Day: February 1, 2018

North Korea has denounced US President Donald Trump’s administration as a “gross violator of human rights”, its state media reported Wednesday. The official Korean Central News Agency released its English-language report on Pyongyang’s annual white paper on US human rights violations as Trump began his State of the Union speech, in which he condemned the North. North Korea’s rights rights record is heavily criticised by both the United States and the United Nations, and it is estimated to have up to 120,000 political prisoners in its sprawling gulag system. Washington…

PARIS: French police on Wednesday questioned pro­minent Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan over allegations that he raped two women, who went public with their claims in the wake of the Harvey Weins­tein scandal. The Oxford professor was summoned to a Paris police station and taken into custody “as part of a preliminary inquiry in Paris into rape and assault allegations”, a police source said. Ramadan has furiously denied the complaints made by two Muslim women who said they were emboldened to break their silence after the revelations that toppled Hollywood mogul…

WASHINGTON: The Trump administration’s South Asia strategy gives US commanders in the region the authority and resources they need to deal with “terrorist safe havens in both Afghanistan and Pakistan”, says the White House. The strategy that President Donald Trump announced in August last year underlines the US determination to defeat the Taliban in the battlefield in order to force them to accept the current administrative set-up in Kabul. As part of this strategy, the Trump administration recently increased drone strikes at alleged terrorist safe havens in the Federally Administered…