Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa lost his bid for a third term on Friday, ending a decade of rule that critics say had become increasingly authoritarian and marred by nepotism and corruption.

As results rolled in overnight from Thursday’s election, it became clear that Rajapaksa had been beaten by opposition candidate Mithripala Sirisena, a one-time ally who defected overnight in November and derailed what the president thought would be an easy win.

Celebratory firecrackers could be heard exploding in the capital, Colombo, after Rajapaksa’s office said he had accepted the victory of Sirisena, who has vowed to root out corruption and bring constitutional reforms to weaken the power of the presidency.

Sirisena, a soft-spoken 63-year-old from the rice-growing hinterlands of this Indian Ocean island state, is expected to be sworn in at Colombo’s Independence Square at 6:00 pm. local time (12.30 pm BST).

His allies say he will rebalance the country’s foreign policy, which tilted heavily towards China in recent years as Rajapaksa fell out with the West over human rights and allegations of war crimes committed at the end of a drawn-out conflict with Tamil separatists in 2009.

US Secretary of State John Kerry was quick to welcome the successful election and commended Rajapaksa for accepting the verdict of the nation’s 15 million voters.

“I look forward to working with President-elect Mithripala Sirisena as his new government works to implement its campaign platform of a Sri Lanka that is peaceful, inclusive, democratic, and prosperous,” he said in a statement.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Sirisena to congratulate the new leader of “a close friend and neighbour”.

Rajapaksa had cold-shouldered New Delhi in recent years, but Sirisena told an Indian newspaper this week that “we will revert to the old, non-aligned policy”.

“India is our first, main concern. But we are not against Chinese investment either. We will maintain good relations with China too,” he told the Hindustan Times.

MOTLEY COALITION

The Department of Elections said that of 7.6 million votes counted so far, Sirisena had taken 52.05 per cent and Rajapaksa was trailing on 46.7 per cent.

The results showed Rajapaksa remained popular among Sinhala Buddhists, who account for around 70 percent of the country’s 21 million people, but Sirisena took his lead from the ethnic Tamil-dominated former war zone in the north and Muslims-dominated areas.

Rajapaksa won handsomely in the last election in 2010, surfing a wave of popularity months after the defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels.

But critics say he had become increasingly authoritarian, with several members of his family holding key positions of power, and although the economy had blossomed since the end of the war, voters complained of the high cost of living.

Rajapaksa had called the latest election two years early, confident that the usually fractured opposition would fail to come up with a credible candidate. But he did not anticipate the emergence of Sirisena, who shared a traditional Sri Lankan dinner with him one evening and turned on him the next day.

Sirisena will lead a motley coalition of ethnic, religious, Marxist and centre-right parties, which analysts say could hamper economic reform and encourage populist policies.

He has pledged to abolish the executive presidency that gave Rajapaksa unprecedented power and hold a fresh parliamentary election within 100 days.

He has also promised a crackdown on corruption, which would include investigations into big infrastructure projects such as a $1.5 billion deal with China Communications Construction Co Ltd to build a port city.

It is not clear if the port, to be built on land reclaimed from the ocean in Colombo, will be cancelled. However, his backers have said a casino licence given to Australian gambling tycoon James Packer’s Crown Resorts Ltd, will be withdrawn.

Source: Christian Today

Al Qaeda militants in Syria are plotting attacks to inflict mass casualties in the West, possibly against transport systems or “iconic targets”, the head of MI5 Security Service said on Thursday.

Speaking after gunmen killed 12 people in an assault on a French satirical newspaper, MI5 boss Andrew Parker warned a strike on the United Kingdom was highly likely.

“A group of core al Qaeda terrorists in Syria is planning mass casualty attacks against the West,” Director General Parker said in a rare public speech at MI5 headquarters in London. His last public speech was in October 2013.

In the speech, planned before the killings in Paris, Parker said seasoned al Qaeda militants in Syria aimed to “cause large-scale loss of life, often by attacking transport systems or iconic targets” in the West.

Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people by attacking the United States with hijacked passenger planes on September 11, 2001. Militants inspired by the group killed 52 commuters in London on July 7, 2005 with suicide bombs.

Al Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in 2011 and the threat posed by the network to the West seemed to recede in recent years.

But spies in Europe and the United States have been troubled that al Qaeda militants from Pakistan have appeared in wartorn Syria, in what some intelligence analysts say could be part of a plot to mount a major attack against the West.

Thursday’s stark warning from one of the West’s most influential spymasters mirrors a growing concern among Western political leaders and their Arab allies about the threat from the cauldron of militant groups in Syria and Iraq.

“DARK PLACES”

Parker said around 600 British extremists had travelled to Syria, many joining the militant group which calls itself “Islamic State” and has taken control of swathes of Iraq and Syria.

The group, an offshoot of al Qaeda, has beheaded two US journalists and an American and two British aid workers in an effort to put pressure on a US-led international coalition bombing its fighters in Syria.

Islamic State militants in Syria were plotting attacks on Britain and making sophisticated use of social media to incite British nationals to carry out violence, Parker said.

MI5, established in 1909 to counter German espionage ahead of World War One, had stopped three potentially deadly “terrorist plots” against the United Kingdom in recent months, he said.

“We face a very serious level of threat that is complex to combat and unlikely to abate significantly for some time,” said Parker, who has argued strongly for more surveillance powers to spy on militant communications on the Internet.

He said that the security services needed to have access to such communications.

“My sharpest concern as Director General of MI5 is the growing gap between the increasingly challenging threat and the decreasing availability of capabilities to address it,” he said.

Twitter and Facebook are so important to militants that technology giants should give security services greater access to their networks, the head of Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping agency said last year.

“The dark places from where those who wish us harm can plot and plan are increasing,” Parker said. “We need to be able to access communications and obtain relevant data on those people when we have good reason.”

Source: Christian Today

Two Christian women were aggressively beaten by a Pakistani Muslim man in the country’s capital of Lahore after the women prevented the attacker from abducting the daughter of one of the women.

According to Pakistan Christian Post, Nusrat Bibi and her sister Rani Bibi, along with their two daughters, were walking home from the local factory on an early December evening when a Muslim man approached the women and began molesting Nusrat’s daughter.

The report states that the daughter, whose age was not identified, was initially able to defend herself and make the attacker stop. However, the attacker, who has been identified as a Muslim named Khawar Khokhar, became enraged and began beating the girl with his cricket bat. He then grabbed her by the hand and warned the mother and aunt not to intervene as he attempted forcibly taking the daughter away, presumably to sexually abuse her.

However, the Bibis would not allow for the girl to be abducted without a fight. The mother and aunt were able to free the girl by coming her to her defense. However, this only enraged Khokhar even more. Khokhar then beat both Nusrat and Rani with the cricket bat. The report indicates that Nusrat, the mother of the molested girl, had received more of a beating than Rani.

The report indicates that after Khokhar was done beating Bibi, he threw her on top of a pile of garbage and he then fled the scene. Due to the altercation, both women had their clothes ripped and both sustained injuries.

As Nusrat received the brunt of the beating, she suffered a broken left arm and two broken fingers in her left hand. The injuries suffered by Rani were not identified.

As the trend of abusive hostility towards Christian women in Pakistan continues, the report states that no neighbors came to the scene to help the women fend off Khokhar, due to Khokhar’s political prestige and legal history.

“No one from the neighbors came forward to save them due to the man’s political [influence] and from his criminal past,” the report stated. “Everyone locked their doors.”

Although the family and Christian-rights activists called for the government to take action against Khokhar, a fair investigation is yet to be conducted despite the fact that the police station filed an incident report. Additionally, the report states that police have failed to arrest Khokhar even though he has preemptively filed a pre-arrest bail petition.

The Bibis have also been threatened by Muslim men to “drop the charges or face dire consequences.” Police officials have also heavily pressured the Bibis to reach some kind of compromise with Khokhar outside of court.

Christian victims of crimes caused by the hostility of Muslim men in Pakistan often do not receive the proper support needed from the Pakistani justice system. More often than not, Christian accusations of attacks and rapes against Muslims go uninvestigated and often end up with the victim being directly threatened not to press charges and pressured to reach a settlement.

In early December, two Christian teen girls in the Punjab province were abducted at gunpoint and gang-raped by a group of four Muslim men when they went outside to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. In the wake of the incident, the family has claimed that they have been threatened not to press charges and that local police have “obstructed attempts to gather medical evidence.”

It was also reported that the same group of men that gang-raped the two teen girls, have also raped another girl from another Christian family in the town. Razaq, a local pastor, said that the other Christian family victimized by the rapists were forced to agree on a settlement outside of court after being pressured by influential Muslims in the town.

After the early-November mob killing of a Pakistani Christian couple, who was tortured and burned to death by an angry Muslim mob after being accused of blasphemy, the couples family has claimed that they have been threatened and bribed to drop their lawsuit. However, this is one case that the Pakistan Supreme Court has actively pursued justice for in calling for the arrest of 138 people, including the two Muslim clerics who incited the mob.

Source: Christian Post