Japan PM Kishida to exit party leadership race: media
Japan PM Kishida to exit party leadership race: media/node/2567346/world
Japan PM Kishida to exit party leadership race: media
Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks during the opening session of the 10th Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting (PALM10) in Tokyo on July 18, 2024. (AFP)
Japan PM Kishida to exit party leadership race: media
Updated 14 August 2024
AFP
TOKYO: Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida intends to drop out of the race to remain his party’s leader, local media reported Wednesday, meaning an expected end to his nearly three-year premiership.
The ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan almost uninterrupted since 1945, is due to hold an internal leadership contest next month.
Kishida has informed senior administration officials of his intention not to run, media including national broadcaster NHK and Kyodo news reported.
Kishida was due to hold a news conference later on Wednesday, with a statement from his office saying he would speak at 11:30 am (0230 GMT).
Kishida, 67, has been in office since October 2021, and has seen his poll ratings slide sharply in response to rising prices hitting Japanese incomes.
His cabinet’s support rating has been languishing around 25 percent this year, according to an NHK poll.
The world’s fourth-largest economy has also struggled to gain traction, with output shrinking 0.7 percent in the first quarter.
In November, Kishida announced a stimulus package worth 17 trillion yen (more than $100 billion at the time) as he tried to ease the pressure from inflation and rescue his premiership.
Having seen prices barely move for years, Japanese voters have been reeling from rising prices since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, pushing up energy costs and putting pressure on the government.
Despite some recovery in recent weeks, the yen has been one of the world’s worst-performing currencies over the past year, falling sharply against the dollar.
While welcome news to Japanese exporters, this makes imports pricier and stokes inflation for households.
Even before November, the government had injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy over the past three years since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Kishida, who has overseen improving relations with South Korea, could in theory govern until 2025, but there was speculation that he might call a snap election.
NHK reported that voices inside the LDP have been growing that the party won’t be able to fight elections under the Kishida government.
Kishida has also faced severe criticism over a major funding scandal within the party.
The prime minister “seems to have judged that he himself needs to take responsibility in order to dispel growing distrust,” NHK said.
Ebola cases in Uganda rise to nine, while 265 others are being monitored under quarantine
Updated 7 sec ago
AP
KAMPALA: Ebola cases in Uganda have risen to nine, while 265 other people were being monitored under quarantine, health authorities said Tuesday.
The nine include the first victim, a male nurse who died the day before the outbreak was declared on Jan. 30. That man remains the only fatality.
Eight patients “are receiving medical care and are in stable condition,” a Health Ministry statement said.
Seven of them were admitted to the main public hospital in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, in addition to one being treated in the eastern district of Mbale, the ministry said, adding that “the situation is under control” amid heightened surveillance.
The nurse who died had first sought treatment in Kampala and later traveled to Mbale, where he was admitted to a public hospital.
Health authorities said that the man also sought the services of a traditional healer. His relatives are among those being treated for Ebola.
Kampala has a highly mobile population of about 4 million, and officials are still investigating the source of the outbreak. Tracing contacts is key to stemming the spread of Ebola, which manifests as a viral hemorrhagic fever.
There are no approved vaccines for the Sudan strain of Ebola that is infecting people in Uganda. But authorities have launched a clinical study to further test the safety and efficacy of a trial vaccine as part of measures to stop the spread of the current outbreak.
The last outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, which began in September 2022, killed at least 55 people by the time it was declared over four months later.
Ebola is spread by contact with bodily fluids of an infected person or contaminated materials. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain and at times internal and external bleeding.
Scientists suspect that the first person infected in an Ebola outbreak acquires the virus through contact with an infected animal or eating its raw meat.
Ebola was discovered in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks in South Sudan and Congo, where it occurred in a village near the Ebola River, after which the disease is named.
Pope slams migrant deportations from US, warns ‘it will end badly’
In 2016, pontiff said anyone who builds a wall rather than a bridge to keep out migrants was ‘not a Christian’
Updated 2 min 38 sec ago
AP
ROME: Pope Francis issued a major rebuke on Tuesday to the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants, warning that the program to forcefully deport people purely because of their illegal status deprives them of their inherent dignity and “will end badly.”
Francis took the remarkable step of addressing the US migrant crackdown in a letter to US bishops who have criticized the expulsions as harming the most vulnerable.
History’s first Latin American pope has long made caring for migrants a priority of his pontificate, demanding that countries welcome, protect, promote and integrate those fleeing conflicts, poverty and climate disasters. Francis has also said governments are expected to do so to the limits of their capacity.
In the letter, Francis said nations have the right to defend themselves and keep their communities safe from criminals.
“That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness,” he wrote.
Citing the biblical stories of migration, the people of Israel and the Book of Exodus, Francis affirmed the right of people to seek shelter and safety in other lands and said he was concerned with what is going on in the US.
“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” Francis wrote.
“The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.”
It is one thing to develop a policy to regulate migration legally; it is another to expel people purely on the basis of their illegal status, he wrote.
“What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly,” he said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week that more than 8,000 people had been arrested in immigration enforcement actions since Trump took office Jan. 20. Some have been deported, others are being held in federal prisons while others are being held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops put out an unusually critical statement after Trump’s initial executive orders, saying those “focused on the treatment of immigrants and refugees, foreign aid, expansion of the death penalty, and the environment, are deeply troubling and will have negative consequences, many of which will harm the most vulnerable among us.”
It was a strong rebuke from the US Catholic hierarchy. Trump won 54 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, a wider margin than the 50 percent in the 2020 election won by President Joe Biden, a Catholic.
The Trump-Francis collision course on migration stems from 2016, when Francis famously said anyone who builds a wall rather than a bridge to keep out migrants was “not a Christian.”
He made the comment after celebrating Mass at the US-Mexico border during the US presidential campaign when Trump promised to build a wall along the frontier.
But migration is not the only area of conflict in US-Vatican relations. On Monday, the Vatican’s main charity Caritas International warned that millions of people could die as a result of the “ruthless” US decision to “recklessly” stop USAID funding.
Caritas asked governments to urgently call on the US administration to reverse course.
Russia has released detained American teacher Marc Fogel, the White House says
Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Donald Trump, left Russian airspace with Marc Fogel
Fogel was arrested in August 2021 and was serving a 14-year prison sentence
Updated 9 min 26 sec ago
AP
WASHINGTON: Marc Fogel, an American teacher who was deemed wrongfully detained in Russia, has been released in what the White House described as a diplomatic thaw that could advance negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Donald Trump, left Russian airspace with Fogel, a history teacher from Pennsylvania, and he’s expected to be reunited with his family by the end of the day.
Fogel was arrested in August 2021 and was serving a 14-year prison sentence. His family and supporters said he had been traveling with medically prescribed marijuana, and he was designated by President Joe Biden’s administration as wrongfully detained in December.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, said the US and Russia “negotiated an exchange” to ensure Fogel’s release. He did not say what the US side of the bargain entailed. Previous negotiations have occasionally involved reciprocal releases of Russians by the US or its allies.
Waltz said the development was “a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine.” Trump, a Republican, has promised to find a way to end the conflict.
Trump also has talked about having a good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. Last month, Trump said that his administration was having “very serious” conversations with Russia about the war.
Fogel’s relatives said they were “beyond grateful, relieved and overwhelmed” that he was coming home.
“This has been the darkest and most painful period of our lives, but today, we begin to heal,” they said. “For the first time in years, our family can look forward to the future with hope.”
There was no immediate comment from Moscow about Fogel’s release on Tuesday.
Other Americans also remain detained in Russia when they weren’t included in a massive prisoner swap last August that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
Those include US-Russian dual national Ksenia Khavana, who was convicted in August of treason and sentenced to 12 years in prison on charges stemming from a donation of about $52 to a charity aiding Ukraine. The Biden White House at the time called the conviction and sentencing “nothing less than vindictive cruelty.”
Tech chiefs hope diversified supply chains will protect against trade war
CEOs of IBM, HP, Blackberry and SAP, discuss impact of tariffs
Executives questioned about artificial intelligence technology race
Updated 49 min 17 sec ago
Jonathan Lessware
LONDON: Diversified supply chains and regional hubs will help protect technology companies against global trade uncertainty, chief executives told the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Tuesday.
The CEOs of IBM, HP, Blackberry and Europe’s biggest software company SAP, also discussed the global race for artificial intelligence technology and how it impacts their firms.
US President Donald Trump launched his latest protectionist salvo on Monday when he said that a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports would take effect on March 12 “without exceptions or exemptions.”
America’s Consumer Technology Association warned last month that the trade war could lead to a 46 percent increase in laptop and tablet prices within the US alone.
Asked whether his company could absorb the hit of the tariffs, HP President and CEO Enrique Lores said: “The situation is very fluid, so it is hard to know exactly what that will be, so what is going to be very important is to be very agile responding, having flexibility, and our goal of course, would be to minimize the impact this will have on the consumer by being flexible and being able to adjust our production all over the world.”
He said the world has realized in recent years that supply chains need to be more diverse and that there is a need to build products in multiple parts of the world “to be more resilient, but also to respond to changes as tariffs could be.
“What we have now is a much more flexible model than what we had that will allow us to respond to the changes.”
IBM’s Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said that while supply chain diversification helps protect against all kinds of shocks, not just tariffs, he was more worried about deteriorating trade relations and their impact on economic growth.
“Every 10 percent increase in global trade is 1 percent increase on global GDP,” Krishna said. “The trade relations is what worries us, because GDP in the end and economic growth is what would drive consumption of technology and what'll allow everyone to grow.”
Lores of IBM said he did not see the challenge as just the “US versus China,” but as adapting to demand for manufacturing capabilities in many different countries.
“So, this is why the new way to look at globalization is by looking at regional centers, much more and whether the center is in the US or the center is in China.”
Canada was one of the countries threatened with 25 percent tariffs by Trump, something which BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo said had “caught our attention,” given his company is based in Ontario.
“It’s particularly an acute issue (for) us, a Canadian company,” he said. “I’m hoping it’s a little bit of a bark and there’s not much bite into it at the end of the day, but we’ll see we’ll see where it all lands.
“I think managing our business on a global level, having regional centers that can help deliver the outcomes that our customers are expecting in the most economical way is really the only thing that we can do to be able to address it properly.”
The panel also discussed the global race to develop AI technology, which has been competing for headlines with Trump’s tariff threats.
The launch of a chatbot by Chinese-owned AI start-up DeepSeek last month wiped $1 trillion from US technology stocks. The competitor to ChatGPT appeared to match its performance at much lower cost, in what some described as a “Sputnik moment” for the AI technology race.
While the world is still digesting the fallout from DeepSeek, SAP CEO Christian Klein said the UAE and the Gulf region had also been leading in the AI digital transformation.
He said when he came to the UAE nine years ago “all the companies were already embracing it, no matter if it’s public or private sector, when in Europe we are still discussing is this technology secure enough? Can we apply it? Here it’s already happening.
“When we talk about inventory, asset management, about saving billions of dollars, by getting smarter on supply chain, here actually we find the use cases by the customers giving us the feedback.”
Lores added: “The work that has been done in these countries during the last 10 years has put them significantly ahead of many, many other countries of the world.”
Joumanna Bercetche, the Dubai-based host of Bloomberg’s “Horizons Middle East and Africa,” discusses AI adoption in emerging economies with Makhtar Diop, managing director of the International Finance Corporation at the World Governments Summit. (Screengrab)
In a separate panel at the summit, Makhtar Diop, managing director of the World Bank’s private investment arm, the International Finance Corp., said he already saw the application of AI widely in developing countries in areas like agriculture and health.
But he added these countries need more energy to power the data centers required to advance AI there.
“If the less advanced countries don’t have electricity, they will not be able to be part of these transformation that is happening right now,” Diop said.
Swedish woman jailed for keeping Yazidi slaves in Syria
Accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria in 2015, Lina Ishaq was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes
Updated 11 February 2025
AFP
STOCKHOLM: A Swedish court on Tuesday sentenced a 52-year-old woman to 12 years in prison on genocide charges, in the country’s first court case over crimes by Daesh against the Yazidi minority.
Accused of keeping Yazidi women and children as slaves at her home in Syria in 2015, Lina Ishaq was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, the Stockholm district court said in a statement.
The crimes warranted a sentence of 16 years, but taking a previous sentence into account it ordered her to spend 12 years behind bars, the court said. Prosecutors had demanded a life jail sentence.
The woman, a Swedish citizen, had already been sentenced to six years imprisonment in 2022 for allowing her 12-year-old son to be recruited as a Daesh child soldier.
Prosecutor Reena Devgun said she was happy with the convictions but she would likely appeal against the sentence.
“These are very, very severe crimes, and compared to other Swedish jurisprudence or Swedish sentencing traditions, I do think that there is room for a more severe sentence,” she told AFP.
The court said the case concerned nine Yazidi, six of whom were children at the time.
All the plaintiffs were captured by Daesh in attacks on Kurdish-speaking Yazidi villages that began in August 2014 in Sinjar, Iraq. Their male relatives were executed and thousands of women were taken.
After about five months of captivity, they arrived at Ishaq’s home in Raqqa.
“The woman kept them imprisoned and treated them as her property by holding them as slaves for a period of, in most cases, five months,” the court said.
Their movement was restricted, they were made to perform chores and some were photographed in preparation to be transferred to other people as slaves.
“Given the fact that she participated in the onward transfer of the injured parties, she is also responsible for enabling their continued imprisonment and enslavement,” the court said.
Ishaq also forced the Yazidis, who practice their own religion, to “become practicing Muslims” by making them recite Qur'an verses and pray four or five times a day.
She also called the injured parties “demeaning invectives such as ‘infidels’ or ‘slaves’,” the court said.
The court stressed “that the comprehensive system of enslavement” was one of “the crucial elements” implemented by Daesh in “the perpetration of the genocide, the crimes against humanity and gross war crimes that the Yazidi population was subjected to.”
As such, the court said “the woman shared the IS intent to destroy a religious group.”
Ishaq’s lawyer Mikael Westerlund said the woman had not decided whether to appeal, but said they were pleased the court had not handed down a life sentence as requested by the prosecution.
“It was important for the prosecution to sentence her for life,” he told AFP.
Around 300 Swedes or Swedish residents, a quarter of them women, joined Daesh in Syria and Iraq, mostly in 2013 and 2014, according to Sweden’s intelligence service Sapo.
Ishaq grew up in a Christian Iraqi family in Sweden but converted to Islam after meeting her late husband and extremist Jiro Mehho, with whom she had six children, in the 1990s.
She traveled to Syria with her children in 2013. Mehho died in August 2013, and Ishaq moved to Raqqa in 2014 and re-married.
