Saturday, April 9, 2016

Six In The Morning Saturday April 9

North Korea 'tests long-range missile engine'

North Korea says it has successfully tested an engine designed for an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The new type of engine would "guarantee" the ability to launch a nuclear strike on the US mainland, the KCNA news agency said.
The test was conducted at the country's long-range missile launch site near its west coast.
It is the latest in a series of tests and launches carried out by the isolated nation.
Leader Kim Jong-un supervised the test, state media report, during which "the engine spewed out huge flames with a deafening boom".
The country would now be able to "keep any cesspool of evils in the earth including the US mainland within our striking range," Mr Kim was quoted as saying.
North Korea should "refrain from actions and rhetoric that further destabilise the region and focus instead on taking concrete steps toward fulfilling its commitments and international obligations," said US state department spokesman Mark Toner.






The Guardian view on the Panama Papers: five days that shook the world


The secretive wealth of public power has been exposed as never before. This poses a serious test for politicians, which Barack Obama passed but David Cameron failed

Sunlight, according to a cliche favoured by David Cameron, is the best disinfectant. Well, this week, the comparison might instead be with dangerously concentrated bleach. After a five-day outpouring of secrets from an obscure office in Panama, a prime minister is out in Reykavik, a president is on the ropes in Buenos Aires and the censors are putting in serious overtime in Beijing. A new regime in world football has been tainted with old-fashioned sleaze, Vladimir Putin has been moved to dismiss a paper trail linking his friends with billions of dubious dollars as a plot, and some big names from showbiz have discovered that they share a lawyer with the associates of gold bullion robbers.



How the corruption revealed in the Panama Papers opened the door to Isis and al Qaeda

Local elites which hide their stolen wealth in offshore financial centres destroy their own credibility and power


Who shall doubt 'the secret hid
Under Cheopspyramid'
Was that the contractor did 
Cheops out of several millions?
The message of Rudyard Kipling’s poem is that corruption is always with us and has not changed much down the ages. There is some truth in this, but degrees of corruption greatly matter, as the Cheops would have found to his cost if he tried to build his pyramid in modern Iraq instead of ancient Egypt. The project would cost him billions rather than millions -  and he would be more likely to end up with a hole in the ground than anything resembling a pyramid.
Three years ago I was in Baghdad after it had rained heavily, driving for miles through streets that had disappeared under grey-coloured flood water combined with raw sewage. Later I asked Shirouk Abayachi, an advisor to the Ministry of Water Resources, why this was happening and she said that “since 2003, $7bn has been spent to build a new sewage system for Baghdad, but either the sewers weren’t built or they were built very badly”. She concluded that “corruption is the key to all this”.

Australian guards "hit children" at refugee detention camp


Dozens of refugees sent by the Australian government to detention centres on the Pacific island of Nauru are protesting the fact that they’ve been trapped there for almost 1,000 days, which is close to three years.  A video recently emerged showing scene of panic amongst the protesting refugees after an apparently violent encounter with security forces. Eighteen-year-old Maria, a refugee living in the camp, told us about the altercation — during which she and two children were reportedly injured.
Harsh immigration laws in Australia mean that, when refugees are caught attempting to enter the country illegally by sea, they are not allowed to enter the country. Instead, they are sent for “offshore processing” in another country. Several hundred migrants are stuck in detention centres on The Republic of Nauru, an island nation in Micronesia in the Central Pacific, after being sent there by Australian authorities. About 40 of them are thought to be children. 

Over the past two weeks, several dozen migrants there have been protesting the fact that they’ve spent close to 1,000 days in the camp.



Gang rape victim moves SC to save others

NASIR IQBAL

ISLAMABAD: A woman who claimed to have been subjected to sexual exploitation, including gang rape, and was now being blackmailed, invited the attention of the Supreme Court on Friday to the heinous crimes committed also by members of law-enforcement agencies.
The woman from Khanpur Bagga Sher village of Muzaffargarh district invoked the jurisdiction of the apex court through her counsel Zulfikar Ahmad Bhutta under enforcement of fundamental rights, claiming that by doing so she intended to save a number of women who become victims of similar exploitation because of broken and ineffective law-enforcement mechanism in the country.

Peru's history of forced sterilisation overshadows vote

Presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori carries the burden of her father's involvement in forced sterilisations.


Jurriaan van Eerten


Lima, Peru -
 Victoria Vigo was in the 32nd week of her third pregnancy when she went to hospital complaining of pains. She was immediately taken to the operating room and given a C-section. Her baby lived for only a few hours. 
Vigo was devastated. But what made it worse was overhearing one of the doctors talk about how she was now being sterilised. 
It was 1996 and Vigo had heard rumours of other women being forcibly sterilised, but had never thought it would happen to her.

Five months later, when a group of researchers from a local university visited her, she found out that her name was on a list that had been sent to the government as proof that the hospital had fulfilled their quota of sterilisations.






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