Former Myanmar military ruler Than Shwe ‘supports new leader’
Myanmar’s former military ruler sees erstwhile foe Aung San Suu Kyi as the country’s “future leader” and has pledged support for her in a secret meeting, the general’s grandson said.
Details of Friday’s meeting between the two was revealed by General Than Shwe’s grandson, who acted as intermediary.
He said in a Facebook post the meeting had lasted two-and-a-half hours.
Ms Suu Kyi led her National League for Democracy (NLD) party to a landslide election victory in October.
The election was the first openly contested general election in Myanmar (also known as Burma) in 25 years.
The BBC’s Jonah Fisher in Myanmar says 80-year-old General Than Shwe, who headed the country’s military junta until he stepped down in 2011, still wields enormous influence.
Where Uruguay leads, the rest of the world struggles to keep up
South America’s second smallest country seems to be reinventing itself as a beacon of innovation and progress
Sunday 6 December 2015 00.05 GMT
As the world’s most powerful nations squabbled in Paris over the cost of small cuts to their fossil fuel use, Uruguay grabbed international headlines by announcing that 95% of its electricity already came from renewable energy resources. It had taken less than a decade to make the shift, and prices had fallen in real terms, said the head of climate change policy – a job that doesn’t even exist in many countries.
This announcement came on top of a string of other transformations. In 2012 a landmark abortion law made it only the second country in Latin America, after Cuba, to give women access to safe abortions. The following year, gay marriage was approved, and then-president José Mujica shepherded a bill to legalise marijuana through parliament, insisting it was the only way to limit the influence of drug cartels.
What’s more, the country cracked down so strongly on cigarette advertising, in a successful bid to cut smoking rates, that it is now being sued by tobacco giant Philip Morris.
Isis in Iraq: On the hunt for jihadist fighters with Kirkuk’s chief of police
As the battle against the militants rages in Iraq, officers seek to round up supporters on the streets
The blindfold was lifted from the face of the 23-year-old and he looked around, blinking, at the garden of the police headquarters. He had been arrested three days earlier by Kirkuk’s imposing district police chief, Brigadier General Sarhad Qadir, now he was passing information about Isis. “It’s like a net, we capture one after the other,” said Brigadier Qadir, adding “this guy is giving good information”.
The informer, Wahid (not his real name), wore a blue and yellow tracksuit that looked too thin for the season, he said he was a former member of al-Qaeda who later joined Isis. The police planned to take Wahid as a guide that evening as they hunted down the rest of his alleged cell, who police accused of carrying out multiple assassinations and car bombings in Kirkuk.
France’s far-right expected to perform strongly in regional polls
France’s anti-immigration National Front is widely expected to make a strong showing at the first round of regional polls. Support for the party has risen in the wake of the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris.
The first round of regional elections in France on Sunday will be watched closely as a barometer of voter sentiment, with mainstream parties increasingly worried by what they see as a dangerous shift to the right.
The far-right National Front party (FN) under leader Marine Le Pen is currently leading the field in polls, with surveys giving it 30 percent support, slightly ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Union for a Popular Movement and its coalition partners.
Le Pen, daughter of former longtime FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, is set for victory in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region, traditionally a leftist heartland. Her 25-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le-Pen is predicted to be equally dominant in the southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur area.
The FN is also likely to be a strong contender in the eastern Alsace-Champagne-Ardennes-Lorraine region, according to polls.
Analysts have predicted that the far-right party could win all three regions in the second round on December 13, unless President Francois Hollande’s Socialists and former President Sarkozy’s center-right coalition join forces to prevent it.
Colombia says it found Spanish galleon; U.S. firm claims half of treasure
Updated 0115 GMT (0915 HKT) December 6, 2015
Colombia says it has found a Spanish galleon sunk 300 years ago in the Caribbean with treasure estimated as high as $17 billion in gold, silver and gems.
“Great news: We found the galleon San Jose!,” President Juan Manuel Santos tweeted.
“Finding the #GaleonSanJose marks an historic milestone for our underwater cultural patrimony,” Santos said Saturday, tweeting a video of the search team at sea.
The discovery off Colombia’s coast is sure to intensify an international dispute over the treasure.
The hunt for the San Jose has already been a long legal saga over how the booty should be split between the Colombian government and an American company based in Bellevue, Washington.
The pirates of Southeast Asia
Malacca Strait is ranked the most dangerous waterway, overtaking Somalia as world’s main piracy hub in 2014.
| Indonesia, Business & Economy, Crime, Asia Pacific
The waters of Southeast Asia have more incidents of piracy than any other part of the world.
The region overtook Somalia as the main piracy hub in 2014.
The Malacca Strait is one of the most strategic sea lanes in the world and it’s also one of the most dangerous. Since 2010, attacks on ships have more than doubled every year.
In the first 10 months of this year, there were 174 reported incidents of piracy, including 12 attempts. That’s more than the number for all of 2013. Most of the targets have been oil and palm oil tankers.
Pirate syndicates are often found to be professional joint ventures between business people and freelance pirates waiting in the harbours for jobs.
Most pirates come from Indonesian fishing villages.The syndicates often use insiders who are part of the crew and even navy personnel.
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