World

Malaysia’s prime minister dissolved parliament Monday to clear the way for snap elections in a bid to restore political stability as the country emerges from the ravages of Covid-19 and a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal.

Elections could be held within weeks following Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s announcement.

Polls were not due until September next year but Ismail faced intense pressure from within his United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party to dissolve parliament and secure a strong mandate in early elections.

It held a slim majority in the just-dissolved parliament.

“Yesterday I met the king … and I sought his permission to dissolve the parliament. And the king agreed to my request to dissolve parliament today,” Ismail said in a televised address to the nation following his audience with Sultan Abdullah.

“I hope the people will use their votes wisely to vote for stability, economic growth and harmony in the country,” he said, referring to the mainly Muslim but multi-racial Southeast Asian nation.

No date has been given for the election, but under the constitution polls must be held within 60 days following the dissolution of parliament.

The dissolution came days after the government unveiled a populist budget that included a few billion dollars worth of cash handouts and a cut in personal income taxes.

– Political turmoil –

Malaysia has been in political turmoil since the last national elections in 2018 when a reformist pact steered by ex-leader Mahathir Mohamad overwhelmingly defeated an alliance led by UMNO, the main party that ruled the country for more than 60 years.

Then incumbent Najib Razak, who was embroiled in a scandal where billions of dollars were alleged to have been looted from the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund, was ousted as prime minister.

He was later convicted of corruption following a lengthy trial and started serving a 12-year jail term in August for the initial batch of charges. He faces more charges that could put him in jail longer.

Hopes for stability after Najib’s ouster faded quickly, however, as Mahathir’s government collapsed after 22 months due to bitter infighting.

He was succeeded by his former right-hand man Muhyiddin Yassin, but growing public anger over his handling of the pandemic forced him to resign less than two years after he took office, and Ismail was named Malaysia’s new leader.

Ismail’s rule has been relatively peaceful after he signed a truce with the country’s opposition to allow the government to focus on recovery after the worst of the pandemic.

Analysts said the elections will hopefully give the next government a stronger mandate to shepherd the country over a five-year term.

“The significance of this polls is that this is the first general elections since Covid-19, so it’s very much an election to select a government to steer Malaysia back to political stability,” James Chin, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Tasmania, told AFP.

“People are looking for political stability. People are just sick and tired of the three governments Malaysia had since 2018. And people realise that for the government or for the country to move forward, you need political stability.”

A landslide in Venezuela has left at least 25 people dead and more than 50 missing after a river overflowed, officials said Sunday, in the latest deadly disaster caused by heavy rains to hit the country.

Houses and businesses were destroyed in the Saturday night deluge, which left the town of Las Tejerias covered with mud and debris, including felled trees, household items and mangled cars.

“We are seeing very significant damage here, human losses,” Vice President Delcy Rodriguez told local media at the scene.

Interior Minister Remigio Ceballos said at least 25 people had died in the disaster as he gave an updated toll on government television VTV late Sunday.

“Unfortunately so far we have 25 people who were recovered dead,” he said. “We also have 52 missing,” he said, adding that search efforts were continuing.

Dozens of people have died in recent months in the crisis-hit South American nation as a result of historically high levels of rain.

“The village is lost. Las Tejerias is lost,” 55-year-old resident Carmen Melendez, who has lived her whole life in the town 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the capital, Caracas, told AFP.

Around a thousand people had joined the rescue efforts, Interior and Justice Minister Remigio Ceballos told AFP, as he worked at the site.

Residents dug through the remains of battered homes looking for loved ones, while search teams arrived with dogs hoping to find survivors trapped in the rubble.

A butcher shop that had closed due to the pandemic and which was due to reopen Monday was buried in muddy sediment that caked the refrigerators and everything else inside.

“We were waiting for the meat to be shipped in — to start after two years closed,” said Ramon Arvelo, one of the workers who was helping remove mud.

“I never thought that something of this magnitude could happen; it’s a really big deal,” said Loryis Verenzuela, 50, as she looked out at the devastation through tears.

– Record rain –

“We had a huge landslide as a result of the changing climate,” Ceballos said, referring to the effects of Hurricane Julia, which passed just north of Venezuela the night before.

“There was a record rainfall,” he added as he surveyed the disaster site — as much rain in one day as is usually seen in a month. 

“These strong rains saturated the ground,” he said. 

Images taken by rescue team drones showed huge amounts of earth piled up in the streets as residents had tried to shovel out the meters of mud that flowed into their houses. 

Las Tejerias resident Jose Santiago spent 40 minutes clinging to an antenna while the huge flood dragged several houses along in the mud, including his own.

“The river caught me and I couldn’t find anything to do besides climb a roof and grab onto an antenna,” the 65-year-old recounted. “I was reborn!”

President Nicolas Maduro declared three days of national mourning for the victims, while Venezuelans took to social media to offer assistance to the town, where electricity and communications have now been cut off.

Caracas baseball team Los Leones said they would organize a collection for the victims, asking for “non-perishable foods, water and clothes.”

The landslide, caused by the biggest river flood in the area in 30 years, is the worst so far this year in Venezuela, which has seen historic rain levels in recent months. 

In August, at least 15 people died in the Venezuelan Andes after heavy rains triggered mud and rock slides.

And in September, at least eight people died when floods from intense rains flowed through a religious retreat in the western part of the country.

In 1999, huge landslides killed some 10,000 people in the state of Vargas, north of Caracas.

North Korea’s recent missile tests involved “tactical nuclear” drills to simulate hitting the South, and were overseen by leader Kim Jong Un in response to US-led joint military exercises in the region, state media said Monday.

Kim made acquiring tactical nukes — smaller, lighter weapons designed for battlefield use — a top priority at a key party congress in January 2021, and this year vowed to develop North Korea’s nuclear forces at the fastest possible speed.

The country revised its nuclear laws last month to allow pre-emptive strikes, with Kim declaring North Korea an “irreversible” nuclear power — effectively ending the possibility of negotiations over its arsenal.

Since then, Seoul, Tokyo and Washington have ramped up combined military exercises, including deploying a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier to the area twice, infuriating Pyongyang, which sees such drills as rehearsals for invasion.

In response, North Korea “decided to organise military drills under the simulation of an actual war” that gamed out hitting South Korea’s ports, airports and military command facilities, KCNA said.

North Korean army units involved in “the operation of tactical nukes staged military drills from September 25 to October 9 in order to check and assess the war deterrent and nuclear counterattack capability,” the report said.

Kim “guided the military drills on the spot,” it said, adding he had dismissed the idea of restarting talks, saying North Korea “felt no necessity to do so”.

The report also said that North Korea’s October 4 missile launch, which flew over Japan and prompted rare evacuation warnings, involved a “new-type ground-to-ground intermediate-range ballistic missile”.

That test aimed to “send more powerful and clear warning to the enemies”.

– Dangerous dynamic –

North Korea’s claim its missile launches are a “response” to US-South Korea drills is part of a “familiar spiral dynamic” on the Korean peninsula, said US-based security analyst Ankit Panda.

“I worry that this is the start of a dangerous dynamic on the Korean Peninsula, where we have two states in a bitter rivalry and each faces strong incentives to fire first in a serious crisis,” he said.

“We also have no real measures of negotiated restraint or hotlines to manage crises,” he added.

“The North Koreans haven’t yet defined what exactly they consider to be a tactical nuclear weapon or mission … but we’re starting to see a picture that suggests any nuclear weapon they’d look to use early in a conflict can be defined as a ‘tactical’ capability,” he told AFP.

North Korea also released multiple photographs of the recent missile launches, tests and exercises showing Kim Jong Un overseeing them all, giving orders and posing with smiling soldiers.

It is significant that North Korea is not framing the recent launches as tests of the missiles themselves, but of the units that launch them, analysts said.

“That suggests these systems are deployed,” Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies wrote on Twitter.

– ‘Nuclear harbinger’ – 

In addition to the array of “tactical nuclear” drills, North Korea said it had carried out “a large-scale combined air-attack drill”, which was also overseen by Kim.

KCNA said this involved “more than 150 fighter planes” but analysts dismissed this as domestic propaganda, and Seoul said last week it had only detected 12 North Korean warplanes flying in formation.

The volley of KCNA statements about its recent tests — which are unusual, as state media no longer routinely comments on launches — indicates Pyongyang is concerned about the recent US-led joint drills, analysts said.

“To strengthen its self-proclaimed deterrent, it is making explicit the nuclear threat behind its recent missile launches,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.

“The KCNA report may also be a harbinger of a forthcoming nuclear test for the kind of tactical warhead that would arm the units Kim visited in the field,” he added.

Officials in Washington and Seoul have been warning for months that North Korea has completed preparations for another nuclear test — which would be the country’s seventh, and first since 2017.

“The fears of a nuclear war in Ukraine are no longer someone else’s concern,” Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University, told AFP.

“We need to take more seriously the fact that the possibility of a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula has increased.”

Taiwan’s leader warned Beijing on Monday that the island would never give up its democratic way of life in a national day speech in which she drew parallels with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The self-ruled democracy’s 23 million people live under the constant threat of invasion by China’s Communist Party, and Moscow’s war in Ukraine has deepened fears that Beijing might attempt something similar with the island.

In her speech, President Tsai Ing-wen compared Moscow’s invasion to Beijing’s goal of one day taking control of Taiwan — which it has vowed to do, by force if necessary.

“We absolutely cannot ignore the challenge that these military expansions pose to the free and democratic world order,” she said.

“The destruction of Taiwan’s democracy and freedom would be a grave defeat for the world’s democracies,” she added.

Taiwan and China split at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

China’s President Xi Jinping has ramped up diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Taipei in recent years and is a key ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Xi, China’s most authoritarian leader in a generation, is on the cusp of securing a third term later this month and has made taking Taiwan a key plank of his landmark “national rejuvenation” project.

But Tsai said becoming part of China was not acceptable to people in Taiwan, which has become a progressive democracy with a distinct Taiwanese identity.

“During the past 73 years, the people of Taiwan have lived and grown together on this land, and have formed our own strong sense of identity and belonging,” she said.

“The broadest consensus among the Taiwanese people and our various political parties is that we must defend our national sovereignty and our free and democratic way of life. On this point, we have no room for compromise.”

– ‘Porcupine strategy’ –

Taiwan is massively outgunned by China, which has the world’s largest military in terms of personnel, and has spent decades expanding its invasion capabilities.

Beijing hosted huge war drills in August around Taiwan to protest against a visit to Taipei by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Allies have urged Taiwan to adopt an asymmetric “porcupine strategy” that would make it hard for China’s larger military to invade, an argument that has been bolstered by the stout defence that Ukraine’s much smaller forces have put up against Moscow.

Tsai addressed this strategic shift directly in her speech. 

“We are ramping up the mass production of precision missiles and high-performance naval vessels,” she said. 

“In addition, we are working to acquire various small, highly mobile precision weapons that will help us develop comprehensive asymmetric warfare capabilities, ensuring that Taiwan is fully prepared to respond to external military threats,” she added.

She also reiterated the need to mobilise and train more civilians to work with the military, a strategy that Ukraine successfully adopted after Russia’s invasion.

“Every citizen is a guardian of our nation,” she said.

Taiwan’s national day comes shortly after China’s and the period can be a time of heightened tensions.

China sent more than 150 warplanes into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in the first 10 days of October last year for what was then a record. 

So far this October has been much calmer with 25 incursions, according to an AFP database.

But the total number of flights has risen dramatically with nearly 1,300 recorded ADIZ incursions so far in 2022 compared to 969 for all of last year. 

Air France and Airbus will go on trial Monday on charges of involuntary manslaughter over the fatal 2009 crash of a jet heading to Paris from Brazil, killing all 228 people aboard.

Victims’ families and some aviation experts say the pilots were insufficiently trained to handle a loss of speed readings caused by crucial equipment freezing over in a storm.

Flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of June 1, 2009, after entering a zone near the Equator known for strong turbulence.

The Airbus A330 was carrying 12 crew members and 216 passengers. It was the carrier’s deadliest crash.

It took nearly two years to locate the bulk of the fuselage and recover the “black box” flight recorders.

Air France and Airbus were charged as the inquiry progressed, with experts determining the crash resulted from mistakes made by pilots disorientated by so-called Pitot speed-monitoring tubes that had frozen over in thick cloud.

But investigating magistrates overseeing the case dropped the charges in 2019, a decision that infuriated victims’ families.

Prosecutors appealed the decision and in 2021 a Paris court ruled there was sufficient evidence for a trial to go ahead. 

Ophelie Toulliou, who lost her brother on the flight, said it was essential “the truth come out, and that the sentences, if deserved, are handed down”.

“But the message is also to make companies that think they’re untouchable understand: ‘You’re like everyone else and if you make mistakes, they will be punished,” she told AFP.

– ‘Lost our speeds’ –

The court will hear testimony from dozens of aviation experts and pilots over two months of hearings, and each company faces a maximum fine of 225,000 euros ($220,000).

There will also be analysis of the final minutes in the cockpit before the plane went into free-fall after entering a so-called “intertropical convergence zone” that often produces volatile storms with heavy precipitation.

In the cold, the Pitot tubes froze, a problem that had already been reported by other pilots — and which were quickly replaced on planes worldwide in the months after the accident.

“We’ve lost our speeds,” one pilot is heard saying in the flight recordings, before other indicators mistakenly show a loss of altitude, and a series of alarm messages appear on the cockpit screens. 

The pilots start climbing and even though a “STALL” alert sounds, reach 11,600 metres (38,060 feet). 

“I don’t know what’s happening,” one of the pilots is heard saying as the stall begins.

– Training overhaul –

The crash prompted an overhaul of training protocols across the industry, in particular to prepare pilots to handle the intense stress of unforeseen circumstances.

Pilots are also now required to continually practice stall responses on simulators.

“That was the big change after this accident for all civil airline companies. Before, it was something pilots learned in basic training and then they were never trained again,” one airline executive told AFP, on condition of anonymity.

Testimony will also be heard from some of the 476 members of victims’ families who are civil plaintiffs in the case.

But Nelson Faria Marinho, president of the Brazilian association of victims’ relatives, said, “I’m not expecting anything from this trial.”

“Even if there is a conviction, who will be punished? The CEOs? They were changed at Airbus and Air France a long time ago,” he told AFP during an interview at his Rio home.

He will be represented by former French pilot Gerard Arnoux, who has advised several of the victims’ families and wrote a book titled “Rio-Paris Is Not Responding: AF447, the Crash that Should Not Have Happened”.

India has the world’s highest rate of women pilots, but when Zoya Agarwal said she dreamed of conquering the skies, her mother cried and told her to wait for a “suitable boy” to marry instead.

Agarwal has enjoyed an illustrious career since gaining her wings in 2004, including her inauguration last year, with an all-woman crew, of the longest non-stop Indian commercial flight.

After helming the 17-hour San Francisco to Bangalore route, Agarwal was feted on national television during India’s Republic Day celebrations, and later became a spokesperson for the UN agency for women. 

Her achievements are as impressive as they once seemed unlikely. When she settled on her dream, she had no role models in her network and no sense that women had access to a career in the flight deck.

“I didn’t even have the right to such a crazy thought as that of becoming a pilot,” she tells AFP at her family’s home outside New Delhi, a few hours before her departure to New York. 

“I was born in an era where the girls in India were expected to get married, have children and look after their families,” she adds.

“And I was not there to do any of those things. I always wanted to spread my wings and fly away.”

It took years for Agarwal to persuade her “very, very conservative” parents that she wanted to pursue a life beyond the horizons of an arranged marriage to “a suitable boy”.

“My mum cried the first time I told her I wanted to be a pilot,” Agarwal says. “She wondered, ‘why did God give us a dysfunctional daughter?'”

Agarwal had to pay for her university studies using her meagre savings, gifted to her on festive occasions throughout her childhood and stored in a piggy bank in her bedroom.

At night she did her homework on the roadside, under the light of street lamps, because frequent power cuts left her family’s home in darkness. 

She still managed to top her classes and her parents, impressed by her determination after years of trying to dissuade her, surprised her by agreeing to pay for her flight training. 

– ‘Working twice as hard’ –

Agarwal — who sports a tattoo with the words “Born to Fly” on her shoulder blade — was one of a “small handful” of women pilots when she began flying with Air India, the national carrier.

She felt an additional burden to succeed, not just for herself but those that would come after her. 

“I always made sure that I (was) working twice as hard,” she says, “because I knew this was paving the way for the future of women in aviation in India.”

The passage has been smoother for those that followed, and India is now the country with the highest rate of female aviators, according to the International Society of Women Airline Pilots.

Nearly one in every eight pilots in India is a woman, according to the organisation — more than double the figure in the United States, despite India having only one in four women overall working in the formal economy. 

Local media reports attribute the high proportion of women to active policies by Indian airlines, who have offered flexible work arrangements, subsidised study, childcare and lengthy maternity leave. 

But Agarwal says more needs to be done to give aspiring women the same opportunities she fought for.

“I want this percentage to be 50,” Agarwal says. “Until then, I will not be happy.”

One day she hopes to open her own air taxi service to be able to directly empower women pilots.

“I want to help women to emancipate themselves, to give them wings,” she says.