DHAKA: Islamist parties in Bangladesh face a ban from politics after the controversial 1979 Fifth Amendment was struck down by the Supreme Court in a landmark ruling that also paved the way for ensuring secularism as the “cornerstone” of the country’s constitution.
Following the Appellate Division’s decision upholding the High Court’s landmark verdict that declared the Constitution’s 1979 Fifth Amendment illegal, restrictions on formation of organisations based on religion were restored.

“Carrying out activities of any political party based on religion is now punishable offence under the Special Powers Act,” Law Minister Shafique Ahmed said.”Their activities are now punishable offence,” he said. Political parties and other organisations using religion as their guidelines now stand banned with cancellation of the Fifth Amendment to the con stitution, he said.

The Supreme Court ruling sets the stage to ban religious parities like the country’s largest Islamist party like Jamaat-e-Islami. The Law Minister said the Supreme Court ruling has paved the way for ensuring secular, multiparty democracy, reports PTI.

“By a historical judgement of our Supreme Court, secularism has been restored, paving the way for the state to ensure secular multiparty democracy to move forward with its agenda of development,” Ahmed said. “Secularism will again be the cornerstone of our constitution,” Ahmed said.

The 1979 Fifth Amendment was aimed to provide constitutional legitimacy to the governments in power — military or otherwise — following the 1975 assassination of the founding leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
In April 1979 the legislature ratified the Fifth Amendment, which provided that all amendments, additions, modifications made between August 15, 1975 and April 9, 1979 were valid and would not be called in question before any judicial body.

According to PTI, “The court put on record its “total disapproval of martial law” and suggested “suitable punishment” to perpetrators as it issued the full text of a key judgement that made the 1979 Fifth Amendment legalising military takeover unconstitutional. The court scrapped the bulk of the 1979 Fifth Amendment, including provisions that had allowed religious political parties to flourish.”
Source: IE

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By Neeraj Nanda

Melbourne: Aamir Khan’s much talked about home production ‘Peepli Live’ is all set to be premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2010 on 6th August. Director Anusha Rizvi, producer Aamir Khan and the film’s stars will be in attendance for a special gala screening of Peepli Live, a biting social-satire on poverty, the media and Indian society.
Producer Aamir Khan, Director Anusha Rizvi and actors of the film are expected to attend the premier in Melbourne.
Burdened with an unpaid loan, poverty-stricken farmers Natha and Budhia risk losing everything. Desperate to keep the roof over his family’s heads, Natha hatches a plan to commit suicide – thereby ensuring the intervention of a government program that helps out the families of deceased. But once a reporter latches onto the story, Natha unwillingly becomes the centre of a frenzied media maelstrom.
A biting social satire that lampoons both government and media in one fell swoop, Peepli Live puts a comedic spin on one of the darkest issues facing India today. First-time filmmaker Anusha Rizvi shines a spotlight on an uncomfortable subject, and turns it into outrageous farce.

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THREE men who racially taunted an Indian man on a bus in Melbourne’s south will be the first to front court under tough new racial vilification laws, reports the HeraldSun.

The report quotes the Police alleging the three men both racially and physically abused a student, of Indian background, on a bus heading towards Portsea about 2pm on Saturday, February 6.

Two of the men will front Frankston Magistrates Court on September 1 on charges of intentionally cause injury, unlawful assault, assault in company, offensive language and incite racial hatred.

The third man is expected to be summonsed to the same date in the near future, the report says.

Victoria Police says it is hoped the laying of charges in relation to the incident will send a strong message to the community that such behaviour will not be tolerated.

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ANALYSIS

By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Jul 26 (IPS) – The 92,000 reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by
the whistleblower organisation WikiLeaks, and reported Monday
by the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, offer no
major revelations that are entirely new, as did the Pentagon
Papers to which they are inevitably being compared.

But they increase the political pressure on a war policy
that has already suffered a precipitous loss of credibility
this year by highlighting contradictions between the
official assumptions of the strategy and the realities shown
in the documents – especially in regard to Pakistan’s role
in the war.

Unlike the Pentagon Papers, which chronicle the policymaking
process leading up to and during the Vietnam War, the
WikiLeaks documents chronicle thousands of local incidents
and situations encountered by U.S. and other NATO troops
that illustrate chronic problems for the U.S.-NATO effort.

Among the themes that are documented, sometimes dramatically
but often through bland military reports, are the seemingly
casual killing of civilians away from combat situations,
night raids by special forces that are often based on bad
intelligence, the absence of legal constraints on the abuses
of Afghan police, and the deeply rooted character of
corruption among Afghan officials.

The most politically salient issue highlighted by the new
documents, however, is Pakistan’s political and material
support for the Taliban insurgency, despite its ostensible
support for U.S. policy in Afghanistan.

The documents include many intelligence reports about Lt.
Gen. Hamid Gul, the director of the ISI, Pakistan’s military
intelligence agency, in the late 1980s, continuing to work
with the Taliban commanders loyal to Mullah Omar as well as
the Jalaluddin Haaqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar insurgent
networks.

Some of the reports obviously reflect the anti-Pakistan bias
of the Afghan intelligence service when it was under former
Northern Alliance intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh.
Nevertheless, the overall impression they convey of
Pakistani support for the Taliban is credible to the news
media, because they confirm numerous press reports over the
past few years.

The New York Times led its coverage of the documents with
its report on the Pakistani-Taliban issue. The story said
the documents reflect ”deep suspicions among American
officials that Pakistan’s military spy service has for years
guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as
Pakistan receives more than 1 billion dollars a year from
Washington for its help combating the militants.”

The issue of Pakistani ”double-dealing” on Afghanistan is
one of the Barack Obama administration’s greatest political
vulnerabilities, because it is bears on a point of
particular political sensitivity among the political and
national security elite who are worried about whether there
is any hope for success for the war strategy, even with Gen.
David Petraeus in command.

One Democratic opponent of the war policy was quick to take
advantage of the leaked documents’ focus on Pakistan’s
support for the Taliban. In a statement issued Monday, Sen.
Russ Feingold, Democratic member of the Foreign Relations
Committee, said the documents ”highlight a fundamental
strategic problem, which is that elements of the Pakistani
security services have been complicit in the insurgency”.

In combination with ”competing agendas within the Afghan
security forces”, Feingold argued, that problem precludes
any ”military solution in Afghanistan”.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai took advantage of the new
story generated by the documents to release a statement
pointing to Pakistani sanctuaries across the border as the
primary problem faced by his government. ”Our efforts
against terrorism will have no effect as long as these
sanctuaries and sources remain intact,” said Karzai.

Last February, then Director of National Intelligence Dennis
Blair said what administration officials had privately
conceded. Disrupting the ”safe havens” enjoyed by the
Taliban on the Pakistani side of the border, he said, ”won’t
be sufficient by itself to defeat the insurgency in
Afghanistan”, but it is a ”necessary condition” for making
”progress” in Afghanistan.

Implicitly admitting its political vulnerability on the
issue, on Sunday, the White House issued a compilation of
statements by senior administration officials over the last
18 months aimed at showing that they have been tough with
Pakistan on Afghanistan.

But none of the statements quoted in the compilation
admitted the reality that Pakistan’s policy of supporting
the Taliban insurgency has long been firmly fixed and is not
going to change.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
agreed in April 2009 that ”elements” of the ISI were
”connected to those militant organisations”. But he
suggested that Pakistani chief of staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani,
with whom Mullen had developed a close personal
relationship, was in the process of changing the
intelligence agency.

Mullen essentially pleaded for time, saying that change
”isn’t going to happen overnight” and that ”it takes a
fairly significant time to change an organisation.”

Admitting that Pakistan’s fundamental interests in
Afghanistan conflict with U.S. war strategy would be a
serious û and possibly, fatal û blow to the credibility of
the Obama administration’s strategy of using force to
”reverse the momentum” of the Taliban.

To the extent that this contradiction and others are
highlighted in the coming weeks as the news media comb
through the mountains of new documents, it could accelerate
the process by which political support for the Afghanistan
War among the foreign policy and political elite continues
to diminish.

The loss of political support for the war among the
political and national security elite has accelerated in
recent months and is already far advanced. More prominent
figures in the national security elite, both Republican and
Democratic, have signaled a developing consensus in those
circles that the war strategy cannot succeed, paralleling
the process that occurred in Washington in 2006 in regard to
the Iraq War.

Just this past week, Robert Blackwill, former deputy
national security adviser for George W. Bush, and Richard
Haass, former Bill Clinton administration official and
president of the Council on Foreign Relations, joined the
chorus of doubters and called for ceding southern
Afghanistan to the Taliban and withdrawing to the north.

Haas penned an article in Newsweek under the title, ”We’re
Not Winning. It’s Not Worth It.”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist
specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback
edition of his latest book, ”Perils of Dominance: Imbalance
of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in
2006.

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July 26, 2010 -
The White House has denounced a massive leak of secret military files that allegedly describe how Pakistan’s spy service aids the Afghan insurgency, but said the information was no surprise.

In all, about 92,000 documents were released by the web whistleblower Wikileaks, containing previously untold details of the Afghan war through Pentagon files and field reports from 2004 to 2010.

The New York Times, one of the first three media outlets to review and report on the leaks, said they “suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban”.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper said the files, many of which detail growing numbers of civilians dying at the hands of international forces as well as the Taliban, painted “a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan”.

Read full story:

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/wikileaks-releases-92000-hidden-afghan-war-docs-20100726-10rtw.html

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By our correspondent

New Delhi: The 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games organizing committee has decided that cow meat (beef) will not be served to anyone during the games. The chairman of the games organizing committee has informed all the catering contractors that Beef will not be served during the games.
The decision has been taken to take care of ‘Hindu sensibilities’ and to avoid facing an ‘agitation’ by the Hindu nationalist BJP over the issue.
The athletes catering contract is held by an Australian company which also had the contract of the Melbourne Games in 2006.

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The analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit looked at access to services, quality of care and public awareness in 40 countries. It found the UK performed particularly well on issues such as obtaining pain killers and quality of support. Along with Australia, it received 7.9 out of 10, well ahead of nations such as Denmark, on 5.1 and Italy, on 4.4. India came bottom on 1.9.
The researchers, part of the group which publishes the Economist magazine, talked to health professionals in 40 countries as well as looking through official data.
They concluded access to drugs and carers were the two most pressing issues for all involved. They also said that most health systems, no matter how well funded, relied to some extent on charities and philanthropic bodies to offer support to patients, particularly through networks of hospices.
David Praill, chief executive of Help the Hospices in the UK and co-chairman of the Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance, said the result was “heartening” for the UK.
But he added: “The system is far from perfect and there remains huge disparity.”
He also said urgent action was needed in those countries with the worst systems.
“Hospice and palliative care is still unavailable to many of those in need, especially in the developing world with millions of people dying in pain and distress every year.”
TOP FIVE COUNTRIES
UK – 7.9 out of 10
Australia – 7.9
New Zealand – 7.7
Ireland – 6.8
Belgium – 6.8
BOTTOM FIVE COUNTRIES
India – 1.9 out of 10
Uganda – 2.1
Brazil – 2.2
China – 2.3
Mexico – 2.7
-BBC, July 14

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Copper Tiffin Indian restaurant before the incident

By our reporter

Sydney: An Indian Restaurant in Sydney last night was attacked and subsequently a loud explosion caused fire in the restaurant, but no casualties or injuries were reported. The Indian Restaurant, which was targeted by some suspected arsonists, was identified as Copper Tiffin Restaurant. It is located on the Cleveland Street in Sydney.

They Sydney police suspect that the restaurant was ‘deliberately lit’. At least four people were inside when the explosion took place. They escaped unhurt.The firefighters brought the fire under control. The police have launched a hunt for two people, who were reportedly seen running from the spot after the incident.

Reports say the restaurant had reported a bomb threat to the police last month. The New South Wales Fire Fighters have said there was “some sort of explosion” at the restaurant.

Another nearby Indian restaurant escaped the fire.

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Brisbane: Dr. Jayant Patel, 60, was today sentenced to seven years jail term for manslaughter for killing three of his patients and harming another.

He was earlier convicted by a Brisbane Supreme Court jury. The surgeries by the Indian educated and American trained doctor were conducted between 2003 and 2005 when Dr. Patel was the Head of Surgery at the Bunderberg base Hospital in Queensland.

Dr. Patel, had pleaded not guilty and his defence had said that all the surgeries were conducted with the consent of the patients.

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By our correspondent

Canberra: Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia was today elected by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) cacus to replace Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, to become Australia’s first woman Prime Minister. Wayne Swan was elected to be the next Deputy Prime Minister. There was no contest as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd withdrew form the contest.
Later in the day the new Prime Minister attended the last day of Parliament.

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