Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{With aerial support from US-led coalition, Iraqi forces launch offensive to drive ISIL from Mosul’s western half.}

Iraqi forces advanced into the southern outskirts of Mosul on the second day of a push to drive ISIL from the city’s western half, as the visiting US defence secretary met officials to discuss the fight against the armed group.

With aerial support from the US-led coalition, Iraqi police and army troops launched the offensive on Sunday, part of a 100-day-old campaign that has already driven the fighters from the eastern half of the city.

Iraqi helicopters fired rockets at the village of Abu Sayyaf early on Monday, targeting a hill that overlooks the city’s airport.

By noon, the forces entered the village and gained control over much of the strategic hill as fighting was still raging.

Separately, militarised police in armoured vehicles were moving towards the sprawling Ghazlani military base on the southwestern outskirts of the city.

A US-led coalition has been providing close air support throughout the campaign to retake Iraq’s second-largest city. US special operations forces are embedded with some Iraqi units and thousands of US troops are in Iraq providing logistical and other support.

Meanwhile, US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis was holding discussions with US and Iraqi officials, a week before he is expected to present a new strategy to President Donald Trump for defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group.

“We’re going to make certain that we’ve got good situational awareness of what we face as we work together and fight alongside each other,” Mattis told reporters traveling with him.

Trump has repeatedly vowed to eliminate the group but has provided few details about how his approach might differ from that of the Obama administration, which had partnered with Syrian and Iraqi forces to drive ISIL, also known as ISIS, out of several towns and cities.

The battle for western Mosul, the group’s last major urban bastion in Iraq, is expected to be the most daunting yet.

The streets are older and narrower in that sector of the city, which stretches west from the River Tigris, forcing Iraqi soldiers to leave the relative safety of their armoured vehicles.

The presence of up to 750,000 civilians also poses a challenge.

Two suicide car bombers struck army and paramilitary forces west of Mosul on Monday, killing and wounding a number of troops, two army officers said, without specifying the number of casualties.

A third suicide car bomber was blown up before reaching the troops, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to brief the media.

ISIL claimed responsibility for two attacks in an online statement, saying the attackers were British and Iraqi.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Publisher Simon & Schuster had defended Milo Yiannopoulos but steps back after comments about sexual consent.}

The publisher behind far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos has cancelled his planned book, Dangerous.

Simon & Schuster’s announcement on Monday came hours after the Breitbart editor was disinvited to this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference because of past comments about relationships between boys and men.

In audio from a podcast, Yiannopoulos, 33, can be heard describing sexual consent as “arbitrary and oppressive”.

“In the homosexual world particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men, the sort of coming-of-age relationships, relationships in which those older men have helped those young boys to discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable – and sort of a rock, where they can’t speak to their parents,” Yiannopoulos is heard saying on the Drunken Peasants podcast.

Documented on a new video from the podcast makers, he is also heard jokingly defending “priest molestation”.

Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint said that “after careful consideration” they had pulled the book, which was the subject of intense controversy.

Until Monday, Simon & Schuster had defended the book.

In December, the publisher asked readers to “withhold judgment until they have had a chance to read the actual contents of the book”.

Yiannopoulos, who was reportedly paid a six-figure advance for the memoir to the tune of around $250,000, was permanently banned by Twitter in July 2016 for racist abuse targeting the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.

Taking to his Facebook page, Yiannopoulos wrote: “They canceled my book.” In a later post, he said: “I’ve gone through worse. This will not defeat me.”

“Dangerous” was originally scheduled to come out in March, but Yiannopoulos had pushed back the release to June so he could write about the uprisings during his recent campus tour.

‘They were fine with his racism’

More than 100 Simon & Schuster authors had objected to his book deal.

Author Roxane Gay withdrew a planned book with the publisher.

On Monday, she said she would continue her protest and not return to Simon & Schuster.

“In cancelling Milo’s book contract, Simon & Schuster made a business decision the same way they made a business decision when they decided to publish that man in the first place,” she said.

“When his comments about pedophilia/pederasty came to light, Simon & Schuster realised it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them.

“They did not finally ‘do the right thing’ and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies. They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies. They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{Rumours still abound about bizarre attack on North Korean leader’s half brother at Malaysia airport.}

A week since news broke that the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had been assassinated, a clearer picture is emerging of the Cold War-style killing in Kuala Lumpur’s international airport.

But rumours still abound about the bizarre attack, and Malaysian police are keeping their cards close to their chest when it comes to their ongoing investigation.

Here is what we know – and what we still don’t know – about the death of Kim Jong-nam.

{{What happened?}}

Last Monday morning, Kim Jong-nam was at the budget terminal of Kuala Lumpur’s main airport preparing to fly to Macau.

He was approached by two women, one of whom grabbed him from behind and sprayed his face with an apparently poisonous liquid, according to police and leaked CCTV footage.

Jong-nam then approached airport staff, gesturing to his face in a bid to explain what happened, footage showed.

The staff later led him to the airport clinic, where a picture released in Malaysian media shows him slumped in a chair.

Kim suffered a seizure and was rushed to hospital but died before he arrived.

{{The first suspects}}

In the days following the attack, police announced they had arrested a 28-year-old Vietnamese woman called Doan Thi Huong, as well as 25-year-old Indonesian Siti Aishah and her Malaysian boyfriend.

Huong – who is shown in CCTV from the airport wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the word “LOL” – worked at an “entertainment outlet” and Aishah was a masseuse at a spa, police said.

Aishah had been duped into believing she was taking part in a TV prank show, the head of police in Indonesia said, citing information from Malaysia.

Residents of the rice farming village in Vietnam where Huong grew up said she was very fashionable, often changing her hair colour and returning each lunar new year with a different foreign boyfriend.

{{The Pyongyang trail}}

Later police arrested a 46-year-old North Korean called Ri Jong-chol, who they said lived in Kuala Lumpur and worked in information technology.

They are currently seeking four more North Korean men, who entered the country on different dates in the fortnight running up to the assassination, and all left on the day it was carried out.

The men returned to Pyongyang on a convoluted route via Indonesia, Dubai and Vladivostok, immigration officials and sources said.

Seoul cited these developments as proof that the North Korean regime was behind the attack. But Pyongyang hit back, accusing the Malaysian investigation of being politically motivated.

{{The motive}}

If Pyongyang were behind the killing, a number of reasons have been put forward as to why the regime might have wanted Jong-nam out of the way.

One theory said he was a marked man since he criticised the country’s system of hereditary succession to a journalist in 2011, when he said North Korea would need to reform and liberalise like China.

Another said Kim Jong-un was paranoid about the slim chance his older sibling posed a threat to his leadership, providing a liberal alternative within the Kim family.

Other analysts said the assassination could have been ordered over reports Kim Jong-nam was preparing to defect.

One suggestion that does not assume the regime’s involvement is that a hit was ordered in connection with alleged shady business dealings in the region.

{{What happens next?}}

Malaysian authorities insisted a family member must come forward to provide a DNA sample before it can be released – something they said has yet to happen.

If no next of kin comes forward within a fortnight, police have said they would consider other options for the body.

A heavy, armed police presence accompanied the arrival of an unmarked convoy at the hospital holding the body in the early hours of Tuesday, amid unconfirmed reports that Kim Jong-nam’s son, Kim Han-sol, had flown to Kuala Lumpur to claim the remains of his father.

A toxicology report should be released between one and two weeks after the post-mortem, the health minister has said on different occasions, which means there could be more detail about the kind of poison used as early as Wednesday.

But whatever the outcome of the investigation, the fallout from the killing has already damaged ties between North Korea and Malaysia and may isolate the Stalinist state yet further on the world stage.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Raid is part of an investigation into allegations that far-right leader used EU funds to pay staff of her FN party.}

French police have searched the Paris-based headquarters of far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) party in relation to a probe into alleged misuse of EU funds, according to a party statement.

The European Parliament (EP) says Le Pen, a member of the European institution since 2004, had paid FN party staff with EP funds.

According to EU rules, parliamentary money should be used only to pay assistants working with the institution.

The parliament says the breach happened during the 2011-12 legislature, after Le Pen assumed her role as FN leader in January 2011.

The EP says 20 assistants presented as parliamentary aides back then continued to work for the FN elsewhere.

Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said Le Pen, currently in a visit to Lebanon, has not yet commented on the police search, but in the past, she has always denied misusing European funds.

“She basically says this is a political smear by her opponents because she is running very much on an anti-EU platform,” Butler said.

Second raid

The raid is the second in a year by investigators trying to determine whether the FN misused EP funds.

“For the second time, a raid took place at the same offices, over the same allegations, which confirms that the first raid amounted to nothing,” the party said in a statement.

The group accused investigators acting for the Paris prosecutor’s office of a “media operation” designed to disrupt Le Pen’s campaign before a presidential vote in April.

The search at the FN headquarters came only days after corruption accusations against conservative candidate Francois Fillon.

Fillon, a former prime minister, has been hit by allegations that his wife was paid for years as his assistant in the French parliament but never actually worked there.

“The parallels are rather striking with Fillon who is also accused of using parliamentary money, this time in France, to pay his relatives for fake jobs,” Butler said.

Butler added: “He has always presented himself as an honest politician and those allegations have been very damaging.

“The spotlight has been very much on Fillon until now but of course with the French police now being involved it seems that perhaps Le Pen will be far more in the headlines after this search.”

An election poll by Opinionway, the French research company, had Le Pen easily beating her four main rivals and winning the first round with a score of 27 percent to move through to the two-way runoff against either Fillon or Emmanuel Macron, the left-wing independent candidate.

According to the poll, Le Pen is predicted to lose in the second round to either of the candidates.

Source:Al Jazeera