Syria's former vice-president said in comments published yesterday that the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which he is trying to topple, will collapse this year.
"The current regime will fall because of the blunders it has committed both in domestic and and international politics," Dubai's Gulf News daily quoted Abdul Halim Khaddam as saying in an exclusive telephone interview from his self-imposed exile in the Belgian capital Brussels.
"It will definitely happen in 2006," Khaddam told the English-language paper, without saying why he was certain the regime would be ousted so soon.
Khaddam, who helped formulate Syria's foreign policy for nearly three decades, also criticized the late president Hafez Assad, saying he should never have allowed his son to succeed him.
Alleging massive corruption inside the ruling family in Syria, Khaddam said that "currently, there is no way to correct the regime from inside the nation. Bashar is acting like someone who has a farm and wants to manage it on his own. He would not listen to any idea other than those praising him."
Khaddam, 74, broke away from Assad late last year, following growing international pressure over the killing of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri last year, which the UN has blamed on Syria.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
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North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French colonial rule. The history of romanized Vietnamese, or Quoc Ngu, links the arrival of the first Christian missionaries, colonization by the French and the rise to power of the Communist Party of Vietnam. It is now reflected in the country’s “bamboo diplomacy” approach of seeking strength through flexibility, or looking to stay on good terms with the world’s major powers. A month after Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) visited,
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