US-based MQM-L activist planning killings to trigger sectarian rift in Karachi: officials - Pakistan dawn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dawn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Naledi Pandor, Minister for International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa, addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 28, 2019 [File: AP/Richard Drew]
Democracy is under pressure across the world. According to the latest annual report by Freedom House, a United States-based non-partisan think-tank, the balance is shifting further “in favour of tyranny”. In the report’s assessment, 2020 was the 15th consecutive year of declining global freedom.
This dire picture is confirmed by other studies. In the 2020 edition of its Democracy Index, The Economist Intelligence Unit recorded the worst state of global democracy since the index was first published in 2006.
US-based academic faces lawsuit for research into Uighurs
Companies in China’s Xinjiang province are said to have filed a domestic civil lawsuit against a high-profile United States-based academic whose research into the treatment of China’s Turkic minority Uighur population, including alleged forced labour, has angered the Chinese authorities.
The reported lawsuit, which the Chinese government has said it supports, appears to be a new way to attempt to silence scholars and critics abroad, experts said.
Chinese official media said this week “a number of enterprises and individuals” in Xinjiang “have directed lawyers to sue German national Adrian Zenz”, the official
Rights groups have called for a transparent and independent investigation into a series of massive explosions in Equatorial Guinea’s main city of Bata that flattened a military camp and nearby residential areas, killing scores of people and causing widespread destruction.
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled the oil-rich country with an iron fist for 42 years, blamed the military for “negligence” in stocking ammunition so close to populated areas.
On Wednesday, state television reported 105 people were killed and 615 were wounded by the conflagration at the camp of Nkoa Ntoma on Sunday.
But Human Rights Watch (HRW), citing Equatorial Guinea-focused human rights group EG Justice, said that “based on the number of bodies pulled from the rubble, the actual number of victims is much higher”.