Cesar Barrioquinto, Editor
C4
MONDAY, MARCH 6, 2017
World
Malaysia expels envoy over Kim assassination K UALA LUMPUR―Malaysia has expelled North Korea’s ambassador, giving him 48 hours to leave the country in a major break in diplomatic relations over the airport assassination of the half-brother of Pyongyang’s leader. Kim Jong-Nam was poisoned February 13 with the deadly nerve agent VX. North Korea has not acknowledged the dead man’s identity but has repeatedly disparaged the murder investigation, accusing Malaysia of conniving with its enemies. “The ambassador has been declared persona non grata” after Malaysia demanded but did not receive an apology for Pyongyang’s attacks on the investigation, Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Anifah Haji Aman said. “Malaysia will react strongly against any insults made against it or any attempt to tarnish its
Russian dissident vows to fight on MOSCOW―It was a few minutes after the prison guards hung him up by his shackled wrists, blindfolded, that Ildar Dadin says he began to crack. The anti-Kremlin activist had already put up with solitary confinement, repeated beatings, and having his head shoved down a toilet by officers at a remote prison in northwest Russia. Then something in him just snapped. “I felt this incredible pain and thought that someone might be coming to rape me,” Dadin told AFP recalling his 15 months behind bars. “I remember I sensed myself starting to break.” Dadin, 34, is the first and only person in Russia to have served time for contravening a tough law clamping down on protests in the country. In December 2015 he was jailed for the supposed crime of holding repeated peaceful demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin’s rule without official permission. Dadin’s case became a cause celebre for those opposed to Russia’s strongman leader. Eventually he managed to get word out about his treatment in jail and the allegations he made of torture exploded into the public eye, shining a spotlight on abuse that forced even the Kremlin to pay attention. Late last month, in a surprise ruling, the Russian supreme court quashed his sentence and ordered him freed. For several days now Dadin has been back at his small flat in a nondescript Moscow neighborhood trying to adjust to a new life with his wife Anastasia, whom he married while in prison. Despite his ordeal in prison and attempts to break him there, the former security guard with closely-cropped hair insisted that he had no intention of giving up his struggle against the Kremlin. “While I was in prison other inmates asked me if I was going to continue, and I always replied firmly: yes,” he said. “Otherwise it would mean that I had started and then got scared.” During his sentence Dadin was shifted between several prisons, but he says the worst came when he was sent to penal colony number seven in the Karelia region on the border with Finland. AFP
reputation,” he said in a statement released late Saturday. Ambassador Kang Chol failed to present himself at the ministry when summoned and “is expected to leave Malaysia within 48 hours,” the statement added. On Sunday morning, reportes besieged Pyongyang’s embassy, from where Kang is expected to depart before the expulsion deadline expires 6pm on Monday. Arch-rival South Korea has blamed the North for the murder, citing what they say was a standing order from leader Kim Jong-Un to kill his exiled half-brother who may have been seen as a potential rival.
The foreign ministry said the expulsion was “part of the process by the Malaysian government to review its relations” with North Korea, which before Kim’s assassination were unusually cozy. “North Korea must learn to respect other countries,” Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said Sunday. The expulsion showed “we are serious about solving this problem and we do not want it to be manipulated,” he added. The diplomatic spat erupted last month when Malaysian police rejected North Korean diplomats’ demands to hand over Kim’s body. Kang then claimed the investigation was politically motivated and said Kuala Lumpur was conspiring with “hostile forces”. Malaysia summoned Kang for a dressing-down, with Prime Minister Najib Razak saying the ambassador’s statement was “diplomatically rude”. Malaysia issued a February 28
deadline for an apology, but “no such apology has been made, neither has there been any indication that one is forthcoming.” Malaysia has also recalled its envoy to Pyongyang and canceled a rare visa-free travel deal with North Korea. Police are seeking seven North Korean suspects in their probe but on Friday released the only North Korean arrested for lack of evidence. After Ri Jong-Chol was deported, he claimed police offered him a comfortable life in Malaysia for a false confession, saying the investigation was “a conspiracy to impair the dignity of the Republic [North Korea]”. Two women -- one Vietnamese and one Indonesian -- have been charged with murdering Kim Jong-Nam, with airport CCTV footage showing them approaching the heavyset 45-year-old and apparently smearing his face with a cloth. AFP
AIR SHOW. A US Air Force F-22 Raptor flies during the Australian International Air Show in Melbourne on March 5, 2017. The annual event sees 180,000 visitors over the 3-day public event held at the Avalon Airfield some 80 kilometers south-west of Melbourne. AFP
Russia’s sex workers risk violence and disease SAINT PETERSBURG―Vladimir Putin recently quipped that Russian prostitutes were “the best in the world” as he dismissed unsubstantiated rumors that Moscow had incriminating evidence on Donald Trump. But the reality is that Russian sex workers operate in a hidden world outside the law and out of sight -- making them doubly vulnerable to infection and abuse, as AFP journalists found after being granted rare access to an illegal brothel. In a grand Stalin-era tower block in the northwestern city of Saint Petersburg, a woman in her
30s opens the door of an apartment, introducing herself as Inna, the receptionist of this so-called salon. “Go into the kitchen. Nadya’s working, but Nastya and Madina are in there,” she says. Nastya, 31, and Madina, 20, are wearing Tshirts over flimsy nighties and are drinking tea in the small kitchen. The women only agree to speak to AFP because they trust an accompanying activist from the only NGO in Russia for sex workers called Serebryanaya Roza, or Silver Rose. The activist, Regina Akhmetzyanova, spends her evening going
to such clandestine brothels to give out condoms and to offer sex workers an HIV test. This is particularly important for prostitutes since the infection rates in Russia are currently growing, with more than 103,000 new cases identified in 2016, up five percent on the previous year, while the real total is likely to be significantly higher. Prostitutes admit they come under pressure to have unsafe sex. “They’ve beaten me and threatened me with a knife, forced me to do it without a condom,” said Madina, who is from Uzbekistan and speaks only basic Russian.
“I’ve had difficult situations with clients many times, for sure,” added Nastya, who came to the city from the Urals region. “I’ve learnt not to show my fear.” “Russian prostitutes are absolute pariahs who have no real way of defending themselves,” says Silver Rose’s founder, Irina Maslova. Maslova knows what she is talking about. The slim blonde in her 40s says she spent six years selling sex in the city before becoming an activist in 2003 and one of the few public advocates for prostitutes’ rights. While prostitution is illegal in
Russia, it is punishable by a fine of just 1,500 rubles ($26, 24 euros). Pimps theoretically face up to three years in jail but are harder to convict since this requires police to track financial flows. Activists say this legal ban is often used by police as an excuse not to investigate crimes against sex workers. “We’re told our profession doesn’t exist, that means, we don’t exist for the government on the one hand, but on the other hand, since (prostitution) is an administrative offense, sex workers are totally defenseless and without rights,” complains Maslova. AFP
RALLY. Go Live Founder and CEO Promise Tangeman, center, and guest attend the inaugural Girlboss Rally on March 4, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. AFP
Pakistan’s financial capital transformed ‘into rubbish bin’ KARACHI―Neighbors forced their way into Mohammad Umair’s home battling smoke and flames in a desperate bid to rescue his young family -- he and his wife survived, their children did not. The fire began in a heap of garbage which blocked the narrow alley outside the five-story building and quickly spread inside, engulfing the family as they slept that night. The tragic case has angered citi-
zens of Karachi already frustrated by a failing waste management system, who are calling for more to be done. Umair, a 31-year-old cloth merchant, breaks down as he explains that two of his children died before they even reached the hospital. “The third one, Abdul Aziz, died while the doctors were trying to save his life,” Umair adds, recalling the cluster of doctors working frantically but futilely around the
tiny body of his infant son. Police have yet to find out what caused the rubbish to catch fire but it spread quickly to their first floor apartment, filling the lone bedroom they shared where the family were all sleeping together. Umair’s wife Shameen blames the city and its citizens for her children’s deaths. “Those who dump trash and those who do not fulfill their duties to clean up are responsible,”
she says flatly, eyes dry as she stands with her husband among the cinders of their former home. “Who else?” Shameen is perhaps the most tragic figure to point fingers at waste management authorities accused of corruption and ineptitude, but she is not the first or the only one. “The present capacity and resources of (the city) cannot cater to the quantum of garbage being
generated daily,” AD Sajnani, chief of the provincial Solid Waste Management Board (SWMB) set up in 2015 to deal with the garbage disposal, told AFP bluntly. Karachi, a megacity of towering high rises and sprawling illegal settlements on the Arabian Sea, saw its growth explode in recent decades after waves of migration, largely refugees fleeing the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas. AFP