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Bangladesh ex-PM Hasina charged with ‘systematic attack’ as trial opens

Bangladesh ex-PM Hasina charged with ‘systematic attack’ as trial opens

The country’s International Crimes Tribunal opens trial against the fugitive former leader for crimes against humanity. Fugitive former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina orchestrated a “systematic attack” on protests against her government, Bangladeshi prosecutors have said at the opening of her trial over last year’s deadly crackdown. “Upon scrutinising the evidence, we reached the conclusion that it was a coordinated, widespread and systematic attack,” Mohammad Tajul Islam, chief prosecutor at Bangladesh’s domestic International Crimes Tribunal (ICT), told the court in his opening speech on Sunday. “The accused unleashed all law enforcement agencies and her armed party members to crush the uprising,” Islam said as he charged the 77-year-old former leader and two other officials of “abetment, incitement, complicity, facilitation, conspiracy, and failure to prevent mass murder” during the student-led mass uprising. The United Nations says nearly 1,400 Bangladeshis were killed between July and August 2024 when Hasina’s government launched a brutal campaign to silence the protesters. Bangladesh has charged her with crimes against humanity over the killings. Advertisement Hasina, 77 – who remains in self-imposed exile in neighbouring India, her old ally – has rejected the charges as politically motivated. She fled by helicopter to New Delhi in August last year after the nationwide protests ended her “autocratic” 15-year rule marked by allegations of repeated human rights violations, including attacks, imprisonment, and even targeted killings of opposition figures, dissenters, and critics. She has since defied an arrest warrant and extradition order to return to Dhaka. The ICT is also prosecuting former senior figures connected to the ousted government of Hasina and her now-banned Awami League party, including former Interior Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and former police chief Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun. Their prosecution has been a key demand of several political parties now jostling for power. The interim government has promised to hold elections before June 2026. Prosecutors submitted their report in the case against Hasina last month, with the court expected to issue formal charges on Sunday. ICT chief prosecutor Tajul Islam said on May 12 that Hasina faces at least five charges, including “abetment, incitement, complicity, facilitation, conspiracy and failure to prevent mass murder during the July uprising”. Investigators have collected video footage, audio clips, Hasina’s phone conversations, records of helicopter and drone movements, as well as statements from victims of the crackdown as part of their probe. The ICT opened its first trial connected to the previous government on May 25. In that case, eight police officials face charges of crimes against humanity over the killing of six protesters on August 5, the day Hasina fled the country. Advertisement Four of the officers are in custody and four are being tried in absentia. The ICT was set up by Hasina in 2009 to investigate crimes committed by the Pakistani army during Bangladesh’s war for independence in 1971. It sentenced numerous prominent political opponents to death, and many saw it as a means for Hasina to eliminate rivals. Adblock test (Why?)

Why Trump and Bukele are destroying Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s life

Why Trump and Bukele are destroying Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s life

In March, the United States government deported to El Salvador 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had lived and worked in the US for almost half his life. Little did he know that he would soon be the face of US President Donald Trump’s sinisterly exuberant mass deportation campaign. Married to US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia was detained while driving in Maryland with the couple’s five-year-old autistic son, who got to witness his father’s capture by the US forces of law and order and has apparently been severely traumatised as a result. In a subsequent court affidavit, Vasquez Sura said her son, who cannot speak, had been “very distressed” by the “sudden disappearance of his father”, crying more than usual and “finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent”. Of course, tearing families apart and traumatising children has long been par for the bipartisan course in everyone’s favourite “land of the free”, although Trump has certainly made more of a sensational spectacle out of it than his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Anyway, there is nothing like sowing a bunch of fear and psychological trauma in the name of national security, right? Advertisement Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador along with more than 200 other people, who shared the honour of serving as demonised guinea pigs in the Trump administration’s current experiments in sadistic countermigration policy. The deportees were swiftly interned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the notorious mega-prison built by Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s self-described “coolest dictator in the world”. The facility houses thousands of people arrested under the nationwide “state of emergency”, which was declared in 2022 and shows no sign of abating. Under the pretence of fighting a war on gangs, Bukele has imprisoned more than 85,000 Salvadorans – over 1 percent of the country’s population – in an array of jails that often function as blackholes in terms of indefinitely disappearing human beings as well as any notion of human and legal rights. And now that incoming US funds and deportees have boosted El Salvador’s international carceral clout along with Bukele’s tough-guy image, there is even less of a rush to end the “emergency”. Meanwhile, the case of Abrego Garcia in particular has provided both Trump and Bukele with an extended opportunity to showcase their mutual passion for sociopathy and disdain for the law. As it so happens, Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador occurred in direct violation of a 2019 ruling by a US immigration judge, according to which he could not be deported to his native country on account of the dangers that such a move would pose to his life. Advertisement Indeed, Abrego Garcia fled to the US as a teenager, precisely out of fear for his life following gang threats to his family. And although the US government was quickly forced to acknowledge that his deportation in March had occurred “because of an administrative error”, the Trump-Bukele team remains determined not to rectify it. After all, this would set a dangerous precedent in suggesting that the possibility of recourse to justice does in fact exist, and that asylum seekers in the US should not have to live in terror of being spontaneously disappeared to El Salvador by “administrative error”. As per a recent New York Times article exposing the details of the debate within the Trump administration over how to manage the PR side of the Abrego Garcia blunder before it became public, officials from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “discussed trying to portray Mr. Abrego Garcia as a ‘leader’ of the violent street gang MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim”. But a lack of evidence has never stopped folks who are not concerned with facts and reality in the first place. Trump officials have continued to insist on Abrego Garcia’s affiliation with MS-13, while the president himself has unabashedly invoked a doctored photograph of tattoos on the man’s knuckles. The administration has also relied heavily on the fact that, in 2019, the police department in Prince George’s County, Maryland, decided that Abrego Garcia was a gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat, among other oh-so-incriminating behaviour. Advertisement To be sure, the frequency with which US law enforcement outfits cite Chicago Bulls merchandise as alleged proof of gang membership would be laughable given the US basketball team’s massive domestic and international fanbase – if, that is, such preposterous profiling tendencies did not directly translate into physical and psychological torment for Abrego Garcia and countless other individuals. In April, the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the US. In addition to thus far failing to comply with that order, the administration has gone to ludicrous lengths to defy a separate order from US District Judge Paula Xinis that it provide details about what exactly it is doing to secure Abrego Garcia’s release. Apparently irked by Judge Xinis’s pushiness, Trump administration officials then went with the good old “state secrets” excuse, which would enable the withholding of information regarding Abrego Garcia’s case in order to safeguard “national security” and the “safety of the American people”, as DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin put it. Bukele, for his part, has handled the Abrego Garcia situation with a petulant and vengeful machismo befitting the world’s “coolest dictator”, taking to X to ridicule the wrongfully abducted and imprisoned man. During an April visit to his partner in crime in the Oval Office in Washington, Bukele made clear to reporters that he would not be lifting a finger on Abrego Garcia’s behalf: “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Advertisement Speaking of terrorism, it is worth recalling that, long before the current “state of emergency” in El Salvador, the US had an outsized hand in supporting right-wing state terror in the country, where the civil war of 1979-92 killed more than 75,000 people. The majority of wartime atrocities were committed by the US-backed Salvadoran military and allied death squads, and countless Salvadorans fled north to the US, where MS-13

Walz urges Democrats to ‘be a little meaner,’ ‘bully the s–t’ out of Trump: ‘A challenging few years’

Walz urges Democrats to ‘be a little meaner,’ ‘bully the s–t’ out of Trump: ‘A challenging few years’

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, called on his fellow Democrats on Saturday to “be a little meaner” and stand up to President Donald Trump, who he described as a “bully.” Walz, a 2024 vice presidential candidate, was the keynote speaker at a Democratic Party state convention in Columbia, South Carolina, where he took jabs at the Republican president and sought to energize his party’s activists. “Maybe it’s time for us to be a little meaner, a little bit more fierce, because we have to ferociously push back on this,” Walz told the crowd in the Palmetto State. The comment came after he said he had been accused of being “mean” when he threw criticism in recent months at Trump administration officials, including billionaire Elon Musk, who has since left his role in the federal government. ACTING ICE DIRECTOR DEMANDS TIM WALZ APOLOGIZE FOR CALLING AGENTS ‘MODERN-DAY GESTAPO’ “The thing that bothers a teacher more than anything is to watch a bully,” Walz, a former schoolteacher, said. “And when it’s a child, you talk to them and you tell them why bullying is wrong.” “But when it’s an adult like Donald Trump, you bully the s–-t out of him back … This is a … cruel man,” the governor added. The Minnesota Democrat also criticized Trump as a “wannabe dictator” and an “existential threat.” “Donald Trump is the existential threat that we knew was coming,” Walz said, noting that, for Democrats, “it is going to be a challenging few years here.” “We’ve got the guts and we need to have it to push back on the bullies and the greed,” he said. Walz also appeared Friday night, along with Maryland Democrat Gov. Wes Moore, at the party’s fundraising dinner and after-party fish fry hosted by South Carolina Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn. Walz and Moore are on a long list of potential 2028 presidential candidates who have been traveling to early-voting states, although the Maryland governor said ​​he would not run for the White House in the next election cycle. “I want to be clear: We can and we must condemn Donald Trump’s reckless actions. But we would also be foolish not to learn from his impatience,” Moore said in his remarks. “Donald Trump doesn’t need a study to dismantle democracy or use the Constitution like a suggestion box. Donald Trump doesn’t need a white paper to start arbitrary trade wars that raise the cost of virtually everything in our lives,” he added. The events gave the two governors the opportunity to test out their messages in front of hundreds of Democrats in the state that has long held the South’s Democratic presidential primary and, last year, kicked off the party’s nominating calendar entirely. State party chair Christale Spain has said she will renew the argument to keep the state’s number one position in the next cycle, although national party organizations have not settled their 2028 calendars yet and party officials in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada are also looking to go first. MINNESOTA REPUBLICAN ANNOUNCES CAMPAIGN FOR GOVERNOR, VOWS TO ‘FIX’ WHAT TIM WALZ ‘BROKE’ Just as he did on Friday night, Walz praised his fellow Democrats in his speech on Saturday for having the “courage” to keep fighting in a largely Republican state, where Democrats have not won a statewide election in about two decades and only hold one congressional seat. “Damnit, we should be able to have some fun and be joyful,” Walz said. “We’ve got the guts and we need to have it to push back on the bullies and the greed.” Walz has not officially said if he will seek a third term as governor in 2026, but acknowledges he is considering it. He has also given mixed signals on a potential 2028 presidential run. The Associated Press contributed to this report.