The daughter of Sukarno, who heads the PDI-P, the party to which outgoing President Joko Widodo belongs, has asked the Constitutional Court to allow her to act as “amicus curiae” in a legal case that could stop Gibran Rakabuming Raka from taking office as vice president after his running mate, General Prabowo Subianto, won the presidency.
A former teacher, he founded the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in 1958, holding firm to the link between the secular principle of development and the Buddhist ideals of altruism and compassion, together with a firm option for non-violence. Among the many honours he received in his long life were the Magsaysay Award in 1969 and the Niwano Peace Prize in 1992.
In 2022, the Supreme Court had intervened by "freezing" the expropriations in the neighbourhood long at the centre of high tensions in East Jerusalem. A judge ordered the eviction of three families by July. Behind the decision is said to be pressure from Nahalat Shimon, a pro-settlement group. The army ordered the seizure of land north of Hebron, a UN note against settler violence.
There are over 8,000 people imprisoned for political reasons and over 300,000 who have been forced to leave the country for the same reasons in a land of just 10 million inhabitants. And ever since the Lukasenko regime forced citizens abroad to return to their homeland to reissue their passports, the number of stateless Belarusians around Europe and the world has multiplied exponentially.
Today's news: 29 Maoist rebels killed in an operation in India; Quantity of a year and a half of rain falls on Dubai in a few hours: airport paralysed; In China there is alarm over water consumption by data centres and artificial intelligence; South Korea doubles rice sent to food emergency countries.
Chinese Human Rights Defenders released a report detailing the stories of children and young people victims of human rights violations, like He Fengmei's daughter, who was separated from her mother a month after her birth and kept in a psychiatric hospital in Henan. In another case, a boy is rejected by schools because his lawyer father defends activists. In Xinjiang children are placed in boarding schools as "orphans" to uproot them from their families.