Arab League labels Hezbollah a 'terrorist' group
The move, which was not backed by Lebanon and Iraq, comes after the Gulf Cooperation Council adopted the same stance.
| Arab League, Hezbollah, GCC, Middle East, Lebanon
The Arab League has declared Lebanese movement Hezbollah a "terrorist" group, only days after the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) adopted the same stance.
The move came during an Arab League foreign ministers' meeting at the organisation's headquarters in Egypt's capital Cairo on Friday.
Nearly all 22 Arab League members supported the decision, except Lebanon and Iraq which expressed "reservations", the bloc said in a statement read out at a news conference by Bahraini diplomat Wahid Mubarak Sayar.
"The resolution of the League's council [of foreign ministers] includes the designation of Hezbollah as a terrorist group," the statement said.The deadly efficiency of Isis and how it grew on the global stage
In this exclusive extract from his hotly anticipated book Blood Year, counterinsurgency expert David Killcullen maps out the leaderless resistance, remote radicalisation, and guerrilla-style terrorism that characterise the ‘Isis Internationale’David Kilcullen
During 2014-15 Isis was building a three-level structure: a state-like core entity in Syria-Iraq, external territories in other countries, and an ad hoc global network of supporters and sympathisers, which I began calling the “Isis Internationale.
Isis Overseas Territories, 2015
By mid-2015, Isis had been established in separate provinces in Libya, as well as in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt’s Sinai desert, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan–Pakistan (Khorasan), Nigeria, and the Caucasus.
There were also numerous Isis wilayat within the core Isis territory in Syria–Iraq, acting as administrative subdivisions of the Islamic State.
Despite a superficial similarity to the Al Qaida (AQ) “franchises” that still existed in some of the same areas, Isis wilayat were different in concept and purpose.
The party in Germany calling for a new 'Fatherland', breaking Nazi taboos - and winning voters in the process
Virulently anti-immigrant, Alternative for Germany is expected to do well in three state elections this weekend, and moderates are worried
His campaign speeches have been compared by some to the wartime propaganda of Joseph Goebbels, yet the new bogeyman on Germany’s xenophobic right seems not to give a damn. When Björn Höcke talks about “1,000 years of Germany” and the threat posed by migrants to the “Fatherland” and the “German Volk [people]”, his supporters go wild with enthusiasm.
Mr Höcke, 43, an ex-schoolteacher who was raised in the former West Germany, is the most popular and radical politician in Germany’s recently formed Alternative for Germany (AfD). The vehemently anti-immigration party is set to make sweeping gains in this weekend’s so-called “Super Sunday” elections in three states because of its outright opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policies, which meant the country registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.
Bye Bye plastic bags: Sisters' remarkable fight to rid Bali of rubbish
March 12, 2016 - 12:46PMJewel Topsfield
Indonesia Correspondent, Fairfax Media
Bali: Balinese sisters Melati and Isabel Wijsen won't rest until all visitors are asked this question upon arrival at Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport. "Welcome to Bali," the sisters chant, hands pressed together in the Balinese om swastiastu greeting gesture. "Do you have any plastic bags to declare?"
Melati and Isabel dream of a day plastic bags will be contraband in Bali. "We want people to arrive on the Island of Gods and there will be no plastic bags," Melati says. "Everyone who enters our home would know no plastic bags could be taken in or out."
It's a dream that has sustained the sisters - who founded the campaign Bye Bye Plastic Bags - for three years now. It has fuelled their quest for a million signatures, made them persevere with beach clean-ups and school presentations and even led to a modified food strike. Their remarkable journey has taken them to London, where they were invited to give a TED talk last September, and to the office of Bali governor Made Mangku Pastika, whom they now count as a friend. The sisters have inspired Bye Bye Plastic Bag campaigns all over the world. But perhaps most importantly, as Melati says in the TED talk, "along the way, we have learned kids can do things. We can make things happen".
Of law and lore: Criminalising violence against women
Herald
Waris Shah’s epic on Heer’s life and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary on Saba Qaiser’s plight are about two protagonists who have many things in common, a river just being one of those. Both come from Punjab. Both made life choices that their fathers did not approve of. Both received punishment for their defiance — one was shot at and thrown in the water to die, the other was coerced into marrying someone against her will.
Punjab, as seen through the literary imagination of Shah in his narration of Heer’s travails, appears little different from what the province looks like from whatever little is known about Qaiser’s story in Chinoy’s Oscar-winning documentary (one only wishes that Chinoy, like Shah, had addressed a local audience in a local language). Patriarchy, violence against women, the link between a family’s honour and the love lives of its women – or lack thereof – are all common themes between them. That may suggest that nothing has changed in this part of the world, over the centuries, as far as the treatment of women is concerned.
ZIMBABWE’S MUGABE GOES MISSING AFTER CANCELED INDIA TRIP
BY CONOR GAFFEY
Concern is growing in Zimbabwe after a 92 year-old man was reported missing after claiming on Monday he was traveling to India. The missing person’s name: Robert Mugabe.
The veteran Zimbabwean leader, who has been in power for 36 years and is the world’s oldest serving head of state, was reported to have left the country on Monday to attend the World Culture Festival in New Delhi, which kicks off in the Indian capital on Friday.
Since then, however, his whereabouts have become something of a mystery. Mugabe canceled his visit to the festival on Wednesday, with his spokesman George Charamba citing “substantial inadequacies in protocol and security arrangements” and saying that Mugabe would return home in “a couple of days.”
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