A Tongan government committee yesterday recommended sweeping democratic changes to the semi-feudal political system less than a month after a new king was proclaimed in Polynesia's last monarchy.
The king and nobles currently control the parliament in the poor South Pacific archipelago of 115,00 people. But the head of the government's reform committee has told parliament that all legislators should be popularly elected.
Committee chairman Sitiveni Halapua told parliament that the country's laws should be changed to establish a "fully elected parliament by the people, for the people."
Tongans were unanimous in their desire for reform and for parliament to be popularly elected, he told parliament.
Currently commoners can elect only nine of the legislators, another nine are selected by 33 nobles and the rest are Cabinet ministers appointed by the king.
The majority also wanted to retain the monarch and 33 nobles at the head of Tonga's social system.
Halapua is still to present the committee's detailed recommendations to parliament, which does not meet again until next week.
The committee was set up by the government following pro-democracy demonstrations and a six-week public service strike last year which saw a royal house and several government cars burned.
The death last month of King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV after a 41-year reign brought his eldest son, Siaosi Tupou V, to the throne.
The former crown prince, known for his taste for ornate uniforms and the London taxi which drives him around Nuku'alofa, was resented by many Tongans for spending much of his time overseas and his extensive business interests.
But he is considered to be more open to reform than his father and a statement from the royal palace last week said that he would "hasten appropriate changes to the system of government in response to the democratic wishes of the people."
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS