Myanmar's military junta said yesterday it wondered whether the US exemption of the Karen refugees from immigration laws presaged an invasion of the country.
Information Minister Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan said the last time Washington allowed an exemption from laws aimed at keeping terrorists and their supporters out was before the "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba after the communist victory there.
"The US government then provided these Cuban exiles with shelter and food and then military training and weapons," he told a news conference in Mone, 260km northeast of Yangon.
"After that, in 1961, the US had these Cuban exiles invade Cuba through the Bay of Pigs," he said.
"The recent exemption made by the US in their immigration law reminds us of the Bay of Pigs Invasion," he said.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month waived a law to make a group of Myanmar refugees, almost all of whom back the Karen National Union, a rebel group fighting for autonomy, eligible for resettlement into the US. As such, some 9,300 Karen refugees housed in Tham Hin camp in Thailand along the Myanmar border will no longer be viewed as terrorism supporters.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the