Tag: InternationalNews

{Expected president’s persona as a gun-loving, motorcycle-riding womaniser with a death squad is only part of the story.}

It was evident hours after the polls closed that Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte would be the next president of the Philippines. By 9pm, the votes he received equalled the sum of those cast for his two closest opponents.

The tough-talking mayor joined political allies on Monday night at a victory dinner before taking a pilgrimage to his parents’ grave at 3am – where he broke down crying, whimpering for his mama to guide him.

It was a vulnerability that contrasts with the 71-year-old Duterte’s public persona as a gun-loving, motorcycle-riding womaniser.

He is only human, after all.

“It’s consistent with his message of healing and national unity to show the human [side] in him,” political analyst Ramon Casiple told Al Jazeera. “He did say he will be prim and proper, as the presidency requires. This is it.”

Duterte is not known for following protocol or niceties.

His survey ratings were on a steady rise until he shared his thoughts on the rape and murder of Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill, then 36.

“The mayor should’ve gotten to her first,” Duterte said as he narrated the incident in an expletive-riddled campaign speech.

He was unapologetic for the remark despite the outrage it stirred, just as he was unrepentant for cussing at Pope Francis and the monstrous traffic caused by his 2015 visit.

“Cussing, I think, is already part of his vocabulary. But I don’t think there’s meat or flesh to every cuss word that he spews,” said campaign volunteer Jeffrey Tupas, a former journalist.

READ MORE: Why the Philippine ‘Punisher’ could be president

Tupas, 38, acknowledged that his boss is an alpha male full of contradictions. He is intimidating but a gentleman; a toughie who sponsored a centre for cancer-stricken children. He is intolerant of criminals, but annually throws a Christmas bash for the city’s prostitutes.

A private and bookish person, Duterte nevertheless frequents a local piano bar where he serenades friends with favourites such as MacArthur Park and Send in the Clowns.

“He is hard to explain as he is unpredictable,” Tupas said, noting those close to him have learned to read subtle signs when their principal is tired, angry, or when he wants to go home to sleep.

One taxi driver and supporter blamed Duterte’s seemingly belligerent language on the mayor’s inadequate grasp of Tagalog, the predominantly spoken dialect on the island of Luzon, where the seat of government and economy and the largest media agencies are based.

“[Duterte] hired a friend of mine to give him a massage one time, and she swears he was very polite and gentle, unlike what we see of him on TV,” the driver said.

Duterte lived as a boy in his father’s home town in Cebu in the central Philippines, where people spoke another dialect. When Duterte was six, his father – who later became governor of Davao – moved the young family to southern Davao City where Bisaya was also spoken.

A lawyer by profession, Duterte joined the city prosecution office in 1977. After the 1986 People Power revolt, he was assigned as officer-in-charge of the city after his own mother declined the post.

He successfully contested the post for mayor in 1986 and, since then, has basically ruled the city under what might be described as a benevolent dictatorship. In those three decades, Davao City was transformed from a gangland to the fourth safest city in the region.

Civic worker Ayrie Ching said, years ago, that people migrated to Cotabato City – the heartland of the Muslim insurgency – because they thought it was safer than Davao.

“I like living in Davao, but it’s something I am able to say with a bit of discomfort – because I’m aware of my privilege … I’m not a drug addict,” said Ching, 28.

She was referring to allegations that Duterte had practically sanctioned the murder of hundreds of drug peddlers by the so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS), a paramilitary group serving as the city’s shadow police force.

A lawyer by profession, Duterte joined the city prosecution office in 1977. After the 1986 People Power revolt, he was assigned as officer-in-charge of the city after his own mother declined the post.

He successfully contested the post for mayor in 1986 and, since then, has basically ruled the city under what might be described as a benevolent dictatorship. In those three decades, Davao City was transformed from a gangland to the fourth safest city in the region.

Civic worker Ayrie Ching said, years ago, that people migrated to Cotabato City – the heartland of the Muslim insurgency – because they thought it was safer than Davao.

“I like living in Davao, but it’s something I am able to say with a bit of discomfort – because I’m aware of my privilege … I’m not a drug addict,” said Ching, 28.

She was referring to allegations that Duterte had practically sanctioned the murder of hundreds of drug peddlers by the so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS), a paramilitary group serving as the city’s shadow police force.

{Drop in temperature and rain stop blaze from growing, as change in wind direction shifts flames away from Fort McMurray.}

Canadian firefighters are looking to cooler weather to help with their battle against the country’s most destructive wildfire in recent memory, as officials sought to gauge the damage done to oil sands boomtown Fort McMurray.

Cooler weather and light rain stopped the blaze from growing on Sunday, while a change in wind direction took the flames away from Fort McMurray whose entire population has been evacuated, according to officials.

There remains no timeline in place for getting Fort McMurray’s 88,000 inhabitants back to their home town.

Neither is there any indication of when energy companies would be able to restart operations in the oil sand-rich town.

“It definitely is a positive point for us, for sure,” said Alberta fire official Chad Morrison in a news briefing, when asked if the fight to contain the flames had a reached a turning point.

“This is great firefighting weather. We can really get in here and get a handle on this fire.”

Saskatchewan under threat

The wildfire scorching through Canada’s oil sands region in northeast Alberta since last Sunday night had been expected to double in size on Sunday, threatening the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan.

But with the fire moving into its second week, favourable weather helped hold it back, giving officials hope that they could soon begin assessing the damage to Fort McMurray, close to where the fire started.

“As more and more fire has burned out around the city and the fuel around the city starts to disappear … We are starting to move into that second phase of securing the site and assessing the site,” Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said.

Officials said on Sunday that 34 wildfires were burning, with five out of control. There are more than 500 firefighters battling the blaze in and around Fort McMurray, with 15 helicopters and 14 air tankers.

{One man was killed and three others wounded by a man wielding a knife east of Munich and police are investigating a possible Islamist connection.}

The man attacked passers-by shortly before 05:00 (03:00 GMT) on Tuesday at Grafing station. One of those hurt was in a serious condition.

The attacker was eventually overpowered by police. A man has been arrested.
Some witnesses said he shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic) but the motive for the attack is unclear.

Bavarian public radio reports that the Munich prosecutor has imposed a news blackout and that contradictory statements have emerged from the scene.

An Upper Bavaria police spokesperson said that a “political motive” had certainly not been ruled out.

The mayor of Grafing, Angelika Obermayr, told Sueddeutsche Zeitung that the suspect was a German national.

“The idea that people get on an S-Bahn train on a beautiful morning or do their paper round and then become victims of a maniac is terrible,” she was quoted as saying.

One of the platforms at Grafing station has been cordoned off and commuter trains have been hit by delays.

{Over 80,000 Fort McMurray residents have been forced to flee their houses and nobody knows what they will come back to.

Fort McMurray, Canada’s oil capital, is a ghost town today.

More than 80,000 residents of the city and its environs have fled a gargantuan wildfire that leapt rivers and roads and marched into their neighourhoods.

Oil workers, store clerks, business owners, teachers, medical personnel and children are now scattered around evacuee centres in the nearby cities of Edmonton and Calgary, and across Canada.

They have become a diaspora.

The fire that drove them away is gradually burning its way into uninhabited forest, where few, if any, people live.

Cooler weather and showers have slowed its advance and plans are being drawn up to send damage-assessment teams into the exclusion zone.

But what of that diaspora? Who are they and when might they return?

Last week, at the main evacuation centre in Edmonton, I walked through the halls and tried to count the number of languages I was hearing: Somali, Swahili, Kurdish, Hausa, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, Turkish, Romanian, Albanian, Arabic and Italian.

I lost count after 30.

Fort McMurray was a huge magnet for immigrants to Canada. It had jobs, opportunity and was welcoming to newcomers.

I spoke to Susan, who was from Kenya. She stood outside a set of glass doors with her three-year-old daughter Sarah.

“We have us: My husband, me and her,” she told me, smiling and gesturing towards the little girl.

“Everything else is gone. Our house, our possessions, everything we worked for. All burned.”

Behind the smile, her eyes betrayed deep concern for a future far from clear.

Sarah spotted someone in a clown suit, tying balloons into shapes and surrounded by happy kids.

She tugged her mother’s hand and the two walked away.

Ahmed from Somalia was an oil worker. He had been in Fort McMurray for several years and was sending money back to Toronto where his family lived.

“I didn’t live in a house, I had an apartment and I don’t think it got burnt down,” he said.

“But I don’t know about my job. No one can tell me when I can go back to work. I might go back to Toronto.”

He had left Canada’s largest city because the jobs there didn’t pay enough. Generous salaries in the oil patch went a long way for his family of four, 2,600km away.

Fort McMurray drew in people from all across Canada, especially the economically challenged Atlantic province of Newfoundland.

They speak with a distinct accent, a bit of Ireland, a bit of the west of England. North America meets Europe’s Celtic fringe.

“Twenty years. Twenty years it’s been,” said a man who didn’t want his name used in press coverage while his insurance claims were being prepared.

“I watched Fort Mac grow and now I’ve seen it burn.”

He was using the city’s nickname. Some use it affectionately, like the man from Newfoundland.

To others, it was a perjorative, a putdown of a place perceived as a boomtown, with economy driven by the “dirty oil” dug from the tar sands of the Athabasca River valley.

The narrative outside of the community might best be summed up in a country and western song called Old Fort Mac.

Ain’t goin’ back

To Old Fort Mac

No matter how much they pay

You can live and work in Old Fort Mac

But there no where to stay, ain’t nowhere to stay

In other verses, the song says you can make a lot of money there but there’s nothing to spend it on except drugs, alcohol and prostitution. It’s funny but mean.

That’s the image of Fort McMurray put across in many media portraits. Expensive, full of young men with pockets full of gold, living the high life between shifts digging carbon from the soil.

It may once have been true. But new Fort Mac, before the fire, was a different sort of place: Full of families, comfortably multicultural, and thanks to lower oil prices, a lot less expensive than it used to be.

Soon, officials promise, they’ll figure out when people can return to their homes, or to sift through rubble and see if anything remains.

The local MP, an ebullient Conservative called David Yurdiga, says things may not be as bad as they seem.

He was allowed across police lines several days after the evacuation.

“I’d say 80 percent of the town looks okay,” he said. “Our infrascture, our schools, the hospital, major buildings, they’re all untouched. If you stand in downtown, you can’t tell there’s been a major fire in other places.”

Among the disaspora, those words were well received.

I relayed them to Peter from Taiwan, who has lived with his parents in Fort McMurray for five years. We were having dinner in an evacuee camp 200km away. Peter had fled there after convincing his 80-year-old father not to stay behind as the flames reached the end of their street.

The old man wanted to guard their possessions from looters.

“I spent two hours getting him to come with us. It was hot, so hot. But then he came. I don’t know what happened after that. But maybe, just maybe, we still have a house. It must be okay,” he said before turning away to look out of the window.

All Diasporas are the same, it seems. Hope is what you cling on to.

{Activists feel under attack after murder of Khurram Zaki, who spread “liberal religious views and condemned extremism”.}

The murder of Khurram Zaki by armed men in Karachi has underscored the vulnerability of human-rights and civil-liberties activists in Pakistan.

Khurram Zaki, 40, was killed on Saturday in the southern Pakistani city by unknown assailants in an attack that also left a journalist dead and a bystander critically injured.

Zaki, whose funeral took place on Sunday, was known for his outspoken stance against the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni sectarian group; the Pakistani Taliban; and Abdul Aziz, a controversial religious leader.

In December 2015, Zaki led street protests demanding that Aziz be arrested and charged with hate speech for allegedly justifying attacks such as the Peshawar school massacre in 2014 where at least 132 school children were killed.

A faction of the Pakistani Taliban, the Hakeemullah group, claimed responsibility for Zaki’s killing, but the police was unable to verify those claims and said the group had previously taken responsibility for attacks it did not carry out in Karachi.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Jibran Nasir, a Pakistan lawyer and activist, said he had no doubt that Zaki paid with his life for his advocacy of liberal causes.

“The primary reason behind Zaki being shot dead was his constant activism in a bold manner,” Nasir said.

“Zaki had an idea of what he was getting into. He received various threats. We’ve registered an FIR [First Information Report] in Karachi after his murder and given the names of people who should be held responsible. Aziz has been named as the prime suspect in the FIR.”

{{‘Vulnerable targets’}}

A former journalist and an active campaigner for human rights, Zaki was the editor of Let Us Build Pakistan, a website and Facebook page which professed to “spread liberal religious views and condemned extremism in all forms”.

“Activists are vulnerable targets,” Nasir said. “Terror outfits continue to spread reign of terror by shooting them and achieving their purpose. But as activists, we knew what we were getting into and we signed up for this.

“We’re talking about certain aspects of the law and core issues, and when you talk about this loudly, you make a lot of enemies. But we expected all this. It hasn’t changed my life in any way and it didn’t change Zaki’s life either.

“Unlike politicians, or VIPs as they are called in Pakistan, we don’t get armed protocol and guards.”

The killing of Zaki comes at a time when Pakistani rights advocates feel they are increasingly under attack.

Saturday marked two years since Rashid Rahman, a human-rights lawyer, was shot dead.

On April 25, Pakistan marked one year since Sabeen Mahmud, another prominent liberal activist, was murdered in Karachi.

Mahmud was shot shortly after hosting a discussion on Balochistan’s “disappeared people”.

She was the director of The Second Floor (T2F), a cafe and arts space that has been a mainstay of Karachi’s activists since it opened its doors in 2007.

Alleged culprit’s confession

Mahmud had been present at the opening of the discussion where Mama Qadeer, Farzana Majeed and Muhammad Ali Talpur – three prominent Baloch rights activists – had been speaking.

The alleged culprit, who also confessed to being involved in the killing of 45 members of the Shia Ismaili community in Karachi, told police that Mahmud had been targeted for her campaign against Aziz.

“We’ve pursued charges of different kinds against Aziz, including him having allegiance with ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, also known as ISIS] and him claiming a Shia lobby is working against him,” Nasir, the Pakistani lawyer and activist, said.

“He knows who we are. I’ve seen videos of him naming me and Zaki. And a lot of social-media campaigns have taken place against us, creating rumours and endangering our lives. I’ve suffered from that and Zaki suffered from that.

“But our actions and activism of the people landed him in hot water and we were able to break this insurmountable reign of terror that Aziz had over Islamabad.”

It is widely believed that Aziz enjoys support in many parts of Pakistan, including that of his students at Jamia Hafsa, a madrassa in the heart of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

“What is the harm in trying the Islamic system?” Ayesha, a 26-year-old graduate of one of Aziz’s seminaries, told Al Jazeera earlier this year.

“The media raise all kinds of propaganda against us, but they never ask us for our or the maulana’s [Aziz’s] point of view.”

{In audio recording, Ayman al-Zawahiri rejects UN-led peace process, praises al-Nusra Front and renews criticism of ISIL.}

The leader of al-Qaeda has urged warring fighters in Syria to unite or risk death while criticising again the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group in an audio recording.

In the clip, posted online on Sunday, Ayman al-Zawahiri criticised the UN-backed political process to find a solution in Syria and praised al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda offshoot which controls most of Idlib province.

“We have to want the unity of the Mujahideen in Sham [Syria] so it will be liberated from the Russians and Western Crusaders. My brothers … the matter of unity is a matter of life or death for you,” Zawahiri says.

Al-Nusra Front is part of an alliance of armed groups known as Jaish al-Fatah, which is leading battles against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and his Russian- and Iranian-backed allies in the southern Aleppo countryside.

In January, al-Nusra Front tried unsuccessfully to convince rival Sunni factions – including the powerful Ahrar al-Sham – to merge into one unit.

As successor to Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri has the allegiance of al-Qaeda branches in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

The authenticity of the recording, the first since January, could not be immediately verified, but it had the hallmarks of previous Zawahiri tapes.

He is believed to be hiding in a border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

‘Extremists and renegades’

In the audio clip, Zawahiri emphasised once again the ideological divide between al-Qaeda and ISIL.

He described ISIL as “extremists and renegades” whose followers would eventually disavow their beliefs and methods.

Al-Qaeda’s dominance is being challenged by ISIL, which controls territory in Syria and Iraq and has branches in Libya and Yemen.

Once a single group in Syria, they split in 2013, largely due to a power struggle among leaders.

The Syrian uprising, which started with largely peaceful protests in 2011 against the Assad government, has descended into a major conflict that has pulled in regional and global powers.

Violence has left at least 250,000 people dead and displaced half the country’s pre-war 22 million population.

In the latest fighting, Syrian warplanes attacked rebels on Sunday near the northern city of Aleppo, reports said.

Dozens of air strikes hit near Khan Touman, a town south of Aleppo which the Jaish al-Fatah took from forces loyal to the government and Iran on Thursday, according to both fighters and Syrian state media.

Aleppo – one of the biggest strategic prizes in the war – has been carved up into government and rebel-held zones.

The surrounding region is also crossed by valuable supply routes into neighbouring Turkey.

Manar, the media outlet of the Lebanese Hezbollah group supporting Assad’s troops in the area, said heavy fighting was going on against rebels.

Government forces have made significant advances in the northern region after Russia entered the war on their side in September.

Inside Aleppo, rebels said on Sunday the Syrian army shelled and bombed overnight their posts near a frontline in the western part of the city near the Jamiyat al-Zahraa neighbourhood.

Rebels are seeking to take over the area that would allow them to enter the heart of government-held parts of Aleppo.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the rebels fired rockets on residential areas in government-controlled areas and in the main Saad al-Jabiri square, with reports of more casualties in the collapse of a building in Midan district which was hit by a missile.

In the western Aleppo countryside, in the rebel-held town of Kafrnaha, an air strike hit a hospital, killing several people, SOHR said.

For its part, Russia said the truce in Aleppo had been extended until Monday.

Separately, Amaq news agency, which is associated with ISIL, said the group had destroyed a gas plant in the desert outside the central city of Palmyra on Sunday.

ISIL fighters retreated from the ancient city two months ago but continue to operate in the surrounding area.