Foreign News
Singapore hangs drug trafficker, third such execution in a week
Singapore has carried out its third hanging of a convicted drug trafficker in a week despite appeals for clemency from the United Nations.
Rosman Abdullah, 55, was executed for trafficking 57.43 grams of heroin into the Southeast Asian city-state, Singapore’s drug enforcement agency said on Friday.
Rosman, a Singaporean, was “accorded full due process under the law, and was represented by legal counsel throughout the process,” the Central Narcotics Bureau said in a statement.
“Capital punishment is imposed only for the most serious crimes, such as the trafficking of significant quantities of drugs which cause very serious harm, not just to individual drug abusers, but also to their families and the wider society,” the CNB added.
UN experts had called on Singaporean authorities to spare Rosman, arguing that the death penalty does little to deter crime and that authorities had not made proper accommodations for his intellectual disabilities.
“We are gravely concerned that Mr. Rosman bin Abdullah does not appear to have had access to procedural accommodations, including individualised assistance, for his disability during his interrogation or trial,” the experts said in a statement released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday.
Amnesty International had condemned Rosman’s scheduled execution as “chilling” and “extremely alarming”.
Rosman’s hanging at Singapore’s Changi Prison comes exactly a week after the execution of a 39-year-old Malaysian and a 53-year-old Singaporean for drug trafficking.
Despite its reputation as a modern city-state and international business hub, Singapore ranks among only a handful of countries, including China and North Korea, that impose the death penalty for drug offences.
Under the country’s laws, anyone trafficking more than 500 grams of cannabis or 15 grams (0.5 ounces) of heroin faces mandatory capital punishment.
Since resuming executions in March 2022 following a hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Singaporean authorities have carried out 24 executions, including eight so far this year.
Singapore’s government, which keeps a tight rein on public protest and the media, has defended the death penalty as a deterrent against drug abuse, citing surveys that show most citizens support the law.
[Aljazeera]
A video of a fashion shoot in India has gone viral and unexpectedly turned a group of underprivileged school children into local celebrities.
The footage shows the children, most of them girls between the ages of 12 and 17, dressed in red and gold outfits fashioned from discarded clothes.
The teenagers designed and tailored the outfits and also doubled up as models to showcase their creations, with the grubby walls and terraces of the slum providing the backdrop for their ramp walk.
The video was filmed and edited by a 15-year-old boy.
The video first appeared earlier this month on the Instagram page of Innovation for Change, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the city of Lucknow.
The charity works with about 400 children from the city’s slums, providing them free food, education and job skills. The children featured in the shoot are students of this NGO.
Mehak Kannojia, one of the models in the video, told the BBC that she and her fellow students closely followed the sartorial choices of Bollywood actresses on Instagram and often duplicated some of their outfits for themselves.
“This time, we decided to pool our resources and worked as a group,” the 16-year-old said.
For their project, they chose wisely – a campaign by Sabyasachi Mukherjee, one of India’s top fashion designers who has dressed Bollywood celebrities, Hollywood actresses and billionaires. In 2018, Kim Kardashian wore his sequinned red sari for a Vogue shoot.
Mukherjee is also known as the “king of weddings” in India. He has dressed thousands of brides, including Bollywood celebrities such as Anushka Sharma and Deepika Padukone. Priyanka Chopra married Nick Jonas in a stunning red Sabyasachi outfit.
IMehak said their project, called Yeh laal rang (the colour red), was inspired by the designer’s heritage bridal collection.
“We sifted through the clothes that had come to us in donation and picked out all the red items. Then we zeroed in on the outfits we wanted to make and began putting them together.”
It was intense work – the girls stitched about a dozen outfits in three-four days but, Mehak says, they had “great fun doing it”.
For the ramp walk, Mehak says they studied the models carefully in Sabyasachi videos and copied their moves.
“Just like his models, some of us wore sunglasses, one drank from a sipper with a straw, while another walked carrying a cloth bundle under her arm.”
Some of it, Mehak says, came together organically. “At one point in the shoot, I was supposed to laugh. At that moment, someone said something funny and I just burst out laughing.”
It was an ambitious project, but the result has won hearts in India. Put together on a shoestring budget with donated clothes, the video went viral after Mukherjee reposted it on his Instagram feed with a heart emoji.
The campaign won widespread praise, with many on social media comparing their work to that of professionals.
The viral video has brought enormous attention to the charity and its school has been visited by several TV channels, some of the children were invited to participate in shows on popular FM radio stations and Bollywood actress Tamannah Bhatia visited them to accept a scarf from the children.
The response, Mehak says, has been “totally unexpected”.
“It feels like a dream come true. All my friends are sharing the video and saying ‘you’ve become famous’. My parents were full of joy when they heard about all the attention we are getting.
“We are feeling wonderful. Now we have only one dream left – to meet Sabyasachi.”
The shoot, however, also received criticism, with some wondering if showing young girls dressed as brides could encourage child marriage in a country where millions of girls are still married off by their families before they turn 18 – the legal age.
The Innovation for Change addressed the concern in a post on Instagram, saying they had no intention to encourage child marriage.
“Our aim is not to promote child marriage in any way. Today, these girls are able to do something like this by fighting against such ideas and restrictions. Please appreciate them, otherwise the morale of these children will fall.”
[BBC]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is on course to win a landslide majority in India’s richest state of Maharashtra, trends show.
The BJP and its allies are leading on close to 220 out of 288 seats, comfortably placed above the halfway mark needed to form a government.
Maharashtra, which has India’s financial hub of Mumbai as its capital, is one of the most politically crucial states in the country.
The BJP, however, is staring at a defeat in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand, where main opposition Congress and its allies are on course to win.
This was the first regional election in Maharashtra since the crucial parliamentary polls earlier this year, in which Modi returned for a historic third term but lost his majority, having to depend on regional allies to form a government.
Maharashtra was one of the states where the BJP suffered a setback and opposition parties won two-thirds of the parliamentary seats.
Modi’s party currently runs the incumbent government in Maharashtra along with breakaway factions of two regional parties, the Shiv Sena and the National Congress Party (NCP).
Political analysts say the BJP’s retention of the state will give a much-needed boost to the party, which also won regional elections in the northern state of Haryana last month.
“This result has taken us by surprise. We knew we would win but never expected such an overwhelming result,” BJP spokesperson Pravin Darekar told reporters in Mumbai.
The outcome will also decide the fate of regional heavyweights, many of whom switched parties overnight in both states.
In Maharashtra, Modi led his party’s campaign from the front, announcing several welfare schemes, many of which were aimed at farmers. The state is a major agricultural belt and producer of crops like onions, soybean and cotton.
The opposition also made similar promises, including waiver of farm loans and financial assistance for women and senior citizens.
Critics have pointed out that the competing poll promises would mean the new government would face a serious fiscal challenge in delivering them, or risk facing voters’ anger.
The state has undergone significant political turmoil in recent years. The BJP-led coalition stayed in power after some lawmakers from the Shiv Sena and the NCP broke away from their parties and joined the government.
Meanwhile, Jharkhand, where seven chief ministers have ruled since the state’s formation in 2000, has also witnessed political upheaval in recent months after its chief minister Hemant Soren was arrested in February on corruption charges, which he denied.
After his release in June, Soren soon hit the road, trying to capitalise on sympathy votes.
While the BJP called Soren corrupt, he alleged that the the federal government was unfairly targeting a tribal chief minister.
Tribal communities make up nearly 9% of India’s population and remain one of the country’s most marginalised groups.
Like Maharashtra, Jharkhand also saw parties promising cash incentives, free power, jobs and health insurance.
[BBC]
A second Australian teenager has died of suspected methanol poisoning, bringing to six the number of foreign tourists who have died after apparently drinking tainted alcohol in Laos.
The family of Holly Bowles, 19, said it was with “broken hearts” that they confirmed her death, more than a week after she fell ill in the tourist town of Vang Vieng.
Her friend Bianca Jones, also 19, and British lawyer Simone White, 28, from south-east London, were confirmed to have died on Thursday.
An unnamed US man and two Danish women, aged 19 and 20, are also among the victims of the suspected poisoning, believed to be connected to bootleg alcohol.
In a statement released to media on Friday, Holly’s family said they were taking comfort from the fact she had brought so much “joy and happiness to so many people”.
They added that she had been living “her best life travelling through South East Asia meeting new friends and enjoying incredible experiences” when she became ill.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said: “All Australians will be heartbroken by the tragic passing of Holly Bowles. I offer my deepest sympathies to her family and friends.”
Holly and Bianca were taken to hospital on Wednesday, 13 November, after they failed to check out of their hostel in the small, riverside town of Vang Vieng, about two hours north of the capital Vientiane.
News reports and testimonies suggest the tourists may have consumed alcohol laced with methanol – a deadly substance often found in bootleg alcohol.
Just a small amount of methanol can be lethal, but it is sometimes added to drinks because it is cheaper than alcohol.
But, as Christer Hogstrand, a professor of molecular ecotoxicology, at King’s College London points out, it is also “not uncommon in home-distilled alcohol”.
“Methanol is like the alcohol in our drinks – colourless and odourless – but its impact on humans can be deadly,” he explained. “It has a different carbon atom structure which completely changes how humans process it in the body, leading to these potentially fatal consequences.”
It is not yet known where any of the people who fell sick or died were poisoned. It can take up to 24 hours for victims to start showing signs of illness.
The Nana Backpacker Hostel – where the Australian teenagers were staying – has said it gave out free shots to around 100 guests the previous evening.
But the hostel’s manager told news agency Associated Press that no other guests had become unwell.
The manager of the hostel has since been detained for questioning by police.
Few details have emerged about any of the other victims and where they may have visited.
Simone White, who lived in Orpington, was reportedly travelling with a group of friends. Ms White was a lawyer with global law firm Squire Patton Boggs, whose work involved general commercial matters, contentious and non-contentious intellectual property law issues according to the firm’s website.
“Simone was a talented colleague with a bright future ahead of her and someone who epitomised our firm values,” the firm said in a statement.
“Our thoughts go out to all of Simone’s family, friends, and those colleagues and clients who had the privilege to work with and know Simone. She will be sincerely missed.”
Australia is pushing authorities to be open about their investigation into the incident.
New Zealand and Dutch officials have also both said they were monitoring incidents involving nationals.
Vang Vieng is a hub for backpackers travelling across south-east Asia. It’s home to the Banana Pancake Trail – a popular backpacking route spanning Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
[BBC]
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