The boat, which maritime officials estimated had about 70 people aboard, had left Sabak Bernam in Malaysia’s western state of Selangor for Sumatra in neighboring Indonesia when the accident happened.
Initial conversations with survivors led officials to believe the passengers were Indonesian, said Muhammad Aliyas Hamdan, an official of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA).
“If they are legal, they would not leave (the country) that way,” Muhammad said, when asked if the people were illegal migrants. The boat sank due to overloading and bad weather, he added.
Thousands of migrants from Indonesia work at construction sites, on palm plantations, in factories and domestic service across Malaysia, some without legal employment documents.
The number of survivors stood at 19, the agency’s director of search and rescue operations, Captain Robert Teh Geok Chuan, told Reuters, including 15 rescued by fishermen earlier, though the death toll could rise.
“We fear the casualty numbers will rise as it’s been several hours since the boat sank,” he added.
Search operations would continue through the night, Teh said, with ships, boats and a helicopter deployed in the hunt for survivors. Indonesia’s search and rescue agency said it was on standby to assist its Malaysian counterpart.
Southeast Asia faced a huge migrant crisis after Thailand cracked down on people-smuggling gangs in May, with more than 4,000 people landing in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Thailand. Hundreds are believed to have drowned.
A fresh surge of refugees and migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh is expected to set out in boats for southeast Asia when the monsoon season ends in about a month, the United Nations has said.
Thursday’s accident happened as Europe faces its biggest refugee crisis since World War Two, and has yet to find a common response. Thousands of people from the Middle East, Asia and Africa have died making the journey across the Mediterranean and on land in Europe.
President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatist whose 2013 election paved the way to a diplomatic thaw with the West, and his allies have opposed such a parliamentary vote, arguing this would create legal obligations complicating the deal’s implementation.
“Parliament should not be sidelined on the nuclear deal issue … I am not saying lawmakers should ratify or reject the deal. It is up to them to decide,” said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state policy in Iran.
“I have told the president that it is not in our interest to not let our lawmakers review the deal,” the top Shi’ite Muslim cleric said in remarks broadcast live on state TV.
Khamenei himself has not publicly endorsed or voiced opposition to the Vienna accord, having only praised the work of the Islamic Republic’s negotiating team.
A special committee of parliament, where conservative hardliners close to Khamenei are predominant, have begun reviewing the deal before putting it to a vote. But Rouhani’s government has not prepared a bill for parliament to vote on.
The landmark deal, clinched on July 14 between Iran and the United States, Germany, France, Russia, China and Britain, is aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear activities to help ensure they remain peaceful in exchange for a removal of economic sanctions.
U.S. President Barack Obama appeared to secure enough Senate votes on Wednesday to see the nuclear deal through Congress — a vote must be taken by Sept. 19 — but hardline Republicans vowed to pursue their fight to scuttle it by passing new sanctions.
Khamenei said that without a cancellation of sanctions that have hobbled Iran’s economy, the deal would be jeopardized.
“Should the sanctions be suspended, then there would be no deal either. So this issue must be resolved. If they only suspend the sanctions, then we will only suspend our nuclear activities,” he said. Iran and the Western powers have appeared to differ since the accord was struck on precisely how and when sanctions are to be dismantled.
“Then we could go on and triple the number of centrifuges to 60,000, keep a 20 percent level of uranium enrichment and also accelerate our Research and Development (R&D) activities,” the Supreme Leader added.
The Vienna agreement puts strict limits in all three sensitive areas of Iran’s nuclear program, seen as crucial to creating confidence that Tehran will not covertly seek to develop atomic bombs from enriched uranium.
Iran has said it wants only peaceful nuclear energy.
HOSTILITY TO CONTINUE
Khamenei also criticized the United States’ Middle East policy, suggesting that antagonism prevailing between Iran and Washington since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Tehran will not abate because of the nuclear deal.
“Our officials have been banned from holding talks with Americans except on the nuclear issue. This is because our policies differ with America,” he said.
“One of America’s regional policies is to fully destroy the forces of resistance and wants to retake full control of Iraq and Syria … America expects Iran to be part of this framework,” Khamenei told a session of the Assembly of Experts which has the power both to dismiss a Supreme Leader and to choose one. “But this will never happen.”
By “forces of resistance”, Khamenei was alluding to Islamist militant groups such as Hezbollah, a close ally — like Iran — of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his war with rebels trying to overthrow him.
Rouhani has made it clear in his speeches that he favors greater engagement with the world, seeming open to cooperating with the United States to reduce conflict in the Middle East.
But Khamenei and his hardline loyalists remain deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions. Relations with Washington were severed in 1979 and hostility towards the United States remains a central rallying point of influential hardliners in Tehran.
Sunni Muslim Gulf Arab neighbors accuse Shi’ite-dominated Iran of trying to extend its influence in the region by backing groups like Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Islamist Hamas in Gaza, Houthi rebels in Yemen and Assad’s government in Syria.
If a new regulation goes ahead as planned on October 1, teenagers in Purwakarta, a local district about 100 kilometres from the Indonesian capital Jakarta, will be banned from visiting each other after 9pm.
To enforce the regulation Dedi Mulyadi, the head of Purwakarta district, said local patrols and new CCTV cameras would keep a watchful eye out for canoodling teenagers breaking the rules.
“Those who violate the rules will be summoned by the village cultural council for counselling,” he told AFP.
“If they break the rules three times, the village council may ask for the parents to marry them.”
It’s not clear how the measure will be enforced — Indonesians under 16 cannot legally marry — but underage ceremonies do still occur.
Mulyadi claimed the regulation — which will only apply to youths under 17 — would help return his hometown to its rural roots.
This new provision would ensure teenagers were home in bed early and living a more traditional life, he added.
“I come from a village and back in the day, you could not visit a neighbour after 9pm because villagers would be in bed, preparing to wake up at dawn to till their paddy fields,” he said.
Mulyadi said this new provision would also help enforce another of his schemes: banning underage, unlicensed drivers from zipping around on motorcycles.
Parents had “thanked” him for reigning in their wayward children after they were caught on motorbikes, he said.
The act of taking a picture of oneself with a mobile phone, placing the subject center-stage, has exploded in popularity in recent years, with everyone from Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II to U.S. President Barack Obama joining in.
But the selfie has also inspired a spate of risk taking and offensive public behavior, pushing the boundaries of safety and decorum, whether by dangling from a skyscraper or posing with live explosives.
Several governments and regulatory bodies have now begun treating the selfie as a serious threat to public safety, leading them to launch public education campaigns reminiscent of those against smoking and binge drinking.
Dozens of grisly selfie-related deaths and injuries in early 2015 led Russia’s Interior Ministry to launch a campaign warning avid mobile phone snappers about the danger of, among other things, posing for a selfie with a lion.
In June, two men in the Ural Mountains died after posing pulling the pin from a hand grenade; in May a woman survived shooting herself in the head in her Moscow office; a month later a 21-year-old university graduate plunged 40 feet (12 meters) to her death while posing hanging from a Moscow bridge.
“A cool selfie could cost you your life,” reads a poster from the campaign, which includes safety videos and information booklets.
Despite Russia’s diplomatic isolation over its support for separatist rebels in Ukraine, on the issue of dangerous selfies the Kremlin finds itself in accord with the European Union and the United States.
In Texas on Wednesday, a 19-year-old father of two died after shooting himself in the neck during a selfie. In Yellowstone National Park exasperated officials issued warnings after five separate selfie takers were gored this summer while standing too near bison.
The European Union in June proposed a law to criminalize social media posts containing pictures of landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or Rome’s Trevi Fountain. And in India this week officials said they were implementing a “no selfie zone” at the Hindu Kumbh Mela festival over fears they may cause stampedes.
ALL ABOUT ME
Yet despite the risks, selfies are more popular than ever, according to data from Google Trends. Searches for the term were up eight times in 2014 over the previous year, leading the Internet search giant to dub it “The Year of the Selfie”.
Selfies tend to attract a type of person already more likely to push the boundaries of normal behavior, says Jesse Fox, an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University.
Her research says people exhibiting the so-called Dark Triad of personality traits – narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy – are likely to pursue selfie glory regardless of who gets hurt in the process.
“It’s all about me. It’s putting me in the frame. I’m getting attention and when I post that to social media, I’m getting the confirmation that I need from other people that I’m awesome,” Fox told Reuters.
“You don’t care about the tourist attraction you’re destroying; you don’t care about annoying people in your social media feed … you’re not even thinking about the consequences of your actions, so who cares if you’re dangling off the side of the Eiffel Tower?”
That has not stopped some countries trying to capitalize on the trend’s popularity.
Tourism Australia this week launched a campaign promising an opportunity to take the “World’s Largest Selfie”, aimed at selfie-mad Japan.
They have installed several so-called GigaSelfie platforms in some of the country’s most breathtaking environs from which, with an associated app, visitors can capture an ultra hi-resolution shot taken by a far away camera.
Now, members of the village council in the Baghpat region of northern India have told Reuters they passed no such order. Family members of the two sisters also told Reuters they are unsure if the ruling was made. And local police deny any such directive was given.
When the accusations first emerged last month, they spread like wildfire. An online petition by Amnesty International seeking justice and protection for the low-caste sisters gathered over 260,000 signatures, mostly in Britain.
But family members said in interviews with Reuters the information that the council made such an order may have just been gossip. “It is all hearsay, we don’t know if this actually happened,” said Dharam Pal Singh, 55, the women’s father and a retired soldier. “We heard it from other villagers.”
He identified one of the villagers, a man who also said he had heard it from others.The incendiary allegations were contained in a petition to the Supreme Court filed last month by a lawyer for the Singh family seeking protection for the sisters. It said one of Singh’s sons fell in love with a married woman of a higher caste, leading to a row between the two families.
Meenakshi Kumari, 23, one of the two sisters allegedly threatened with rape by a village council in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, leaves her lawyer’s chamber in New Delhi, India, September 1, 2015. – Reuters
In its most sensational claim, the court filing said Meenakshi Kumari, 23, and her 15-year-old sister fled their home after being told they would be stripped naked and paraded with their faces blackened before being raped to atone for their brother’s transgression.
“THESE THINGS CAN HAPPEN”
Rahul Tyagi, the lawyer who brought the case to the Supreme Court, was hired by the family when the row over the affair started some months ago.
Tyagi said he stood by the petition, which the family filed because of fears for the safety of the sisters, and denied failing to check the facts. However, he said he had never visited the village, nor spoken to any members of the council who supposedly issued the rape order. “We have documentary evidence for nine out of 10 things in the case,” he said. “The other things people will not come out with unless there is an independent investigation.”Kumari, the elder sister, admitted she didn’t know if the council had issued a ruling but said she took the threat seriously because women are often punished in India for things they have not done. “It is very tough life for women,” Kumari said in an interview at Tyagi’s office in the relative security of the capital. “These things can happen.”
She said she had heard of the threat to rape her from her father.
Unelected village councils like the one in Baghpat do mete out rough justice in many parts of rural India, ruling on matters of marriage, property and how women should dress. In rare instances the councils have ordered rape as a punishment.
However, it typically is difficult to confirm such rulings because village councils usually only issue verbal orders, and no record is kept of proceedings.This case appeared to fit a familiar narrative. It combined some of rural India’s most tenacious problems: entrenched hierarchies built on prejudice and the ancient Hindu caste system colliding with more modern values, a history of weak governance and increasing violence towards women.
NO PROOF
Reuters interviewed more than 20 people involved in the incident in the village of Sankrod, in Baghpat district, an hour’s drive away from the capital New Delhi, where closely packed concrete homes are surrounded by corn and cane fields.
The veiled mother of Meenakshi Kumari, 23, one of the two sisters allegedly threatened with rape by a village council in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, stands inside her house at Sankrod village in Baghpat district, India, September 1, 2015. – Reuters
There were many discrepancies in the accounts offered by the families of the sisters and the married woman, members of the village council, the lawyer who drew up the Supreme Court petition, and police officials.But no one said they had any evidence that the council had handed down the rape punishment, as alleged in the court petition. The petition said the council was comprised of upper caste men. The village council is actually more than 80 percent female and headed by a woman who, like the sisters, is from the bottom of the caste hierarchy. “How many times do I have to tell you that there was no meeting?” said Bala Devi, 55, who has run the council for the last five years. “We spend our time discussing mundane things like fixing the roads or water pumps.”
Sharad Sachan, a police superintendent, concluded after interviewing council leaders and other villagers that no such order had been issued. “The Supreme Court asked us to investigate and we plan to tell them our findings later this month,” Sachan said.
The Supreme Court is not due to rule on the case until later this month.Amnesty said it did not investigate the case or visit the village, and instead relied on the court submission. Gopika Bashi, women’s rights campaigner at Amnesty International India, said that despite the doubts cast over the story there were no plans to withdraw its petition.”We will continue to push for protection for the family,” she said.
Should Mayweather win, as is widely expected, he would match the 49-0 record of former heavyweight great Rocky Marciano but says he would not be tempted to come out of retirement for a 50th fight.
“Forty-nine is my last fight,” the five-division world champion, aged 38, told reporters on a conference call on Wednesday before saying that self-preservation in the ring had always been a top priority.
“My health is more important. Anything can happen (in boxing). I am not really worried about losing. You can make a lot of money but you still won’t be able to talk, walk and have a sharp mind.
“Of course, it’s always about self-preservation. I come first but I appreciate the fans. I do. The only thing I can do is believe in myself. I’m going to be TBE (The Best Ever) until the day I die.”
Many pundits have doubted Mayweather’s claim that he will end his career after the Sept. 12 bout, pointing to the American’s U-turn when he came back from a 21-month retirement to fight Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez in September 2009.
“Like I have said and Floyd has said a number of times, this will be his last fight,” Leonard Ellerbe, CEO of Mayweather Promotions, said on Wednesday’s conference call.
“Why can’t a man go out when he has had an illustrious career, accomplished everything that he needed to accomplish and be done? And he has done it his way.
“Over the last week, I have received three major movie offers. We fully expect Floyd to be heavily, heavily involved in the entertainment industry because this is what he does right now … that is going to occupy a lot of his time.”
Mayweather, whose 48-0 record includes 26 knockouts, is renowned for his brilliant defence in the ring though he has often been criticized for selecting easy opponents while building his impressive resume.
Asked what he regarded as the greatest achievement of his career, he replied: “Every fight played a major key … and number 49 is going to be important also. But my career’s not over yet.”
Berto, a twice former welterweight world champion, will step into the ring as a heavy underdog after losing three of his last six fights but Mayweather is wary of underestimating his opponent.
“When you’ve got a guy that’s put in a situation with nothing to lose, it makes him work that much harder,” said Mayweather. “He has a chance to be one of the top guys in the sport when I am through. You never overlook anyone.”
Thirty-two Senate Democrats and two independents who vote with the Democrats now back the agreement.
“No deal is perfect, especially one negotiated with the Iranian regime. I have concluded that this Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is the best option available to block Iran from having a nuclear bomb,” Mikulski, of Maryland, said in a statement.
“For these reasons, I will vote in favor of this deal.”
Mikulski’s backing means Obama’s fellow Democrats will have enough votes to protect the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers in the U.S. Congress. The agreement, announced on July 14, exchanges sanctions relief for Iran for Tehran’s agreeing to curtail its nuclear program.
U.S. lawmakers have until Sept. 17 to vote on a “resolution of disapproval,” which would weaken the international pact by eliminating Obama’s ability to temporarily waive many U.S. sanctions on Iran.
With Republicans virtually united in opposition, Democrats have spent the summer rallying support for an agreement seen as a potential legacy foreign policy achievement for the president.
Republicans hold majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate, and are likely to pass a Republican-sponsored disapproval resolution. However, Obama promised to veto any such measure, and opponents would have needed two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override the veto.
Support by 34 senators means a veto would be sustained.
A resolution would also fail if deal supporters can muster 41 votes in the Senate to block it using a procedural motion. Senate leadership aides on both sides of the issue said it was still too early to say whether that would happen.
Mikulski’s support leaves 10 undecided Senate Democrats.
The passenger, who reported being raped and beaten after hailing a ride with the Uber driver in Delhi last year, sued the online car service in a U.S. federal court in January, claiming the company failed to maintain basic safety procedures.
The driver was arrested by Indian police and appeared in court in December. Uber’s Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick at the time called the incident “horrific” and pledged to help “bring this perpetrator to justice.”
However, Uber also argued in court filings that the woman sued the wrong corporate entity as the driver had a contract with Uber B.V., a Netherlands-based entity with no U.S. operations.
The court filing did not disclose any details on how the case was settled, and representatives for Uber and the woman declined to comment.
India is one of Uber’s largest markets outside the United States by the number of cities covered. The rape allegation triggered protests and reignited a debate about the safety of women in Asia’s third-largest economy, especially in New Delhi, which has been dubbed India’s rape capital.
Uber, valued at around $50 billion this year, has said it would introduce additional safety measures including more stringent driver checks and an in-app emergency button.
In the lawsuit, the woman, who resides in Delhi and was not named, called Uber the “modern day equivalent of electronic hitchhiking.”
“Buyer beware – we all know how those horror movies end,” the lawsuit stated.
Earlier this year, both sides had agreed to participate in private mediation to try to resolve the lawsuit, according to court filings.
Ishant Sharma, who was fined 65 percent of his match fees for giving send-offs to Lahiru Thirimanne and Dinesh Chandimal in the second test, landed in trouble with the Sri Lankans in the final contest as well.
Thirimanne, Chandimal and paceman Dhammika Prasad, who had an animated altercation with Ishant on Monday, have also been charged with code of conduct breaches, the ICC said.
“Details to be announced after the conclusion of the Test,” the governing body said on Twitter.
Tempers flared on Tuesday when Ishant, after taking a single and running past Prasad, was seen smacking his own head, as if daring the bowler to try and bounce him.
Chandimal joined from the slip, brushing shoulders with Ishant.
At the end of India’s second innings, Ishant ran towards the Indian dressing room to change and get ready to bowl and Prasad was also seen sprinting behind the Indian, as if trying to catch up with him.
Ishant gave animated send-offs to Upul Tharanga and broke into wild celebration after Chandimal’s dismissal.
The umpires have spoken to both captains and the players, especially Ishant, face stringent punishment.
It was the lowest year-on-year inflation in over 12 years.
“Pakistan’s inflation has been relatively low in the past year, mainly due to lower electricity and international oil prices,” said Chief Statistician Asif Bajwa.
On a month-on-month basis, prices fell by 0.24 percent in August from July.
The average annual inflation rate for July-August 2015-16 over July-August 2014-15 was 1.76 percent.
