INTERNATIONAL

The ruling party of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has won enough parliamentary seats to form the next government, according to official general election results released on Friday. The latest batch of results from Sunday’s vote confirmed Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) had secured the 322 seats in the bicameral legislature needed to form a government. The NLD has taken 346 seats of the 412 seats that have been declared, with results from 64 more yet to be announced. The comfortable win will be a welcome boost for Suu Kyi. The NLD won by a similar margin in the last election in 2015, the first free vote since the end of military rule. This time, the ballot was seen as a referendum on Suu Kyi’s government, which is hugely popular at home. However, its reputation a...

The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah said on Wednesday he was pleased about “the humiliating downfall” of U.S. President Donald Trump, but urged regional allies to be on alert for any U.S. or Israeli “folly” during the rest of his term in office. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, described Trump’s administration as “among the worst, if not the worst” in the United States, but said the new president would not alter Washington’s pro-Israel policy in the Middle East. Describing the U.S. elections as a travesty of democracy, he accused Trump of having no restraints and said his administration’s “arrogance and aggressiveness” had heightened the possibility of war. The Iran-backed Hezbollah leader said he derived personal pleasure at the outcome of the U.S. elections also because Trump had ordered ...

Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud urged the world on Thursday to take “a decisive stance” to address efforts by Iran to develop nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, in his annual address to the top government advisory body. The kingdom stresses the dangers of Iran’s regional project, its interference in other countries, its fostering of terrorism, its fanning the flames of sectarianism and calls for a decisive stance from the international community against Iran that guarantees a drastic handling of its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction and develop its ballistic missiles programme, the king said. Tensions have risen in the region since United States President Donald Trump pulled the US out of a landmark nuclear deal with world powers in 2018 and reimpo...

Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot dead a radio journalist outside his home in the Philippines on Tuesday, police said, four years after the broadcaster survived a near-identical assassination attempt. Virgilio Maganes, 62, based in the province of Pangasinan, northwest of Manila, was shot six times and died at the scene. The Presidential Task Force on Media Security described the killing as “an act of cowardice” and vowed to hunt down those responsible. Maganes had survived the previous attempt on his life in November 2016 by playing dead. “We demand that the authorities work fast to solve his death, which could be related to the botched attempt on his life,” the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said in a statement. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said both ...

Amid the heightened Islamophobia, A mosque in the city of Zaandam in the northwestern Netherlands was attacked by unknown persons on Tuesday, Anadolu Agency reported. Quoting a Mosque official, the report said, "We don't know who carried out the attack, but we are worried. We are worried that the weather gets dark early especially in the winter and our students study religion in the mosque in the evenings." Genç, the mosque official said the caretaker who came to the mosque noticed the situation, adding they had never experienced such a thing before. He said there was no damage to the mosque other than broken windows and that the attack would become more clear once the security cameras were examined.

More than half of all Muslim-American candidates for public office who ran in the general election won their races. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jetpac and MPower Change said of the 110 Muslim-Americans who ran for a variety of posts, 57 emerged or are projected to emerge victorious following the Nov. 3 general election. The individuals ran in competitions that spanned 24 states and Washington, D.C., and the number of Muslim candidates in the election is the highest the groups have tracked since 2016. Of the 57 victors, seven made history as the first Muslims elected to their respective state offices. It is noteworthy that the United States House of Representatives has 435 seats and the Senate has 100 seats. Mohammed Missouri, executive director of Jetpa...

After years of delays caused by the red tape, cutbacks and opposition from religious and political factions, the first government-funded mosque in Athens since 1833 opened its doors to worshippers on Friday, the Associated Press reported. Thousands of Muslims from Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh live in Athens but the city has not had a formal mosque since it forced Ottomans to leave nearly 200 years ago. The Plans to build a mosque in Athens began in 1890 but it took decades for them to materialize due to opposition from a predominantly Christian Orthodox population and nationalists but most recently a decade-long financial crisis. Amid the coronavirus outbreak, only a limited number of worshippers, wearing masks and sitting at a distance from each other due to COVID...

With his re-election chances fading as more votes are counted in a handful of battleground states, U.S. President Donald Trump launched an extraordinary assault on the country’s democratic process from the White House on Thursday, falsely claiming the election was being “stolen” from him. Offering no evidence, Trump lambasted election workers and alleged fraud in the states where results from a dwindling set of uncounted votes are pushing Democrat Joe Biden nearer to victory. Several news networks cut away from the president, who spoke for about 15 minutes in the White House briefing room before leaving without taking questions. Biden, the former vice president, was chipping away at the Republican incumbent’s leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia even as he maintained narrow advantag...

The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said on Wednesday that Israel has killed more than 46 Palestinian journalists since the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. This came in a rally staged outside the UN headquarters in Gaza Strip on the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. Tahseen al-Astal, the deputy head of the syndicate, called on the UN to assume its responsibilities in protecting journalists and prosecuting the perpetrators of Israeli crimes against Palestinian journalists. The Syndicate counts annually between 500 and 700 Israeli occupation attacks and crimes against Palestinian journalists and it’s time for these crimes to stop and to hold accountable those who committed them and those who issued the orders, al-Astal said. The Israeli...

Paestinian prisoner Maher al-Akhras is on the “verge of death”, after passing 100 days on hunger strike in protest against his administrative detention by Israeli authorities. The European External Action Service, the diplomatic service of the European Union (EU), warned last week that Akhras’s health is deteriorating.  “Regardless of the allegations against Mr al-Akhras, the European Union reiterates its long-standing concerns about the extensive use by Israel of administrative detention without formal charges,” it said. Administrative detention is a highly controversial practice. Used almost exclusively against Palestinians, it allows for detention without charge or trial for renewable periods of three to six months, without the possibility of appeal or knowing what ac...