Persons in News
Longtime Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has won another five-year term with more than 60 per cent of the votes, Uganda’s electoral commission says, following an election that observers say fell short of democratic.
Mr Museveni, a former guerilla leader, came to power 30 years ago when he toppled brutal dictator Idi Amin. This is the fourth election where he has faced multiple candidates.
Elections observers from the European Union said that the vote took place in an “intimidating atmosphere for both voters and candidates”, adding that they “received reports of intimidation and harassment of opposition parties by security agencies as well as arrests of supporters and voters from more than 20 districts”.
The most prominent opposition candidate, Kizza Besigye, “was detained by police who burst into his election headquarters in the capital, Kampala, just as he was about to start a press conference to dispute the election process”.
However, Mr Musevani has been “praised for helping Uganda achieve economic growth and for leading a successful campaign against HIV/AIDS, but has been criticized over alleged human rights abuses by his security forces”.
Kosovo’s Members of Parliament (MPs) have elected Foreign Minister Hashim Thaci as president, at the end of a day marred by protests. He succeeds Atifete Jahjaga as head of state. Some opposition lawmakers were earlier banned from voting after they released tear gas in the parliament building.
Mr Thaci, 47, was a guerrilla leader during a conflict that led to Kosovo – a mainly ethnic Albanian province – declaring independence from Serbia. “I pledge to build a new Kosovo, a European Kosovo and to deepen our relationship with the U.S.,” he said.
Mr Thaci – who had also served as prime minister – fell out with many opposition groups after helping to negotiate with Serbia a deal that gave more autonomy to Kosovo’s minority Serbs. Serbia – and many other countries around the world – does not recognise Kosovo’s self-declared independence in 2008.
Swiss football executive Gianni Infantino is the new President of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association (French)/International Federation of Association Football (English). He vowed to lead FIFA, the sport’s world governing body, out of years of corruption and scandal after being elected president to succeed Sepp Blatter.
“We will restore the image of FIFA and the respect of FIFA, and everyone in the world will be proud of us,” the 45-year-old law graduate, for the last seven years general secretary of Europe’s governing body UEFA, told an extraordinary FIFA Congress in Zurich. He now inherits a very different job from that inhabited by his compatriot Mr Blatter, who toured the world like a head of state for 17 years, dispensing development funds to his global support base.
After a close first round of voting in which he narrowly beat Asian Football Confederation President Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, Mr Infantino appeared to gather up all the votes that had been cast for the two trailing candidates, scoring a simple majority of 115 votes in the second round to Mr Salman’s 88.
Before the election, the Congress had overwhelmingly passing a set of reforms intended to make it more transparent, professional and accountable. The package should mean that the new president will face much closer scrutiny than Mr Blatter did, and have less influence over the day-to-day management of the organisation’s business affairs.
The reforms include term limits for top officials and disclosure of earnings, and a clear separation between an elected FIFA Council responsible for broad strategy and a professional general s3ecretariat, akin to a company’s executive board, handling the business side.
Criminal investigations in the United States and Switzerland have resulted in the indictment of dozens of football officials and other entities for corruption, many of them serving or former presidents of national or continental associations. In addition, FIFA has been forced to investigate controversies surrounding the awarding of its showpiece, the World Cup finals, especially the decision to grant the 2018 tournament to Russia and the 2022 finals to Qatar, a small, scorching desert state with little football tradition.
Outgoing FIFA president Sepp Blatter and suspended UEFA boss Michel Platini have had bans from all football-related activities upheld. But the suspensions have been reduced from eight to six years by FIFA’s appeals committee.
Both were found guilty of breaches surrounding a U.S.$2 millon ‘disloyal payment’ to Mr Platini. They both deny any wrongdoing and have said they will appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
Mr Blatter, FIFA boss since 1998, had already announced he was quitting after reports emerged he was under investigation in the United States. Mr Platini had been tipped as a future leader of football’s world governing body and is a three-time European Footballer of the Year.
H. L. Dattu, former Chief Justice of India, was appointed as the next chairperson of National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
The former CJI took over the position from Justice C. Joseph, who has been the acting chairperson since the end of the five-year term of former chairperson K. G. Balakrishnan.
He was selected by a committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The committee consisted of Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan, Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Rajya Sabha deputy chairman P. J. Kurien and Rajya Sabha Opposition leader Ghulam Nabi Azad.
Under the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, the President appoints the chairperson and members of the NHRC on the recommendation of the high-powered committee headed by the Prime Minister.
Justice Dattu was Chief Justice of India from September 28, 2014, to December 2, 2015. Justice Dattu enrolled as an advocate in 1975 and began practising in Bangalore and dealt with all types of matters – civil, criminal, tax and Constitutional cases.
From 1983 onwards he appeared in various capacities before the Karnataka High Court including as government pleader for sales tax department, standing counsel for Income Tax department and later as government advocate.
After being designated as a senior standing counsel for IT department in 1995, Justice Dattu was elevated as a judge of the Karnataka High Court. He was elevated as the Chief Justice of the Chhattisgarh High Court in February 2007 and shortly afterwards shifted in the same capacity to the Kerala High Court.
Former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who led the world body during one of its most difficult periods, with failed missions in Rwanda and Bosnia, died in Cairo, aged 93.
The Egyptian diplomat became the first secretary-general from Africa in 1992, but his tenure ended abruptly five years later when the United States vetoed his second term.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described Boutros-Ghali as a respected statesman and scholar of international law who brought “formidable experience and intellectual power” to the top UN job. “His commitment to the United Nations – its mission and its staff – was unmistakable, and the mark he has left on the organization is indelible,” Mr Ban said.
A former Egyptian foreign minister, the veteran diplomat headed the world body during one of its most difficult times with crises in Somalia, Rwanda, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.
After a series of clashes with the U.S. administration, Washington turned against Boutros-Ghali and decided to back Ghanaian Kofi Annan for the top post in late 1996. Under his tenure, the United Nations expanded its peacekeeping missions but the retreat from Rwanda ahead of the 1994 genocide and from the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica a year later were seen as dismal failures.
Amitabh Kant, currently secretary in department of industrial policy and promotion, was named the first full-time chief executive of the NITI Aayog, and will have tenure of two years. NITI stands for National Institution for Transformation of India. He has been holding additional charge as chief executive, NITI Aayog since December 2015.
Barack Obama kicked off a two-day summit with the leaders of ASEAN at Sunnylands in Rancho Mirage, the first-ever such meeting on U.S. soil.
The U.S. is hosting the conference with the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, as another key step in Mr Obama’s effort to “rebalance” foreign policy toward the Asia-Pacific, shoring up U.S. economic and security ties in the region—and asserting American leadership—as China exerts its military and financial might there too.
Among the issues on the agenda: maritime security and South China Sea disputes; Islamic State radicals and extremism; North Korea’s nuclear programme and recent missile test; and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, entrepreneurship and innovation.
What is ASEAN? Ten countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia—make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The grouping, established in 1967 with five members, was founded to “promote political and economic cooperation and regional stability”. ASEAN member states have a total population of 600 million, more than the European Union.
Harper Lee, the author of the acclaimed ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ about racial injustice in a small town in the American south, has died, aged 89.
Born Nelle Harper Lee in 1926, her first book ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ came out in 1960 and was a huge critical and commercial success. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted into a film starring Gregory Peck.
She did not release another novel until last year, when ‘Go Set A Watchman’, which purports to be a sequel, but has its iconic characters in atypical representations. Research had showed it was actually a first draft.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu blamed a Syrian Kurdish militia working with Kurdish militants inside Turkey for a suicide car bombing that killed 28 people in the capital Ankara, and he vowed retaliation in both Syria and Iraq.
A car laden with explosives detonated next to military buses near Turkey’s armed forces’ headquarters, parliament and government buildings in the administrative heart of Ankara.
Mr Davutoglu said the attack was clear evidence that the YPG, a Syrian Kurdish militia that has been supported by the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria, was a terrorist organisation and said that Turkey, a NATO member, expected cooperation from its allies in combating the group.
Within hours, Turkish warplanes bombed bases in northern Iraq of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency against the Turkish state and which Mr Davutoglu accused of collaborating in the car bombing.
Turkey’s armed forces would continue their shelling of recent days of YPG positions in northern Syria, the Turkish PM said, promising that those responsible would “pay the price”.
The PYD, the political arm of the YPG, denied involvement in the bombing, while a senior member of the PKK said he did not know who was responsible. The attack was the latest in a series of bombings in the past year mostly blamed on Islamic State militants.
Turkey is getting dragged ever deeper into the war in neighbouring Syria and is trying to contain some of the fiercest violence in decades in its predominantly Kurdish southeast.
The YPG militia, regarded by Ankara as a hostile insurgent force deeply linked to the PKK, has taken advantage in recent weeks of a major Syrian army offensive around the northern city of Aleppo, backed by Russian air strikes, to seize ground from Syrian rebels near the Turkish border.
That has alarmed Turkey, which fears the advances will stoke Kurdish separatist ambitions at home. It has been bombarding YPG positions in an effort to stop them taking the town of Azaz, the last stronghold of Turkish-backed Syrian rebels north of Aleppo before the Turkish frontier.
The co-leader of the PYD denied that the affiliated YPG perpetrated the Ankara bombing and said Turkey was using the attack to justify an escalation in fighting in northern Syria. Turkey has said its shelling of YPG positions is a response, within its rules of engagement, to hostile fire coming across the border into Turkey.
A co-leader of the PKK umbrella group said that he did not know who was responsible for the Ankara bombing. But the attack, he said, could be an answer to ‘massacres in Kurdistan’, referring to the Kurdish region spanning parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Turkey has been battling PKK militants in its own southeast, where a 2-1/2 year ceasefire collapsed last July and pitched the region into its worst bloodshed since the 1990s.