بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Headline News 21/09/2018
Headlines:
Theresa May Demands Respect from EU after Brexit Humiliation
Nawaz Sharif: Ex-PM and Daughter Released from Pakistan Prison
China is Treating Islam like a Mental Illness
Details:
Theresa May Demands Respect from EU after Brexit Humiliation
UK Prime Minister Theresa May said Friday that negotiations with the European Union were "at an impasse" after a disastrous summit at which her Brexit plan was largely rejected. May struck a defiant tone during a Downing Street statement in which she called for the European Union to "respect" the British position and the result of the June 2016 referendum. A day after returning from the summit in Salzburg, she called for the EU to spell out its objections to her plan or come up with an alternative. "Throughout this process, I have treated the EU with nothing but respect. The UK expects the same. A good relationship at the end of this process depends on it," she said. Downing Street had hoped the informal Salzburg summit would pave the way to a resolution of outstanding issues in Brexit talks before a formal meeting in October. Instead, the leaders of the 27 remaining EU nations were unexpectedly resolute in their opposition to her proposals. Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, said key aspects of the plan, agreed at the Prime Minister's Chequers country retreat in July, "will not work" in their current form. French President Emmanuel Macron went even further, saying that the entire Brexit project was sold to the British people by "liars" who immediately fled the stage, unwilling to see their project through. In her Downing Street statement, May refused to budge and said the ball was in the EU's court. "At this late stage in the negotiations, it is not acceptable to simply reject the other side's proposals without a detailed explanation and counter proposals," she said. "So we now need to hear from the EU what the real issues are and what their alternative is so that we can discuss them. Until we do, we cannot make progress. In the meantime, we must and will continue the work of preparing ourselves for no deal." May will face tough questions at her Conservative Party's annual conference, which begins September 30. [Source: CNN]
From the outset, May has struggled to forge a unified position over brexit has she has fought tooth and nail to appease three interest groups: the conservative party, industrialist supports of May and the electorate. This weakness has served only to strengthen the hand of the EU in the brexit talks.
Nawaz Sharif: Ex-PM and Daughter Released from Pakistan Prison
Pakistan's former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been released from prison, two months after he began a 10-year jail sentence for corruption. The release came hours after a court suspended the sentences of Sharif and his daughter Maryam, who were jailed shortly before July's general election. Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) lost to Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) later that month. The decision came during the Sharifs' appeal. They have denied wrongdoing. The car carrying Sharif, his daughter and son-in-law Safdar Awan was showered with rose petals by supporters as their convoy left Adiala jail. Sharif was sentenced in July after being found guilty of corrupt practices related to the ownership of four luxury properties in central London linked to his family. He says the charges are politically motivated. The three-time prime minister was ousted from power a year earlier by Pakistan's Supreme Court, after his children were linked to offshore companies in the Panama Papers leaks of 2015. His daughter, Maryam Nawaz Sharif, received seven years for abetting a crime and one year for not co-operating - sentences which were due to run concurrently - while son-in-law Safdar Awan was given a one-year sentence for not co-operating. The convictions also barred them from seeking public office for up to 10 years after release. All three had the jail sentences imposed by the lower court on 6 July suspended by Islamabad's high court, as part of an appeals hearing. "The prosecution has failed to show the properties belong to Nawaz Sharif. It also failed to prove how was Maryam Nawaz sentenced under the same charge sheet which convicted Nawaz Sharif," Justice Athar Minallah told the court. Their convictions remain under appeal within the top court, but a date for a hearing has yet to be fixed. The anti-graft body that launched the case, the National Accountability Bureau, can still appeal to the Supreme Court against the latest ruling. The trio were released on bail of $4,000 each on Wednesday evening. [Source: BBC]
Nawaz’s release coincides with Khan’s meeting with US Secretary of state and his visit to Saudi Arabia. One may recall that under Musharraf’s rule, the US and Saudi Arabia also obtained the release Sharif from prison. The deal brokered at the time was that Sharif would live in exile and not partake in Pakistani politics. Is a similar deal on the table? And what happened to Imran Khan’s pledges of eradicating poverty.
China is Treating Islam like a Mental Illness
One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates—most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority—have told reporters that over the course of an indoctrination process lasting several months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, and recite Communist Party propaganda songs for hours each day. There are media reports of inmates being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol, which are forbidden to Muslims, as well as reports of torture and death. The sheer scale of the internment camp system, which according to The Wall Street Journal has doubled in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region just within the last year, is mindboggling. The U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China describes it as “the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today.” Beijing began by targeting Uighur extremists, but now even benign manifestations of Muslim identity—like growing a long beard—can get a Uighur sent to a camp, the Journal noted. Earlier this month, when a UN panel confronted a senior Chinese official about the camps, he said there are “no such things as reeducation centers,” even though government documents refer to the facilities that way. Instead, he claimed they’re just vocational schools for criminals. China has long feared that Uighurs will attempt to establish their own national homeland in Xinjiang, which they refer to as East Turkestan. In 2009, ethnic riots there resulted in hundreds of deaths, and some radical Uighurs have carried out terrorist attacks in recent years. Chinese officials have claimed that in order to suppress the threat of Uighur separatism and extremism, the government needs to crack down not only on those Uighurs who show signs of having been radicalized, but on a significant swath of the population. The medical analogy is one way the government tries to justify its policy of large-scale internment: After all, attempting to inoculate a whole population against, say, the flu, requires giving flu shots not just to the already-afflicted few, but to a critical mass of people. In fact, using this rhetoric, China has tried to defend a system of arrest quotas for Uighurs. Police officers confirmed to Radio Free Asia that they are under orders to meet specific population targets when rounding up people for internment. In one township, police officials said they were being ordered to send 40 percent of the local population to the camps. [Source: The Atlantis]
No matter how hard China tries to suppress Islam, Allah will make His Deen prevail.
[هُوَ الَّذِي أَرْسَلَ رَسُولَهُ بِالْهُدَى وَدِينِ الْحَقِّ لِيُظْهِرَهُ عَلَى الدِّينِ كُلِّهِ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْمُشْرِكُونَ]
“It is He Who has sent His Rasool with guidance and true Deen (faith) to make it prevail over all other deens (faiths) even though the mushrikin may hate it.” [TMQ: Al Tawbah:33]