliban weapons surfaced following reports about Taliban fighters seizing some U.S. attack planes, Black Hawk helicopters and other vehicles and equipment. But trending posts about the Taliban’s new “arsenal” relied on outdated spending and purported to cite precise accounting where there is none yet.

Early on, widely shared Facebook posts inaccurately stated that the Biden administration gifted the Taliban with “$80+ billion” in military weapons.

That estimate is False. The U.S. spent about $88.6 billion on security in Afghanistan over the course of two decades, but just a fraction of it went toward military hardware. Defense expert John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told us that aircraft and other military equipment remaining are likely worth less than $10 billion.

Another misleading post about weapons in the Taliban’s hands listed 19 categories of military equipment, including 358,530 assault rifles, 22,174 Humvees and 33 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.

This is also exaggerated. There has been no accounting of how much military equipment was left in Afghanistan. The figures cited are inflated and outdated, with most of the equipment being provided over many years to the Afghan forces.

The “358,530 assault rifles” figure, for example, appears to be from a 2017 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that counted the number of rifles, including AK-47s and sniper rifles, provided from 2004 to 2016.

And none of the figures show how many items remained in Afghanistan and were usable when the Taliban took control in mid-August.

Overall, most of the weaponry and equipment were provided over many years to the Afghan forces that opposed the Taliban, while some remained in control of the U.S. military.

Claim: Biden didn’t attend the ceremony for the 13 U.S. service members killed in Kabul.

We rated this Pants on Fire.

The baseless allegation was made by various conservatives — notably Republican political adviser Blair Brandt, and Buzz Patterson, a GOP candidate for Congress in California. They said in now-deleted tweets that Biden skipped the dignified transfer ceremony at Dover Air Force Base for the remains of the 13 U.S. military service members who died in the Aug. 26 attack.

But the plane carrying the remains of the service members hadn’t yet arrived at the base when the tweets were posted. The ceremony took place the next day, on Aug. 29. Biden attended. He and first lady Jill Biden met with the families of the service members at Dover’s Center for Families of the Fallen.

Claim: The U.S. military left its working dogs in Afghanistan.

A viral photo of dog crates in front of a battered and empty U.S. helicopter sparked outrage among fans of dogs and the military. Prominent Republicans like Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said that they were military dogs abandoned at the Kabul airport during the U.S. evacuation.

But that isn’t right. The federal government said the dogs pictured do not work for the military and that its working dogs were evacuated from the country in mid-August.

“The U.S. military did not leave any dogs in cages at Hamid Karzai International Airport, including the reported military working dogs,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby tweeted on Aug. 31. “Photos circulating online were animals under the care of the Kabul Small Animal Rescue, not dogs under our care.”

Some of the animals in the images likely belonged to independent defense contractors and could be characterized as “contract working dogs.”

Some animal welfare groups like American Humane dismissed any distinction between the dogs’ contract or military status and called on Congress to start classifying contract dogs the same way it does military dogs.

Multiple groups involved in evacuating the dogs cited a series of setbacks, including chartered flights falling through, unrest at the airport and stringent U.S. safety regulations. Advocates said the dogs are safe, but what happens to them now is uncertain.

Claim: Video shows the Taliban executed someone by hanging them from a helicopter.

Conservative bloggers, pundits and politicians like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz shared a short, blurry video of a helicopter flying with a person dangling from a rope.

“This horrifying image encapsulates Joe Biden’s Afghanistan catastrophe: The Taliban hanging a man from an American Blackhawk helicopter,” Cruz tweeted.

That explanation is False. Various other images and videos reviewed by PolitiFact show that the person dangling from the chopper was alive, moving and waving his arms. The person was suspended by a harness that wrapped under his arms, not a noose around the neck.

Several news outlets and fact-checkers reached the same conclusion, determining that the video did not depict an execution, and that the person had been tasked with trying to fix a flag on a public building.

Aśvaka News Agency, an Afghan news outlet, later confirmed to PolitiFact that the person was controlled and was hanging from the helicopter to fix the flag at the governor’s building in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city.

Cruz later acknowledged that his tweet “may be inaccurate” and deleted it. But others, like Fox News host Sean Hannity, continued to give the false story air after it was widely debunked.

NOT REAL NEWS: A Look at What Didn’t Happen this Week

— By The Associated Press | August 20, 2021

— Tom Kertscher, Gabrielle Settles and Bill McCarthy contributed reporting.

This February 2003 photo provided by photographer Murat Düzyol shows three women walking behind a man in Erbil, Iraq. A version of this original image was manipulated to digitally add chains on the women's ankles, with a caption erroneously claiming it was made in Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of the country in August 2021. (Murat Düzyol via AP)

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

Photo from Iraq altered to create fake image of chained Afghan women

CLAIM: A photo shows three Afghan women chained to one another, walking behind a man who holds the end of the chain.

THE FACTS: The photo is fake. It was based on an old photo, and the chains were digitally added. Photographer Murat Düzyol told The Associated Press he took the original photo in Erbil, Iraq, in February 2003. Tweets sharing the altered photo were among several misleading social media posts that began to emerge after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on Sunday. Twitter users posted the manipulated photo and suggested that it showed women in Afghanistan walking behind a man. In the edited photo, chains were digitally added onto the ankles of the women, with the man holding the chain. There was no chain in the original photo. Also, it was taken in Iraq, not Afghanistan. “#AfghanWomen. God protect women and children because an institution like the United Nations has become impotent,” said a Twitter user who tweeted the altered photo. Over the years, the photo has been misrepresented and posted multiple times. One blog falsely stated the photo was taken in Afghanistan and said it showed an example of women walking about five paces behind their husbands. Düzyol, who lives in Istanbul, told AP he took the photo in 2003. Around that time, he often visited Iraq and took photos. The day the photo was taken, there was a ceremony commemorating Iraqi civilians who were killed in the city of Erbil, he said. “As people were returning to their homes after the ceremony, such a composition randomly appeared on the street. It’s a completely instant snapshot and completely natural,” Düzyol explained in an email. “The women obviously knew each other, but I’m not sure they knew the man.” Many fear the Taliban will reimpose a strict interpretation of Islamic law that was practiced when they ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time, women were barred from attending school and having jobs outside the home. They had to wear burqas and be accompanied by a male relative when they were in public. After taking over, the Taliban said they promise to honor women’s rights within the norms of Islamic law, but many Afghans are skeptical. — Associated Press writer Arijeta Lajka in New York contributed this report.

Afghan citizens pack inside a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, as they are transported from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan, Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. On Friday, Aug. 20, 2021, The Associated Press reported on stories circulating online incorrectly claiming another photo showed a plane full of Afghan refugees being evacuated from the country this week, with not a single woman or child among them. In fact, that photo, which appeared online as early as 2018, shows Afghan refugees being sent back to their country from Turkey, according to a story at the time from Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency. Photos captured this week show that hundreds of Afghan men, women and children have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. (Capt. Chris Herbert/U.S. Air Force via AP)

Photo of Afghan men on plane is from 2018

CLAIM: A photo shows a plane full of Afghan refugees being evacuated from the country this week, with not a single woman or child among them.

THE FACTS: In fact, this photo appeared online as early as 2018. It shows Afghan refugees being sent back to their country from Turkey, according to a story at the time from Turkey’s state-run news agency, the Anadolu Agency. The photo looks down the aisle of an airplane filled with men, some of them waving at the camera. Social media users are sharing it as new this week with claims it shows only men, with no women and children, being evacuated from Kabul after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. “And not a single woman or child among them!” one Facebook user wrote alongside the picture. “As if the invasion of our southern border weren’t enough of a challenge. Now the biden Administration is flying in hardened, fighting-aged men from Afghanistan.” Another Facebook user wrote, “Another wave of ‘refugees’ is already heading to Europe, this time from Afghanistan.” But a reverse-image search reveals the picture does not show recent evacuation efforts from Afghanistan. The photo showed some 324 Afghan refugees who had entered Turkish territory illegally and were detained and sent back to Afghanistan in April 2018, according to an article on the Spanish-language version of the Anadolu Agency’s website. Photos captured this week show that hundreds of Afghan men, women and children have been evacuated from Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover. — Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in New York contributed this report.

FILE - The Afghan flag flies atop the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 17, 2021. On Friday, Aug. 20, 2021, The Associated Press reported on a photo circulating online that was digitally altered to make it appear that the Taliban flag was flying on the tower of the palace in Kabul on Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)

Photo digitally altered to show Taliban flag on Afghan presidential palace

CLAIM: A photo shows the Taliban flag flying on the tower of the Afghanistan presidential palace in Kabul on Sunday night.

THE FACTS: The photo is fake — an old photo was digitally altered to make it appear that the Taliban flag was flying above the palace. On Sunday, Taliban forces seized the presidential palace. The Associated Press took photos and video Tuesday showing that the Afghan flag was still flying from the building. The photo that was manipulated was first shared in 2020 and originally showed the palace adorned with Afghan flags. In the manipulated version, the Taliban flag replaces the Afghan flag. It looks clearly altered -- the flag appears too rectilinear and the script too flat to be on a moving flag. The edited photo was shared across social media and by some media outlets, with captions saying it showed the fall of Afghanistan. The Taliban took over Afghanistan two weeks before the U.S. was supposed to fully withdraw its troops from the country. President Ashraf Ghani has fled the country. AP photos showed the Taliban inside the presidential palace on Sunday.

Video claiming to show Taliban fighters on trampoline is more than a year old

CLAIM: A video shows Taliban fighters jumping on a trampoline this week as they celebrate their return to power in Afghanistan.

THE FACTS: This video is not current and has circulated online for more than a year. In the days since the Taliban seized power across Afghanistan, capturing all major cities in less than a week, social media users have shared videos of the insurgents allegedly celebrating their victory in gyms, amusement parks and presidential suites. One such video, which social media users claim shows Taliban fighters rejoicing on a trampoline, has circulated since at least March 2020. The video of four men jumping on an expansive trampoline and one standing to the side was shared with captions like “Taliban’s terrorists right now” and “Taliban fighters celebrating their takeover of Kabul by Jumping on a Trampoline.” But it appeared on Facebook as early as March 31, 2020. It was also shared on YouTube on Aug. 28, 2020, with the caption, “Taliban first time trampoline.” It wasn’t clear who captured the original video or who was featured in it. — Ali Swenson

Video showing shaking house is from Alaska, not Haiti

CLAIM: Video from a camera inside a home shows the house shaking from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Saturday.

THE FACTS: The video being shared online shows an earthquake that struck nearly three years ago in Alaska, not Haiti. As images and videos emerged from Haiti following Saturday’s earthquake, social media users began misrepresenting the Alaska video from 2018 to suggest it showed the earthquake rumbling through a home in Haiti. More than 2,000 people have been reported dead in Haiti following the earthquake that struck the southwestern part of the Island. In 2010, an earthquake of similar magnitude left more than 300,000 dead in the country. Posts online Saturday shared the video showing the Alaska earthquake, with wording that suggested it showed the power of the earthquake in Haiti. The posts sharing the video said to pray for Haiti. The original video was shared to Twitter by James Easton on Nov. 30, 2018, when Alaska was hit with a 7.0-magnitude earthquake. At the time, The Associated Press reported that the earthquake left thousands without power and buckled roadways in some places. Easton told the AP via email that the video showed his home in Alaska. Easton tweeted the video, saying that he was “just a little bit shaken” by the earthquake. The video showed the house violently shaking and the camera footage soon being cut off by the quake. “It’s amusing to see the video pop up every so often, but the focus should really be on the actual damage in Haiti,” he said. — Associated Press writer Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed this report.

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Sunday, August 15, 2021

Canada to require air travelers to be vaccinated (AP) The Canadian government will soon require all air travelers and passengers on interprovincial trains to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said Friday that includes all commercial air travelers, passengers on trains between provinces and cruise ship passengers. “As soon as possible in the Fall and no later than the end of October, the Government of Canada will require employees in the federally regulated air, rail, and marine transportation sectors to be vaccinated. The vaccination requirement will also extend to certain travelers. This includes all commercial air travelers,” his office said in a statement. France announced this week that it will require people have a special virus pass before they can travel by plane, train or bus across the country.

Debt: So long to the savings glut (The Week) “Americans are borrowing again,” said AnnaMaria Andriotis at The Wall Street Journal. After a year in which many consumers reduced spending, stashed savings, and used stimulus checks to pay down debt, more people have gone back to “splurging on cars, vacations, and eating out”—and seeking loans to pay for it. “Lenders originated some 3 million auto loans and leases in March, the highest monthly figure on record,” with the balances for those new originations topping a record $73 billion. A record 6 million new general-purpose credit cards were also issued the same month. The balances on our cards are still “about $140 billion lower than at the end of 2019,” said Alexandre Tanzi and Katia Dmitrieva at Bloomberg. But household debt—which includes mortgages, credit cards, and other consumer loans—rose in the second quarter “at the fastest pace since 2013.” Much of that was driven by the hot housing market—and Americans scrambling to refinance while mortgage rates remained low.

More US cities requiring proof of vaccination to go places (AP) Hold on to that vaccination card. A rapidly growing number of places across the U.S. are requiring people to show proof they have been inoculated against COVID-19 to teach school, work at a hospital, see a concert or eat inside a restaurant. Following New York City’s lead, New Orleans and San Francisco will impose such rules at many businesses starting next week, while Los Angeles is looking into the idea. The new measures are an attempt to stem the rising tide of COVID-19 cases that has pushed hospitals to the breaking point, including in the Dallas area, where top officials warned they are running out of beds in their pediatric intensive care units.

Western fires threaten thousands of homes, strain resources (AP) A month-old wildfire burning through forestlands in Northern California lurched toward a small lumber town as blazes across the U.S. Western states strained resources and threatened thousands of homes with destruction. Crews were cutting back brush and using bulldozers to build lines to keep the Dixie Fire from reaching Westwood east of Lake Almanor, not far from where the lightning-caused blaze destroyed much of the town of Greenville last week. To the northwest, the Monument Fire continued to grow after destroying a dozen homes and threatened about 2,500 homes in a sparsely populated region. They were among more than 100 large wildfires burning in a dozen Western states seared by drought and hot, bone-dry weather that has turned forests, brushlands, meadows and pastures into tinder. The U.S. Forest Service said Friday it’s operating in crisis mode, fully deploying firefighters and maxing out its support system.

500 years later, Mexico recalls Spanish conquest (Los Angeles Times) The final resting place of one of Mexico’s signature historical figures is easy to miss. A simple red plaque—just a name and the years he lived—marks the spot where his tomb is embedded in a wall to the side of the altar in a dilapidated downtown church. The name alone, however, recalls centuries of conflict and a never-ending debate about the essential identity of Mexico: HERNAN CORTES 1485-1547. The legendary Spanish military commander may be hidden away in death, but a few blocks away, authorities are readying a remembrance of his momentous triumph—the conquest of the Aztec Empire. Friday marks the 500th anniversary of the fall in 1521 of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, now the site of Mexico City. The bloody siege culminating in its surrender launched three centuries of Spanish dominion in Mexico. “We were all born from the conquest, no longer Aztecs, no longer Spanish, but Indian-Hispanic-Americans, mestizos,” wrote Carlos Fuentes, the late Mexican author. “We are what we are because Hernán Cortés, for good or for bad, did what he did.”

7.2 magnitude earthquake hits Haiti; at least 304 killed (AP) A powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck southwestern Haiti on Saturday, killing at least 304 people and injuring at least 1,800 others as buildings tumbled into rubble. Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he was rushing aid to areas where towns were destroyed and hospitals overwhelmed with incoming patients. The epicenter of the quake was about 125 kilometers (78 miles) west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said, and widespread damage was reported in the hemisphere's poorest nations as a tropical storm also bore down. Henry declared a one-month state of emergency for the whole country and said some towns were almost completely razed.

Belarus floods the European Union with migrants (CNN) Desperate, frightened and begging for help, they emerge from the darkness: a group of Yazidi migrants, lost in the forests of eastern Europe. It’s a surreal sight—and one that has been repeated over many recent nights. Having survived persecution by ISIS at home in Iraq, here on the Belarus-Lithuania border the Yazidis find themselves caught up in a breathtakingly cynical plot. Belarus’s authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, has been accused of using these desperate souls as pawns in his high-stakes game with the European Union. Over the course of 24 hours from July 27 to 28, a record 171 people were caught on the border—many of them Iraqis. A total of more than 4,000 have been caught so far this year. European officials say Lukashenko’s bureaucracy is extracting thousands of euros from each traveler then “weaponizing” them—according to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis—in order to burden Belarus’s neighbor Lithuania. Officials say the migrants are flown from the Middle East to Minsk, and then guided to the Belarus-Lithuania border by unspecified facilitators, where they are allowed to cross, unimpeded by Belarusian border police. Lithuania has called it “petty”—“mass revenge” for sanctions imposed by the EU after Belarus forced a Ryanair plane to land in Minsk so they could arrest an opposition blogger on board. A Western intelligence official told CNN the scheme could not function without the permission of the Belarusian state, and that Lukashenko was likely using the migrants as a way to pressurize the EU into negotiations on lifting the sanctions against him.

Heat wave edges higher in southern Europe (AP) Intense heat baking Italy pushed northward towards the popular tourist destination of Florence Friday while wildfires charred the country’s south, and Spain appeared headed for an all-time record high temperature as a heat wave kept southern Europe in a fiery hold. Italy saw temperatures in places upwards of 40 C (104 F), and Rome broiled. By late afternoon Friday, the heat in Florence reached 39 C (102 F). That city and Bologna also were issued alerts for Saturday by the health ministry. Many southern European countries have suffered days of intense heat, accompanied by deadly wildfires in Algeria, Turkey, Italy and Greece. Wildfires on the Italian island of Sardinia were reported largely contained, but a blaze early Friday near Tivoli in the countryside east of Rome forced the evacuation of 25 families.

At least 40 killed in Turkey flood as search for missing continues (Reuters) Families of those missing after Turkey’s worst floods in years anxiously watched rescue teams search buildings on Saturday, fearing the death toll from the raging torrents could rise further. At least 40 people have died from the floods in the northern Black Sea region, the second natural disaster to strike the country this month. Drone footage by Reuters showed massive damage in the flood-hit Black Sea town of Bozkurt, where emergency workers were searching demolished buildings.

Marine vanguard lands in Kabul as US speeds up evacuations (AP) The first forces of a Marine battalion arrived in Kabul at week’s end to stand guard as the U.S. speeds up evacuation flights for some American diplomats and thousands of Afghans, spurred by a lightning Taliban offensive that increasingly is isolating Afghanistan’s capital. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said “elements” of a battalion were now in Kabul, the vanguard of three Marine and Army battalions that the U.S. was sending to the city by the end of the weekend to help more Americans and their Afghan colleagues get out quickly. The Taliban, emboldened by the imminent end of the U.S. combat mission in the country, took four more provincial capitals Friday, heightening fears they would move soon on the capital, which is home to millions of Afghans.

‘Why did my friend get blown up? For what?’ (Washington Post) After enlisting in the U.S. military against his family’s wishes, Chicago native Tom Amenta said he found himself in “middle-of-nowhere,” Afghanistan, in 2002 as an Army Ranger in a remote area some 15 minutes from the border with Pakistan. He was fighting the initial battles of a war that few knew would stretch on for 20 years. Now 40 and retired from the military, he felt anger foam inside as he watched the evening news. Headline after headline broadcast the latest gains by Taliban fighters, who have seized control of more than a dozen of the country’s provincial capitals as the Afghan government inches closer to collapse in the final days of the U.S. withdrawal. Friends who had been killed there came to mind, including NFL star Pat Tillman. Fond memories of former Afghan colleagues, such as interpreters, who remained in the country and whose fates he didn’t know, also resurfaced. “It makes me angry, really angry,” Amenta said of the U.S. withdrawal, lamenting the billions upon billions of dollars spent on the war effort—not to mention the emotional, financial and human toll suffered by thousands of Americans who served or sent their loved ones to fight in Afghanistan. “I mean, why did my friend get blown up? For what?” said Amenta. “No one’s saying, ‘Hey, you know, at least we did something.’ There’s just nothing to really show for it,” former Army medic Frank Scott Novak said. “And so, everyone’s kind of angry and wondering, why? Why were we even there?”

Nobody running Lebanon, says central bank boss (Reuters) Lebanon’s central bank governor said nobody was running the country as he defended his decision to halt fuel subsidies that have drained currency reserves, saying the government could resolve the problem by passing necessary legislation. In an interview broadcast on Saturday, governor Riad Salameh pressed back against government accusations that he had acted alone in declaring an end to the subsidies on Wednesday, saying everyone knew the decision was coming. The move is the latest turn in a crippling financial crisis that has sunk the Lebanese pound by 90% in less than two years and pushed more than half the population into poverty. Salameh said Lebanon could recover but it was not possible to say how many years that would take. “So far you have nobody running the country,” he said in the interview with Radio Free Lebanon. Lebanon’s sectarian politicians have failed to agree on a new government since Prime Minister Hassan Diab quit last August after the catastrophic Beirut port blast.

[24newshd]

Latest News Afghanistan warned not to use US visit for blaming Pakistan

When US President Joe Biden meets Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Chairman Afghan High Peace Council Dr. Abdullah Abdullah at the White House this week, it is not just the future of the war-torn country but also Pakistan’s role will be the main talking point.

Ahead of the all-important visit, Pakistan reached out to the Afghan government conveying in clear terms that the upcoming visit must not be used to blame Islamabad, officials told The Express Tribune on Tuesday.

Latest News

Latest News Pakistan it is because of this reason that Pakistan’s ambassador to Kabul not only met Afghan leaders from across party lines but Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi also interacted with Dr Abdullah as well as his Afghan counterpart Hanif Atmar at the sidelines of the recent Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey.

Officials while speaking on condition of anonymity said that Pakistan fears that “spoilers” within the Afghan setup may use the upcoming visit of President Ghani and Dr. Abdullah to blame Islamabad for the failure.

FM Qureshi at the recent Afghan Track-11 dialogue minced no words when he stated that President Ghani might use the upcoming visit to the White House to blame Pakistan.

“If the objective [President Ghani’s visit] is to start a new blame game and hold Pakistan responsible for all the ills, I think it will not help. It’s a shared responsibility and no one is going to buy this anymore. We will not take any responsibility. We have been accused enough,” he added.

Foreign Office spokesperson Zahid Hafiz Chaudhri in a separate statement said: “The visit by Afghan leaders to Washington DC is a bilateral issue. However, I wish to reiterate our hope that the US will continue its engagement and efforts for the success of the Afghan peace process. Peace in Afghanistan remains a shared objective.”

The White House said President Ghani and Dr Abdullah’s visit would highlight an “enduring partnership” between the United States and Afghanistan as the military drawdown continues.

But since President Biden announced to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by September this year, the Afghan Taliban have made rapid strides as they took control of 30 districts Since May 1.

The Taliban, meanwhile, reacted to the visit and termed it “useless”.

"They [Ghani and Abdullah] will talk with the US officials for the preservation of their power and personal interest," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said. "It won’t benefit Afghanistan."

As the peace process hangs in the balance, there are elements in the Afghan government that have already started pointing a finger at Pakistan. The Afghan National Security Adviser and the Afghan vice president in particular in recent weeks issued scathing statements against Pakistan.

The Afghan NSA’s repeated diatribe accusing Pakistan of using the Afghan Taliban as proxy has compelled Islamabad to sever all official links with Hamdullah Mohib.

Pakistan has also warned that such baseless allegations would only undermine peace efforts.

Given the trust deficit between the two countries, officials said, Islamabad would closely follow the visit of Afghan leadership to the White House. While President Biden has been interacting with the Afghan leadership, he has not yet reached out to Prime Minister Imran Khan.

When asked the same at a recent interview by an American media outlet, PM Imran said President Biden might have other priorities at this stage.

But observers find this approach by the Biden administration as perplexing given the critical and important role Pakistan has in any Afghan peace deal.

[pkhotnews]

Pakistan calls for test into capture of uranium in India

Pakistan calls for test into capture of uranium in India

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Satur­day communicated genuine worry over illicit ownership of a huge amount of uranium by two unapproved people in India and highlighted holes in state control systems there. “We have noted with genuine concern the reports about capture of more than 7kg characteristic uranium from unapproved people in India,” Foreign Office Spokesman Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said. Indian…

[creepingsharia]

Another judge releases another jihadi - convicted and sentence to life - over coronavirus - this time in Virginia

In recent weeks, a Boston judge released a convicted jihadi - who plotted to behead an anti-jihad blogger - well before his sentence was served.

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — A judge on Tuesday ordered an Islamic scholar serving a life sentence for soliciting treason after the Sept. 11 attacks be released from custody while he pursues his appeal.

The order from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria grants release to Ali Al-Timimi in part because of concerns he is susceptible to the coronavirus and in part because of a recent Supreme Court case that could invalidate several counts on which he was convicted back in 2005.

Al-Timimi, a Washington D.C., native who obtained a doctorate in computational biology from George Mason University shortly before his arrest, has been imprisoned for the past 15 years, most recently at the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado.

He was convicted of soliciting treason and other counts after prosecutors say he used his influence to steer a group of young men to try to join up with the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Several of his followers, who played paintball games in the Virginia woods to train for holy war around the globe, got as far as Pakistan, where they received training from a militant group called Lashkar-E-Taiba. None actually ever joined the Taliban.

Al-Timimi argued that prosecutors overstated his influence with those who traveled to Pakistan, and that he was punished for unpopular speech rather than criminal conduct. Timimi preached that the Sept. 11 attacks portended a global holy war between Muslims and non-believers. At his trial, several of his followers testified tat Al-Timimi told them in a secret meeting just days after the Sept. 11 attacks that able-bodied Muslims had an obligation to defend the Taliban if they were able to do so.

His case has sat in an unusual procedural limbo for more than a decade, and an appellate court has never fully ruled on the validity of his convictions. Jonathan Turley, his appellate lawyer, has argued that prosecutors failed to turn over evidence that would have pointed to Al-Timimi's innocence. In particular, he has alleged that the government used a northern Virginia cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki as an informant, and that al-Awlaki tried unsuccessfully to lure Al-Timimi into illegal conduct as part of a government sting.

Al-Awlaki later left the U.S. and became a leader in al-Qaeda before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike.

Prosecutors have argued consistently that there is no evidence related to al-Awlaki to which Al-Timimi’s lawyers would have been entitled.

In her ruling, Brinkema said she was compelled to release Al-Timimi in part because he is at risk for contracting COVID-19 while imprisoned. In addition, several counts on which Al-Timimi was convicted for conspiring to commit a crime of violence could be invalidated because of a recent series of Supreme Court rulings.

Those Supreme Court cases, which say that federal law was impermissibly vague on what constitutes a “crime of violence,” have resulted in successful appeals across the country. Indeed, several members of the paintball group that was linked to Al-Timimi through the now-defunct Dar al Arqam mosque in Falls Church have recently been released as a result of the Supreme Court cases.

Brinkema, in her ruling, states that if the four counts in question are indeed overturned, the 15 years which Al-Timimi has already served would exceed his revised sentence.

The order is scheduled to take effect once Al-Timimi concludes a 14-day quarantine administered by the Bureau of Prisons.

Joshua Stueve, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which prosecuted Al-Timimi, declined comment Tuesday on whether the government plans to appeal Brinkema's ruling.

----------------------------------------

Background on the convicted Islamic terrorist via IPT:

Al-Timimi was indicted in 2004 and was convicted in 2005 of soliciting and engaging others to levy war against the United States and attempting to contribute services to the Taliban. Members of the Virginia Paintball Jihad cell testified at Al-Timimi's trial that shortly after September 11, 2001 he convinced several of them to travel to Pakistan to obtain training for jihad from the U.S. designated Foreign Terrorist Organization Lashkar e Taibah.[1] He was sentenced to life in prison plus 70 years without parole.

[abdulrehman9-blog]

Accountability

Opposition Jailed in Pakistan:  Across-the-Board Accountability or Military-Backed Victimization? (By Abdul Rehman, a freelance writer from Pakistan)

Pakistan’s ex-prime minister Mian Nawaz Sharif has recently been arrested, or re-arrested to be precise, in a new graft case from the jail where he was serving a jail term. Although the NAB references against him were being framed since the beginning of General Musharraf era, the drive picked up after the famous Panama Leaks. He was first removed from the office of Prime Minister and then was convicted and arrested before the general elections along with her daughter. But after the suspension of that verdict, he was soon convicted and arrested in Al-Azizia case, whose jail term he is still going through with his bail plea denied and appeal pended. [1]

His dauther Maryam Nawaz Sharif was arrested by National Accountability Bureau (NAB) in early August on account of graft charges. This was not the first time she has faced detention in the recent past. Earlier on, she was convicted by an accountability court before the general elections last year and was arrested on her arrival in Pakistan, but was released later after suspension of the verdict by Islamabad High Court. [2]

His brother, Mian Shehbaz Sharif, had also been facing all this through the years, but in the recent legal drive he has been parallelly targeted and was arrested in an alleged Ashiana Housing Scheme case, where he is still on bail with the case going on. This volly of the legal cases during the current regime of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) is not limited to the Sharif family and has also involved NAB cases against most of the active leaders of the major opposition parties, namely Mian's Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PMLN) and Benazir's Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). [3]

Of course the NAB Chairman, along with the much-telecasted spokesmen of the ruling party, call all this unbiased accountability or across-the-board accountability and boast taking the elite people to task, but is it really so, specifically if this campaign of cases starts giving visible one-sided look? [4]

All the major opposition parties do not agree to this claim and have a general consensus that they are being targeted. Mian Nawaz Sharif has repeatedly said that it is victimization in the guise of accountability, which is of course not acceptable. His brother Mian Shehbaz Sharif, who has been more cautious in his word-selection earlier, now explains this recent campaign as emerging from an "unholy alliance" between the ruling PTI and NAB who seem to be working in tandem. [5-6]

Mr Bilawal Bhutto Zardari from PPP, the only and young son of late Benazir, is more expressive and openly declares that the institution of NAB was formulated by Musharraf regime with the actual purpose of "political engineering" or the crooked manipulation of the political field [by the powerful military establishment]. Attributing all this recent campaign of cases to behind-the-scene military masters also, he and Maryam Nawaz are very vocal in calling PM Imran Khan as a "selected PM" or a mere "puppet" very often. Though not being that blunt, most opposition leaders have similar sentiments about the current accountability. [7-8]

Unfortunately, the ground realities are also visibly undermining the credibility of the on-going accountability process. The legal drive is very intense against both the major families of Pakistan politics, namely Sharif family & Benazir family, with a barrage of cases against them, which does give a reflection of Musharraf's dictatorial era. Along with the two families, many of their active, supportive or vocal affiliates are also taking the brunt of these cases and have been jailed recently, causing others to recede to more cautious stances. [9-10]

On the other hand, NAB's treatment of those affiliated with ruling PTI is much different and most of case files against them lie closed. Critical cases against the party itself, including those with allegations of party receiving illegal foreign funding and the party maintaining secret bank accounts, have effectively been pushed under-the-carpet. Case against PM Imran Khan himself for the alleged misuse of official helicopter has also been put to silence. Proofs of undisclosed properties owned by Imran's sister Aleema Khan surfaced and were accepted by her too, but she was allowed to go free, while Maryam Nawaz was sentenced in a similar but lighter case. Similarly, probes against some other major PTI players like Pervez Khattak lie conveniently suspended. [11-15]

Apparantly, all this recent accountability drive against Sharif family was started by surfacing of Panama Leaks, which contained the names of Nawaz's sons as owners of offshore companies. But irony in Panama case is that it contained names of above 400 Pakistanis, yet none of them has even been prosecuted against other than Nawaz Sharif. Some of them, including Zulfi Bukhari and Aleem Khan as an example, are among the close affiliates of Imran Khan himself, but are seemingly enjoying complete immunity from the on-going accountability drive. [16-17]

Other irritating fact about this accountability is its alleged use for horse-trading or switching loyalties, as often complained by opposition. Apparantly, some of the cases are whehemently pursued against some known figures, but are put to pending status if they join, or agree to join, the "favourite" PTI. Information Minster Fidous Aashiq Awan from PPP was facing such charges, which were dropped around the time she joined PTI. More visible is the Nandipur Power Plant case filed against some of the PPP leaders some times back, where the recent verdict absolved the main accused Mr Babar Awan who is now in PTI, while indicted his other fellows. [18-20]

Although all this accountability game is not without the involvement of the courts, yet the major courts have also been showing concern on NABs partial attitude. Last year Supreme Court admonished NAB for having double-standards and being politicized in its treatment of cases, where some are pursued forcefully and others are grossly neglected. In another comment couple of years back Supreme Court had blamed NAB for destroying the country [by its policies]. [21-23]

In some of the cases included in this accountability drive, higher courts have openly criticized NAB for targeting the family of ex-PM. In an earlier Hudaibia Mills reference, Supreme Court did conclude last year that its only motive was to pressurize [blackmail] Sharif family. In another Saaf Paani case against Shehbaz Sharif, Lahore High Court also observed this year that it was selectively made by NAB with mala fide intentions of targeting him. [24-25]

Another disturbing reality in both of the Nawaz's convictions by the Accountability Court verdicts is that no corruption against him could be established and the punishment was on "assets beyond means", a charge which is apparantly preposterous in the case of a long-time wealthy industrialist. Due to this, the verdicts have been duly condemned from within the legal fraternity too, including a Supreme Court judge seeing disparity in accountability decisions. Also important to note is that Interpol, when asked for the repatriation of Nawaz's sons to Pakistan this year, declared the proofs in the case to be "insufficient", and refused to act on them. [26-28]

Involvement of powerful military establishment in these cases has also been often alleged. During July last year, Justice Shaukat Siddiqui of Islamabad High Court openly gave details of him being pressurized by ISI officials for keeping Nawaz Sharif in the jail and the Chief Justice being pressurized to make favourable benches for related cases. This was denied by military spokesman, but recently another case of judiciary manipulation happened when judges on the the major opposition cases got abruptly transferred, while one was allegedly close to the end of case. Additionally, Maryam herself recently released a video evidence showing the accountability court judge who convicted Nawaz Sharif, apparantly admitting that he had been blackmailed [by intelligence] to give guilty verdict against the accused. [29-31]

Another troubling fact of ex-military officials placed at the key posts in NAB has also been highlighted time and again, giving more evidence of the military's dominent role in the accountability process. One of the earlier Chairmen of NAB, who was also a close affiliate of Musharraf, openly admitted that Musharraf used to manipulate the accountability cases being investigated one way or other, as per his [or military's] desires. [32-34]

The alleged hidden coordination between the military-backed ruling PTI and NAB is even verified by some of the statements of their own dignitaries too. Chairman NAB, in a May 2019 interview to an eminent journalist Javed Chaudhry, himself admitted of not arresting government affiliates [during accountability] in order to avoid instability. After an uproar about it from opposition, NAB sposkesman later denied it. But he is not the only one; recently Senior Minister Fawad Chaudhry has also boastingly admitted that it is PTI, and not NAB, who is in control of this accountability drive. [35-36]

A rather disturbing irony of this accountability drive is its contrast with the on-ground data. Global watchdog Transparency International, in its report on the three previous regimes, has concluded that Musharraf's time was the worst in terms of corruption and Nawaz's time was the best, and also that corruption normally drops when PMLN comes to power. But here, in total disregard to all this, maximum thrust of accountability is focused on the same PMLN, while the Musharraf's close affiliates are not only immune to this, but many are enjoying the government positions too. [37-38]

Thus, considering all these hidden painful facts behind the much-touted slogans of unbiased accountability, it can easily be seen that all these are mere beautiful coats on the face of a largely one-sided and bitter persecution or silencing campaign against the political rivals. And thusforth, the government unleashing such campaign against its opponents can only and justifiably be categorized as a military-backed dictatorship, whatever democratic on-the-face name it may possibly be claiming. [39-41]

[1] “Nawaz’ bail plea in Al-Azizia case rejected”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/436706-al-azizia-case-verdict-on-nawaz-bail-plea-today

[2] “Nawaz, Maryam, Capt Safdar released after suspension of Avenfield sentence by IHC”, https://tribune.com.pk/story/1807039/1-ihc-commences-hearing-sharifs-suspension-plea/

[3] “Shahbaz granted bail in Ashiana-i-Iqbal Housing, Ramzan Sugar Mills cases”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1463815

[4] “NAB believes in across-the-board accountability”, https://dailytimes.com.pk/166639/nab-believes-across-board-accountability/

[5] “Nawaz slams ‘political victimisation’ disguised as accountability”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1438060

[6] “’NAB and PTI are in an unholy alliance,' Shahbaz says in parliament”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1439586

[7] “NAB was established for political engineering, says Bilawal after interrogation”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/446484-ppp-workers-throng-nab-headquarters-as-bilawal-appears-before-anti-graft-watchdog

[8] “Bilawal calls Imran Khan puppet prime minister, vows to resist govt 'pressure'”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/396828-bilawal-calls-imran-puppet-prime-minister-vows-to-resist-govt-pressure

[9] “Corruption charges against Benazir Bhutto and Asif Ali Zardari”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_charges_against_Benazir_Bhutto_and_Asif_Ali_Zardari

[10] “Former PM Shahid Khaqan Abbasi arrested in LNG case”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/500227-former-pm-shahid-khaqan-abbasi-may-be-arrested

[11] “PTI foreign funding case: ECP scrutiny panel again fails to make progress”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/416984-pti-foreign-funding-case-ecp-scrutiny-panel-again-fails-to-make-progress

[12] “PTI operating 18 undeclared bank accounts: SBP report”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1456646

[13] “PPP leaders to NAB: where is helicopter case against PM?”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/465178-ppp-leaders-to-nab-where-is-helicopter-case-against-pm

[14] “Aleema Khan given 'Mother of NRO' award by PM Imran: Marriyum Aurangzeb”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/429885-aleema-khan-given-mother-of-nro-award-by-pm-imran-marriyum-aurangzeb

[15] “NAB summons Khattak in land scam probe”, https://thefrontierpost.com/nab-summons-khattak-land-scam-probe/

[16] “Over 400 Pakistanis to be named and shamed in new Panama Papers list”, https://www.geo.tv/latest/104698-Over-400-Pakistanis-to-be-named-and-shamed-in-new-Panama-Papers-list

[17] ” PTI's Aleem Khan, Imran's friend Zulfi Bukhari named in second set of Panama leaks”, http://dunyanews.tv/en/Pakistan/335891-PTIs-Aleem-Khan-Imrans-friend-Zulfi-Bukhari-nam

[18] “PPP's Firdous Ashiq Awan joins PTI”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1336332

[19] “NAB drops probe into 14 mega corruption cases”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/222905-NAB-drops-probe-into-14-mega-corruption-cases

[20] “PTI’s Babar Awan acquitted, Raja not, in Nandipur case”, https://dailytimes.com.pk/418766/ptis-babar-awan-acquitted-raja-not-in-nandipur-case/

[21] “Why NAB getting politicised, asks SC”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/384691-why-nab-getting-politicised-asks-sc

[22] “Supreme Court bench slams NAB for its 'double standards'”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1440858/supreme-court-bench-slams-nab-for-its-double-standards

[23] “NAB has destroyed Pakistan, turned nation into a laughing stock: SC”, https://tribune.com.pk/story/1588700/1-nab-destroyed-pakistan-turned-nation-laughing-stock-sc/

[24] “SC’s detailed decision: Hudaibiya seemed a tool to pressurise Sharifs”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/264970-sc-s-detailed-decision-hudaibiya-seemed-a-tool-to-pressurise-sharifs

[25] “Saaf Pani scam: NAB selectively proceeded against two accused”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/429590-saaf-pani-scam-nab-selectively-proceeded-against-two-accused

[26] “No ‘bright evidence’ of corruption found against Nawaz: AC”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/338572-no-bright-evidence-of-corruption-found-against-nawaz-ac

[27] “Strict liability not applied universally, argues Justice Isa”, https://tribune.com.pk/story/1734643/1-strict-liability-not-applied-universally-argues-justice-isa/

[28] “Interpol declines to arrest Hassan Nawaz”, https://nation.com.pk/13-May-2019/interpol-declines-to-arrest-hassan-nawaz

[29] “Pakistan's ISI dictating judiciary, doesn't want Nawaz out of jail, alleges High Court judge”, https://zeenews.india.com/world/pakistans-isi-dictating-judiciary-doesnt-want-nawaz-out-of-jail-alleges-high-court-judge-2126573.html

[30] "ANF court judge stops hearing midway in Rana Sanaullah case after being repatriated to LHC", https://www.dawn.com/news/1502171

[31] “Maryam releases alleged video of Al-Azizia case judge claiming he was 'blackmailed'”, https://www.geo.tv/latest/242386-maryam-releases-alleged-video-of-al-azizia-case-judge-claiming-nawazs-innocence

[32] "Army officers still calling the shots in NAB", https://www.thenews.com.pk/archive/print/113321-army-officers-still-calling-the-shots-in-nab

[33] “Ex-khakis rule the roost in NAB”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/102569-Ex-khakis-rule-the-roost-in-NAB

[34] "Musharraf stopped probes, says ex-chief of NAB", https://www.dawn.com/news/851664

[35] “PML-N demands probe into NAB chief tape leaks”, https://epaper.dawn.com/DetailImage.php?StoryImage=25_05_2019_001_001

[36] “Fawad credits PTI for accountability; NAB seeks action against minister”, https://www.dawn.com/news/1489544

[37] “Present PML-N govt least corrupt: TI”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/14371-present-pml-n-govt-least-corrupt-ti

[38] “‘Most corrupt govt of last 19 years excluded from PTI govt’s probe’”, https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/505942-most-corrupt-govt-of-last-19-years-excluded-from-pti-govt-s-probe

[39] “Imran Khan's first year in office: U-turns and oppression”, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/imran-khan-year-office-turns-oppression-190726091846779.html

[40] “Pakistan Imprisons Opposition To Silence Dissent”, https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/pakistan-imprisons-opposition-to-silence-dissent/30120923.html

[41] "Glimpse of the face of a fascist regime", https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/07/opinion/glimpse-of-the-actual-face-of-a-fascist-regime/

[bountyofbeads]

Bipartisan Senate report calls for sweeping effort to prevent Russian interference in 2020 election

By Craig Timberg and Tony Romm | Published October 08 at 2:45 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 8, 2019 5:15 PM ET

A bipartisan panel of U.S. senators Tuesday called for sweeping action by Congress, the White House and Silicon Valley to ensure social media sites aren’t used to interfere in the coming presidential election, delivering a sobering assessment about the weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than two and a half years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump — and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote.

“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election," said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the committee’s chairman. “Their goal is broader: to sow societal discord and erode public confidence in the machinery of government. By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories, and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”

Though the 85-page report itself had extensive redactions, in the visible sections lawmakers urged their peers in Congress to act, including through the potential adoption of new regulations that would make who bought an ad more transparent. The report also called on the White House and the executive branch to adopt a more forceful, public role, warning Americans about the ways in which dangerous misinformation can spread while creating new teams within the U.S. government to monitor for threats and share intelligence with industry.

The recommendations call for Silicon Valley to more extensively share intelligence among companies, in recognition of the shortage of such sharing in 2016 and also the ways that disinformation from Russia and other countries spreads across numerous platforms — with posts linking back and forth in a tangle of connections.

“The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated and ongoing information warfare campaign,” the report says. The Russian effort was “a vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood... an increasingly brazen interference by the Kremlin on the citizens and democratic institutions of the United States."

The committee report recounts extensive Russian manipulation of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Google and other major platforms with the goal of dividing Americans, suppressing African American turnout and helping elect Trump president. Tuesday’s report, the second volume of the committee’s final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, offered the most detailed set of recommendations so far for stiffening the nation’s defenses against foreign meddling online — now a routine tactic for many nations.

While the report tracks closely with the previous findings of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III and several independent researchers, the comprehensiveness and forcefulness of the report’s conclusions are striking in light of Trump’s efforts to minimize the impact of Russian interference in the election that brought him to office. The release also comes amid a burgeoning impeachment inquiry over whether Trump sought foreign help — from Ukraine and others — to help his reelection chances in 2020.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Trump has questioned the findings by U.S. intelligence officials that the 2016 election was a target of Russian manipulation, sometimes embracing conservative conspiracy theories even as federal investigators have detailed efforts to interfere through fake social media accounts, leaks of stolen Democratic Party documents and hacks into state voting systems.

The Senate Intelligence Committee backed the views of other federal officials regarding the sweep and goals of the Russian effort saying that the operation “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

The White House, say numerous researchers and outside critics, has failed to lead the kind of aggressive, government-wide effort they argue would protect the 2020 race, though some federal agencies took steps to address foreign threats more forcefully during the 2018 congressional election.

That included a cyber-operation that disrupted Russia’s Internet Research Agency, based in St. Petersburg, on election day. Mueller indicted the agency and 13 affiliated Russians for their alleged role in 2016 election interference, which played a central role as well in Mueller’s landmark final report, released in April.

“With the 2020 elections on the horizon, there’s no doubt that bad actors will continue to try to weaponize the scale and reach of social media platforms to erode public confidence and foster chaos,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the committee. “The Russian playbook is out in the open for other foreign and domestic adversaries to expand upon — and their techniques will only get more sophisticated.”

Lawmakers delivered their recommendations just days after new revelations of possible election interference jolted Washington. On Friday, Microsoft announced it had discovered Iranian-linked hackers had targeted the personal email accounts associated with a number of current and former government officials, journalists writing on global affairs and at least one presidential candidate's campaign.

Microsoft declined to name the affected campaign, and said the account was not compromised. Still, the Iranian effort highlighted the lingering aftermath of Russia’s online efforts three years ago, as other countries around the now seek to adopt the Kremlin’s tactics, turning disinformation and other forms of election meddling into a global phenomenon.

Iran has joined Russia as a leader in foreign online interference. The list of countries known to have conducted such operations also includes Saudi Arabia, Israel, China, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Venezuela, say researchers. A report by Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Project said last month that at least 70 nations have sought to manipulate voters and others online, though most meddle mainly in their own domestic politics.

The Senate Intelligence Committee also has documented extensive Russia efforts to manipulate American voting systems.

In the first chapter of the committee’s report, released in July, lawmakers said that voting systems in all 50 states likely had been targeted by Russian agents in some manner. While it affirmed that votes had not been changed or compromised during the 2016 election, it concluded that the U.S. government had fallen far short in its security responsibilities by failing to warn state officials, who oversee elections, and provide them with sufficient, actionable threat information.

Last year’s Senate Intelligence Committee report on social media manipulation found Facebook in particular was key to reaching African Americans and conservative voters. The 20 most popular Facebook pages run by the Russians — with names such as “Being Patriotic,” “Blacktivist” and “Army of Jesus” — generated 39 million likes, 31 million shares, 5.4 million reactions and 3.4 million comments. The Russian campaign reached 126 million people on Facebook and 20 million more on Instagram, company officials reported to Congress.

Tuesday’s report described how efforts to manipulate Americans over social media operated in multiple steps. Fake accounts operating from Russia started by ingratiating themselves into online conversations using non-political comments, then switched to overtly partisan content.

The Russian-created “Army of Jesus” Facebook group, for example, on Oct. 26, 2016 —less than two weeks before the presidential vote — said, “There has never been a day when people did not need to walk with Jesus.”

Then, with the election approaching on Nov. 1, the same “Army of Jesus” page said, “HILLARY APPROVES REMOVAL OF GOD FROM THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE.”

The report also noted that the paid advertisements on Facebook, Instagram and other platforms were much less important than the free, viral context created by teams of Russian disinformation operatives working across multiple platforms.

Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, said the tech giant since 2016 has “stepped up our efforts to build strong defenses on multiple fronts,” including efforts to detect fake accounts and remove coordinated efforts to spread misinformation on the site. In September, Facebook hosted U.S. government officials and other tech company representatives to discuss ways to safeguard the 2020 election.

Google and Twitter did not immediately respond to requests.

Instagram, which is owned by Facebook and has grown increasingly influential in recent years, played a key role the Russian disinformation campaign. The top 10 accounts run by the Russian operatives were designed to appeal to specific groups, including African Americans, veterans and gay people. The names of the accounts included, “@Blackstagram,” “@american.veterans,” “@rainbow_nation,” “@afrokingdom,” “feminism_tag” and “@cop_block_us.”

“On the basis of engagement and audience following measures," the report said, "the Instagram social media platform was the most effective tool used by the [Internet Research Agency] to conduct its information operations campaign.”

Putin helped Trump in 2016. What is he planning for 2020?

By Paul Waldman | Published October 08 at 3:40 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted October 8, 2019 5:15 PM ET

We’ve just received a new report on the Russian attack on the 2016 elections, and the conclusions — because they are supported by actual evidence and are in accord with everything we’ve learned since then — will not make President Trump happy:

A bipartisan panel of U.S. senators Tuesday called for sweeping action by Congress, the White House and Silicon Valley to ensure social media sites aren’t used to interfere in the coming presidential election, delivering a sobering assessment about the weaknesses that Russian operatives exploited in the 2016 campaign.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, a Republican-led panel that has been investigating foreign electoral interference for more than two and a half years, said in blunt language that Russians worked to damage Democrat Hillary Clinton while bolstering Republican Donald Trump — and made clear that fresh rounds of interference are likely ahead of the 2020 vote.

This is nothing new, but it’s still notable that a bipartisan committee led by a Republican was able to release it, given the fact that the leader of the Republican Party still periodically claims that Russia may not have been behind the attacks.

Right out of the gate, the committee writes that the Internet Research Agency, the Russian intelligence entity tasked with waging cyberwarfare, “sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.”

This assertion should be utterly uncontroversial by now, but think for a moment about the context in which it lands.

The president of the United States has become obsessed with a banana-pants conspiracy theory, which says there was no Russian attack in 2016 at all, but instead the whole thing was engineered from Ukraine to make Russia and Trump look bad. That Ukraine is involved is not merely coincidence: On the same phone call in which Trump made clear to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he wanted Zelensky to get on an investigation of Joe Biden, Trump brought up this conspiracy theory.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike," Trump said to Zelensky, referencing a cybersecurity firm that worked for the Democratic National Committee. "I guess you have one of your wealthy people … the server, they say Ukraine has it.”

The conspiracy theory has it that a DNC server was spirited away to Ukraine, presumably to hide the fact that the Russians never hacked into it and the whole thing was some sort of false-flag operation.

Despite having the full resources of the U.S. intelligence apparatus at his disposal, Trump prefers to believe the speculations of a bunch of tinfoil-hat-wearers on 4chan. But that’s not all: Right now, the attorney general of the United States is bouncing around the globe trying to determine why the FBI would possibly have wanted to investigate the Russian attack that has now been extensively documented by both the Senate Intelligence Committee and Robert S. Mueller III’s prosecutors, as though the FBI’s investigation were unnecessary and obviously suspicious.

The committee was clear, as the intelligence community has been, that the Russian attack didn’t end after 2016 but is an ongoing threat, an effort to destabilize Western democracies that began before that election and continues to this day. Near the end of their report, the authors write:

The Committee recommends that the Executive Branch should, in the run up to the 2020 election, reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election.

In a different time, this recommendation might be so obvious as to be mundane, but we have a president who has, both publicly and privately, welcomed and even solicited foreign interference in the 2020 election, so long as it’s done to benefit him.

Amidst the Ukraine controversy, we’ve almost forgotten about Russia, but you can bet that the Russians are already preparing their offensive actions — what intelligence professionals call “active measures” — for 2020. Which brings me to another part of the Intelligence Committee report.

Under the section titled “Features of Russian Active Measures” they list “Fluid Ideology," noting: “Because the Kremlin’s information warfare objectives are not necessarily focused on any particular, objective truth, Russian disinformation is unconstrained by support for any specific political viewpoint and continually shifts to serve its own self-interest.”

Other "Russian Active Measures“ noted in the report include "Attacking the Media.” and “Exploiting Existing Fissures.” All of which sounds an awful lot like they’re describing Donald Trump, the campaign he waged in 2016 and the one he’ll mount in 2020.

Though we can’t say with complete certainty that Russia will be working to help Trump get reelected, it would be a shock if it doesn’t. Vladimir Putin surely derives no end of satisfaction from the fact that the American president acts toward him like an 11-year-old girl who got a chance to talk to one of the Jonas brothers.

And if Putin’s goal is to spread chaos and disorder throughout the West, there’s no better way to do it than to help Trump stick around.

Senators warn of foreign social media meddling in US vote

By Christina A. Cassidy and Mary Clare Jalonick | Published October 08 at 5:08 PM ET | AP | Posted October 8, 2019

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of U.S. senators urged President Donald Trump on Tuesday to warn the public about efforts by foreign governments to interfere in U.S. elections, a subject he has largely avoided, and take steps to thwart attempts by hostile nations to use social media to meddle in the 2020 presidential contest.

The recommendations came in an 85-page report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has been investigating Russia’s large-scale effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The senators described the social media activities of the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency in 2016 as part of a “broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society.”

The senators noted the Russians’ social media effort was a “vastly more complex and strategic assault on the United States than was initially understood,” with planning underway in 2014 when two Internet Research Agency operatives were sent to the U.S. to gather intelligence.

While a previous assessment indicated the Russian activities aspired to help then-candidate Trump when possible, the Senate report went further and said the Russians’ social media campaign was “overtly and almost invariably supportive” of Trump and designed to harm Democrat Hillary Clinton. Also targeted by Russian social media efforts were Trump’s Republican opponents — Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Trump has been largely dismissive of Russian activities in 2016 and now faces an impeachment inquiry into whether he inappropriately solicited foreign election help from Ukraine ahead of the 2020 vote.

Tuesday’s report concluded the Russian activities were focused largely on socially divisive issues, such as race, immigration and guns, in “an attempt to pit Americans against one another and against their government.” It found Russian efforts targeted black Americans more than any other group and the overall activity increased rather than decreased after Election Day in 2016.

“Russia is waging an information warfare campaign against the U.S. that didn’t start and didn’t end with the 2016 election,” said North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the Republican chairman of the panel. “By flooding social media with false reports, conspiracy theories and trolls, and by exploiting existing divisions, Russia is trying to breed distrust of our democratic institutions and our fellow Americans.”

The senators warned that Russia is not the only one posing a threat to U.S. elections, pointing to China, North Korea and Iran. The nation’s intelligence chiefs have warned about the threat of foreign interference in the upcoming 2020 election.

“The Russian playbook is out in the open for other foreign and domestic adversaries to expand upon - and their techniques will only get more sophisticated,” said Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the panel’s top Democrat.

The report detailed efforts by the Russians to exploit tensions in American society, particularly along racial lines. For instance, over 66 percent of the Internet Research Agency’s Facebook ads contained a term related to race and its Facebook pages were targeted to black Americans in key metropolitan areas.

California Sen. Kamala Harris, a Democrat running for president, highlighted parts of the report on Twitter and urged lawmakers to take action to prevent future interference.

“I think of America as a family_and like any family, we have issues. We have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation that we need to confront,” Harris wrote on Twitter. “But someone came into our house and inflamed these tensions to turn us against each other. We can’t let that happen again.”

In the report, the Senate Intelligence Committee recommends that the Trump administration “publicly reinforce” the danger of attempts by hostile nations to interfere in the 2020 election. It also calls for the administration to develop a framework for deterring future attacks and to create an interagency task force to monitor the use of social media by foreign governments for interference.

Senators also recommended social media companies improve coordination and cooperation with relevant government agencies. In addition, they said, Congress should consider legislation to ensure the public knows the source behind online political ads.

On Tuesday, House Democrats unveiled an election security bill that would require more transparency in online political ads along with tightening laws around the exchange of campaign information between candidates and foreign governments and requiring that campaigns report illicit offers of foreign help to the FBI.

The House bill would require TV stations, cable and satellite providers and social media companies such as Facebook to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure political advertising is not purchased by people outside of the U.S., either directly or indirectly, in part by requiring that the customer provide a valid U.S. address.

This summer, Facebook announced it would be tightening its rules around political ads and requiring those who want to run ads pertaining to elections, politics or major social issues to confirm their identity and prove they are in the U.S. with a tax identification number or other government ID.

A separate House election security measure passed the House at the beginning of the year, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declined to take it up. McConnell, however, has supported an effort to send $250 million in additional election security funds to states to shore up their systems ahead of 2020.

“Today’s bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report makes it crystal clear to everyone that Vladimir Putin exploited social media to spread false information in the 2016 elections and that the Senate must take action to ensure Americans know who is behind online political ads to help prevent it from happening again,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York.

An earlier report by the committee focused on efforts by the Russians to target state and local election systems.

[warningsine]

ISLAMABAD: A Pakistan high court on Tuesday (Aug 29) suspended former prime minister Imran Khan's prison sentence for a graft conviction, his lawyer said, but it was unclear if he would be immediately released.

A spokesman for Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said that the Islamabad High Court had overturned a lower court's decision this month to imprison him for three years, a judgement which has barred him from contesting upcoming elections.

His party and lawyers said he was granted bail, but they feared that the 70-year-old would be rearrested over one of the more than 200 cases levelled against him since he was ousted by parliamentary vote in April 2022.

"We have filed a separate application requesting the court pass an order barring the authorities from arresting him in any other case," Gohar Khan, one of the lawyers, told AFP.

"If authorities arrest him in any other case, it will be against his legal rights."

Khan has been in prison for three weeks since a judge found him guilty of failing to properly declare gifts he received while in office.

A special court in Islamabad has ordered prison authorities to keep Khan in judicial custody and present him before the court on Wednesday, according to an undated order seen by Reuters.

A Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) official, who requested anonymity, said Khan was charged with making public the contents of a confidential cable sent by Pakistan's ambassador to the United States and using it for political gain.

Khan's top aide, former Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, has already been arrested in the same case.

Khan alleges that the cable proves that his removal was at the behest of the United States, which he said pressed Pakistan's military to topple his government because he had visited Russia shortly before its attack on Ukraine.

Both the United States and the Pakistani military have denied that.

Anticipating his release, Khan's legal team said they would head for the Attock jail, a century-old prison around 60km west of the capital, Islamabad.

But political commentator Omar Quraishi told AFP "it remains to be seen if the former prime minister will be released and if so, when", because of the volume of other cases involving Khan.

KHAN BEHIND BARS

The charismatic 70-year-old is Pakistan's most popular politician and claims his ousting and subsequent legal cases have been orchestrated by the powerful military establishment to deny him a second term.

Khan was also briefly jailed on graft charges in May, sparking days of civil unrest, but since then, his PTI party has been targeted by a major crackdown which has vastly diminished his street power and seen most of his senior leadership jump ship or be locked away.

Islamabad said that it was targeted by "anti-state" violence during backlash over that arrest.

But rights groups say authorities used overly broad anti-terror laws to suppress PTI, and the domestic press reported pressure to censor or smear Khan on the airwaves.

While Khan was imprisoned this month, Pakistan's parliament was dissolved at the request of his successor Shehbaz Sharif to pave the way for a caretaker government which will usher in elections in the coming months.

No date for the polls has yet been announced.

Khan, a former cricket star, surged to power in 2018 on a wave of popular support, an anti-corruption manifesto and the backing of the powerful military establishment.

When he was ousted in April last year, analysts said it was because he had lost the support of those same generals who handed him the keys to office.

He was replaced by a shaky coalition of the dynastic parties which have historically ruled Pakistan.

But as an opposition politician, he waged an unprecedented campaign against the influential generals, who have staged at least three successful coups leading to decades of martial law.

Khan's political opponents say that the former prime minister will remain in custody.

"He has been on judicial remand for 15 days, which is expiring tomorrow, and he will be produced for extension of the remand tomorrow in a special court," said Ataullah Tarar, a key aide to former Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Khan's camp called for him to be released following Tuesday's suspension of his graft conviction.

"Arresting him in any other case will cause further damage to our national integrity and repute of judicial system," Khan's aide Zulfikar Bukhari posted on messaging platform X.

"Let the innocent be free!" he added.

[newstfionline]

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

House Sets Impeachment Vote to Charge Trump With Incitement (NYT) House Democrats introduced an article of impeachment against President Trump on Monday for his role in inflaming a mob that attacked the Capitol, scheduling a Wednesday vote to charge the president with “inciting violence against the government of the United States” if Vice President Mike Pence refused to strip him of power first. As the impeachment drive proceeded, federal law enforcement authorities accelerated efforts to fortify the Capitol ahead of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration on Jan. 20. The authorities announced plans to deploy up to 15,000 National Guard troops and set up a multilayered buffer zone with checkpoints around the building by Wednesday, just as lawmakers are to debate and vote on impeaching Mr. Trump. Federal authorities also said they were bracing for a wave of armed protests in all 50 state capitals and Washington in the days leading up to the inauguration.

National Guard inauguration deployment (Military Times) The Defense Department has authorized as many as 15,000 troops to be deployed to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. National Guard Bureau chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson said that there will initially be a deployment of 10,000 troops—an increase of about 4,000 from those in D.C. now. That figure is twice the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. The general declined to specify whether the guardsmen will be armed, stating that “we will work very closely with the federal agency, the FBI and law enforcement to determine if there is a need for that.” A D.C. National Guard spokesman told Military Times on Sunday that while some troops came to town with their weapons, carrying them on the streets had not yet been authorized.

Companies cutting off Trump and GOP (Yahoo Finance) Marriott and Blue Cross Blue Shield are just a few of the companies that are halting donations to GOP lawmakers who objected to certifying Joe Biden as president, while other businesses move to cut ties with President Trump directly. The actions come on the heels of Friday’s permanent suspension of Donald Trump’s Twitter account and Amazon’s move to cut off social media platform Parler’s servers. (NYT) The backlash is part of a broader shunning of Mr. Trump and his allies unfolding in the wake of the assault on the Capitol. Schools stripped the president of honorary degrees, some prominent Republicans threatened to leave the party and the New York State Bar Association announced it had begun investigating Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, which could lead to his removal from the group. And the P.G.A. of America announced it would strip Mr. Trump’s New Jersey golf club of a major tournament.

Virus deaths surging in California, now top 30,000 (AP) The coronavirus death toll in California reached 30,000 on Monday, another staggering milestone as the nation’s most populous state endures the worst surge of the nearly yearlong pandemic. Newly confirmed infections are rising at a dizzying rate of more than a quarter-million a week and during the weekend a record 1,163 deaths were reported. Los Angeles County is one of the epicenters and health officials there are telling residents to wear a mask even when at home if they go outside regularly and live with someone elderly or otherwise at high risk. California has deployed 88 refrigerated trailers to use as makeshift morgues mostly in hard-hit Southern California, where traditional storage space is dwindling.

A never-ending scandal (Bloomberg) Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35, the fighter jet already being flown by the U.S. and eight allies, remains marred by 871 software and hardware deficiencies that could undercut readiness, missions or maintenance, according to the Pentagon’s testing office. The Defense Department’s costliest weapons system “continues to carry a large number of deficiencies, many of which were identified prior to” the development and demonstration phase, which ended in April 2018 with 941 flaws, Robert Behler, the director of operational testing, said in a new assessment obtained by Bloomberg News in advance of its publication.

Pompeo Returns Cuba to Terrorism Sponsor List (NYT) The State Department designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism on Monday in a last-minute foreign policy stroke that will complicate the incoming Biden administration’s plans to restore friendlier relations with Havana. In a statement, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited Cuba’s hosting of 10 Colombian rebel leaders, along with a handful of American fugitives wanted for crimes committed in the 1970s, and Cuba’s support for the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro. Mr. Pompeo said the action sent the message that “the Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice.” The action, announced with just days remaining in the Trump administration, reverses a step taken in 2015 after President Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba, calling its decades of political and economic isolation a relic of the Cold War.

Brexit sandwich problems (BBC) A Dutch TV network has filmed border officials confiscating ham sandwiches and other foods from drivers arriving in the Netherlands from the UK, under post-Brexit rules. Under EU rules, travellers from outside the bloc are banned from bringing in meat and dairy products. The rules appeared to bemuse one driver. “Since Brexit, you are no longer allowed to bring certain foods to Europe, like meat, fruit, vegetables, fish, that kind of stuff,” a Dutch border official told the driver in footage broadcast by TV network NPO 1. In one scene, a border official asked the driver whether several of his tin-foil wrapped sandwiches had meat in them. When the driver said they did, the border official said: “Okay, so we take them all.” Surprised, the driver then asked the officials if he could keep the bread, to which one replied: “No, everything will be confiscated—welcome to the Brexit, sir. I’m sorry.”

Merkel sees coronavirus lockdown until early April: Bild (Reuters) Chancellor Angela Merkel has told lawmakers in her conservative party that she expects a lockdown in Germany to curb the spread of the coronavirus to last until the start of April, top-selling Bild daily cited participants as the meeting as saying. “If we don’t manage to stop this British virus, then we will have 10 times the number of cases by Easter. We need eight to 10 more weeks of tough measures,” Bild quoted Merkel as saying.

‘A Stalin with double meat’ (Foreign Policy) A Moscow kebab shop named after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin has closed after just 24 hours of opening after a string of complaints from angry residents. In its brief existence Stalin Doner served items like “Stalin with double meat” and “Beria with tkemali sauce”—a reference to Stalin’s notorious secret police chief. The shop’s owner, Stanislav Voltman, was interviewed by police for three hours following complaints. “They asked me if my head was screwed on straight,” Voltman told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. “It’s not like I had Hitler as the face of my brand,” Voltman said. Despite public outcry about the kebabs, support for Stalin is on the rise in Russia. A Levada Center poll in 2019 found that 70 percent of Russians think Stalin played a completely or relatively positive role in the life of the country.

In Kashmir, Hopes Wither (NYT) Kashmir, the craggily beautiful region in the shadow of the Himalayas long caught between India and Pakistan, has fallen into a state of suspended animation. Schools are closed. Lockdowns have been imposed, lifted and then reimposed. Once a hub for both Western and Indian tourists, Kashmir has been reeling for more than a year. First, India brought in security forces to clamp down on the region. Then the coronavirus struck. The streets are full of soldiers. Military bunkers, removed years ago, are back, and at many places cleave the road. On highways, soldiers stop passenger vehicles and drag commuters out to check their identity cards. Conflict in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority region, has festered for decades. And an armed uprising has long sought self-rule. Tens of thousands of rebels, civilians and security forces have died since 1990. India and Pakistan have gone to war twice over the territory, which is split between them but claimed by both in its entirety. Now, as India flexes its power over the region, to even call Kashmir a disputed region is a crime—sedition, according to Indian officials. Many say that the political paralysis is the worst it has ever been in Kashmir’s 30 years of conflict, and that people have been choked into submission.

India’s top court suspends implementation of new farm laws (AP) India’s top court on Tuesday temporarily put on hold the implementation of new agricultural laws and ordered the formation of an independent committee of experts to negotiate with farmers who have been protesting against the legislation. The Supreme Court’s ruling came a day after it heard petitions filed by the farmers challenging the controversial legislation. The court said that the laws were passed without enough consultation, and that it was disappointed with the way talks were proceeding between representatives of the government and farmer leaders. Tens of thousands of farmers protesting against the legislation have been blocking half a dozen major highways on the outskirts of New Delhi for more than 45 days. Farmers say they won’t leave until the government repeals the laws. They say the legislation passed by Parliament in September will lead to the cartelization and commercialization of agriculture, make farmers vulnerable to corporate greed and devastate their earnings. The government insists the laws will benefit farmers and says they will enable farmers to market their produce and boost production through private investment.

First came political crimes. Now, a digital crackdown descends on Hong Kong. (Washington Post) HONG KONG—The police officers who came to take away Owen Chow on national security grounds last week left little to chance. Determined to find his phones, they had prepared a list of mobile numbers registered to his name, even one he used exclusively for banking, said the 23-year-old Hong Kong activist. Officers called each number in succession, the vibrations revealing the locations of three iPhones around his apartment. By the end of their operation, police had amassed more than 200 devices from Chow and 52 others held for alleged political crimes that day, according to those arrested, as well as laptops from spouses who are not politically active and were not detained. The digital sweep showed how Hong Kong authorities are wielding new powers under the national security law, introduced last summer, far more widely than the city’s leader promised. Since the Jan. 6 raids, authorities have blocked at least one website, according to the site’s owner and local media reports, raising concerns that Hong Kong is headed for broader digital surveillance and censorship akin to that in mainland China. Hong Kong police have begun sending devices seized from arrested people to mainland China, where authorities have sophisticated data-extraction technology, and are using the information gleaned from those devices to assist in investigations, according to two people familiar with the arrangement who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their safety.

26 missing, at least 13 dead in Indonesia landslides (AP) Rescuers are searching for 26 people still missing after two landslides hit a village in Indonesia’s West Java province over the weekend, officials said Tuesday. At least 13 people were killed and 29 others injured in the landslides that were triggered by heavy rain on Sunday in Cihanjuang, a village in West Java’s Sumedang district. Some of the victims were rescuers from the first landslide.

Leading human rights group calls Israel an ‘apartheid’ state (AP) A leading Israeli human rights group has begun describing both Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single “apartheid” regime, using an explosive term that the country’s leaders and their supporters vehemently reject. In a report released Tuesday, B’Tselem says that while Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, blockaded Gaza, annexed east Jerusalem and within Israel itself, they have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. “One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government,” said B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. “This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea.” That a respected Israeli organization is adopting a term long seen as taboo even by many critics of Israel points to a broader shift in the debate as its half-century occupation of war-won lands drags on and hopes for a two-state solution fade.

Uganda bans social media ahead of presidential election (Reuters) Uganda banned social media on Tuesday, two days ahead of a presidential election pitting Yoweri Museveni, one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders, against opposition frontrunner Bobi Wine, a popular singer. Internet monitor NetBlocks said its data showed that Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat, Viber and Google Play Store were among a lengthy list of sites unavailable via Uganda’s main cell network operators. Campaigning ahead of the vote has been marred by brutal crackdowns on opposition rallies, which the authorities say break COVID-19 curbs on large gatherings. Rights groups say the restrictions are a pretext for muzzling the opposition. At 38, Wine is half the age of President Yoweri Museveni and has attracted a large following among young people in a nation where 80% of the population are under 30, rattling the ruling National Resistance Movement party.

Coronavirus-spurred changes to global workforce to be permanent (Reuters) Sweeping changes to the global labour market caused by the coronavirus pandemic will likely be permanent, policy makers said on Tuesday, as some industries collapse, others flourish and workers stay home. The pandemic, which has so far infected at least 90.5 million people and killed around 1.9 worldwide, has up-ended industries and workers in almost every country in the world as tough lockdowns were imposed. The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that the impact of huge job losses worldwide is creating a fiscal gap that threatens to increase inequality between richer and poorer countries. The ILO estimated that global labour income declined by 10.7 per cent, or $3.5 trillion, in the first three quarters of 2020, compared with the same period in 2019, excluding government income support. India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said the pandemic had created an “accidental challenge” under which the government delivered food on a regular basis to 800 million people and provided sustained business funds. Philippines central bank Governor Benjamin Diokno said it was clear some industries will not survive, others will not be as dynamic as before, and yet others will be boosted by the massive changes. The need for a more nimble and innovative approach to education will remain long after the pandemic ends, said Helen Fulson, Chief Product Officer at educational publisher Twinkl. “How many children today will be doing jobs that currently don’t exist?’ she said at Reuters Next on Monday. “We don’t know how to train for these jobs.”

[pkhotnews]

Backing for Palestinians' battle reaffirmed

Backing for Palestinians’ battle reaffirmed

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan would keep supporting the Palestinian individuals in their battle for right to self-assurance and accomplishing the objective of foundation of a free state, said Foreign Office Spokesman Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri on Thursday. Talking at an online class facilitated by the Islamabad Policy Institute (IPI) on ‘Elements of Muslim World and Future of Palestine: Time to Fight Back’,…

[nasiknews]

Environment For 'Constructive Dialogue' With India Not There: Pakistan

Environment For ‘Constructive Dialogue’ With India Not There: Pakistan

Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman, Asim Iftikhar Ahmed | File Photo Islamabad- Pakistan’s Foreign Office has said that doors for diplomacy on outstanding issues with India remain open, but the environment for “a fruitful and constructive dialogue” is not there, according to a media report on Friday. The remarks by Foreign Office spokesman Asim Iftikhar came in response to questions on ties with…

[bountyofbeads]

Four Million Indians in One State Risk Being Denied Citizenship. Most Are Muslims. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/world/asia/india-muslims-narendra-modi.html

Donald Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s "nativist" policies are reverberating around the the world. 😢😢😭😭

Four Million Indians Risk Being Denied Citizenship. Most Are Muslims.

By Jeffrey Gettleman and Hari Kumar

Aug. 17, 2019

NEW DELHI — More than four million people in India, mostly Muslims, are at risk of being declared foreign migrants as the government pushes a hard-line Hindu nationalist agenda that has challenged the country’s pluralist traditions and aims to redefine what it means to be Indian.

The hunt for migrants is unfolding in Assam, a poor, hilly state near the borders with Myanmar and Bangladesh. Many of the people whose citizenship is now being questioned were born in India and have enjoyed all the rights of citizens, such as voting in elections.

State authorities are rapidly expanding foreigner tribunals and planning to build huge new detention camps. Hundreds of people have been arrested on suspicion of being a foreign migrant — including a Muslim veteran of the Indian Army. Local activists and lawyers say the pain of being left off a preliminary list of citizens and the prospect of being thrown into jail have driven dozens to suicide.

But the governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not backing down.

Instead, it is vowing to bring this campaign to force people to prove they are citizens to other parts of India, part of a far-reaching Hindu nationalist program fueled by Mr. Modi’s sweeping re-election victory in May and his stratospheric popularity.

Members of India’s Muslim minority are growing more fearful by the day. Assam’s anxiously watched documentation of citizenship — a drive that began years ago and is scheduled to wrap up on Aug. 31 — coincides with another setback for Muslims, this one transpiring more than a thousand miles away.

Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Modi unilaterally wiped out the statehood of India’s only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir, removing its special autonomy and turning it into a federal territory without any consultation with local leaders — many of whom have since been arrested.

Among Mr. Modi’s critics, events in Assam and Kashmir are Exhibits A and B in their conviction that the prime minister is using the early months of his second term to push the most forceful and divisive Hindu nationalist agenda  ever attempted in India and to fundamentally reconfigure the concept of Indian identity to be synonymous with being Hindu. Many Indians, on both sides of the political divide, see Assam and Kashmir as harbingers of the direction Mr. Modi will take this nation of 1.3 billion people in the coming years.

The stated purpose of the citizenship dragnet in Assam is to find undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh — a predominantly Muslim country to its south. Amit Shah, India’s powerful home minister, has repeatedly referred to those immigrants as “termites.’’

All of the 33 million residents of Assam have had to prove, with documentary evidence, that they or their ancestors were Indian citizens before early 1971, when Bangladesh was established after breaking away from Pakistan. That is not easy. Many families are racing to get their hands on a decades-old property deed or fraying birth certificate with an ancestor’s name on it.

Beyond this, Mr. Modi’s government has tried to pass a bill in Parliament that carves out exemptions for Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and people from other religions — but leaves out Muslims.

Mr. Modi’s critics say he is playing a dangerous game and pulling apart the diverse, delicate social fabric that has existed in India for centuries.

The prime minister’s political roots lie in a Hindu nationalist movement that emphasizes the religion’s supremacy. This worldview has a long history of sowing division between the country’s Hindu majority and Muslim minority, at times exploding in violence.

Assam has been hit by its own troubles and ethnic bloodshed. But the violence being reported now is self-inflicted.

Noor Begum, who lived in a small hamlet in a flood-soaked district, spiraled into depression after finding out that she and her mother had been excluded from the citizenship lists. Her father and seven siblings had made it.

It didn’t make any sense to the family: Why, if they all lived together and were born in the same place, would some be considered Indian while others illegal foreigners?

“Of course she was Indian,” said her father, Abdul Kalam, a retired laborer. “She used to sing Indian national songs at school. She felt very Indian.”

On a bright morning in June, Noor hanged herself from a rafter. She was 14.

Many Muslims in Kashmir are despondent as well. After Mr. Modi’s government erased Kashmir’s autonomy, thousands of outraged Kashmiris took to the streets, only to be locked down by a heavy deployment of security forces and a smothering communications blackout.

Kashmir has long been a flash point. Both India and Pakistan control different parts of it and several times, the tensions have driven the two nuclear armed rivals to war or dangerously close to it.

Though the Indian government has eased some of the communication restrictions in the past few days, hundreds of Kashmiri intellectuals are still under arrest and Pakistan is seething.

The tension with Pakistan tends to lift Mr. Modi’s political fortunes. His forceful stand against India’s No. 1 enemy just adds to his image as an unswerving patriot and one of the most decisive and powerful prime ministers India has produced in decades.

Many in India’s Hindu majority don’t object to Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist policies or even seem to think too much about them. They praise what they see as the strides he has made in fighting poverty and projecting a more muscular image of India on the world stage.

But critics say his Hindu nationalist beliefs are central to who he is and intentionally divisive, engineered to win votes from the Hindu majority. India is about 80 percent Hindu and 14 percent Muslim. (Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists make up most of the rest of the population.)

A small but vocal minority of left-leaning intellectuals, Muslim leaders and opposition politicians has tried to turn public opinion against Mr. Modi’s policies without much success.

What is happening in Assam and Kashmir “is an assault on the very imagination of India, of the freedom struggle, of the Constitution, of the idea of a country in which everyone belongs equally,” said Harsh Mander, a former civil servant turned human rights activist.

“Muslims are the enemy,” he said. “It’s a war on the Indian Constitution.”

Ashutosh Varshney, the head of Brown University’s South Asia program, said that India “in all probability and unless checked is headed toward a Hindu nationalist, majoritarian state.”

With the political opposition in total disarray and all government agencies — especially the bureaucracy and the security apparatus — firmly in Mr. Modi’s hands, Mr. Varshney said the only hope for India’s secular democracy is in the courts.

But, he cautioned, “The judiciary might well surrender.”

Even a streak of alarming headlines in recent weeks, including big job losses in the auto sector, deadly flooding across the country and a new outbreak of violence by Hindu mobs against Muslims, hasn’t dented Mr. Modi’s popularity.

Outsiders may wonder how any political movement in India could question Muslims’ contribution to society. India is a thoroughly multicultural place, and Muslims have contributed for centuries, even ruling the country at times. Muslim emperors built some of India’s brightest cultural treasures, including the Taj Mahal.

But since Mr. Modi took office in 2014, government bodies have rewritten history books, lopping out sections on Muslim rulers, and changed official place names to Hindu from Muslim. Hindu mobs have lynched dozens of Muslims; participants are rarely punished.

Mr. Modi and allies in his Bharatiya Janata Party, known as the B.J.P., have denied any anti-Muslim bias and rejected criticism that the way they have handled the mass citizenship check in Assam has been harsh or discriminatory. State level officials in Assam said this was purely an administrative exercise to ferret out people who have no legal right to stay in India.

Rupam Goswami, a spokesman for the state B.J.P. party, said the registry “is only a process of documentation.”

Like much of India, Assam has reflected a tapestry of different ethnic groups and religions for as long as anyone can remember. Its beautiful tea estates have attracted flocks of migrant workers.

But many indigenous Assamese, who are mostly Hindu, have resented immigrants from Bangladesh, saying that the ethnic Bengalis were coming into their state and taking away their jobs and their land. In 1983, this locals-versus-outsider enmity blew up.

Assamese villagers slaughtered more than 1,000 ethnic Bengalis, many of them Muslim — scholars say that most ethnic Bengalis in Assam are Muslim. In 2012, another smaller wave of violence erupted.

The next year, India’s Supreme Court set in motion a process for a large-scale registration of citizens to be updated in Assam. This would determine who was an Indian and who was not. The deadline for residents to provide documentary proof that they or their ancestors have a legacy as Indian citizens, going back to March 1971 or earlier, has been extended several times.

Though this issue predates Mr. Modi’s taking India’s reins in 2014, the B.J.P. has aggressively backed the process, with Mr. Shah vowing to clear out all the “termites.’’

When a preliminary Assam citizenship list was published in 2018, leaving off four million people, scholars said the majority were Muslim but large numbers of Bengali-speaking Hindus were also excluded.

The B.J.P. then had to regroup. Its response was to push a new citizenship bill that said migrants from neighboring countries who were Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsees or Jains would be eligible for Indian citizenship. One of South Asia’s biggest religious groups was conspicuously left off: Muslims.

The government said it was trying to help religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. To critics, it looked like another anti-Muslim campaign, plain and simple.

The bill sailed through the lower house of Parliament but stalled after many Assamese politicians said they didn’t like the religious dimension the B.J.P. was injecting — or the possibility that the large number of Hindu Bengalis would be given an exception. Some B.J.P. politicians say they want to revive it.

Many of the people whose names were left off the list were born in India, lived here all their lives and were considered citizens in every right.

One of them was Mohammed Sanaullah, a retired army captain. In May, he was picked up on suspicion of being an illegal migrant and jailed for nearly two weeks.

Mr. Sanaullah said he was totally demoralized.

“I am an Indian, my father is an Indian, my grandfather was an Indian, my forefathers were Indian. They were all born in India. We will be Indian forever,” he said.

The Assam state government sends suspected foreign migrants to foreigner tribunals, a growing network of more than 100 small courts where the onus is on the suspects to provide the proof that the government is demanding. Human rights observers have complained that the proceedings often discriminate against Muslims and are the equivalent of sham trials.

The B.J.P. doesn’t want to stop at Assam.

Mr. Shah and other party leaders have promised their supporters that they will bring mass citizenship reviews across the country. Human rights activists fear these could be used to discriminate against minorities and this will be made easier because, under Supreme Court rules, individuals are allowed to legally challenge another’s citizenship.

More than 3.5 million people who have so far been left off the Assam citizenship list have filed challenges to their exclusion, and state-level officials are reviewing these claims.

But Assam is not waiting. The state government, which is controlled by an arm of the B.J.P., is planning to build 10 new detention camps with the capacity to hold thousands of people.

Bangladesh has not been eager to accept the ethnic Bengalis in Assam as citizens either. That could leave many languishing in a legal no-man’s land without many rights.

Critics say what is happening in both Kashmir and Assam are attempts to change the demographics in these areas in favor of Hindus. Kashmiris fear the government’s real plan in wiping out their autonomy is to pave the way to resettle large numbers of Hindu Indians in Kashmir and end its status as the one Muslim-majority territory in India.

Under the changes, Kashmiris will lose the special land rights they used to hold that made it difficult for non-Kashmiris to buy land in their state. Mr. Modi has argued that the new arrangement will bring outside investment, better governance and a “new dawn.”

But other Indian states have similar protections for local residents and Mr. Modi’s party is not trying to change those.

Critics say the difference is obvious: Those states are not Muslim.

Suhasini Raj contributed reporting from New Delhi, and Shajid Khan from Rowmari Chapari, Assam.