■INDIA
Hirsi Ali slams ‘appeasers’
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born former Dutch lawmaker threatened with death for her outspoken criticism of Islam, yesterday accused the world’s liberal democracies of appeasing radical Muslims. Hirsi Ali, who since 2004 has lived under constant guard against death threats from Islamic extremists, made her accusation during an appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Hirsi Ali said fear of offending Muslims and the wider Islamic world meant Islam had been largely exempted in Europe and the US from the critical scrutiny applied to other religions. “In the West, people are frigidly stuck in an attitude of self-doubt,” fearful of Muslim radicals but also worried of being seen as anti-Muslim and thus betraying their own liberal traditions, Hirsi Ali said. “This appeasement has made the public space in these countries a lot less safe.” Genuine debate about Islam, Ali said, was all too often “shut down by those who have a stake in keeping any criticism of Islam away. It’s extraordinary to see the energy we spend on protecting individual Muslims from questioning their moral framework. We should make Islam go through the same enlightenment process other religions have gone through by using that questioning process.”
■BANGLADESH
Millions gather for prayer
At least 4 million Muslims attended prayers yesterday near Dhaka at the climax of the largest annual Islamic event after the hajj, police said. The Bishwa Ijtema, or World Muslim Congregation, concluded after an imam led final prayers with devotees filling every open space, rooftops and kilometers of roads leading to the congregation site. The gathering, at which Muslims pray and listen to religious scholars, was first held in the 1960s on the banks of the Turag river and was launched by Tablig Jamaat, a non-political group that urges people to follow Islam in their daily lives. Police inspector Mamun Hasan said at least four million people attended the event. Dhaka was deserted yesterday as many residents left their jobs — Sunday is a working day in Bangladesh — and headed to the venue, 40km north of the city.
■CHINA
Beijing pushes bikes
Beijing’s city government wants to reverse the declining trend of people using bicycles to help ease pollution and growing traffic chaos, state media said yesterday. Twenty years ago, more than 80 percent of residents in China’s capital cycled, but that proportion has shrunk to a little under a fifth, news agency Xinhua said. The government wants to ensure that around a quarter of the population uses bicycles by 2015. They hope to achieve this by restoring bike lanes which had been taken over for vehicle use and by building more parking places, said Liu Xiaoming, head of the Municipal Communications Commission. Beijing is home to around four million cars, out of a total human population of 17 million, Xinhua said.
■PHILIPPINES
Arroyo pleads for maid’s life
President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is pleading with Kuwait to spare the life of a Filipino housemaid who was sentenced to death after a murder conviction. The Department of Foreign Affairs said yesterday that Arroyo has asked Vice President Noli de Castro to travel to Kuwait to intercede on behalf of Jakatia Pawa, who was convicted of stabbing to death her employer’s daughter in 2007. The department says De Castro will deliver a letter of appeal from Arroyo to Kuwait’s emir.
■CANADA
PM let envoy spy for CIA
Former ambassador to Iran Kenneth Taylor said on Saturday that he worked as a CIA spy during the 1979 hostage crisis in wake of the Islamic revolution. Taylor broke his silence in an interview published in the daily Globe and Mail, as a book detailing his involvement hit bookstores. “It had been under wraps for 30 years,” Taylor said, adding it was his “assumption... that it would be for another 30 years …“I didn’t expect to be here to talk about it.” The arrangement was set up by then-US president Jimmy Carter and Canadian prime minister Joe Clark, whereby Taylor would provide US intelligence with information from his position at the Canadian embassy in Tehran.
■BOLIVIA
Cabinet split male-female
President Evo Morales on Saturday swore in a new Cabinet of 20 ministers, half of whom are women — a first in the nation. “My great dream has been fulfilled, half of my Cabinet are women, the other half men,” said Morales, speaking at a ceremony at the Quemado presidential palace. Morales, 50, was sworn in for a second five-year term on Friday after he winning re-election last month. The only precedent in Latin America for a similar split was under President Michelle Bachelet in Chile, who after her 2006 election divided her Cabinet of 26 ministers equally among men and women.
■BRAZIL
Cordero extradited
Former Uruguayan army officer Manuel Cordero was extradited to Argentina on Saturday, where he faces trial for the 1976 disappearance of an Argentine citizen, Brazilian police said. His extradition had been ordered on Tuesday but was postponed as his lawyers argued he was in such poor health he needed to remain hospitalized. But after medical examinations on Saturday, Cordero was taken to the Argentine border and handed over. Cordero, who had been under house arrest at his home near the border before being hospitalized, is accused of being part of Operation Condor, a coordinated repression by South American dictatorships in the 1970s against left-wing activists that was carried out with CIA assistance.
■UNITED KINGDOM
Mom jailed for hoax
A mother was jailed on Friday for pretending that her healthy son was “the sickest boy in Britain” and needed to be fed through a tube and be taken to school in a wheelchair. During a bizarre six-year deception, Lisa Hayden-Johnson, 35, claimed her boy had life-threatening illnesses, including diabetes, cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis, and used the fantasy to pocket donations and gifts and to meet royals, politicians and celebrities, the Exeter Crown Court was told. She amassed cash donations and charity gifts, including two cruises, and successfully lobbied for her son to win a child bravery award, prosecutors said. The boy, who was convinced he really was seriously ill, was subjected to 325 medical encounters, including blood tests and intravenous treatments. He was fed through a tube and confined to a wheelchair. The boy never suffered from any of the disorders. He was taken into care in 2007.
■NICARAGUA
Ortega attacks US on Haiti
President Daniel Ortega said the US government is using the Haitian earthquake as a pretext to occupy Haiti militarily. “The Yankees should come with medicine, not with weapons,” he said in a speech in Managua on Saturday broadcast on TV. “The US government is taking advantage of the situation in Haiti to impose a military occupation.”
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
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