Foreign News
Vietnam nominates public security minister to be new president
Vietnam’s governing Communist Party has nominated the public security minister to be the next president, state media reported, months after his predecessor stepped down as part of a anti-corruption crackdown.
On Saturday, the party’s central committee picked To Lam, 66, the Vietnam News Agency reported.
Lam has been public security minister since 2016 and has taken a hard line on human rights movements in the country.
In March, President Vo Van Thuong resigned after a little more than a year in office due to “violations” and “shortcomings”, the party said.
Thuong was the second president to quit in two years amid an anti-corruption crackdown that has seen several senior politicians fired and top business leaders tried for fraud and corruption.
When he took office, Thuong said he was “determined to fight corruption”, and was believed to be close to party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong – who is seen as the most powerful figure in the country.
Thousands of people, including top officials and senior business leaders, have been caught up the country’s “blazing furnace” campaign against corruption, which has touched the highest echelons of Vietnamese politics and is led by Trong.
Tran Thanh Man, 61, was also nominated as the new head of Vietnam’s National Assembly, state media said, becoming one of Vietnam’s four most powerful leaders.
Man succeeds Vuong Dinh Hue, who was asked to step down last month because of “violations and shortcomings”.
The nominations have been accepted by the party’s central committee but will be officially voted in by the National Assembly, which is due to meet next week.
All top leadership “must be truly united, truly exemplary, wholehearted and devoted to the common cause”, the central committee said.
In April, a court in Vietnam sentenced a property tycoon to death for her role in a $12.5bn financial fraud case, the country’s largest on record. Truong My Lan chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, was found guilty of embezzlement, bribery and violations of banking rules at the end of a trial in Ho Chi Minh City.
Lan’s arrest in October 2022 was among the most high-profile in the continuing anti-corruption drive that started in 2016 and has picked up pace since 2022.
(Aljazeera)
US President Donald Trump’s administration has exempted smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices from “reciprocal” tariffs, including the 125% levies imposed on Chinese imports.
US Customs and Border Patrol published a notice late on Friday explaining the goods would be excluded from Trump’s 10% global tariff on most countries and the much larger Chinese import tax.
The move comes after concerns from US tech companies that the price of gadgets could skyrocket, as many of them are made in China.
This is the first significant reprieve of any kind in Trump’s tariffs on China, with one trade analyst describing it as a “game-changer scenario”.
[BBC]
A notorious bandit kingpin and 100 of his suspected followers have been killed in a joint military operation in north-west Nigeria, authorities say.
Gwaska Dankarami was said to have been a high-value target who reportedly served as second-in-command to an Islamic State-linked leader.
The alleged gang leader had been hiding in the Munumu Forest, with authorities reporting that several other criminal hideouts were also destroyed across the state on Friday.
His apparent death comes after bandits kidnapped 43 villagers and killed four others in a deadly attack on a village called Maigora in the northern Katsina State earlier this week.
The police had said that it deployed security forces in pursuit of the kidnappers.
However, this is not the first time Dankarami’s death has been reported.
In 2022, the Nigerian Airforce claimed to have killed him in a similar operation.
The Katsina State commissioner for internal security and home affairs, Nasir Mua’zu, said the killing was a significant milestone in the fight against banditry in the state.
“It is expedient to state that this successful mission has significantly disrupted the criminal networks that have long terrorised communities across Faskari, Kankara, Bakori, Malumfashi, and Kafur,” Mua’zu added.
Security forces said they had also recovered and destroyed two machine guns and locally fabricated shotguns.
In a separate operation on Thursday, security forces killed six bandits, including their commander, while several other bandits escaped with bullet wounds.
Seven motorcycles were also intercepted and recovered during the intelligence-led operation.
Katsina, the home state of former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, has witnessed sporadic attacks by bandits and kidnappers that have claimed many lives.
The state governor, Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, has expressed the government’s determination to eliminate criminals and ensure every forest is thoroughly monitored to protect residents.
The authorities said that the operations are part of a broader effort to restore stability in the state and the north-west region of Nigeria, which has witnessed repeated banditry attacks.
[BBC]
At least three suspected rebel fighters and one Indian soldier have been killed in separate firefights in Indian administered Kashmir less than a week after Interior Minister Amit Shah visited the disputed territory.
The Indian army said on Saturday that Indian soldiers killed three fighters in a gun battle that began on Wednesday in a remote forest in Kishtwar in southern Kashmir.
Senior Indian army official Brigadier JBS Rathi said troops had displayed “great tactical acumen”.
“In the gun battle, three terrorists were neutralised,” he told reporters on Saturday in a commonly used term for rebels opposed to Indian rule in Kashmir.
Weapons and “war-like stores” were recovered from the site, the army’s White Knight Corps posted on social media platform X.
A soldier was killed in a separate incident late on Friday night in Sunderbani district along the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border that cuts Indian-administered Kashmir into two.
The White Knight Corps said on X troops had “foiled an infiltration attempt” there.
Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan since their independence in 1947, with both claiming the territory in full but governing only part of it.
India has an estimated 500,000 soldiers deployed in the territory after an armed uprising against Indian rule in the late 1980s.
Thousands of people, most of them Kashmir civilians, have been killed as rebel groups have fought Indian forces, seeking independence for Kashmir or its merger with Pakistan.
In 2019, a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights accused India of human rights violations in Kashmir and called for a commission of inquiry into the allegations. The report came nearly a year after the then UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Husseincalled for an international investigation into abuses in the Muslim-majority region.
Last month, four police officers and two suspected rebels were killed in the region in a clash that also wounded several police officers.
The territory has simmered in anger since 2019 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended the region’s semi-autonomy and drastically curbed dissent, civil liberties and media freedoms while intensifying military operations.
Thousands of additional troops, including special forces, were deployed across southern mountainous areas last year following a series of deadly rebel attacks that killed more than 50 soldiers over three years.
India regularly blames Pakistan for pushing rebels across the LoC to launch attacks on Indian forces.
[Aljazeera]
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