News in Brief

Date: 29 January 2023 - 21:40

News ID: ۱۱۱۸۹۱

SEOUL (AFP) – North Korea on Sunday denied providing arms to Moscow after the United States said Pyongyang supplied rockets and missiles to Russia’s private military group Wagner. In a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency, a senior North Korean official rejected the accusations, warning that the U.S. would face a “really undesirable result” if it persisted in spreading the “self-made rumor”. “Trying to tarnish the image of (North Korea) by fabricating a non-existent thing is a grave provocation that can never be allowed and that cannot but trigger its reaction,” said Kwon Jong Gun, director general of the Department of U.S. Affairs. He also called it “a foolish attempt to justify its offer of weapons to Ukraine”. Earlier this week, U.S. President Joe Biden promised 31 Abrams tanks, one of the most powerful and sophisticated weapons in the U.S. army, to help Kyiv fight off Moscow’s invasion. The move drew a rebuke Friday from Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who accused Washington of “further crossing the red line” by sending the tanks into Ukraine.

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NEW DELHI (Dispatches) – University students across India are either being suspended or being detained by the police, over the screening of a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged role during the deadly Gujarat sectarian riots in 2002, as India continues to stop even the personal viewing of the documentary. In one of the several similar incidents, police forces swarmed the Delhi University campus, after student groups supportive of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) objected to the screening the students had planned to organize within the premises, that led to 24 students being detained and many being manhandled. Protests erupted at DU on Friday over the police crackdown on students to watch the controversial documentary. Similar disruptions and protests have been reported from universities across the country since the first episode of the two-part documentary was aired last week on BBC-2 in the UK, which the Indian government has called a piece of “propaganda”. The Modi government is trying its best to stop the public screening and even a private viewing of the controversial documentary that reveals an inquiry done by the UK government after the 2002 Gujarat riots also claimed the lives of British citizens, along with killing at least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims.

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LONDON (Daily Mail) – The UK Ministry of Defence has been spying on the social media accounts of public figures critical of the government’s COVID-19 policies since the start of the pandemic, a whistleblower told the Daily Mail newspaper. The military’s secretive 77th Brigade compiled dossiers on anyone with a sizable following who questioned the lockdowns, mandates, and predictions of doom that characterized London’s response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to the source, who worked for the unit during the pandemic. The unit’s duties included combating “disinformation” and “harmful narratives… from purported experts”, assisted by raw data scraped from social media by AI and civilian employees. Undesirable narratives were suppressed or removed, while government narratives were promoted.  “I developed the impression the government was more interested in protecting the success of their policies than uncaring any potential foreign interference,” the whistleblower told the Mail.

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LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fired the chairman of the governing Conservative Party on Sunday for a “serious breach” of ethics rules in failing to come clean about a tax dispute. Sunak had faced days of pressure to sack Nadhim Zahawi amid allegations he settled a multimillion-dollar unpaid tax bill while he was in charge of the country’s Treasury. The prime minister acted after a standards probe found Zahawi had breached the ministerial code of conduct. It said he had failed to disclose details of his dispute with tax authorities and the fact that he had paid a penalty. In a letter to Zahawi, Sunak said he had been forced to act to keep his promise that his government “would have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level.” Zahawi had acknowledged the tax dispute but argued his error was “careless and not deliberate.” In his response to Sunak, Zahawi pledged to support the prime minister as a backbench lawmaker and made no reference to the ethics inquiry.

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TUNIS (AP) – Tunisians headed to polls to take part in the second round of parliamentary elections on Sunday, as all eyes are on the turnout amid deepening economic woes.  A total of 262 candidates competed for 131 seats in the new legislature, a body largely stripped of its powers following President Kais Saied’s dramatic power grab. The voting stations for the run-offs opened after the first round of polling drew only an 11 percent turnout. Only 30 candidates, out of the total who wanted to fill the 161-member parliament, gained enough votes in the initial round last month. Critics of the president blamed the low turnout on the sweeping political changes brought about since Kais Saied rose to power  Saied has decreed the new, mostly powerless, parliament as part of a reconfigured presidential system that he introduced after shutting down the previous parliament in 2021 and assuming broad control over the state. His critics accuse him of seeking to dismantle the democratic system enacted after Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, which sparked the Arab Spring in turn.

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PRAGUE (AP) – Petr Pavel, a retired army general, decisively defeated  billionaire Andrej Babis in a runoff vote to become the Czech Republic’s new president. Pavel, 61, will succeed controversy-courting Milos Zeman in the largely ceremonial but prestigious post.  With all the ballots counted by the Czech Statistics Office, Pavel had 58.3% of the vote compared with 42.7% for Babis. Turnout was just over 70%, a record high for a presidential vote. “We can have different views of a number of issues, but that doesn’t mean we’re enemies,” Pavel said in a message to voters who cast ballots for Babis after what was considered a nasty presidential campaign period. “We have to learn how to communicate with each other.” Babis conceded defeat and congratulated Pavel on his victory. He called on his supporters “to accept that I’ve lost and accept we have a new president.”