PM Narendra Modi praises Afghan President's bold initiatives towards peace

 Prime Minister Narendra Modi today praised Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani's bold initiatives towards peace and expressed hope that it will be respected by all parties, referring to a ceasefire announced by the Afghan leader for Eid.

Speaking at the restricted session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit, Prime Minister Modi also promised that India will play an active role in the contact group for Afghanistan under the SCO banner.

"Afghanistan is an unfortunate example of effect of extremism and terrorism. I hope the bold initiatives towards peace taken by President Ghani will be respected by all parties," Modi said at the summit, also attended by Pakistan President Mamnoon Hussain.

Modi was referring to the Afghan government's surprise announcement of the week-long ceasefire with the Taliban for Eid.

The ceasefire will last from the 27th of Ramadan until the fifth day of Eid-al-Fitr, President Ghani had tweeted last week, indicating it could run from June 12-19.

Responding to Ghani's announcement, the Taliban yesterday announced the suspension of fighting for the first three days of Eid - the first ceasefire by the militant group in Afghanistan since the 2001 US invasion.
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After G7 Debacle, White House Takes Up Fight Against ‘Back-Stabbing’ Trudeau

Bashing the leader of one of America’s venerable allies, the White House escalated its trade tirade and leveled more withering and unprecedented criticism on Sunday against Canada’s prime minister, branding Justin Trudeau a back-stabber unworthy of President Donald Trump’s time.

“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said in an interview nationally broadcast in the US.

The verbal volleys by Navarro and Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow picked up where Trump left off Saturday evening with a series of tweets from Air Force One en route to Singapore for his nuclear summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Kudlow suggested Trump saw Trudeau as trying to weaken his hand before that meeting, saying the president won’t “let a Canadian prime minister push him around. ... Kim must not see American weakness”.

Just as the Trudeau-hosted Group of Seven meeting of the world’s leading industrialised nations had seemed to weather Trump’s threats of a trade war, the president backed out of the group’s joint statement that Trudeau said all the leaders had come together to sign.

Trump called Trudeau “dishonest and weak” after Trudeau said at a news conference that Canada would retaliate for new US tariffs.

Trudeau didn’t respond to questions about Trump when the prime minister arrived at a Quebec City hotel on Sunday for meetings with other world leaders.

Trudeau spokesman Cameron Ahmad said on Saturday night that Trudeau “said nothing he hasn’t said before — both in public and in private conversations” with Trump.

Roland Paris, a former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau, jabbed on Trump on Twitter.

“Big tough guy once he’s back on his airplane. Can’t do it in person. ... He’s a pathetic little man-child.”

Trudeau said he had reiterated to Trump, who left the G-7 meeting before it ended, that tariffs would harm industries and workers on both sides of the US-Canada border. Trudeau told reporters that imposing retaliatory measures “is not something I relish doing” but that he wouldn’t hesitate to do so because “I will always protect Canadian workers and Canadian interests”.

Navarro, the Trump trade adviser, said his harsh assessment of what “bad faith” Trudeau did with “that stunt press conference” on Saturday “comes right from Air Force One”.

Rohingya terrorists robbed & killed innocent villagers’

Rohingya Muslim militants brandishing guns and swords massacred 105 Hindu men, women and children over two days in Myanmar last year, Amnesty International has revealed.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rohingya rebel group, terrorised, murdered and abducted Hindus in northern Rakhine state just before a disproportionate campaign of violence was carried out by Myanmar’s security forces against the Rohingya, forcing some 700,000 of them to flee to Bangladesh.

On August 25, 2017, the same day that ARSA staged coordinated attacks on 30 police outposts and border guards, killing a dozen government forces and sparking the government crackdown, ARSA captured scores of Hindus and slaughtered them outside their own villages.

Twenty Hindu men, 10 women, and 23 children, 14 of whom were under the age of eight, were killed by ASRA in the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik, according to Amnesty. The same day all the 46 Hindus in the neighbouring village of Ye Bauk Kyar disappeared.

Based on dozens of interviews with survivors, as well as forensic pathologists’ analyses of photographic evidence, Amnesty has revealed how at 8 am on August 25, 2017, the ARSA attacked the Hindu community in the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik in northern Maungdaw township. Armed men dressed in black and Rohingya villagers, who are predominantly Muslim, rounded up their Hindu neighbours, robbed, bound, and blindfolded them, before marching them to the outskirts of the village where ARSA fighters killed 53 of them, execution-style, starting with the men.

Eight Hindu women and eight Hindu children were abducted and spared after the Rohingya rebel fighters forced the women to agree to “convert” to Islam.

“The men held knives and long iron rods. They tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us. One of them said: ‘You and Rakhine (Buddhist) are the same, you have a different religion, you can’t live here. I gave them my gold and money,” 22-year-old survivor Bina Bala told Amnesty.

Raj Kumari, 18, said: “They slaughtered the men. We were told not to look … They had knives, spades and iron rods. … We hid ourselves in the shrubs and could see … My uncle, my father, my brother were all slaughtered.”

Formila, 20, told Amnesty the fighters returned “with blood on their swords and hands” and told the women the men had been killed. Later, as Formila and the other abducted women were being marched away, she turned back and saw ARSA fighters kill the other women and children. “I saw men holding the heads and hair of the women, then they cut their throats,” she said.

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Saudi Arabia Launches First New Cinema, Public Showings Start Friday

Saudi Arabia launched its first commercial movie theatre on Wednesday, ending a nearly 40-year ban on cinemas under a push by the crown prince to modernize the deeply conservative Muslim kingdom.

A red carpet invitation-only gala event attracted senior government officials, foreign dignitaries and select industry figures to watch Marvel's superhero movie "Black Panther" on a 45-foot screen at a converted symphony concert hall in Riyadh.

Tickets will go on sale on Thursday for the first public viewings on Friday, according to Adam Aron, chief executive of operator AMC Entertainment Holdings

"Saudis now are going to be able to go to a beautiful theatre and watch movies the way they're supposed to be watched: on a big screen," he told Reuters ahead of the screening.

Confetti rained down through the multi-storey atrium as he and the Saudi information minister announced the official launch of the theatre and proceeded into the 450-seat movie hall.

The opening marks another milestone for reforms spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to open the country culturally and diversify the economy. Saudi Arabia is the world's top oil exporter.

The prince, 32, has already eased restrictions in the last two years including on public concerts, women driving and gender mixing.

The kingdom banned cinemas in the early 1980s under pressure from Islamists as Saudi society embraced a severe form of Islam.

Yet Saudis have been avid consumers of Western media and culture. Despite the cinema ban, Hollywood films and television series are widely watched at home and private film screenings have been largely tolerated for years.

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